Snarl: In Defense of Stalled Traffic and Faulty Networks

4. Vitality

62 4 ✦ Vitality “The relationship which should exist between road and surroundings has gone wrong or rather, there isn’t any relationship. Everyone just tries to get through as best he can, running the gauntlet of a chaos of laws and landscape.” —Norman Bel Geddes, 19231 Bel Geddes makes this point near the middle of his Magic Motorways , just after unveiling his proposal for a nationwide system of automated highways. The highway of the future, he assures his readers, will make running this chaotic gauntlet unnecessary. Indeed, an orderly and proper set of interactions among road, law, and landscape will happen naturally and comfortably on the highway of the future. And in particular, they will happen on this highway at night. “The time will come,” Bel Geddes continues, when night driving will be regarded as actually more pleasant than driving in the daytime. For the light of the sun is variable and capricious . No one can control its direction or its intensity. But at night the automatic devices of the road will supply an ideal control of light. . . . [T]here is no special witchcraft in the idea of driving along a highway through a self induced flood of light. These things can be done. There is no reason for drivers to go on being slaves at night when they could so easily be masters.2 This is an intriguing collection of assertions. According to Bel Geddes, the street does not simply order chaotic relationships, replace witchcraft with Vitality ✦ 63 rational control, and foster a quite literal individual enlightenment. It also protects citizens from slavery. This is a street, in other words, that is hyperbolically constitutional in a way that written law has rarely been. This is also a street, however, whose constitutionalism has a peculiarly physical quality. Starting his discussion with the infrastructure, the surroundings , and the landscape—spaces and figures that would not be out of place in recent materialist or critical environmentalist writing3 —Bel Geddes suggests that responsible legal and political analyses cannot leave aside the physical world. His point that law and landscape are the same thing— and that when they are disordered, they produce oppression and chaos— prefigures Lessig’s association between law and the “built environment” or the “architecture” of cyberspace4 by a good half century. Bel Geddes, though, also maintains the vital materiality of this association in a way that Lessig does not. By emphasizing night driving, Bel Geddes even privileges this material constitutionalism over human sensory perception. But Bel Geddes also leaves out one key player in this otherwise multifaceted portrait of the automotive public sphere. Strangely, he never mentions the cars. Indeed, he describes the relationship between “road” and “surroundings” as explicitly a relationship among everyone, road, laws, landscape , and not cars. Even stranger, he then continues his discussion by celebrating the autonomy of the human driver—even as his proposal calls for an automated, nonhuman highway. As a result, Bel Geddes undermines his (doubtless unintentional) call for a materialist, mechanical, and potentially posthuman politics. Leaving out the cars and concerning himself solely with human liberty, he returns to the well-worn paths of a centuries-old, humancentered liberal analysis. The question is how Bel Geddes could advocate such an inconsistent theory of automotive politics. How could he champion a nonhuman public sphere that includes environments, infrastructures, and inorganic actants while also seeking nothing more than to free human drivers from enslavement ? Or, from the opposite direction, how could he champion a human public sphere predicated on individual movement and mobility yet situate this movement not in bodies with agency but in the automatic road itself? How, in other words, could he propose a set of constitutional relationships that hint intriguingly at twenty-first-century permutations on democratic engagement but are grounded within a nineteenth-century liberal tradition? Arguably, this evocative but incoherent picture of the highway as public sphere is the inheritor of a likewise evocative but incoherent set of constitutional histories. Indeed, Bel Geddes seems to be drawing throughout his 64 ✦ Snarl work not just on a history of mechanical or automotive politics but on a history of mechanical or automotive politics that had not yet been told when he wrote. He is drawing, in other words, on an influential yet unspoken history of mechanical democratic engagement. His description, his predictions , and his proposals rest on a historical tradition of constitutions and machines—or, more specifically, of cars...