thinking the car in post-war france david inglisdocshare01.docshare.tips/files/388/3881095.pdf ·...

Auto CoutureThinking the Car in Post-war France

David Inglis

ONE OF the aims of this special issue of Theory, Culture & Society isto redress one of the odder lacunae in the contemporary socialsciences, namely the relative neglect of the motor car as an object

of analysis and scrutiny (Hawkins, 1986). Occasional scholars such as PaulVirilio (e.g. 1986 [1977]) have drawn social theoretical attention to the rolesplayed by modes of transportation in general, and automotive forms inparticular, in the creation and maintenance of patterns of social organiz-ation.1 Yet it nonetheless remains the case that the automobile has notreceived due attention from thinkers who wish to comprehend the contoursof contemporary societies. As Sheller and Urry (2000) argue, this is aparticularly curious state of affairs, in part because automobile technolo-gies have been profoundly involved throughout the 20th century in shapingand reshaping urban and non-urban spaces, ways of thinking and being,and modes of social interaction.

In this article, I intend to draw the attention of those interested inputting the automobile into the centre of social theoretical analyses, to theideas of certain French authors who were concerned to understand thesignificance of the car in the social conditions they experienced. The authorsthat I examine made their contributions to French intellectual life ingeneral, and the understanding of automobile culture in particular, in thepost-war period. I will focus on the period roughly spanning 1950–75, partlyfor reasons of space but also, and more importantly, because there was aparticularly rich vein of thinking about the car at this time that can betapped by the present-day analyst. Although intellectuals living in pre-warFrance also gave some attention to automotive issues, as we will see brieflybelow, it was only really within the conditions of the post-war consumeristboom of the mid-1950s and after that the privately owned car became botha ubiquitous sight on French roads, an object that was within the financial

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purview of the broad mass of the population, and a source of concern andinterest for writers, film-makers and other members of the intelligentsia.Because mass motor transportation came later to France than it did to theUnited States, and because the car figured as a contested technology in theperiod I am dealing with, being seen variously as a Trojan horse of Ameri-canization or something that could quite comfortably fit into everydayFrench life, French intellectuals were in many cases highly attuned towardsseeking to understand what the car’s impacts would be on social and culturalconditions. The ideas we will deal with in this article were fuelled by intel-lectuals’ interest in what France might look like under the aegis of the auto-mobile.

My specific purposes in this article are threefold. First, I wish toprovide a succinct socio-cultural history of the development of car culturein post-war France, the ground out of which sprang the ideas as to thesignificance of the automobile developed by different intellectuals in theperiod. Second, I wish to draw together those ideas, presenting what arerather scattered writings by a variety of different authors in a synopticfashion. This is the first time, as far as I am aware, that this exercise hasbeen carried out in an English-language publication. In this way, I intendto make accessible to the Anglophone reader many of the interestingperspectives on car culture developed by French thinkers in the periodunder scrutiny. Third and finally, I would like to draw attention, whereappropriate, to the ways in which the ideas and perspectives set out heremay continue to be of use to authors who wish to grasp the implications ofthe car in the workings of society in the present day. As I believe will beapparent from my analysis of post-war French contributions to the compre-hension of an ‘automobilic society’, many of the ideas on display hereremain of great interest to social theorists. In some senses, therefore, Frenchauthors of the post-war period can be seen as foundational figures in thedevelopment of theories as to the dynamics of car culture. This article isintended as a contribution to identifying a corpus of ‘classic writings’ onthis topic, upon which contemporary thinkers might usefully draw.

I will first set out the historical background to the development of post-war automotive conditions in France, examining briefly in an empirical veinthe rise of the French car industry and noting the enthusiastic embracingof the automobile by the modernist architect Le Corbusier. I will thenconsider the ways in which the car figured as the embodiment of spectacu-lar forms of display, as this theme was pursued in the semiotic writings ofRoland Barthes and the young Jean Baudrillard. Next I will turn to investi-gate the primarily hostile response of leftist thinkers such as Guy Debord,Henri Lefebvre and André Gorz to the apparent destruction of Frenchphysical spaces by the construction of the networks of concrete and asphaltthat the car requires for its functioning. After that I will turn to considerhow certain French thinkers related the car to certain wider socialdynamics, such as conspicuous consumption and competitions for socialstatus, and the aggressive behaviours fostered by a highly individualistic

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and competitive society. Finally, I will see how it was possible by the later1960s onwards for certain French thinkers to view the car as an integralpart of everyday life, which has brought with it its own particular rituals andidiosyncratic forms of social practice. I will conclude by drawing out thecontinuing relevance of aspects of these various perspectives for contem-porary endeavours to ‘think the car’.

Enter the AutoAt the very beginning of the automobile age, France was a world-leader incar design and production. Although the very first motorized vehicles hadbeen developed in Germany in the late 1880s, it was French entrepreneurs,such as the bicycle manufacturer Armand Peugeot, who took the lead infurther developing these designs and making them commercially viable(Laux, 1976). This process developed quite quickly throughout the 1890s.One of the first fully fledged automobile races in the world took placebetween Paris and Bordeaux in 1895. The success of a voiture sans chevauxbuilt by the French firm Panhard and Levassor in covering the 730 milesbetween Paris and Bordeaux and back again in only 52 hours, announcedto the world that the automobile was no longer just an experimental devicebut a fully operational form of transport with huge potential to change theways people and goods could be transported. Aided by the good conditionof French roads and the wide availability of petrol throughout the country,the number of automotive vehicles in France rose from 300 in 1895 to morethan 14,000 in 1900 (Barker, 1987).

Although after this time the absolute numbers of automobiles on theroad in both the United States and Great Britain were greater than in France,nonetheless car manufacture had became an important part of the Frencheconomy in the years around the First World War, the manufacturersRenault, Peugeot and Citroën all having become major employers at thistime. One reason for this was that the wartime economy’s need for motortransport had transformed car manufacturing from a primarily small-scale,partially artisanal form of production to a large-scale, mass productionenterprise (Fridenson, 1989; Kuisel, 1981). In the inter-war years, AndréCitroën consciously presented himself as the French Henry Ford, bringingthe benefits of American-style management to the production process(Schweitzer, 1982). Conversely, the large car plants of the companies abovebecame notorious for industrial militancy amongst the workforce, a repu-tation that persisted for at least another 50 years (e.g. Mothé, 1965).Although relatively high prices meant that private cars were in the inter-war period restricted to the well-to-do middle classes, by the early 1930sthere was already a fairly large number of car dealers in most large urbanareas (Fridenson, 1972). Another indication of the increasing ubiquity ofthe car among upper levels of the bourgeoisie in the period between thewars was the rapid growth of motoring publications such as magazines,tourist guides (like the one produced by the tyre company Michelin), andmaps aimed specifically at drivers (Fridenson, 1987).

