Governmentality / Performativity : Automobility / Subjectivity

Goettlich, W. – Governmentality / Performativity : Automobility / Subjectivity

Governmentality / Performativity : Automobility / Subjectivity

When Barak Obama (in)famously declared1 some Americans cling to their guns and religion, his

political capital notwithstanding, he made two clear errors. The first error was to privilege the

gun rather than the car as a primary material signifier of American identity-definition. This may

appear quite a claim, given that the right of citizens to bear arms is not only enshrined in the

Constitution of the United States, among certain groups that comprise a non-trivial proportion of

the population it is also understood as an obligation in order to maintain the correct balance of

power between the citizenry and government. The automobile, on the other hand was not

produced in any number until a century after the framing of the Constitution. The second error

was to make this assertion under the presumption the people of whom he spoke had real recourse

to other material-symbolic possibilities in identity formation, as though the putative market logic,

often discursively assumed to extend to the so-called free market of ideas, would extend further

to the free selection of material-symbolic signifiers and lifestyle. The aim of this essay, then, is

to try to address these two ideas together; on the one hand the importance of the automobile in

American identity formation (subjectivity), and on the other the specific modalities (techniques)

through which the formation of automobilized subjects are formed in relation to the discursive

regime of governmentality particular to contemporary social-cultural life in the United States.

Technologies of the Self

I begin with Foucault’s (1988) Technologies of the Self to emphasize the importance of the

relationships between historically situated philosophical traditions and changing deployments of

power as specifically-oriented, technological practices (techniques) carried out, upon and

through the body. But the body I have in mind to examine is not, strictly speaking, the monadic,

‘individual’ body; these sacks of organically derived fibres, juices and electrical currents,

presumed to be distinctly delineable. The body I want to talk about is a materially-

1 Katherine Q. Seelye and Jeff Zeleny, “On the Defensive, Obama Calls His Words Ill-Chosen,” New York

Times, April 13, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/us/politics/13campaign.html

Goettlich, W. – Governmentality / Performativity : Automobility / Subjectivity 2

heterogeneous, discursively and performatively (Butler 1993) assembled one (Dant 2004;

Suchman 2009). It is a body, I argue, made more available to processes of subjectification

through regimes of governmentality by each of its successive valences of assembly. I am,

however, getting ahead of myself. The first issue at hand is a brief sketch of Foucault’s ideas

related to subjectification through technologies of the self.

Foucault identified four major types of technologies, or “‘truth games’ related to specific

techniques that human beings use to understand themselves” (1988, 18) These technologies

include those of production (the transformation and manipulation of objects), sign systems

(signifiers, meanings and communication), power (an objectification of the subject, making them

more available to determination or domination) and self. All four of these technologies are

relevant to the following discussion, although it is the technology of self, which permits

individuals to “effect by their own means or with the help of others certain number of operations

on their own bodies and souls, thought, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves

in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality" (18),

that is most pertinent. This is for at least two reasons. The first is that it is this technology that

opens most directly into Rose’s analysis of freedom, upon which I will draw shortly. The second

is that the specific techniques that Foucault identifies in his genealogy of technologies of the

self- in particular self-awareness, the verbalization of thought and writing- are significant in

terms of my theoretical object.

Through the examination of two of these technologies (power, self), as practice, Foucault works

to expose how a “certain idea or model of humanity was developed, and […] has become

normative, self-evident, and is supposed to be universal” (15). His project operates as a history of

the “organization of knowledge with respect to both domination and the self […] technologies of

individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of

the self” (18-19). What, then, are the specific techniques of knowledge that condition the

possibility of subjectification? From Epictetus, Foucault identifies the perpetual watch over

representations, which leads through the Freudian structural-model concept of the super-ego to


the theorization of governmentality. Foucault identifies the Delphic exhortation to ‘know thyself’

(gnothi sauton), well trafficked as a motto in modernity as the inversion of the “hierarchy of the

two principles of antiquity, 'take care of yourself' and 'know thyself'. In Greco-Roman culture

knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of taking care of your self. In the modern

world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle” (22). This knowledge of

oneself- self-awareness in contemporary parlance- is the prerequisite of self-critique and control,

themselves the nominal bases for the autonomous operation of the responsibilized individual in a

regime of freedom-governmentality. How to take care of oneself, however, as I will discuss later,

has a particular bearing and renewed relevance in terms of subjectification within the

contemporary American system of automobility.

