Against
Automobility. Böhm, S., Jones, C., Land, C., & Paterson, M.
(Eds.) Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA. 2006. 259 pp includes
bibliographical references and index. ISBN paperback 14051152709;
hardback 9781405152709.
Keywords:
Mobility, technology, paradigm, capitalism, liberalism
Review
The
edited volume Against Automobility is an important and timely
contribution to the expanding book shelf dealing with Automobility
and its consequences. Before offering a review of the book and of its
chapters, a succinct sketch of the outlines of this immensely
innovating body of knowledge, which concerns Automobility and its
consequences, and with which this volume corresponds, is needed.
Under the title of "Automobility," hides a development
which amounts to a (Khunian) paradigm shift in the social sciences.
At stake is an immensely vibrant, interdisciplinary locus of research
and theorizing, which is vast in scope and revolutionary in the
cutting edge influences it both absorbs and inspires. The basic idea
is that sociology and related disciplines (primarily, but not
exclusively within the social sciences) have hardly addressed thus
far the organization of the system or the culture of automobility,
and the consequences it carries on modern ways of living.
Explorations essentially stretch from the material artifact
(emblematically embodied by the automobile), to a much broader view
that addresses automobility. Essays on automobility employ conceptual
developments from material culture, studies in technology and
society, mobility studies and more, thus creating a most stimulating
field of thought and research; a truly vibrant intellectual quarter
in social sciences. While it is early to judge what will be this
field's core (canonic) essays, it is clear that the edited volume
Automobilities, edited in 2005 by Featherstone, Thrift and
Urry, should be included, as well as a number of other publications
having to do with the works of John Urry (for instance, Sociology
beyond societies [2000] and [2008]?? his last work - mobilities).
It is now that we may turn to the preset edited publication, and see
the ways it corresponds with and ads to what has thus far been
accomplished.
The volume Against Automobility brings us the fruits of a conference
that took place in Keele University in September, 2002. The volume
consists of thirteen chapters arranged in four sections, which
jointly aim at improving the state of knowledge in the field depicted
above, by systematically adopting a critical approach to automobility
and by highlighting the limitations, contradictions and (as the
editors nicely phrase it) impossibilities of automobility.
The first section, titled Conceptualizing Automobility, includes
three introductory chapters that supply two types of background to
the essays that follow. First, the editors argue for a need for a
critical approach to the field of automobility, an approach which
will transcend theoretical definitions that have been suggested thus
far (notably, Urry's notion of the "system of automobility").
In the Introduction chapter, the editors thus argue, and I tend to
agree with them, that previous approaches and definitions do not put
enough accent on the alarming, unavoidable and coercive consequences
of the exponential growth of the automobile industry and of the
objects and technologies it has produced over the last century; also,
and at the same time, the editors point at the far reaching
consequences of these developments in terms of the social practices
and the implications of embodying automobility. The editors here
argue for and indeed accomplish a politicization of automobility and
also an examination of how automobility has been managed and
regulated and how it has been naturalized and de-politicized so
effectively over the last century.
The second introductory aspect of this section concerns supplying the
basic building stones of the emerging field of automobility. While
some of the material is well-known to those familiar with the
sociological literature on automobility, it is nonetheless
interesting to read Urry's new take on issues he has tackled before
(in a chapter titled, "Inhabiting the Car"). Specifically,
the notion Urry has recently promoted—that of inhabiting the
car and the habitable (mobile) space of the automobile, emerge as
intriguing and productive. The third chapter, titled "Driving
the Social" (by Joanna Latimer and Rolland Munro), works against
a common reductive and purist attitude, which tends to focus on the
automobile itself and to restrict the system or culture around it to
the fetishized object. Instead, the authors argue that "driving
as a form of incorporation, elicits particular kinds of relations and
ways of being in the world" (p.49), and from here the way is
shirt to assert that "the car has become the contemporary
carrier of the social, much as conversation could once have been said
to define the social" (p.49).
