Snarl: In Defense of Stalled Traffic and Faulty Networks

5. Mobility

83 5 ✦ Mobility “What is going to become of this civilization, mad over machines and overrun with them?” —boston globe, 1923 In a 1923 article, “Get off the Earth,”1 the Boston Globe’s editorial humorist, “Uncle Dudley,” floated an answer to this question. After ridiculing schemes to dig subways “under the cities to take the motors off the street,” laughing at the idea of parking cars “by the thousands in great caverns underground,” and mocking plans to “thrust [pedestrian tunnels] beneath crossings,” Uncle Dudley made a simple proposal: “There must be room on the earth,” and so it is up to the “machine lovers” to “fly up and get off.”2 A number of decades later, in a very different tone, Henri Bernard continued his discussion of the Parisian parking problem by likewise challenging the wisdom of underground automobile storage, especially in the older parts of the city. Questioning the designation of subterranean areas beneath Paris as “free space,” Bernard argued that, to the contrary, the land underneath monuments such as Notre Dame contained vestiges of a twomillennia past, both Gallo-Roman and medieval. If there was anywhere in France that should not be given over to the “scrap metal” that was the car, he concluded, it was these underground spaces.3 Finally, in 1999, in the wake of the devastating Marmara earthquake, Ayşe Arman wrote an article, “Earthquake Wildness,” in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet. Starting with a discussion of how Istanbul commuter traffic 84 ✦ Snarl had changed in the days and weeks following the disaster, Arman describes how the quake altered human patterns of movement through urban space. The “normal” pre-earthquake scene on the streets involved “normal people, like normal, head[ing] home after work,” while the nightclubs spawned latenight and early morning traffic jams. Following the quake, however, people would “drag” their cars here and there, looking for nonexistent parking spots in streets full of people as well as cars. This post-earthquake scene, she concluded , was a paradoxical one—in which (human) drivers were in a constant “state of mobility,” while (mechanical) traffic was in a “state of gridlock.”4 These three passages seem to have little to do with one another. Separated by decades, national culture, and genre, the only thread that connects them is that each sketches a relationship among cars, political subjects, and the earth. In the first, cars take up too much room and must get off the earth or go into space. In the second, cars likewise pose a terrestrial threat—this time, however, by potentially disrupting the human history interred, undisturbed, under the earth’s surface. In the third, wandering human drivers and immobile cars become a medium for expressing the earth’s ongoing convulsions and tremors. But this connecting thread, although delicate, is also strong. Indeed, over the course of these passages, a well-established history of the automotive public sphere once again emerges—this time, however, embedded in narratives of constitutionalism in the air, on the ground, or under the dirt. Uncle Dudley, for example, describes the earth as a human-biological environment that supports a now threatened human-biological “civilization.” The mechanical invaders do not belong and must leave. By continuing, however , that “machine lovers,”5 too, must get off of the planet, the article also plays on two additional themes. First, it mobilizes a well-established liberal trope about what properly belongs to the public sphere and what does not. Second—and in apparent contradiction—it highlights the ineffectiveness of delimiting the public sphere in this classically liberal way. Love has traditionally played a dual role in fables of liberal democratic engagement. On the one hand, it has been the (politically redemptive) emotion that distinguishes (usually democratic) biological organisms from their (usually authoritarian) nonbiological counterparts.6 On the other hand, love has been the disruptive, unruly, bodily activity that undermines appropriate civic engagement.7 Love has thus both rescued liberal politics—saving democracy from dystopian mechanical oppression—and disrupted proper, rational political function. When Uncle Dudley banishes “machine lovers” from the planet, therefore, he is disqualifying from a loving humanity those Mobility ✦ 85 humans who interact inappropriately with machines—essentially those who love incorrectly. In addition, he is disqualifying from political engagement the beloved machines that—like others in the liberal tradition who have provoked love (or lust)—must be kept at all costs from entering the public sphere. But in...