Auto-Specularity: Driving through the American Night

Of all the skills demanded by contemporary civilization, the one of driving an automobile is certainly the most important to the individual, in the sense at least that a defect in it is the greatest threat to his life.

James Jerome Gibson, 1938¹

Introduction

The automobile headlamp is a modest device, a practical necessity introduced late in the nineteenth century, swiftly standardized in operation and assimilated to driving codes and conventions and, just as quickly, forgotten, except when it fails to work. Yet the headlight—the light produced by the headlamp—introduced a luminous space unprecedented in its ubiquitous mobility. Suddenly in conflict with other, prior spaces, the headlight became distinctly social: designed, regulated, adjudicated, and conditioning the behavior of its occupants relative to their specific position. Inside the headlight, drivers and passengers found themselves at the vertex of a luminous cavity moving through a mantle of dark, while outside, at the headlight's periphery, other drivers and pedestrians were insulted by the visual violence of sudden glare and the peril of collision. The headlight's social dynamism was grounded in its conflict of these new subject positions, each of which required a new kind of vision. Pedestrians learned to overcome "sudden blindness," the ephemeral disability caused by the glare of oncoming headlights, while drivers learned to master a novel visual world.

By day, light fell from above, equally on all things; drivers calibrated their motion against a diverse visual backdrop uniformly rendered in all directions. By night, the headlamp projected a bright, horizontal light. Objects appeared less as solid forms than as configurations of variously reflective surfaces, which changed as the car moved and the angle of the projecting beam changed. For the night driver, the world seen through the tunnel of road ahead became a specular rather than a geometric construct. Drivers focused forward, repeatedly scanned a constantly shifting field of view to classify heterogeneous luminous signals in terms of hindrance, continuance, or irrelevance, and all at relatively high speeds. With the headlight directing attention and forecasting direction, drivers sometimes sensed their headlights as an emanation from themselves, a motorized ocular extramission. Thus, night drivers registered the mechanical energy of the car as a shifting specular world generated by their own forward motion. This auto-specularity suffused the night drive, one of the most thrilling personal experiences in the early twentieth century. Like the early twentieth century's other great visual experience, cinema, night driving was an alloy of visual flux and bodily stasis organized by a beam of horizontal light coincident with the viewer's eye. But it was played out for considerably higher stakes.

Rushing in the Darkness

Headlamps had been used for some time on moving vehicles such as carriages, bicycles, and locomotives. Typically, on carriages, an oil lamp was hung from a mount at the side of the cab and encased in glass to protect the flame. With neither lens nor reflector, the lamp cast a dim circle around itself, with fraction of the light falling on the road ahead. Reflectors could direct the light but it was still feeble and diluted over a wide arc. For their part, bicycle lamps were dim, awkward to install, liable to sway greatly, and easily extinguished.² Riding a bicycle at night, particularly along unlighted and unpaved streets, was difficult and motivated only by pressing need or an outsized sense of adventure. Locomotives, in contrast, could carry powerful headlamps that substantially reconfigured the view ahead but these were limited to use along rail lines, which were isolated, fenced, or otherwise marked off from routine circulation.

Obtaining the point of view of the locomotive engineer in the front cab was rare but by the late nineteenth century a marvel of modernity—the private experience of speed—had become a common literary trope. Speed was most vivid at night, when darkness shrouded distance and diminished motion parallax. To the eyes, speed was an incandescent spectacle, a phantasmagoria of moving lights. To the mind it was a puzzle of trembling flicker, glare, and glint—terms that soon acquired technical definitions—dissociated from and even dissembling the...