One of the most tragic and deadly events in our culture is the
highway accident. Every year for decades, Helen Leavitt (1970, p13)
reports, at least three million people are maimed and another 55,000
killed in automobile accidents. The bodies that are caught up in these
accidents and the cultural logics that explain this tragic form of
subjectivity are worthy of mapping. Marking a new type of subjectivity
centered on the accident and new cultural logics of distraction, the raw
number of fatalities and injuries over the last Century mandates a
diagram of such inevitability, fatality, and culture.
1. the highway: accident(al) subjectivity.
The accident and its catastrophic consequences are both abstract (as a
type of collateral damage accepted by society) and concrete (as
intertwined in the lived experiences of hundreds of thousands of people).
The lines of the highway accident are segmented, severed, fractured,
and fragmented. As a means of absorbing the magnitude of the tragedy
occurring along the highway, three figures of the fatal body emerge out
of the wreckage. The three figures are the alcoholic, the soldier, and the
consumer of safety, all of which receive a particular identity as the
subjects of automobile accidents and highway fatalities. Tens of
thousands of highway deaths occur every year, but those numbers are
rarely about “us” even though they are always about us. We are waging
war with ourselves on roads and highways, but the casualties somehow
become remote statistics--the abstract residue of industrialism.
Collecting these statistics together is less about the order of magnitude
involved and more about the context of acceptance and inevitability that
have formed around the subject of the accident.
The shocking numbers cataloging accident victims represent people and
their bodies, but they also constitute people and their bodies. The losses
are so incomprehensible that the slightest drop in the numbers is
celebrated. A chink in the armor, no matter how small, translated into
fewer deaths. Or did it? “The death rate in 1976 for each 100 million
vehicle miles driven dropped from 3.5 to 3.4 - the lowest on record since
highway-accident statistics were first kept in 1923” (“Survival,” Jan. 10,
1977). Later in the same article, the optimism tied to the drop from 3.5 to
3.4 was tempered by additional data: “Only a marked increase in the total
amount of driving raised the number of fatalities slightly over the previous
year” (“Survival,” Jan. 10, 1977).
Marie Riccobono was one of the people who, in 1977, narrowly escaped
the fatality count. Her short and shocking account was one of the many
narratives of highway trauma that stretched throughout the country.
Marie (McCombs, Aug. 7, 1977) recounted the initial moments after
waking up from an accident:
Whether the means of expression involves a narrative such as Marie’s, a
statistical observation, or a comparison to other tragedies, the
automobile accident is always frightening and traumatic. James King
(July 14, 1980), the Chairman of the National Transportation Safety
Board, compared the magnitude of automobile accidents to airline
crashes: “it is as if a big airliner crashed every day of the year--but these
deaths are occurring on the roads.”
From Louisiana to New Jersey the car-nage was reported in similar ways:
“There were 933 traffic deaths in Louisiana last year -- one every nine
hours and 23 minutes. It was the same number of traffic deaths as in
1985. There were more than 68,000 people reported injured” (“Three of
Four,” Oct. 12, 1987). In 1986, “1,039 persons lost their lives on New
Jersey's highways in 946 fatal accidents. That's 7 percent higher than
1985 and the worst toll since 1982, when 1,061 were killed in 965
crashes” (Polner, Sept. 3, 1987). Year after year the numbers remained
the same and the fatalities continued: “American drivers get into 17,500
accidents on an average day, according to the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration” (Feder, Nov. 6, 1988). “Between 4,000 and 5,000
people nationwide are killed each year in accidents involving heavy
trucks, more than four to five times as many as those who die in domestic
airplane crashes, the Office of Technology Assessment said in its study”
(Henderson, Sept. 29, 1988). On November 30, 1991, a accident
involving dozens of cars on California’s Interstate-5 killed 16 people,
making it the second-worst accident in terms of fatalities after a “1976
accident in which 29 children died when a bus plunged off a freeway
bridge exit” (“I-5 Pileup,” Nov. 30, 1991). Such specific events were often
swallowed up in the enormity of the figures: “122 people are killed and
thousands are injured every day in car accidents” and “motor vehicle
crashes still account for 95 percent of the nation’s transportation deaths
and remain the leading killer of people ages 5 to 32” (Eldridge, Sept. 26,
1991). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services offered a
punctuation mark: “Traffic crashes are the leading cause of death in the
United States for all age groups from 1 through 34 years” (“Annual,” Dec.