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The dramatic impact the automobile could have on the thinking ofintellectuals at this period is vividly demonstrated in Le Corbusier’s (1971)modernist manifesto L’Urbanisme, dating from 1924. Here he set out aprospectus of a new urban utopia, a glass and concrete Paris of the futurecharacterized by high-rise towers, shopping centres, aerial highways andsubterranean garages. The manifesto is prefaced by a parable about how hepersonally came to realize the beauty of this vision. Taking a stroll alongthe boulevards one summer evening, his perambulations were curtailed bythe sheer density and noise of the traffic. As he put it, ‘the fury of trafficgrew. To leave your house meant that once you had crossed the thresholdyou were a possible sacrifice to death in the shape of innumerable motors’(Le Corbusier, 1971 [1924]: 3). Initially disoriented and dismayed, LeCorbusier says that he quickly came to realize that this situation, charac-terized by the omnipresence of the automobile, was thoroughly emblematicof the future. Instead of being appalled by this prospect, he came to believethat humankind not only had to come to terms with it, but also had toembrace it, through creating new ideals of beauty that were congruent witha world of concrete highways and speeding vehicles. He says that he hadcome to see a new purpose in his life:

. . . I was assisting at the titanic reawakening of a comparatively new phenom-enon . . . traffic. Motors in all directions, going at all speeds. I was over-whelmed, an enthusiastic rapture filled me. Not the rapture of the shiningcoachwork under the gleaming lights, but the rapture of power. The simpleand ingenuous pleasure of being in the centre of so much power, so muchspeed. (1971 [1924]: 3)2

As Marshall Berman (1993: 167) puts it, on Le Corbusier’s view at thisperiod, the ‘man in the street will incorporate himself into the new power[of traffic, and thus of the future as a whole] by becoming the man in thecar’. The automobile driver becomes the quintessential figure of a brave newworld characterized by rationality, technology and speed.3

In the years after the Second World War, France underwent a seriesof major socio-cultural and socio-economic changes. As Gauron (1983: 96)puts it, by the late 1950s, ‘French society had been shaken profoundly bystrong demographic growth, new capitalistic ways of production, rapidurbanization, and the opening of frontiers for international exchange anddecolonization.’4 The car was profoundly implicated in a number of thesewide-ranging social changes. A confluence of several factors ensured thatthe production of private cars far exceeded the amount produced annuallybefore the war. The French state embarked upon a series of large-scalemeasures to ‘modernize’ the economy, one aspect of which was to createautomotive conditions analogous to those that pertained in the USA. Suchprocesses were aided by the fact that the Renault company was national-ized, partly as a result of the collaborationist stance of some of its seniorexecutives during the Occupation (Jones, 1984).


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The three larger car manufacturers, namely Renault, Citroën andPeugeot, plus the smaller companies Simca and Panhard, were encouragedby the government each to target different sectors of the car market, and inso doing further to stimulate its development, especially amongst lowersocio-economic groups. Thus Renault focused on the economy market,building the relatively inexpensive 4CV from 1946 onwards and the R4 from1961. Peugeot cars were pitched at middle-market range, producing thepopular 203 model from 1949 onwards. While Citroën primarily wasoriented towards the more luxury end of the market, it also produced theiconic 2CV, which was at first aimed at farmers but soon became a popularchoice among young people and bohemians (Dauncey, 2001).

This partly state-encouraged development and segmentation of themarket had the effect of encouraging substantial numbers of upper working-and lower middle-class people to enter into the condition of car ownershipfrom the mid-1950s onwards. Car ownership was particularly high amongstthe new class of ‘cadres’, the middle-ranking personnel who managed tech-nocratic enterprises in both the public and private sectors (Boltanski, 1987).It was these middle-income white-collar workers who were the particularavatars of the burgeoning consumer economy, in which automobiles andhousehold goods such as refrigerators were increasingly sold as essentialsof life. As a result of these various developments, although France hadlagged behind other western European countries in terms of private carownership in the early 1950s, by the mid-1960s France was as motorizedas any other western European country (Fridenson, 1987: 134).

Auto-spectacleIn the relatively short span of time between 1945 and the mid-1960s, theprivate car had turned from being a preserve of the upper middle classesto occupying an increasingly central position in the life of all social classes.Although by this time most French people still did not actually own a car,nonetheless drivers and non-drivers alike were subjected to the constantpublicity for automobiles to be found in newspapers and magazines, and onradio and the new medium of television (Fridenson, 1981).5 It was more thesymbolic, rather than as yet directly physical, ubiquity of the car that meantthat it took ‘centre stage in cultural debate’ in France from the early 1950sonwards (Ross, 1996: 23; see also Bardou et al., 1982).6 The French ingeneral, and the intelligentsia in particular, were highly reflexivelyconscious of the roles played by the automobiles in society in part because,unlike in the USA, the rise of the car was not taken for granted or seennecessarily to be a harbinger of the benefits of scientific and technologicalmodernity.7 As the literary scholar Roland Barthes (2002 [1963]) noted in1963, only food rivalled the automobile as a vehicle for reflections by theFrench upon the nature of their country in the present day, and its likelyfuture under conditions of American-influenced consumerism.

Despite its increasing symbolic omnipresence in French society, theautomobile at first tended to be perceived by both intellectual and other


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social groups as something of an alien object, which was not fully integratedinto quotidian existence in the way it was in the USA. For example, inJacques Tati’s 1958 film Mon Oncle, a satire on the then-current vogue formodernist interior design and households oriented around les gadgets, thearrival of a new green and pink Chevrolet is initially ‘treated by the cameraas a fantastic and singular visitation’ from out of the blue (Ross, 1996: 31).The idea that the brand-new, shining automobile is like a visitor fromanother world is reflected in one of the most famous accounts of the car’srole as a distillation of wider socio-cultural currents. In a striking news-paper piece from the mid-1950s that later became part of the collectionMythologies, Barthes (1993 [1957]: 88) reflects on the display at a car fairof the new Citroën DS (Déesse – ‘the goddess’). Barthes is concerned todevelop a semiotic reading of what the car signifies, what messages areinscribed into its very form. He remarks that:

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothiccathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passionby unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole popu-lation which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

The ‘magical’ nature of the DS makes it the modern equivalent of a religiousconception of perfection. ‘It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen fromthe sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object . . . anobject is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easilysee in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin’ (1993 [1957]:88). The spiritual elements of the DS rest in its design, in that its smoothlines and sleek façade are suggestive of an object that has not been madeby human hands, with all the imperfections and flaws that hand-productionsuggests. Instead, the form of the DS suggests a world beyond human frailty,a Platonic realm of pure forms where harmonious geometry reigns supreme.The point Barthes is making here echoes that of Marx – the commodity formhas theological elements about it, in that it is a fetish which disguises theconditions of its own genesis. For Barthes, automobile design is one ofthe most supreme expressions of the fetishism of commodities, whereby theprosaic conditions of exploitative production are transmogrified intothe supernatural arena of streamlined impeccability.

