The car is killing the car

November 11th, 2009

Views: 241

Posted by ChrisG at 3:48 pm

Just found this over at Copenhagenize.com, Andre Gorz’s devastating little essay on fossil fuel culture [subscription needed], from all the way back in 1973.

Mass motoring effects an absolute triumph of bourgeois ideology on the level of daily life. It gives and supports in everyone the illusion that each individual can seek his or her own benefit at the expense of everyone else. Take the cruel and aggressive selfishness of the driver who at any moment is figuratively killing the “others,” who appear merely as physical obstacles to his or her own speed. This aggressive and competitive selfishness marks the arrival of universally bourgeois behaviour, and has come into being since driving has become commonplace.

Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master. This vehicle, in other words, would oblige the owner to consume and use a host of commercial services and industrial products that could only be provided by some third party. The apparent independence of the automobile owner was only concealing the actual radical dependency.

It’s easy to see the parallels here with Ivan Illich (an extract from Energy and Equity is also up). Through their critique of the symbolic potency of the car, both show how managerialism and/or technocracy replace striving for a just political community with the never-ending quest for the most efficient reproduction of the social order. The limits on political freedom appearing as the guarantee of personal liberty.

Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle.

Bikes and open-access publishing or death!