1991).
Having moved through a few decades of the car accident and its
statistics, the questions arise: What is being generated by this
acceptance of the accident? What kinds of subjectivity are being
produced through these daily explosions associated with the highway
machine? To help answer these quandaries, three types of fatal bodies
enter the scene: the alcoholic, the soldier, and the consumer. The fatal
body of the alcoholic comes out of the distinction between accidents
involving alcohol and accidents caused by something other than alcohol.
The fatal body of the soldier comes out of the comparison between
warfare and highway fatalities and the recognition that the highway
machine is waging an indiscriminant war. Driving means death. And,
third, the fatal body of the consumer comes out of the need for safety
and the opposition between the corporate drive for profit and the
consumer’s desire to minimize risks and maximize safety. The
government stands between these competing desires in Ralph Nader’s
Unsafe at Any Speed. From the fatal bodies of the alcoholic, the soldier,
and the consumer of safety, this essay on the contemporary history of
the highway accident will traverse the terrain of risks, dangers, and the
fatal body.
2. (im)mobile alcohol and the fatal driver
The fatal body of the alcoholic and the alcoholic’s victims stems from the
link between a particular behavior (drinking and driving) and the risk of
causing a fatal car accident. Much of the data describing accident
statistics will contend that risks increase for younger drivers and drivers
under the influence of alcohol, a human habit that predates and will
probably postdate the highway machine. When breaking down the
number of traffic fatalities, the separation of alcohol-related accidents
from other accidents implies that the alcohol risk is preventable and the
other half must be accepted. Koza (Dec. 3, 1982) reports: “A new federal
study of records in 15 states estimates alcohol is involved in as many as
55 percent of all fatal highway crashes, contributing to 27,500 deaths
and 700,000 other injuries each year.” Referring to overall fatality
statistics, a federal study contends: “Almost half of these fatalities are
alcohol-related” (National Highway Administration, 1989) and almost half
of Americans are involved in an alcohol-related crash during their lives.
Simply, alcohol is significant to the categorization of accidents.
Assuming that the consumption of alcohol can be proven to cause an
accident, the classification of accidents based on the presence of alcohol
works to isolate a certain number of accidents as unnecessary and
capable of being eliminated through better policies targeting alcoholism.
The repetition of the accident involving alcohol produces a particular
subject: the profile of the fatal driver. Who is this fatal driver? This
persona is the generalized subject that can be connected, in theory, to
over half of the thousands of traffic deaths in the U.S. each year. Calling
this figure “a profile of peril,” the Department of Transportation
conducted a study to determine what type of driver “is most likely to
cause a fatal highway accident” (“Survival,” Jan. 10, 1977). According to
the study, this perilous driver poses a greater threat during the early
morning hours of the weekend, and this driver “is usually a male, 25 to 35
years old, a heavy or problem drinker who probably prefers beer to
liquor. Most often, he has a high-school education, drives an older car,
and is single, separated or divorced” (“Survival,” Jan. 10, 1977). The
fatal driver can afflict any driver at any time, yet the abstract profile
almost always maps alcohol consumption on to this young male persona.
In other words, the young male alcoholic is more likely to don the outfit of
the murderous and murdering driver, although the costume of the fatal
driver is a one-size-fits-all: it can be worn by anyone behind the wheel.