In the late 1960s, a period by which the car had come to figure as amuch more prosaic object in everyday life in France, Jean Baudrillarddeveloped the vein of semiotic analysis of automobile design first indicatedby Barthes. Intended to provide a taxonomy of everyday objects such asfurniture and household items, his book Le Système des objets (1996 [1968])reflects the great strides that consumer capitalism had made in France sincethe war, in that Baudrillard (1996 [1968]: 3) says apropos of all the variousgoods that now crowded modern French interiors, that as yet ‘we lack thevocabulary to name them all’. Baudrillard devotes a part of the book to thediscussion of the significance of the automobile in contemporary French


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social life, regarding the car as now just as important to the averageconsumer-citizen as was the home.

The feature of (primarily American) cars that particularly capturesBaudrillard’s attention is the phenomenon of tail-fins.8 The irony of the tail-fin is that ‘scarcely had [the car] emancipated itself from the forms of earlierkinds of vehicle than the automobile-object began connoting nothing morethan the result so achieved – that is to say, nothing more than itself as victo-rious function’ (Baudrillard, 1996 [1968]: 59). A curious logic is at workhere, for ‘the car’s fins became the sign of victory over space’, yet ‘they werepurely a sign, because they bore no direct relationship to that victory [and]indeed if anything they ran counter to it, tending as they did to makevehicles both heavier and more cumbersome’ (1996 [1968]: 59). Tail-finstherefore were signifiers not of ‘real speed, but of a sublime, measurelessspeed. They suggested a miraculous automatism, a sort of grace’ (1996[1968]: 59). A fetishization of speed is carried out by the material signifierof tail-fins which paradoxically reduce the technical efficiency of the car.

Like Barthes, then, Baudrillard sees in car design elements of a theo-logical discourse as to sublimity and purity. Also, in like fashion to Barthes’ideas in Mythologies (e.g. 1993 [1957]: 54) to the effect that French life isincreasingly being colonized by objects and systems of signs which bear nocorrespondence to, and which obliterate, ‘nature’, Baudrillard’s discussionof tail-fins indicates that natural objects like birds’ and sharks’ fins areappropriated into the design of cars, and in so doing are de-natured, andrendered into a purely abstract and artificial series of signifiers as to sleekmovement through space. In this way, the car-commodity plays a part indestroying an older and more apparently ‘natural’ environment, in favour ofa wholly man-made context in which natural phenomena only appear asstylized parodies. Here we have an early indication of Baudrillard’s centralthematic preoccupation, namely the construction and operation of a societybased around simulacra, symbols which have lost all touch with an exteriorreality they purport to represent, and which thus come to signify only them-selves and their kind (Baudrillard, 1983). The implication of Baudrillard’scomments on car design is that the prefix ‘auto’ in the word ‘automobile’points not only to a vehicle that ‘moves itself’, but also to an auto-referentialsymbolic form that creates its own universe of meaning at the expense ofthe functioning of other, more apparently ‘natural’, semantic systems. Theaesthetic elements in movement come to be associated less with the organicbody of the animal, and more with the inorganic body of the auto, which inturn presents itself as a perfected form superior to ‘mere’ nature. In thisfashion, the ‘natural’ is more and more processed out of existence, replacedby a self-consciously artificial imaginary which has the automobile at itscentre as the symbolic quintessence of dynamic force.

To Hell on the HighwayWhile semioticians like Barthes and Baudrillard grappled with the signify-ing potency of the automobile, other thinkers on the left who sought to


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reconfigure Marxian models of social critique for a consumerist age beganto deal critically with the car as it became more and more ingrained intothe fabric of French social life. For many of these leftist thinkers, the auto-mobile seemed to be a very potent symbol of the destructive effects of state-led modernization processes (Mathy, 1993; Rigby, 1991). The auto seemedto be both one of the prime symbols, and one of the central guarantors, ofwhat Alain Touraine (1971) called the ‘programmed society’, a social orderdominated by the twin factors of a technocratic state and an all-encom-passing consumerism. The car seemed to herald the construction of a‘French high-road to Americanization’ (Lefebvre, 1971 [1968]: 67), adevelopment that the left looked at with some trepidation. One of the leadingleftist thinkers of the era, Henri Lefebvre (1971 [1968]: 100), expressed theviews of many intellectuals on the left: ‘the motor-car is the epitome of“objects”, the Leading-Object’, the distillation and apotheosis of theconsumerist mentality that seemed rapidly to be engulfing French societyfrom the 1950s onwards. In a situation where fetishized objects were takento fulfil the ‘false needs’ inculcated into individuals by consumer capitalism,the auto was seen to take ‘place of honour in the system of substitutes’ forauthentic pleasures (Lefebvre, 1971 [1968]: 104). From this point of view,in the context of a society increasingly programmed by the state around theneeds of capital, ‘nothing can beat the motor-car’ for reinforcing the worstand most reactionary habits and practices (1971 [1968]: 100).

One version of this critique of the car can be found in the ideas of theSituationist International, a group of ultra-leftist intellectuals and artistsformed in the late 1950s who sought to develop Marx’s analysis ofcommodity fetishism in such a way that it could come to grasp the novelelements in consumerist society that had arisen in the post-war period(Plant, 1992). One of the key figures in this group, Guy Debord, began fromthe late 1950s onwards to think about the car in terms of its role as the‘supreme good of an alienated life’ (Debord, 1989 [1959]: 56). In the shortarticle entitled ‘Theses on Traffic’, which he wrote in 1959, Debordidentified what he took to be the central contradiction that lay at the heartof automotive culture. On the one hand, the car had come to figure as ‘themost notable material symbol of the notion of happiness that developedcapitalism tends to spread’ throughout modern societies (1989 [1959]: 56).Yet on the other hand, the car operates as a means of further developing theextent of the exploitation of the labouring masses. While upper working-class and lower middle-class people had tended to see the ownership of anautomobile as a means to augmenting their lives, for instance, through facili-tating trips to places of recreation during their leisure hours, car usage hadquite another, somewhat more subterranean, effect. By having to expendtime getting to and from work by car, and having to suffer the miseriesconcomitant with increasing congestion of the roads as more and morepeople took to this form of transport, the worker ended up paradoxicallygiving a greater proportion of his or her day over to work-related activities.As Debord saw it, the car had played a very important role in augmenting


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processes of extraction of surplus value from workers in ways Marx couldnot have fully anticipated: ‘commuting time . . . is a surplus labour whichcorrespondingly reduces the amount of “free” time’ available to the driver(1989 [1959]: 56). Consequently, a form of transportation that wasrepresented to workers as a boon for leisure purposes was actually adisguised vehicle of further extraction of time and effort in the interests ofthe economically dominant. From this perspective, when the car was usedfor commuting, it functioned as a Trojan horse in the service of the exploit-ing classes.

