Working on an exciting new ~Project~
Roxana Kreimer is a Buenos Aires intellectual and social activist. She holds regular public meetings on philosophy and has dedicated her life to the production and dissemination of knowledge. One of her books, La tirania del automovil, which is freeely available online
here covers the emergence of the automobile and begs for an expansion of the critique of the automobile into the realms of the social science.
This is an important work not only for its insights into the symbology of the automobile, but also for the way she explains its effects on gender and class relations, imperialism and the urban setting. It is made even more valuable by being free and open to the public. A great resource and service for the community!
I am happy to announce that I and a few others will be translating the book! It will be in English and also freely available to the public. The translation will require hundreds of hours of work, which is why we are accepting donations to help get the book done faster and with less strain on our lives.
As a first release of what has been translated, and to give you a ~taste~ of how important and insightful the work is, I am including the introduction, translated by me, below. Enjoy!
The Tyranny of the Automobile: An Introduction
During the 20th
Century automotive transport in general and the automobile in
particular have decisively modified the structure of cities, the
environment and human behavior. The automobile is much more than a
means of transportation: it
embodies at once the material representation and the symbology of a
culture. Created towards the end of the 19th
century and massively adopted in a good part of the planet by 1940,
it has produced changesin ways of life so radical that we are still
trying to understand what it means.
With surprising
speed, the automobile went from being a dream of mechanical prophets
to being the first massive “animal” created by the human being
for his service. Object of universal consumption, priviliged motor of
the economy, generator of
massive trends, identity product par excellence, the utmost
expression of capitalist individualism, it has produced more deaths
and injuries than a large number of wars and, nevertheless, the
victims appear to embody the “inevitable” or “inexorable”
consequence of technology and progress in the modern world. According
to studies done by the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2002, more
than 1,200,000 people died in transit accidents. In less than twenty
years, this figure will double.
While the deaths
occasioned by the two World Wars spawned movements against the the
idea of progress, the deaths sustained by automotive transport, on
the other hand, appear justified as an inevitable consequence of
technological progress. In the century when medical advances have
substantially extended the average life span in developed countries,
automotive transport engendered more agony with the same movement
with which is has anesthetized the perception of danger. Research
into this phenomenan, into the global acceptance of a mode of
transport that harasses minute by minute the lives of citizens and
that has contributed to the death of millions of people in the 20th
century, is not a task to be undertaken in the technological field.
It requires an elucidation framed as a set of problems which can only
be confronted from the perspectives offered by philosophy and the
social sciences.
Like Auschwitx,
as procedures of a specific type of rationality applied to massive
death, caused reflection among critical theorists, the present
research springs from the consequences of technological development in
relation to the deaths sustained in the 20th century by
automotive transport, deaths that civilization hegemonically judges
inevitable in the name of the modern world's progress.
The automobile has
been the object of a vast literature, but it is still a topic
scarcely explored by fields that go beyond the realms of urbanism and
road safety.
This book is the
first that calls for exhaustive research into the distinctive
aspects that have made, despite the growing number of deaths and
damages that it causes, the automobile an emblematic and mythic
object of the modern world. The purpose is to research the
constitutive traits of modernity embodied by the automobile and to
study the social impact that it has had on urban life in relation to
the ethical limits around which one should promote technological
development. As I intend to demonstrate further on, automobile
accidents cannot be explained only (not even fundamentally) by the
lack of road safety education, nor by insufficient policing on roads
and highways, nor by drivers' aggression. According to The Report of
Road Risk from the year 2002, presented by the People's Advocacy
(DefensorÃa del Pueblo) of the city of Buenos Aires, 88 percent of
those polled in the city believe that the lack of respect for the
norms of transit is the principal cause of accidents. This book seeks
to question the general belief that the explanation for traffic
deaths begins and ends in road discipline and to highlight among the
most important causes the way in which the automobile has been
accepted, among other reaons, because it embodies the fundmanetal
characteristics of the ideal of the modern individual, an absolute
trust en the pristine conscience that assumes an infallible
individual, asolute master of one's actions, who is never distracted
and always enjoys a sound mind. Nevertheless, the car rejects the
“invisible hand” of road rationalityand reveals itself as the
most irrational, passionate and violent instrument generated by
modern technology. The studies on the problems of violence and risk
in relation to the effects of automotive transport which has come to
be understood as a milestone that has substancially modified life in
our cities during the 20th century will be central to this
analysis.
