First, freedom of mobility is a ruse
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Automobilty____ The automobile is a full assault on space that control how and where we move and in what time controlling the structures of life. The car is a tool of destruction and full control that obliterates the earth.Bratton 2k6 (Benjamin H., Lecturer @ the Southern California School or Architecture at UCLA, “ “Logistics of Habitable Circulation,” Introduction to 2006 Edition of Speed and Politics, pg. 15-16) Dromocracy depends on technologies that in their employ- ment, straddle the pre-political and the hyperpolitical, working on the bodies of the masses as a practical material that can be strate- gically designed and deployed. If the city is a collective prostheses of its inhabitants, other technologies are for a more individual, specific purpose, for example the car. "The transportation capacity created by the mass production of automobiles became a social assault on space" that would undo centripetal urban concentration exploding it into the congested network ofthe open highway (50). "No more riots, no need for much repression; to empty the streets, it's enough to promise everyone the highway: this is the aim of [the Nazi party's] Volkswagen plebiscite" (49). Dromocracy extends to this new platform: "Speed limits...we are talking about acts of government, in other words of the political control of the highway, aiming precisely at limiting the extraordinary power of assault that the motorization of the masses creates" (51). Earlier in the century, the concentration of industrial technology into individual motor- ized locomotion had already revolutionized the battlefield in the figure of the tank; that "automotive fort" (78). These offered their commanders a new calculus of speed and movement. As if sailing across a smooth surface, the tank "extends war over an earth that disappears, crushed under the infinity of possible trajectories" (79). Virilio suggests these "battleships of earth" (79) should not be called "all-terrain," but "sans-terrain" in their obliteration of territorial impediment (78). Later with the Jeep (and more grotesquely the Hummer) the personal fortress would allow for the (largely preten- tious) presumption of this power to the performance of the daily commute.6 But vehicular prostheticization is not only automotive. Others are assimilated as surgical prosthetics, others as fashion. The long marches of soldiers across fields plowed by battle during World War I presented the· problem of damaged feet, and gave rise to the practical science of Orthopedics, and the redesign of the pedestrian soldier's locomotive technology: his shoes. This accomplishment is amplified and embellished in the cultural imaginary for which the sports shoe becomes a vehicle of personal ambulatory and logistical excellence ("Just do it"). Cars/Highways____ Automobility is historically bound into governmentality and systems of surveillance.Dodge and Kitchin 2007 (Martin, Geography, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, and Rob, NIRSA, National University of Ireland, “The automaticmanagement of drivers and drivingspaces,” Geoforum, Vol. 38, No. 2] As Foucault has documented, particularly his genealogies (1976, 1978), modern life is infused with the apparatus and systems of governmentality that seek to order and regulate the behaviour of individuals by producing a particular form of rationality designed to ensure good government through a more efficient and rationalized legal and social field (McNay, 1994). These systems hold power because they instill a regime of self-disciplining and conformity through the threat of discipline for noncompliance with social norms and rules. The systems intervene in all aspects of daily life and are supported by technologies designed to monitor and evaluate behaviour, and that this surveillance is potentially ever-present. Such technologies include censuses, health records, school attendance, criminal records, tax records, registration of births, deaths, marriages, and more recently CCTV footage, mobile phone records, and as we document various systems surrounding automobilities and its infrastructures. As many commentators have noted with respect to governmentality and automobilities, the long held myth of ‘freedom of the road’ has never been a reality, with driving being subject to various forms of state regulation that have sought to selfdiscipline drivers through the threat of direct disciplining (official warnings from traffic police, fines, disqualification, confiscation of vehicles, imprisonment, and so on). The first cars required a person to run in front of the vehicle waving a red flag to warn unsuspecting pedestrians. Not long after roads became managed in order to make them more serviceable and navigable for drivers. This included the introduction of road grading schemes and then consistent number identification, the application of standard road markings and signage, and the introduction of traffic lights and speed limits to regulate flow. These regulations became fixed in material-legal form as the Highway Code, introduced in Britain in the 1930s and now common in most countries (Featherstone, 2004). Highway codes were complemented by the formalised testing and licensing of drivers by the state. In Britain this became a legal requirement with the passing of the 1903 Motor Car Act (Higgs, 2001). In the same Act, the registration of vehicles was introduced that mandated the visual display of a license plate that uniquely identified each vehicle and enabled the police to trace the owner’s address details in local registries. Later in the twentieth century, drivers were required to insure vehicles they owned, limit their consumption of alcohol, wear seat belts and not use a handheld phone when driving2 and automobiles became subject to a raft of other forms of regulation including pollution orders, safety and fuel efficiency standards, and regular road worthiness testing, and marked with globally unique VIN codes3. As this short list demonstrates, with the transition from novel sight to ubiquity, drivers and vehicles have been increasingly drawn into the orbit of governmentality through successive layers of monitoring, identification, and regulation by the state. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 1.14 Mb. Share with your friends:
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