Debord took the car to task in analogous ways in his book La Sociétédu spectacle (1995 [1967]), published just before, and widely taken to beprophetic of, the upheavals of May 1968. In this context, Debord argues thatthe car is complicit in all that is becoming disastrously wrong with contem-porary France, for ‘giant shopping centres created ex nihilo and surroundedby acres of parking space . . . these temples of frenetic consumption’ aremoral and spiritual wastelands, where the only values to be found areexpressed in the facile tag-lines and jingles of advertising executives (1995[1967]: 123).

Similar sorts of ideas as to the spaces created by large-scale automo-bile use were put forward by Henri Lefebvre at around the same period(Gardiner, 2000). For Lefebvre, a central fact of French modernity in the1960s and 1970s was the car’s colonization of everyday life. From thisperspective, automobile use had come to reconfigure very profoundly manyaspects of how life is lived. Echoing the views of Debord, Lefebvre (1971[1968]: 101) argues that the ‘disintegration of city life’ in its more communalforms (meeting-halls, public parks, market-places, etc.) derives from thesebeing swept away by, among other things, the construction of autoroutesthrough cities, the enlarging of existing city streets to meet the needs ofincreased motor traffic, and the cocooning of individual motorists withintheir own privatized vehicular spaces. For Lefebvre (here drawing on theideas as to different species of spaces developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty[1996 (1945)]), this is a triumph of the ‘geometric space’ favoured by tech-nocratic public servants working hand in glove with car manufacturers, overthe ‘lived spaces’ of community-based association. Within the geometricspatial imaginary, ‘space is conceived in terms of motoring needs and trafficproblems’ only. Under contemporary social conditions, ‘traffic circulation[has come to be] one of the main functions of a society and, as such, involvesthe priority of parking spaces . . . streets and roadways’ over all otherconsiderations (Lefebvre 1971 [1968]: 100). The inner city comes more andmore to be characterized by ‘commercial centres packed tight withcommodities, money and cars’ (Lefebvre, 1993 [1974]: 50).

Within such urban conditions, argues Lefebvre (1993 [1974]: 313),the car driver’s experience of the cityscape loses the richness and multi-dimensionality open to the stroller, for it is characterized by the deadeningrationality of geometrically ordered space:


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. . . the driver is concerned only with steering himself to his destination, andin looking about sees only what he needs to for that purpose; he thus perceivesonly his route, which has been . . . mechanized and technicized, and he seesit from one angle only – that of its functionality: speed, readability, facility[and so on]. . . . [Thus] space appears solely in its reduced forms. Volumeleaves the field to surface, and any overall view surrenders to visual signalsspaced out along fixed trajectories already laid down in the ‘plan’.

As Baudrillard (1996 [1968]: 66) put it, making the same sort of point, thecar has the capacity to transfigure space and time in such a way that theworld is reduced to ‘two-dimensionality, to an image, stripping away its reliefand its historicity’.

Pursuing these themes in writings from the early 1970s, Lefebvreregards the re-creation of space in the present day as a situation wherebythe city tends to get ‘sliced up, degraded and eventually destroyed’, by the‘proliferation of fast roads and of places to park and garage cars, and theircorollary, a reduction of tree-lined streets, green spaces, and parks andgardens’ (Lefebvre, 1993 [1974]: 359). The conclusion Lefebvre draws inhis work of this period is that increasingly ‘it is almost as though automo-biles and motorways occupied the entirety of space’ (1993 [1974]: 374). Thisconquest of physical space by the car could be seen as the apotheosis ofAmericanization processes, whereby the French urban environment camemore and more to resemble the concrete and asphalt landscape of largeAmerican conurbations. Writing this time in the 1980s, Baudrillard (1994[1986]) makes the point of the car’s usurpation of older urban spaces (inthis case, those of Los Angeles) in this way: the ‘city was here before thefreeway system, no doubt, but it now looks as though the metropolis hasactually been built round this arterial network’. From this perspective,which is shared by Lefebvre, the car, which once was an adjunct of theurban environment, has come to be not only its defining feature but also itsmaster.

On the nightmarish view held by Lefebvre in the early 1970s, ‘themotor-car has . . . conquered everyday life, on which it imposes its laws. . . .Today the greater part of everyday life is accompanied by the noise ofengines’ (1971 [1968]: 101). This is the same conclusion reached by Jean-Luc Godard in his film Week-end, dating from 1967. Modern urban societyis represented, in a bravura 8-minute long single take, as a gridlocked hellof jammed traffic, the ennui of commuting, exhaust fumes and bloodyhighway accidents.9

Clearly, for leftist intellectuals of this period, the car had come tosignify a malaise into which France had been brought by the combinedforces of technocratic state modernization, misguided industrialization andthoughtless consumerism. The implication of these ideas of Lefebvre, aswell as those of Debord (and, in a way, those of Barthes and Baudrillardtoo), is that ‘Nature’, in the guise of the farms and marketplaces of an older,more bucolic France, has been swallowed up by the car-park, the ring-road


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and the out-of-town mall, all of these indicating an obliterating Ameri-canization of French physical space. In the present day, it would be a veryeasy matter merely to write off the ideas of Lefebvre set out above asembodying a conservative lament for a fictitious golden age of sociability, aGemeinschaft of lived spaces ruined by the dynamics of an automobile-powered, geometrically ordered Gesellschaft.