The book's second and third sections, respectively titled Governing
Automobility and Representing Automobility, offer new perspectives,
data and analyses that expose, criticize and politicize automobility,
broadly defined. These sections include seven critical essays of
multidisciplinary theoretical backgrounds (with a particular flavor
for political science), which together depict in interesting ways the
"regime of automobility." The book's purposes are made
persuasively clear in these chapters, as the focus of the inquiry
shifts from conceptualizing automobility for the sake of social
theory and knowledge, to deconstructing automobility for the sake of
social emancipation, equality and change. Compared with earlier
literature, this represents a change of both content and tone: we
hear less of sociological dynamics and complexities, and more of
ideologies, regulating agents and plans, and advertisements, which
are promoting automobility, and of the bleak consequences of the
almost unprecedented success of this regime.
These sections present works on such issues as the history of the
automobility regime (Merriman on the "British Motorway in the
1950s"), the rhetoric of regulating policies (Forstrop on the
"Zero Tolerance" program in Sweden), and the effects of
liberal ideology on the spread of automobile ideology (Rajan on
Automobility and the Liberal Disposition). While the book's second
section (Governing Automobility) tackles policies and ideologies head
on, its third section (Representing Automobility) inquires of popular
culture and images of automobility in commercials and movies. This
makes the latter section a bit lighter and sometimes downright
amusing, such as with Martin-Jones' chapter, "No Literal
Connection," which discusses commoditization and the oil and
military industry as represented in The Big Lebowski.
The book's forth and concluding section, titled After Automobility,
duly suggests alternative possibilities for automobility. While the
essays in this section are interesting and challenging as are the
book's other chapters, it is here that the project is perhaps a bit
overextended. While throughout the book and throughout the
sociological literature on automobility more generally, a systematic
(and conscious) attempt is made to expose the overwhelming scope of
automobility in late-modern societies, it is nonetheless important to
see what falls within and without the field. It is important to make
sure that automobility, while engrossing, is not a conceptual
waste-basket, but that whatever developments and contributions are
made, they are tied to the field and offer substantial contribution.
To conclude, the volume Against Automobility offers an important
contribution to the field—an emerging field defined by the
distance between the automobile itself (a material product and a
symbolic fetish), and the utterly complex, techno-human, ideological
regime of automobility. The book accomplishes this by first
reiterating the fantastic scope of automobility and its formative
effects on late-modernity, and then by pushing and extending the
limits of this multidisciplinary field in much needed political and
critical directions.
As I look ahead at the future of the research of automobility,
defined as a system, a regime, or both, I would suggest two
directions that reflect this book's inspirations and my own
inclinations. The first proposition concerns tying critical academic
explorations to social and political activities. Nowhere does this
synergy between "high" theory and "low"
groundwork aimed at creating social change seem more in-need and
potentially fruitful than in relation to managing automobility
differently. Of course, understanding the intricacies of the system
of automobility, and de-mystifying and de-naturalizing its regime are
the necessary first steps. I just argue that we are at a point where
this has already been accomplished effectively, and we can and should
proceed.
Second, with regards to research itself I would argue that time is
ripe now for engaging in more creative and evocative ways of
researching, theorizing and representing automobility. Just as the
vast scope of this field is continuously being uncovered and
realized—a theoretical pursuit to which this books
significantly contributes—so should sociological research, and
means through which it is conducted (i.e. methods) and represented,
be innovative and creative: special ambitions require special means.
Chaim
Noy, PhD
Independent
Scholar
1/a
Shalom Yehuda St. apt.#6
Jerusalem,
93395
ISRAEL
tel./fax.:
972-2-6732188
References
mentioned
Featherstone, M., Thrift, N. J., & Urry, J. (Eds.). (2005).
Automobilities. London: SAGE.
Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond societies: mobilities for the
twenty-first century. London: Routledge.
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