Foucault further suggests the importance of confession (1988, 1990) and writing (1988)

as techniques of self. Confession appears in the context of early Christian practice and, later,

during the 19th century as part of what he theorizes as the discursive construction of sexuality.

Care of oneself through the process of self-examination (self-confession) in writing dates to the

Stoic period, turn of the first millennium B.C.E. Foucault identifies the writings of Seneca the

Younger as examples of this technique of care for the self, in which processes of subjectification2

are realized through the treatment of the self as an object of examination and reflection, “in order

to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed" (1988, 27). Finally, Foucault identifies

exagoreusis, a technique based on Christian values of obedience and contemplation, the aim of

which was the “permanent verbalization of thoughts […] by telling himself not only his thoughts

but also the smallest movement of consciousness, his intentions, the monk stands in a

hermeneutic relations onto only to the master but to himself. This verbalization is the touchstone

[…] of thought." (47). It is during the 18th century, Foucault argues, that such techniques of

2 While I using the contemporarily relevant concept of subjectification here- the processes (in the most general sense)

through which certain ‘advanced’ primates often called human beings become individuals (or subjects) in light of their historico-cultural conditions of possibility (knowledge-power), it should not be understood as having a directly transferrable meaning to a wholly other time and place. Foucault identifies some of the writings of Seneca as representative of the emergence of writing as a technique of attention to one’s self. Passing through the vagaries of time and culture, this technique is mutated and recombined in such ways as to be a technique of contemporary subjectification, while retaining a traceable lineage (per Foucault) to the time of the Stoics; this does not however mean that Seneca was wrapped up in processes of subjectification that you or I would recognize or could analyze as such.


verbalization were emptied of the requirement of self-renunciation as demanded by early

Christian practice, re-appropriated by the “so-called human sciences” in the service of a new

project, the positive constitution of a new kind of self.

Governmentality

Drawing substantially, although by his own admission unorthodoxly, from the work of

Foucault, Rose (1999) attempts to re-theorize the discursive, disciplinary structures (conditions

of possibility) through which freedom is produced in what he terms advanced liberal societies.

Rose’s conceptualization of freedom is not solely a negative one, i.e. the absence of explicit and

binding authoritative instruction and control, for example the pursuit of monadic, personal liberty

that is presumed in the American mythological treatment of freedom3. Rather it is a productive

one, which is to say Rose understands freedom operates concurrently and constitutively through

processes of subjectification, of the emergence as an acknowledgeable / locatable subject in what

Foucault terms the “grid of intelligibility of the social order” (1993, 93). Here, the analytical

distinction brought forward by Foucault between the juridically defined and productive models

of power is resonant in Rose’s work. In the juridical model Foucault identifies the privileging of

metaphors of law and sovereignty, themselves operational concerns in pre-modern, monarchical

societies in which the modalities of the exercise of power were oriented primarily toward

“deduction (prélèvement) and death” (89), understood to derive from the divine right of the

sovereign. It is, however, the latter model- power as productive capacity- that concerns Foucault

(and Rose) more directly:

Power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, this forming a chain or a system or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general

3 See the Declaration of Independence,(1776): “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” without undue interference

from temporal powers; the removal of layers of human-designed interference between man and his [sic] God.


design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. (92-93)

It is from this point that Rose works to elaborate productive power in terms of

governance and governmentality. The word play here is both irresistible and instructive:

governmentality / govern-mentality may be understood as the internalization by the individual