However, such analyses of the spaces of driving arguably remainrelevant today in that they have been usefully developed in recent years, inmore ‘neutral’ and ‘anthropological’ ways, by the ethnologist Marc Augé.The latter gives an account of the ‘non-places’ characteristic of the socialconfiguration he dubs ‘supermodernity’, such as airport waiting lounges andthe interiors of jumbo jets. For Augé (1995) the driver cruising throughFrance on the main autoroutes experiences a means of perception highlycharacteristic of the de-natured, de-historicized, geometricized, abstractcondition of supermodernity. On the one hand, the major arterial networkstend to bypass most cities and towns, thus for the sake of speed deprivingthe driver of experiencing those places first-hand; such places merelybecome ‘names on a map’, and nothing is known of them beyond that. Yetat the same time, the network of autoroute road signs is at pains to pointout ‘historical sites’ and ‘places of interest’. Augé concludes that ‘motorwaytravel is . . . doubly remarkable: it avoids, for functional reasons, all theprincipal places to which it takes us; and it makes comments on them’(1995: 97; see Merriman, 2004). The nature of ‘driverly’ perception, there-fore, is that it potentially gets to ‘experience’ large chunks of geography onlyas a series of abstract signs that flash by intermittently. Like the airlinepassenger, the motorway driver has been allowed to cover great distancesat the expense of having anything other than a highly mediated engagementwith any specific place on his or her travels. Space becomes flattened outand abstracted to a high degree, and specificities and localities are traducedand rendered into ciphers in the gliding monotony of the highway.

Cars and ContemptIn the above, we began to trace out the contours of accounts of the natureof the experiences involved in automotive transportation. This leads us toconsider the ways in which, according to Lefebvre and other contempora-neous French thinkers, the car has come to alter the experienced world ofthe people who have come to rely upon it.

In the part of his book Everyday Life in the Modern World (1971[1968]) devoted to automotive culture, Lefebvre argues that in contemporaryFrance ‘the motor-car’s roles are legion’, for it ‘directs behaviour in variousspheres from economics to speech’ (1971 [1968]: 103, 100). In terms of thelatter factor, what Lefebvre had in mind was the various signifying systemsthat codify the arrangement of cars on highways, not just the Highway Code– ‘the epitome of compulsive sub-codes disguising by their self-importanceour society’s lack of directive’ – but also other forms of discourse ‘such aslegal, journalistic or literary tracts, advertisements, etc.’. Given the


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proliferation from the 1950s onwards of texts relating to automobile trans-port, from the documents of traffic law to glossy magazines devoted to thelatest automotive models, Lefebvre notes that the car ‘has not only produceda system of communication’ dedicated to itself, ‘but also organisms andinstitutions that use it and that it uses’ (1971 [1968]: 103).

As a result of this exponential growth in cultural and institutionalforms pertaining to the car, according to Lefebvre the latter had come tocolonize more and more areas of everyday life in contemporary France.Echoing Barthes, Lefebvre argues that the car has come to figure as a centralnexus of commodity consumption, further developing the ramifications thatthis system has had for what people think is important in their lives.

The car is a status symbol, it stands for comfort, power, authority and speed,it is consumed as a sign in addition to its practical use, it is something magic,a denizen from the land of make-believe . . . it symbolizes happiness andprocures happiness by symbols. (1971 [1968]: 102–3)10

Lefebvre points out the intimate connections between type of car owned andsocial status. One can look down with disdain on the person who has a lessstylish, less powerful or less technologically advanced car than oneself. Theperceived inferiority of the car becomes mentally transferred to its driver,such that the person who drives a modest vehicle can be regarded withcontempt by the driver of a more symbolically potent model. One’s socialstanding in the eyes of others is strongly bound up with what sort of car onepossesses.11

It is not just the particular model of the car, or how it looks, that hasbecome important for a driver’s sense of self-worth; rather, the fetishizedidea of ‘performance’ has arisen as a way in which individuals seek to gainsome individuality for themselves by reference to the power and handlingcapacities of their vehicles, in a social context where ‘true’ individuality isincreasingly stymied (Lefebvre, 1971 [1968]: 102). While the car is thecommodity par excellence, and is thus a vital means of ensuring the conti-nuity of regulated forms of everyday practice, nonetheless it creates its ownillusions of ‘freedom’. For Lefebvre (1971 [1968]: 101), the motorist iscaught in a curious paradox, created by the nature of the car itself:

Motorized traffic enables people and objects to congregate and mix withoutmeeting, thus constituting a striking example of simultaneity withoutexchange, each element enclosed in its own compartment, tucked away in itsshell; such conditions contribute to the disintegration of city life and fostera . . . ‘psychosis’ that is peculiar to the motorist; on the other hand the realbut limited and pre-established dangers do not prevent most people from‘taking risks’, for the motor-car with its retinue of wounded and dead, its trailof blood, is all that remains of everyday life, its paltry ration of excitementand hazard.

On this account, the highway is based around the orderly flow of traffic, an


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analogy to the ordered flow of commodities in an economy based aroundconstant consumption. Yet the advertising mechanisms that help maintainthe flow of consumption often draw upon images of individualized freedom,flight and speed to sell the latest auto models. This helps to stimulatedisorder and anarchy in the traffic system, if only mostly fleetingly and inits interstices. Nonetheless, the car has come to occupy a somewhat ambigu-ous position in modern life, in that it ‘is a condensation of all the attemptsto evade [forms of] everyday life’ that are more and more regulated, becauseit has been defined as the last refuge of ‘hazard, risk and significance’ inan administered society (1971 [1968]: 103).

What lies at the back of Lefebvre’s analysis here is the internationallyrecognized notoriety of French driving conditions in the 1960s and 1970s,with France having the highest number of road deaths out of all WestEuropean countries consistently year after year. On a Monday, newspaperswould have a special section devoted to the prior weekend’s death toll onthe roads (Vallin and Chesnais, 1975).12 The issue of the often aggressiveindividuality of (primarily male) drivers was taken up in the mid-1970s bythe sociologist Luc Boltanski. Boltanski (1975) discussed the phenomenonof drivers engaged in competition with others on the road as an expressionof the culture of competitive individualism fostered by a class society organ-ized around accumulation of private wealth and consumer goods, andupward social mobility. The dangerous nature of driving was the result ofraces between drivers who sought to ‘maximize their gains in space, whichwould be equivalent to maximizing their profits in time’ (Ross, 1996: 61).From this viewpoint, an aggressively acquisitive society breeds certainstyles of everyday practice, notable among which is a bellicose driving style.At around the same period, the political analyst André Gorz, writing underthe nom de plume Michel Bosquet (1977 [1973]: 21), put the same point inthese terms:

. . . mass motoring produces an absolute triumph of bourgeois ideology on thelevel of daily practice by creating and nourishing within the individual theillusion that he [sic] can prevail and advance himself at everyone’s expense.The brutal, competitive egotism of the driver symbolically murdering the‘idiots’ obstructing his headlong passage through the traffic represents theflowering of a universally bourgeois behaviour. (‘You’ll never forge socialismwith these people’, said an East German friend as he gazed in horror at hisfirst Paris rush-hour.)