3. driver-soldier
Whether or not we attach the figure of the mobile alcoholic to the death
parade of the highway machine, the omnipresence of the fatal driver, and
society’s acceptance of these drivers as an allowable form of collateral
damage, gestures toward another distinct subject. This distinct subject is
the driver as soldier. The driver soldier marks the driver as a type of
human cannon fodder, putting life on the line in the name of circulation
and the highway machine. Defense and security take on new angles:
“More than 2 million persons have died in auto accidents in the U.S. in
this century or more than three times the 652,000 battle deaths the U.S.
sustained in all the wars it ever fought” (McCombs, Aug. 7, 1977). Why is
it that the only human event comparable to the carnage of the road
accident is warfare? Who are the soldiers and what is the cause?
Comparing deaths on the highway to deaths in battle arises as one of the
primary ways to emphasize the extent of the destruction.
The fatality comparison between warfare and driving is astounding, but
not nearly as one-sided as the injury statistics: “Four million persons
were injured in auto accidents in 1975 alone, and while most of these
were minor injuries this figure for only one year is still double the
1,904,000 total of all battle deaths and wounds in all our wars”
(McCombs, Aug. 7, 1977). Depending on whether the agent is the
human or the machine, these human/machinic murderers have been
waging a toll greater than war itself. The soldiers may not be aware of
their conscription, but even recognition is futile in many cases because
the alternatives to road and highway travel are often not available. The
well-prepared soldier can do little more than acquire a well-armored
vehicle (putting other soldiers at risk) and exercise caution. The well-
prepared soldier merges into the figure of the discerning and vigilant
consumer. For the soldier as consumer, the distinction between the
product of safety and the product of fatality is difficult to maintain.
highway accident. Every year for decades, Helen Leavitt (1970, p13)
reports, at least three million people are maimed and another 55,000
killed in automobile accidents. The bodies that are caught up in these
accidents and the cultural logics that explain this tragic form of
subjectivity are worthy of mapping. Marking a new type of subjectivity
centered on the accident and new cultural logics of distraction, the raw
number of fatalities and injuries over the last Century mandates a
diagram of such inevitability, fatality, and culture.
1. the highway: accident(al) subjectivity.
The accident and its catastrophic consequences are both abstract (as a
type of collateral damage accepted by society) and concrete (as
intertwined in the lived experiences of hundreds of thousands of people).
The lines of the highway accident are segmented, severed, fractured,
and fragmented. As a means of absorbing the magnitude of the tragedy
occurring along the highway, three figures of the fatal body emerge out
of the wreckage. The three figures are the alcoholic, the soldier, and the
consumer of safety, all of which receive a particular identity as the
subjects of automobile accidents and highway fatalities. Tens of
thousands of highway deaths occur every year, but those numbers are
rarely about “us” even though they are always about us. We are waging
war with ourselves on roads and highways, but the casualties somehow
become remote statistics--the abstract residue of industrialism.
Collecting these statistics together is less about the order of magnitude
involved and more about the context of acceptance and inevitability that
have formed around the subject of the accident.
The shocking numbers cataloging accident victims represent people and
their bodies, but they also constitute people and their bodies. The losses
are so incomprehensible that the slightest drop in the numbers is
celebrated. A chink in the armor, no matter how small, translated into
fewer deaths. Or did it? “The death rate in 1976 for each 100 million
vehicle miles driven dropped from 3.5 to 3.4 - the lowest on record since
highway-accident statistics were first kept in 1923” (“Survival,” Jan. 10,
1977). Later in the same article, the optimism tied to the drop from 3.5 to
3.4 was tempered by additional data: “Only a marked increase in the total
amount of driving raised the number of fatalities slightly over the previous
year” (“Survival,” Jan. 10, 1977).
Marie Riccobono was one of the people who, in 1977, narrowly escaped
the fatality count. Her short and shocking account was one of the many
narratives of highway trauma that stretched throughout the country.