(citizen) of the mentalities (dispositions) prerequisite to the extension of governance through

subjectivity. It is a “certain kind of reason” that “makes possible both the exercise of government

and its critique” (1999, 7), but it is also the self-reflexive critique and articulation (exercise of

self-awareness) by the subject, performed upon him- or herself, that is a definitional feature of

subjectification in such regimes of governmentality. Rose cites Foucault’s maxim that

governmentality is the conduct of conduct, which operates through processes of formal

rationalization and informal (or less formal) articulations while always necessarily presupposing

the governed subject as being free: “To govern humans is not to crush their capacity to act, but to

acknowledge it and to utilize it for one's own objectives" (4). Rose argues the state, the modern

governmental apparatus par excellence, now numbers but one of several elements in “multiple

circuits of power, connecting a diversity of authorities and forces, within a whole variety of

complex assemblages” (5). I include automobility amongst these assemblages, acting as it does

to form linkages between large-scale social features (e.g. territory and population) and cultural

apparatuses (e.g. value systems), and the “micro-technologies for the management of human

conduct” (5). I will return to this idea below, but for the moment a more detailed elaboration of

the concepts central to Rose’s project, which he announces as a genealogy of freedom, is in

order.

By way of distinguishing between governance and governmentality, Rose first identifies

two primary approaches in the sociology of governance. The first is normatively informed,

which is to say informed by the notion of good governance. The second, related, approach he

terms descriptive, and it is oriented toward the characterization of the structural effects realized

through multiple actors and political relations. By contrast, studies in the analytics of


governmentality are oriented toward knowledge and action, of the emergence of “new positive

knowledges” (18) and “regimes of truth” (19), and the ways in which, through these regimes,

“conditions of possibility and intelligibility” (19) are formulated for the subjects circumscribed

by their ramification. The discursive bases of these regimes are implicit in Rose’s critique of

Habermas’ claim of the ongoing colonization of the ‘lifeworld’ by the state, in which “the very

nature and meaning of state and lifeworld were transformed in this process” (18). This is not

simply semantic play, but an example of the largely un-schematized redirection of

power/knowledge flows along “self-organizing networks […] tenuous, reversible,

heterogeneous, dependent upon a range of 'relatively autonomous' knowledges, knowledgeable

persons and technical possibilities" (17-18).

It is through this conceptual demarcation of an analytics of governmentality that

power/knowledge, in its contemporary formulations, is exposed to interrogation. Rose makes

clear his project demands tracing the sources of power/knowledge rationalities: Who are the

authorities? What are their objectives? And what means (strategic, technical) are deployed in the

pursuit of these objectives? The importance of discursive construction is clear, as Rose claims

“political rationalities are discursive fields […] zones of intelligible contestation […] as to what

should be done, by whom and how” (28). Intelligibility- to be intelligible- is the capacity to be

identified, articulated and located as a subject within a particular regime of governmentality, to

be seen or spoken of, to possess an audible voice or be respond-able to, is to profit from access to

the discursive field(s) of that regime. Intelligibility is closely related to the rationalizing

modalities of contemporary, advanced liberal regimes of governmentality in which to “govern is

to act under a certain description. Language is not secondary to government; it is constitutive of

it. Language not only makes acts of government describable; it also makes them possible” (28).