While the Althusserian elements in such analysis render it a little crude(‘bourgeois ideology’ is seen directly to produce particular everyday prac-tices, in this case competitive and belligerent driving), nonetheless itremains useful today for focusing attention on the wider socio-culturalcontexts which produce such phenomena as ‘road rage’ and other forms ofviolence on the highways. The factors that lie behind the actions of thedriver who sees red vis-à-vis other motorists to the point of deliberately


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inflicting physical damage on them could be seen not as residing purely inthe psyche of the individual alone, but as also part of a wider socio-culturalorder characterized by competitive individualism and selfish consumerism,especially given that that form of consumerism often involves deprecationof other people’s choice of car models (Collett and Marsh, 1986).

The Quotidian CarThus far we have examined some of the more gloomy prognoses as to thedevelopment of automotive culture in post-war France made by certainintellectuals of the period. Yet even in the depths of the most despairingcritiques of automotive culture there lay hidden more upbeat accounts ofthe restructuring of social and spatial relations in the age of the auto.Certainly Lefebvre’s analysis of the encroachment of large-scale motortransport on the fabric of urban France can be seen as a nostalgic hanker-ing after a pre-automobile cityscape, but it can also be seen as an attemptto identify the contradictions in car culture. The aim of Lefebvre’s overallanalysis of the conditions of everyday life was to ‘expose its ambiguities –its baseness and exuberance, its poverty and fruitfulness’ (1971 [1968]: 13).The privatization that travel undergoes in the car era in fact could be takento be productive of both aggressive individualism in drivers and the possi-bility that the car operates as a refuge from an overly administered form ofexistence, a refuge that allows a little recklessness and ‘fun’ to be injectedinto the otherwise highly regulated life of the commuter.

A shift from a ‘structuralist’ analytic which stresses the imperatives ofsystems upon individuals to a ‘post-structuralist’ paradigm, which looks athow such systems are negotiated by particular persons in everyday settings,is characteristic of a substantial element of French social thinking from themid-1970s onwards.13 In his analyses of the ‘rhythms’ of city life dating fromthe later 1970s, Lefebvre (1995, 2004) was concerned to depict the temposof city life as following the beats both of officially imposed social order (e.g.the effects of policing of the streets) and of unofficial, localized resistancesto it (e.g. driving through red lights). This sort of analysis was also devel-oped throughout the 1970s by Michel de Certeau. His stated concern waswith showing the ways in which individuals work within, subvert andconnive against systems of regulation and control (de Certeau, 1984: xii).While ‘places’ are locales where regimes of power inscribe themselves, deCerteau sought to uncover how these can be turned into ‘spaces’, localesused in ‘unofficial’ ways by particular persons. Thus the focus turns to theways in which ‘the street geometrically defined by urban planning is trans-formed into a space by walkers’ (1984: 117). On such a view, which seeksto locate unexpected pockets of creativity and movement within an appar-ently wholly administered urban order, city planners and other such authori-tative groups are seen to be:

. . . incapable of imposing the rationality of reinforced concrete on multipleand fluid cultural systems that organize the living space of inner areas


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(apartments, stairways and the like) or public domains (streets, squares, etc.)and that innervate them with an infinite number of itineraries. (de Certeau,1997 [1974]: 133)

Thus the ‘geometric’ spaces identified by Lefebvre turn out on de Certeau’saccount to be subvertible by unofficial, anti-hegemonic practices whichrender them back into ‘lived spaces’. The spirit of de Certeau’s writingsdirects our attention not only to ‘unofficial practices’ of driving such asaggressive overtaking and the like pointed to by Lefebvre, but also to themundane cases where what should happen does not: late departures, missedturn-offs, unreliable maps and all the other mishaps that exist beyond andin spite of the rationalized system of the contemporary highway (for a moredetailed account of the implications of de Certeau’s analysis of car culture,see Thrift’s article in this volume).

A further element of the car’s appropriation by people in everyday lifewas first indicated as early as 1963, in an article by Barthes (2002 [1963])in the journal Réalités. There Barthes argues, in marked contrast to hisnewspaper piece from the mid-1950s mentioned above, that the car hasbecome an absolutely ordinary and taken-for-granted element of French life.He identifies the binary opposition that he feels above all others has cometo categorize different aspects of the car: the opposition between ‘sporty’(sportif) and ‘homely’ (domestique). The former side of the car, which obvi-ously comes to the fore more in some models than others, connotes unfet-tered individualism, the driver being representable as a free spirit breakingaway from the rest of the pack. (The connection between this mentality andBoltanski’s and Gorz’s aggressive individualists is obvious.) The more‘homely’ aspect of the car, which is foregrounded most typically in the familysaloon or estate, by contrast, allows a different, more gentle sort of indi-vidualism. It suggests a cosy cocoon of one’s own, where through means ofbricolage, the owner creates his or her own personalized environment byadding extra fittings such as sun-blinds on the rear windows and decora-tions such as stickers commemorating either places visited or allegiance toa sports team. This is the sort of car that gives one a feeling of being in aspace of one’s own, a familiar environment over which one has control, evenif one has travelled hundreds of miles. Once again we see Baudrillard’s(1996 [1968]: 67) writing of the late 1960s echoing Barthes’ ideas. The para-doxical nature of the domestique aspects of the automobile is that ‘it makesit possible to be simultaneously at home and further and further away fromhome’. The ambiguity of the car rests in its simultaneous ability to be both‘a projectile . . . [and] a dwelling place’ (1996 [1968]: 69).Thus ‘the carrivals the house as an alternative zone of everyday life: the car, too, is anabode, but an exceptional one; it is a closed realm of intimacy, but onereleased from the constraints that usually apply to the intimacy of home,one endowed with a formal freedom of great intensity . . .’ (1996 [1968]: 67).