Marie (McCombs, Aug. 7, 1977) recounted the initial moments after
waking up from an accident:
- “I had no pulse when they took me to the hospital and they all
said I wouldn't make it through the night,” she said, her voice
laboring slowly with the words and punctuated by the sharp
sucking noises of her breathing.
“The neurosurgeon said it was a miracle that I lived. I developed
pneumonia, meningitis, stress ulcer. I started bleeding internally. I
had a fractured skull . . . They even tried a new drug on me - it
made my hair fall out.”
The details of her travail in the four years since her accident
are almost too terrible to recount. From the busy world of high
school and young adulthood with its familiar pleasures and
frustrations she was plunged into a struggle for survival.
Whether the means of expression involves a narrative such as Marie’s, a
statistical observation, or a comparison to other tragedies, the
automobile accident is always frightening and traumatic. James King
(July 14, 1980), the Chairman of the National Transportation Safety
Board, compared the magnitude of automobile accidents to airline
crashes: “it is as if a big airliner crashed every day of the year--but these
deaths are occurring on the roads.”
From Louisiana to New Jersey the car-nage was reported in similar ways:
“There were 933 traffic deaths in Louisiana last year -- one every nine
hours and 23 minutes. It was the same number of traffic deaths as in
1985. There were more than 68,000 people reported injured” (“Three of
Four,” Oct. 12, 1987). In 1986, “1,039 persons lost their lives on New
Jersey's highways in 946 fatal accidents. That's 7 percent higher than
1985 and the worst toll since 1982, when 1,061 were killed in 965
crashes” (Polner, Sept. 3, 1987). Year after year the numbers remained
the same and the fatalities continued: “American drivers get into 17,500
accidents on an average day, according to the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration” (Feder, Nov. 6, 1988). “Between 4,000 and 5,000
people nationwide are killed each year in accidents involving heavy
trucks, more than four to five times as many as those who die in domestic
airplane crashes, the Office of Technology Assessment said in its study”
(Henderson, Sept. 29, 1988). On November 30, 1991, a accident
involving dozens of cars on California’s Interstate-5 killed 16 people,
making it the second-worst accident in terms of fatalities after a “1976
accident in which 29 children died when a bus plunged off a freeway
bridge exit” (“I-5 Pileup,” Nov. 30, 1991). Such specific events were often
swallowed up in the enormity of the figures: “122 people are killed and
thousands are injured every day in car accidents” and “motor vehicle
crashes still account for 95 percent of the nation’s transportation deaths
and remain the leading killer of people ages 5 to 32” (Eldridge, Sept. 26,
1991). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services offered a
punctuation mark: “Traffic crashes are the leading cause of death in the
United States for all age groups from 1 through 34 years” (“Annual,” Dec.
1991).
Having moved through a few decades of the car accident and its
statistics, the questions arise: What is being generated by this
acceptance of the accident? What kinds of subjectivity are being
produced through these daily explosions associated with the highway
machine? To help answer these quandaries, three types of fatal bodies
enter the scene: the alcoholic, the soldier, and the consumer. The fatal
body of the alcoholic comes out of the distinction between accidents
involving alcohol and accidents caused by something other than alcohol.
The fatal body of the soldier comes out of the comparison between
warfare and highway fatalities and the recognition that the highway
machine is waging an indiscriminant war. Driving means death. And,
third, the fatal body of the consumer comes out of the need for safety
and the opposition between the corporate drive for profit and the
consumer’s desire to minimize risks and maximize safety. The
government stands between these competing desires in Ralph Nader’s
Unsafe at Any Speed. From the fatal bodies of the alcoholic, the soldier,
and the consumer of safety, this essay on the contemporary history of
the highway accident will traverse the terrain of risks, dangers, and the
fatal body.