In the first
chapter I will analysize the automobile as an emblem of the modern
subject. I will describe the automobile as an instrument that the
modern individual feels to have articualted “in his image and
likeness.” The subject as principle rector, with the clear and
distinct conscience of a rational being, autonomy, liberty,
democratic utopia and universalist of egalitarian dignity, progress,
acceleration of time, mediated reality, reduction of distance,
authenticity: traits belonging to modernity that the automobile
embodies like no other instrument conceived in its depths. I will
characterize the automobile as an instrument that represents much
more than a mode of transportation, produced under the budgets of a
model individual who will be subject to critique throughout this
work.
In the second
chapter I will analyze the history of the automobile in its 100-year
life, in relation to modern industrial development and the impact
that produced the invasion of this completely novel technology. I
will investigate the identification of the automobile with the modern
systems of the assembly line (fordism) as archetypes of massive
production in an industrial society and the global imposition of the
automobile as a representation of the hegemony of the United Statesm,
in contrast with English hegemony represented by rail roads.
In the following
chapter I urge research into the impact of automotive transport in
new configurations of urban spaces. I will analyze the radical change
that urban structures have undergone since the generalization of
automobile use, the mode in which the train tracks have been
displaced for the construction of asphalt paths, the upsurge of
phenomena such as air pollution, sound pollution and the weakening of
the city, favoring the implemtation of new transport policies which
have, in turn, disintegrated the city.
In the fourth
chapter I analyze and reject the arguments used by specialized
organizations to explain automobile accidents. I deal with beliefs of
the citizens in relation to accidents and postulate a new perspective
for analyzing this phenomenon outside of the urbanist and road safety
framing.
I will investigate
in the fifth chapter how speed and risk operate in modern, popular
imagination, the appeal that speed exercises beyond the realm of
transport and speed as an instrument of change, en relation to
progress and youth, the group most affected by automobile accidents.
The phenomenon of speed will be analyzed starting with Crash,
the
novel by Ballard which brings the modern fascination with speed to
the fore.
In the next
chapter, I compare the advantages and disadvantages that the
different forms of modern transportation offer, and I will analyze
the impact of the advent of the automobile in some cultures who have
other hegemonic modes of transport.
I will dedicate the
seventh chapter to the mythic and symbolic function of the automobile
in contemporary culture and its relation with the whole of
signification embodied by the horse in the Middle Ages, through the
perspective of gender, advertising, education and cinema.
A fundamental
chapter to this work, the eighth, will be dedicated to the analysis
of the automobile and of transit as representations of a breaking of
social ties. It will involve more evidence that the study of this
phenomenan should not be limited to road safety, and that it requires
an analysis from the perspectives of philosphy and the social
sciences. I will analyze chaotic transit and traffic jams that
characterize a good part of the countries who automotive fleet has
grown significantly in recent years as part of the breaking of social
ties and the “war of all against all” which represents
contemporary indlividualism.
Next, in the ninth
chapter, I will evaluate the costs and benefits of tenchological
development and critique the notion that general use of the
automobile represents “progress” for modern culture. The analysis
will consider deaths and injuries in automobile accidents, the
supposed “shortening of distances” traveled, the radical change
in urban structures and the environmental impact, among other
factors.
The tenth chapter
will be dedicated to the formulation of proposals oriented towards a
more rational urban planning. We will see initiatives from movements
around the world seeking to establish limits on the “culture of the
automobile,” and summaries of other proposals seeking to
progressively reduce the negative effects of the automobile in the
contemporary world.
