Well not quite. But a story last Saturday on Weekend Edition captured its essence. If someone asks what my book is about, one answer would be it is a 240 page reply to this story.
People love cars because they provide the feel of controlling a powerful machine amid a too complicated modern world.
Auto independence celebrated in action films, race car tv, and curvy empty road cruising ads masks the drivers profound dependence on others--from miners to highway engineers.
This fantasy of self-reliance extends equal blindness to the environmental devastation spreading far beyond smog and carbon emissions to the massive chemical spillage and metal extraction required for racing grave pits of personal mobility.
While feeding an illusion of unspoiling innocence, hybrids, electrics, biofuel Benzes all contribute to this high speed poisoning and ever further sprawl of eco-ruining asphalt-brick-steel ex-urban lives.
The micro-horrors of bus riding razor cut the personal party balloon, tiny leaks hissing the deflation of dreamy separation from quotidian vagabond grime. At least for a moment, one must confront the extreme inequality wrought by planetwide financial propping of U.S. super-consumerism.
This blog seeks to articulate the links between local/global pleasures/pains, with a politics of partiality not unlike Donna Haraway's:
"There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds. All these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability, but of elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another's point of view, even when the other is our own machine." --Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
No comments:
Post a Comment