2. (im)mobile alcohol and the fatal driver
The fatal body of the alcoholic and the alcoholic’s victims stems from the
link between a particular behavior (drinking and driving) and the risk of
causing a fatal car accident. Much of the data describing accident
statistics will contend that risks increase for younger drivers and drivers
under the influence of alcohol, a human habit that predates and will
probably postdate the highway machine. When breaking down the
number of traffic fatalities, the separation of alcohol-related accidents
from other accidents implies that the alcohol risk is preventable and the
other half must be accepted. Koza (Dec. 3, 1982) reports: “A new federal
study of records in 15 states estimates alcohol is involved in as many as
55 percent of all fatal highway crashes, contributing to 27,500 deaths
and 700,000 other injuries each year.” Referring to overall fatality
statistics, a federal study contends: “Almost half of these fatalities are
alcohol-related” (National Highway Administration, 1989) and almost half
of Americans are involved in an alcohol-related crash during their lives.
Simply, alcohol is significant to the categorization of accidents.
Assuming that the consumption of alcohol can be proven to cause an
accident, the classification of accidents based on the presence of alcohol
works to isolate a certain number of accidents as unnecessary and
capable of being eliminated through better policies targeting alcoholism.
The repetition of the accident involving alcohol produces a particular
subject: the profile of the fatal driver. Who is this fatal driver? This
persona is the generalized subject that can be connected, in theory, to
over half of the thousands of traffic deaths in the U.S. each year. Calling
this figure “a profile of peril,” the Department of Transportation
conducted a study to determine what type of driver “is most likely to
cause a fatal highway accident” (“Survival,” Jan. 10, 1977). According to
the study, this perilous driver poses a greater threat during the early
morning hours of the weekend, and this driver “is usually a male, 25 to 35
years old, a heavy or problem drinker who probably prefers beer to
liquor. Most often, he has a high-school education, drives an older car,
and is single, separated or divorced” (“Survival,” Jan. 10, 1977). The
fatal driver can afflict any driver at any time, yet the abstract profile
almost always maps alcohol consumption on to this young male persona.
In other words, the young male alcoholic is more likely to don the outfit of
the murderous and murdering driver, although the costume of the fatal
driver is a one-size-fits-all: it can be worn by anyone behind the wheel.
3. driver-soldier
Whether or not we attach the figure of the mobile alcoholic to the death
parade of the highway machine, the omnipresence of the fatal driver, and
society’s acceptance of these drivers as an allowable form of collateral
damage, gestures toward another distinct subject. This distinct subject is
the driver as soldier. The driver soldier marks the driver as a type of
human cannon fodder, putting life on the line in the name of circulation
and the highway machine. Defense and security take on new angles:
“More than 2 million persons have died in auto accidents in the U.S. in
this century or more than three times the 652,000 battle deaths the U.S.
sustained in all the wars it ever fought” (McCombs, Aug. 7, 1977). Why is
it that the only human event comparable to the carnage of the road
accident is warfare? Who are the soldiers and what is the cause?
Comparing deaths on the highway to deaths in battle arises as one of the
primary ways to emphasize the extent of the destruction.
In 1956, more than 39,000 persons were killed in motor vehicle
accidents. In 1968, that annual figure had topped 55,000 persons
killed and 3,712,000 injured. By comparison, 15,000 Americans
were killed in the Vietnam War in 1968. Your chances of getting
killed by an auto accident in 1968 were almost four times greater
than getting killed in the war. (Leavitt, 1970, p257)
The fatality comparison between warfare and driving is astounding, but
not nearly as one-sided as the injury statistics: “Four million persons
were injured in auto accidents in 1975 alone, and while most of these
were minor injuries this figure for only one year is still double the
1,904,000 total of all battle deaths and wounds in all our wars”
(McCombs, Aug. 7, 1977). Depending on whether the agent is the
human or the machine, these human/machinic murderers have been
waging a toll greater than war itself. The soldiers may not be aware of
their conscription, but even recognition is futile in many cases because
the alternatives to road and highway travel are often not available. The
well-prepared soldier can do little more than acquire a well-armored
vehicle (putting other soldiers at risk) and exercise caution. The well-
prepared soldier merges into the figure of the discerning and vigilant
consumer. For the soldier as consumer, the distinction between the
product of safety and the product of fatality is difficult to maintain.
