Zeilinger, Martin (2009) 'Quit stalling…!': Destiny and destination on L.A.'s inner city roads. Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 1 (2). pp. 367-384. ISSN 2000-1525

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Abstract

If driving has today really become a Western “metaphor for being” (Hutchinson), then common roadside signs proclaiming “Right lane must exit” or “Through traffic merge left”, inventions such as the automatic transmission, and the agreeable straightness of freeways can all be understood as symptoms of an ongoing socio-political struggle between the driver as democratic agent, and the state as institu-tionalized regulatory force. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the context of urban traffic, where private motorized transportation represents both the supreme (if illusory) expression of personal freedom, and official efforts to channel individualism by obliterating its sense of direction and ideological divergence. On the concrete proving grounds of the clogged inner-city freeway, “nomad science” and “state science” (Deleuze & Guattari) thus oscillate between the pseudo-liberatory expressivity of mainstream car culture and the self-effacing dromoscopic “amnesia of driving” (Baudrillard). Are a city’s multitudes of cars resistant “projectiles” (Virilio) or, rather, hegemonic “sites of containment” (Jane Jacobs)? This essay approaches the complex tensions between “untamable” democratic mobility and state-regulated transit by way of two Hollywood-produced films that focus on traffic in Los Angeles: in Collateral (2004), a cab driver comes to recognize and transcend the hopelessly directionless circularity dictated by his job; in Falling Down (1993), a frustrated civil service employee abandons his car on a rush-hour freeway and decides to walk home, forced to traverse the supposedly unwalkable city without the “masking screen of the windshield” (Virilio). As they “quit stalling”, both protagonists become dangerous variants of the defiant nomad – one a driver who remains on the road but goes “under the radar”, the other a transient pedestrian whose movement becomes viral and unpredictable. My analysis of the films’ metropolitan setting and of the incessant movement that marks both narratives links political and philosophical economies of motion, speed, and transit to a discussion of the various bandes vagabondage (Deleuze & Guattari) that are formed between city and driver, driver and car, and car and pedestrian. In this discussion, the inner-city road emerges as a primary site of conflict between civic rule and individual subject, and the flow of urban traffic comes to represent the tensions generated in spaces where movement is understood as both liberating and as a form of control. - See more at: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/article.asp?DOI=10.3384/cu.2000.1525.09122367#sthash.OWb9TlsB.dpuf

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Culture Unbound is an Open Access journal, indicating that all its content is freely available to anyone with an internet connection. Furthermore we publish all our articles under a Creative Commons license that specify what a user can do with a document. Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs. Culture Unbounduses a so called “Attribution Non-commercial” (CC BY-NC) license which allows users to distribute the work and to re-work it without the author's permission, but not for any commercial purposes and never without acknowledging the original author. Culture Unbound does not charge any publication fees from the authors. Authors are welcome to parallel publish their articles without embargo as long as they include a full reference to the original source.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Traffic; Urbanism; Los Angeles; Falling Down; Collateral - See more at: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/article.asp?DOI=10.3384/cu.2000.1525.09122367#sthash.OWb9TlsB.dpuf
Divisions:	Research Labs > Data Materialization Studio
Date Deposited:	06 Apr 2017 19:09
Last Modified:	20 Dec 2021 17:16
URI:	https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/1550

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