This article is concerned with how to conceptualize and theorize the nature of the ‘car system’ that is a particularly key, if surprisingly neglected, element in ‘globalization’. The article deploys the notion of systems as self-reproducing or autopoietic. This notion is used to understand the origins of the 20th-century car system and especially how its awesome pattern of path dependency was established and exerted a particularly powerful and self-expanding pattern of domination across the globe. The article further considers whether and (...) how the 20th-century car system may be transcended. It elaborates a number of small changes that are now occurring in various test sites, factories, ITC sites, cities and societies. The article briefly considers whether these small changes may in their contingent ordering end this current car system. The article assesses whether such a new system could emerge well before the end of this century, whether in other words some small changes now may produce the very large effect of a new post-car system that would have great implications for urban life, for mobility and for limiting projected climate change. (shrink)

This article critically engages with the work of Bruno Latour and, in particular, his book We Have Never Been Modern. Looking beyond the wit and brevity of Latour's writing, the article focuses on some of the non-innocent aspects of his vision of a non-modern world. Rather than completely rejecting the `Great Divides' between Nature and Culture, Westerners and non-Westerners, Latour is seen as only interested in erasing these major fault lines of modernity in order to draw them anew. Ultimately, Latour (...) is not asking his readers to doubt the superiority of Western science but only to understand this superiority differently — as contingent and uncertain rather than necessary and secure. Latour is not as alone as he would have us believe in bringing a non-modern world into focus and the article devotes the bulk of its attention to comparing Latour's thoughts with those governing the Euro-American discipline of international relations before and after the end of the Cold War. Latour's particular account of the non-modern condition, it is argued, corresponds well with the shift from realism to neo-realism within international relations and the replacement of bi-polarity by global technological competition as the dominant feature of the international system. Although Latour continues to be regularly attacked in the so-called `Science Wars' as an enemy of Western science, he actually joins forces with leading Euro-American security experts today in contending that the future of both `Science' and the `West' hinges on the careful monitoring and management of hybrid networks of humans and non-humans and not on uncompromising acts of `purification' as has been the strategy in the past. (shrink)