4. consuming fatalities
From the alcoholic, to the soldier, and now to the consumer desiring safety,
a helpful guide to the fatal body comes to us from Ralph Nader. Nader
maps a valuable combination of safety concerns, demonstrating the fragility
and the resiliency of the highway machine’s status in America. His book,
Unsafe at Any Speed, has received much praise and criticism, although we
only borrow his link between consumer advocacy and safety. Nader (1972,
p. xciii) contends that a pro-active stance on highway and automobile safety
is necessary and has been necessary since the arrival of the highway
machine: “The time has not come to discipline the automobile for safety;
that time came over four decades ago. But that is not a cause to delay any
longer what should have been accomplished in the nineteen-twenties.”
Nader indicts the safety moves of the Big Three automobile manufacturers,
but his harshest comments are reserved for General Motors. Nader
demonstrates how G.M. stymied federal attempts to impose safety
standards such as a mandatory shoulder belt and non-reflective
windshields and how they promoted style (over safety) as a driving market
force.
The consequences, for Nader, of each obstacle in the path of safety are
quantifiable and absolutely disastrous. The numbers stand out in any
configuration, and comments about deadly warfare, everyday apocalypse,
societal suicide, and mass murder are not misplaced. Tying his concern to
the ways danger works through the politics of subjectivity, Nader (1972, p.
xci) proclaims: “The automobile tragedy is one of the most serious of these
man-made (sic.) assaults on the human body.” The consumer of safety is
trying to avoid the specter of the body of the fatal driver. The consumer of
safety, ushered in by Nader’s argument that the market would need to
pressure the manufacturers for improved safety features, is an outgrowth of
the deadly driver, the alcoholic driver, and the soldier driver. Through
Nader’s account of how the government and industry teamed up to thwart
pressure for increased road and vehicle safety, he positions the consumer
as the individual forced to seek out safe vehicles in the face of shoddy
regulations and misleading advertising. To achieve a higher level of safety,
given a growing awareness of the fatal driver, the consumer must maintain
a constant watch. Consumer vigilance constitutes a particular type of driver
that recognizes the danger of highway travel, yet continues to drive and
continues to assume one of the figures of the fatal driver. The fatal body
itself is tied up in the consumption of safety (and health), for an entire
collection of industries and agencies exist to cope with, and profit from,
highway accidents. Nader (1972, p.xc) notes that highway fatalities support
a large service industry: “A vast array of services--medical, police,
administrative, legal, insurance, automotive repair, and funeral--stand
equipped to handle the direct and indirect consequences of accidental
injuries.”
Not only before the accident, but also after, the tentacles of institutional
control reach out to try stabilizing these accidental(al) bodies: “It is in the
post-accident response that lawyers and physicians and other specialists
labor” (Nader, 1972, p.xc). The danger is so evident and predictable that it
calls for the need for new forms of subjectivity. In Nader’s world, the effect
is a call to action and “the forging of new instruments of citizen action”
(1972, p.xci). He cites a picket led by a group of practicing physicians at
the 1965 International Automobile Show in New York as proof of these new
possibilities. Through the politics of social movements and a journalistic
quest for corporate transparency, Nader ingrains the importance of the
automobile tragedy in our bodies, our identities, and our society.
Regarding questions of safety and averting the automobile tragedy, Nader
does add accountability to the consuming public, despite his concerted
attack on the state and big industry. He (Nader, 1972, p343) surmises:
“Motorists may benefit from the efforts of dedicated and selfless
champions…but these efforts will not be enough without a residual vigilance
throughout the consumer public.”