The point that both Barthes and Baudrillard each in their own wayswant to make is that the interior of the car is a domestic arena infused with


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the capacity – at least theoretically – to take one wherever one may sodesire. This illustrates the degree to which, by the 1960s, the car wasviewable in France not just as a hostile entity but as much a familiar partof a person’s life as the furniture in their home or the sights of their localneighbourhood. This was not a perspective limited merely to the writings ofBarthes and Baudrillard, but can be seen as part of a more general sensi-bility characterized by a view of the car as a ‘place of one’s own’.14 InJacques Tati’s final film of note, tellingly entitled Trafic (1970), although thegeneric modern city is represented as constituted of a never-ending sea ofcars, the idiosyncratic things that their human inhabitants do inside the carsis dwelt upon. For example, there is a celebrated sequence in which theaudience gets to watch different drivers stuck in traffic picking their noses.Another set-piece likens the ways the windscreen wipers of particular carswork to the corporeal and personal characteristics of their drivers – thewipers of a fat man’s car move ponderously, while those of a very agedgentleman do so only with the greatest effort. The technology is humanizedby Tati in order to emphasize that after purchase, the car becomes indige-nized, reworked and recast to some degree to suit the personalities of itsusers (Bellos, 1999).15

The same sort of ‘humanistic’ appraisal of the everyday activities ofpeople, including drivers, is apparent in the novelist and essayist GeorgesPerec’s work from the mid-1970s. Perec’s account of the minutiae of quotid-ian life dwells in part on the role of the car in everyday existence. Forexample, while sitting on the outside terrace of a cafe on the junction of theRue de Bac and Boulevard Saint-Germain, he commands himself to‘describe the number of operations the driver of a vehicle is subjected towhen he parks merely in order to go and buy a hundred grams of fruit jelly’.Perec (1997 [1974]: 51–2) lists the rigmarole the driver goes through:

� parks by means of a certain amount of toing and froing� switches off the engine� withdraws the key, setting off a first anti-theft device� extricates himself from the vehicle� winds up the left-hand front window� locks it� checks that the left-hand rear door is locked;

if not:

� opens it� raises the handle inside� slams the door� checks it’s locked securely� circles the car; if need be, checks that the boot is locked properly� checks that the right-hand rear door is locked; if not, recommences the

sequence of operations already carried out on the left-hand rear door


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� winds up the right-hand front window� shuts the right-hand front door� locks it� before walking away, looks all around him as if to make sure the car is

still there and that no-one will come and take it away.

Perec’s intention is to gaze so hard at the ‘ordinary’ that it stops beingprosaic and starts to be seen as peculiar, odd and rather extraordinary; heis in essence engaged in an ‘anthropological’ de-familiarization of thecommonplace. His phenomenology of car use asks us to examine closelyour own everyday automotive activities, and to reflect on the little ritualsthat make up our quotidian existence both inside the car and without. Aglint of wry humour makes its way into Perec’s account above towards theend, with the driver being seen to turn to see if his car is actually still wherehe left it a second before, leaving the reader perhaps with a little jolt ofrecognition as s/he remembers seeing this done or doing this him- or herself.

ConclusionThis benevolent view of the car’s role in people’s lives put forward in literaryterms by Perec and visually dramatized by Tati is a far cry from the oftenapocalyptic denunciations of car culture formulated by other French intel-lectuals in the period from the 1950s through to the 1970s. This fact indi-cates that French intellectual engagements with the rise and developmentof mass automobility encompassed a diverse set of different possibleresponses, ranging from the most hostile to the most empathetic, as to thecar and its possible effects on society, culture and everyday life. I have beenconcerned in this article to set out the range of these responses, in orderboth to present them to an Anglophone audience, and to pull the differentideas together from their various sources in such a way that otherwiseoccluded patterns might become visible. We have seen that in post-warFrance, the automobile could variously be regarded as, among other things,spectacular commodity, threat to French values and spaces, avatar of Ameri-canization, symbol and agent of reproduction of aggressive individualism,home-from-home and an essential part of everyday life, a ‘humanized’ objectthat expresses the individuality of its driver and around which peculiar littlerituals had developed. As a result, a very wide variety of interpretations ofthe car’s socio-cultural significance were possible, and were put forward, inpost-war France. We can identify in broad outline a chronological aspect tothese responses: those that regard as the car as a relatively ‘alien’ andunfamiliar object naturally enough date from the period when mass motor-ization was beginning to develop, whereas those accounts which see the caras a prosaic and ‘homely’ entity date from a period when automobility hadbecome thoroughly woven into the fabric of French quotidian existence.

This article has at one level sought to present a succinct history of thedevelopment of car culture at a particular time in a particular place, namelypost-war France, and its impact, as perceived by thinkers of the period, on


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wider cultural and social dynamics. Yet although the ideas we haveexamined were originally responses to particular sets of socio-culturalconditions, nonetheless I believe they possess interest and utility whenregarded beyond their original context of production.16 The semiotics of cardesign first pioneered by Barthes and then taken up by Baudrillard I thinkremains a valuable means of investigating the significance that car designsin the present day may have in wider cultural contexts. For example, wemight take inspiration from Barthes and Baudrillard to try to understandwhat the automotive designs that go under the verbal label ‘people carrier’might tell us about attitudes towards family life held by certain types ofdriver today. In a similar fashion, and as indicated above, we could todayfurther develop the ideas of analysts such as Lefebvre, Gorz and Boltanskias to linkages between more general cultural patterns of individualism andcompetitiveness, and the specific case of aggressive driving styles. It would,for example, be interesting to carry out empirical research to ascertainwhether incidents of ‘road rage’ today tend to occur most frequently amongthe social group that both Boltanski and Gorz may have had in mind backin the 1970s as the least chivalrous of drivers, namely ‘young executives’of the lower middle class, whose social position arguably compels themalways to be oriented towards ‘putting one over’ on other people, be thesecolleagues, customers, or other drivers on the roads.

I am also particularly struck by the possibility of taking further the‘phenomenological’ perspectives on automotive experience developed bycertain thinkers dealt with above. Perec’s detailed descriptions of what cardrivers actually do in their everyday automotive practices is already a usefulstep in this direction. But I also have in mind here the potential implicit inLefebvre’s utilization of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology for the under-standing of how drivers experience movement on the road. Lefebvre openedup this perspective in one direction, namely how the geometric spaces ofthe road are viewed by the car driver, an issue that has been taken up morerecently by Augé. But what could be developed further is a more generalMerleau-Pontian account of the dispositions and activities that the wholebeing of the driver engages in while on the road. A Merleau-Pontian (1996[1945]) analysis, which is based upon seeing the human being as a conflu-ence of mind and body rather than as an abstract intellect confronting itsown inert flesh, would seek to depict the ways in which the mind and bodyof the driver are as one when they are involved in the acts that togetherconstitute practical and partially pre-reflective modes of inhabiting the car.Different modes of driving, such as those based on differences in gendersocialization, could be investigated, as could the ways in which the driver‘lives’ in his or her car, whether it is in motion or stationary (Sobchak, 1994).

This suggestion as to a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of driverlyexperience is just one example of how perspectives on the car first devel-oped in post-war France could be developed and extended in the presentday as we seek more fully to grasp the fundamental roles the car plays insocial orgaization and the life of the individual. Intellectuals of many


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different hues in post-war France thought that the car was ‘good to thinkwith’. I hope that this article has demonstrated that their ideas as to auto-mobility are good to think with too.