5. automoto-subjectivity
We have briefly hitchhiked with the alcoholic profile of peril, the soldier
driver on the front lines of the machine, and the consumer seeking safety
and predictability. Before these three figures crash, let us make one more
pass at the fatal body, emphasizing Dumm’s notion of danger, Baudrillard’s
link between inertia and silence, and Virilio’s map of the accident as an
inherent corollary of speed and the technologies of speed. Ralph Nader
seals the transition from the subject of the fatal driver to the accident itself
as a figure of industrialism: “The history of the tragedy reveals many
obstacles which must be overcome in the taming of any mechanical or
biological hazard which is a by-product of industry or commerce” (1972, p.
xci). Locked into the need for circulation, experiences are propelled in
faster and faster ways. The shorter the distances become, the greater the
potential of a motion-arresting accident. But is it an arrest of motion or the
final accumulation of speed's excess? More motion pushes back the risk of
immobility just as it pushes forward immobility's likelihood.
The machine is partly machinic because of its continual series of
explosions. Harnessing energy also promises its leakage. Road accidents
and the enormity of tragedy and destruction associated with the highway
machine are the flip side of the practices of circulation. Humans move
along the highway, but when that movement is suddenly and terminally
halted, the need has been demonstrated for more security or a higher level
of safety. The life of circulation is also the lethality of excess speed. The
unexpected shock of the accident and the danger of fatality mark a “line of
flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) in an otherwise consistent subject. The
line of flight is called a “quantum dimension of power” by Thomas Dumm
(1994), a moment in the constitution of subjectivity that transforms fear into
disgust. The struggle between fear and disgust establishes the impact of
the fatal driver: driving means death. Thomas Dumm (1994, p139)
elaborates on the impact of the dissolution of the subject:
- The politics of danger is ubiquitous in modern life. Danger may be
conceived as a line that serves to create and delimit others. It is a
technique at work in the processes by which the modern subject is
constituted. Yet it also intrudes into what Deleuze and Guattari refer
to as the quantum dimension of power, the area of flows and powers
that cannot be contained by segmentations and lines. In discussing
the dangers of the line, they argue, ‘The more rigid the segmentarity,
the more reassuring it is for us. That is what fear is, and how it
makes us retreat into the first line’ (Thousand Plateaus, p227). The
trajectory that overcoming fear takes is first clarity, then power, then
disgust. And disgust concerns the lines of flight that might be
anxiously pursued once one overcomes fear.
A danger such as the car accident that is simultaneously an elimination of
thousands of people puts another angle on Dumm’s deployment of the
“modern subject.” If danger is a technique in the constitution of the modern
subject, than the highway machine has embedded itself in the subjectivity of
American culture since the early decades of the 20th Century as a “subject-
erasing” form of subjectivity. Dumm's comments make immense strides.
His articulation of danger as a process in the constitution of subjectivity
connects to Baudrillard’s triad of inertia, silence, and the fatal. The modern
body begins to merge with the fatal body.
6. the accidental mode(rn)
The modern is fraught with dangers and their politics, but it is also a
backdrop for the resolution of those dangers. Resolution of danger in the
context of the highway accident is ongoing. The end point of motion, a
body catapulting through the air, new nodes of gravity, and a fleeting
transcendence are some of this figure’s lines of flight. The snapshot of the
accident, a body frozen in place immediately prior to contact, gives us an
image of the accident(al) subject. Unlike almost any other subject, this
body is a line of flight, yet also a material entity with organs capable of
experiencing injury or death. The “body-in-accidental-motion” is both the
extreme and the limit of the human driver as subject. In theorist Jean
Baudrillard’s terms (1987, p101), the fatal is the void produced by inertia
and a response to acceleration:
- To counter the acceleration of networks and circuits the world will
seek slowness, inertia. In the same movement, however, it will seek
something more rapid than communication: the challenge, the duel.
On the one side, inertia and silence. On the other, challenge and
the duel. The fatal, the obscene, the reversible, the symbolic, are
not concepts, since nothing distinguishes the hypotheses from the
assertion. The enunciation of the fatal is also fatal, or it is not at all.
In this sense it is indeed a discourse where truth has withdrawn (just
as one pulls a chair out from under a person about to sit down).
Baudrillard’s depiction of a battle between acceleration and inertia speaks
directly to the highway machine and the accident, offering a final impact
or to this essay. One ramification of the highway is the perpetual event
of the accident—the highway machine is always pulling the chair out from
under its users. Jolts in the machine are violent and sudden. Society has
always found ways to negotiate accidents and large-scale warfare, but
nothing has had the monumental impact that the automobile and the road
have had in terms of the destruction of human lives. The destruction is
also pronounced because it is a result of technology and modes of
transport that humans have built themselves. These are not earthquakes
or diseases, but colliding vehicles that were intended to “speed up” the
process of circulation. Even guns and other weapons are distinct from cars
and highways because guns have the express purpose of either injuring
another human or scaring that human into submission. How has the
subject of the fatal body of the accident victim assumed significant but
acceptable status in the United States?
Paul Virilio aligns the event of the accident with inertia, forming a link
between society and the specificity of automotive motion. The accident—
which is the halting of movement in a sudden way— is capable of producing
the fatal subject as an effect of highway inertia. Virilio’s (1989, p111)
contention is that motion and the absence of motion are tied together
through the mutation of the automobile and the shrinking of distance:
- Spatial distance suddenly makes way for mere temporal distance.
The longest journeys are scarcely more than mere intermissions.
But if, as already shown, the nineteenth century and a large part of
the twentieth really experienced the rise of the automotive vehicle in
all of its forms, this mutation of it is by no means completed. As
before, except now more rapidly, it will make the transition from the
itinerancy of nomadic life to inertia, to the ultimate sedentariness of
society.
In this frame, the accident is the malaria of the Panama Canal: the inertia of
highway fatalities. The subject of the driver is now always tied up with the
risks and realities of the highway fatality. Driving means death.
The constitution of the driver was ushered in by the individuality and
personal mobility of the automobile. Highway construction ensured greater
access and reliability for more and more drivers, setting up a marketing link
between drivers and units of economic consumption. Concurrent with the
arrival of the driver as a subject of the highway machine, the operator of a
motor vehicle also faced the risk of an accident. Road accidents became
such regular events that a subject position emerged that was tied to the
unexpected arrest of motion in a potentially fatal fashion. Thus, the body-
as-accident came to mark a subjectivity outside typical lines of identity—a
perpetual line of flight caught between embodiment and the object of
cultural trauma. The subjectivity emanating from this site of struggle is
contingent, contorted, and often an imaginary for other subjects attempting
to negotiate the inherent dangers of highway travel. Even within one
generalization—the subject propelled to death by a vehicle in a collision—
multiple figures emerge such as the fatal bodies of the alcoholic, the
soldier, and the consumer of safety.
Kevin Douglas Kuswa teaches rhetoric at the University of Richmond
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| Accident(al) Rhetoric and (Dis)Figures of the Fatal Driver’s Subjectivity 1 January 2009 by Kevin Douglas Kuswa |
The National Safety Council estimates that more Americans
have been killed by automobiles than in all of the wars this
country has fought.
-Helen Leavitt (1970,p13)
have been killed by automobiles than in all of the wars this
country has fought.
-Helen Leavitt (1970,p13)
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Report. Dec. 6th, v40, n48, p821.
Baudrillard, Jean (1987). The Ecstasy of Communication. New York: Semiotext(e).
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“Three of Four Highway Deaths Traced to Alcohol, Speed.” (October 12, 1987). U.P.I.
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"Road accidents and the enormity of tragedy and destruction associated with
the highway machine are the flip side of the practices of circulation."
the highway machine are the flip side of the practices of circulation."
| SHARED SACRIFICE THE JOURNAL OF PROGRESSIVE THOUGHT 1 JANUARY 2009 |
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