Notes

1. Virilio (1986 [1977]: 14) argued in his work from the late 1970s that the modernstate is only secondarily the institution whereby one class oppresses all others.Rather, the state should be understood as a means of transportive order, in that itis essentially a mechanism of ‘highway surveillance’, which sees social order ascontiguous with ‘the control of traffic (of people, of goods), and revolution, revolt,with traffic jams, illegal parking, multiple clashes, collisions’. Likewise, the city isprimarily ‘a human dwelling-place penetrated by channels of rapid communication. . . a habitable circulation’ (1986 [1977]: 5). Seeing the urban and political ordersas configurations of vehicular movement allows Virilio to characterize humanhistory in terms of differing transport regimes. For example, the functioning of theNazi state hinges on its motorization of the German people through mass owner-ship of a Volkswagen – ‘no more riots, no need for much repression; to empty thestreets, it’s enough to promise everyone the highway’ (1986 [1977]: 25).2. The affinities between this position and those of the Italian and Russian Futuristartists working in about the same period are obvious. The speeding vehicle is seento be a harbinger of a revolution in thought, representation and social practice (seeMartin, 1968).3. This optimistic view of the car was an object of satire and scepticism even inthe 1920s. For example, the Russian author Ilya Ehrenburg’s (1976 [1929]) novelThe Life of the Automobile, written while he was resident in Paris, set out in highlycaustic ways the negative impacts the car was having on different countries aroundthe world, including France.4. Quotes from works in French are the present author’s translations. All page refer-ences are to the French editions.5. As early as 1929, Ehrenburg (1976 [1929]: 3) noted the ubiquity of advertisingfor cars in France: ‘The streets of Paris, swarming with automobiles, were coveredwith posters [advertising automobiles] as cajoling and coddling as the hiss of thenocturnal serpent.’6. Kristin Ross (1996) shows in some detail the impact that cars in general, andAmerican models in particular, played in French popular culture, especiallycinema, of the later 1950s and early 1960s. In films such as Jacques Demy’s Lola(1960) and Robert Dhéry’s La Belle Americaine (1961), the American automobileis treated as a fantastic and alien intrusion into quotidian French existence. Thecar also made its way into Francophone novels of the period. Françoise Sagan’simmensely popular Bonjour tristesse (1955), for example, has a car crash as itscentral plot device. As relatively early as 1953, the crime writer Georges Simenon(2003 [1953]) had based a whole novel, Feux rouges (Red Lights) around theAmerican dependence on car transportation and its peculiar effects on theAmerican psyche (Marnham, 2003). For a study of popular cultural representationsof cars in America at the same period, see Dettelbach (1976).7. Even as early as the 1920s, American intellectuals were describing the car’sprofound transformation of the quotidian aspects of life in the United States. InRobert and Helen Lynd’s (1957 [1929]) classic sociological analysis of ‘Middletown’


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(actually Muncie, Indiana), the car is seen to have had wide-ranging impacts oneveryday existence, from reducing church attendance by facilitating longer-rangeSunday pleasure trips to freeing car-driving teenagers from parental scrutiny. Asone respondent put it, in answer to the question as to what factors were changingthe community, ‘I can tell you what’s happening in just four letters: A-U-T-O!’ (1957[1929]: 251).8. As Gartman (1994, 2004) points out, tail-fins on American cars were probablyfirst derived from the fins of fighter aircraft rather than animals’ fins.9. The film, with its emphasis on revolutionary violence coming to wreck orderedbourgeois life, as symbolized in the car, could be seen as prophetic of the eventsof May 1968. As Jean Collet (1970: 134) noted in the period immediately after theevents, ‘The cars that burned in the Ile-de-France of Weekend, filmed in October1967, did not wait for another October before setting the torch to other cars.’10. Barthes (2002 [1963]) in his 1963 article on automobiles denied this point,arguing that the car had by this time ceased to function as an important statussymbol in French cultural life.11. Although cars feature in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1996 [1979]) analyses of the fieldof cultural consumption in France in the 1960s and 1970s to a certain extent, theydo not play a very major role, an interesting lacuna in Bourdieu’s account of tastesin cultural objects.12. The more passive style of American driving, in contrast to its more aggressiveFrench counterpart, catches Baudrillard’s attention in his travelogue America (1994[1986]: 53). The way in which Americans drive on freeways – cruising along, notbothering to overtake or cut up other drivers – gives a profound sense of the natureof the American collectivity. In a hyper-individualistic social order, the smooth flowof traffic ‘is the only real society or warmth here, this collective propulsion, thiscompulsion – of lemmings plunging suicidally together’.13. One might see this ‘post-Marxist’ turn towards prosaic and everyday forms of‘resistance’ against sources of official power as a means by which leftist intellec-tuals could retain their ‘radical’ credentials while giving up on more organized,group-oriented forms of political struggle in light of the ‘failure’ of the May 1968events.14. This is not, however, to claim that the intellectual dispositions of differentauthors (and artists) working within this sensibility were wholly congruent with eachother. Tati’s humanism is of course very far away, in many respects, fromBaudrillard’s semiotic anti-humanism.15. In Playtime (1967), Tati places his comic creation Monsieur Hulot in a LeCorbusier-like Paris of chrome, metal and the insistent presence of automobiles.Yet Tati shows that under the hyper- (or super-) modern surface, the pulse of humanlife still continues to beat. For example, at one point in the film, the playing ofcarnival music is seen to transform a gridlocked roundabout into a funfair carousel,with the cars slowly but elegantly turning around like so many hobbyhorses.16. Ironically, the scholar who today is arguably the main French thinker on issuesof ‘mobilities’, namely Paul Virilio (e.g. 2000 [1995]), has pronounced that the carhas now, at the symbolic level, become outmoded by new forms of transportation,most notably Internet forms of communication which allow the individual to moveinstantaneously through forms of space hitherto unknown. While Virilio’s ideas inthis direction are often very stimulating, the rhetoric he sometimes puts forward as


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to the relative unimportance of the car today and in the future does not very wellreflect the continuing dominance of automotive transport in moving people inmundane physical spaces, as opposed to the spaces of the electronic ether.

References

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David Inglis is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. Hewrites in the areas of social theory and the sociology of culture. He is theauthor (with John Hughson) of Confronting Culture: Sociological Vistas(Polity, 2003), and is currently writing Culture and Everyday Life for Rout-ledge. He is co-author with Roland Robertson of Globalization and SocialTheory: Redefining Social Science (Open University Press, forthcoming).


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