Regimes of governmentality are necessarily what Rose terms regimes of enunciation, which are

elaborated by and materialized through the granular, quotidian and prosaic practice of techniques

of the subjects of such regimes. Here there is a certain consonance with Butler’s (1993)

theorization of performativity through citationality that I will discuss shortly. In any case, the


technique-practicing subjects in question are the so-called free (and freedom loving)4 individuals

of advanced liberal societies. Rose makes clear, however, the governable subject is not a

universal one, rather such subjects are formed through “multiple objectifications” (40), and it is

the regime of governmentality-enunciation-intelligibility that describe the conditions of

possibility for the motivations, practices and identifications of the governed subject. As certain

structural actors (e.g. the church, public schooling and broadcast media) lose political relevance

in these regimes, processes of citizen formation (subjectification) operate through new actor-

modalities, including “commercial consumption regimes and the politics of lifestyle,” through

which the individual identifies with “one of a plurality of cultural communities” (46). In my

view Rose’s argument is largely correct, with the caveat that, following D’Alisera (2000), these

newer vectors of subjectification ramify an individual’s valence of identification such that a

plurality of identifications with a plurality of cultural communities (a sort of identity

constellation in time-space-imagination-language) is not only possible but demanded by and

necessary to the conditions of intelligibility of such regimes. Lastly, and perhaps somewhat

counter intuitively, Rose argues such processes of subjectification are “simultaneously

individualizing and collectivizing” (46). The subject in this sense is not the unitary, the ‘true’ (or

true-to-self), unique individual of classical modern identity discourses implied in the negative

formulation of freedom (discussed above). Rather, it is a subject of multiplying constitution, a

series of discursive effects (an effect itself) and referential practices, all of which depend upon

set- rather than unit-oriented action.

Before shifting focus from Rose, it will be useful to consider three other of his conceptual

treatments as they relate to practices of automobility: space, translation and technology. Rose

understands governable space(s) as coming into being through a similar mechanism of

enunciative recursion. Governable spaces are not simply delineated by schematics of domination,

but rather are thought and performatively acted into being as such by their subject population.

However, the resources from which this population draws is itself realized through a regime of

4 Elaborate the expressions of ‘freedom loving’ here


governmentality, the manifold possibilities within such space to “experience in certain ways, to

distribute attractions and repulsions, passions and fears across it, to bring new facets and forces,

new intensities into being” (31).

While governable space is not engineered as such, it is both modeled in and modeling of

thought. Furthermore space itself may be remodeled through the thought and practice it was

constitutive of in the first instance. For example, while the distance a contemporary North-

American might travel in a ‘normal’ day will certainly vary widely, the various techniques of

mobility available to that person define the operational limit of space much differently than it

would have been conceived by a historical counterpart. The relative accessibility of automobility

to the suburban commuter translates into travelable distances and times to and from the

workplace that would have otherwise consumed an entire working day not many years ago.

The contemporary suburban land- / mindscape is itself an effect of automobility. More than just

direct distances travelled, the possibilities for what may be done today, or normatively what

should be done today, in order to make it an effectively ‘productive day’ become profoundly

extensible in regimes of governmentality in which automobility is so imbricated5 (auto-

mentality? govern-mobility?). Subsidiary component technologies, optional add-ons (so to

speak) to the driver-car assembly compound and amplify the effects of space-thought recursion.

The GPS, both factory-installed and after-market versions (and, for that matter, the app

versions standard on most smartphones), illustrates this point quite well. Getting lost is to enter

into (temporary) unintelligibility within a regime of govern-mobility. It is to lose- or waste time,

to enter into a space of un-productivity. The technology of cartography has always served to

territorialize space, to render it (at least practically) accessible to the “spatializing gaze of the

governors” (36). A material map, however, is an asynchronous, asymmetrical technology; the

abstraction and material reproduction of the object at one time allows its user to locate him or

5 The car is not the only technological apparatus through which these types of power effects flow. Mobile devices,

particularly the currently ubiquitous ‘smartphone’ have become required kit in order to function ‘productively’ in the day-to-day. I would speculate there is work being done on the human-smartphone assembly, although I am not, at this point, familiar with it. Productivity is itself an entirely other concern, and one that I cannot attempt to adequately address in the scope of this essay. Having said that, I would argue that the pressure to be productive- for the moment, individual experiences of its embodiment for notwithstanding- is widely felt in advanced liberal, automobilized societies.


herself in space at another, thereby retaining their putative unitary status vis-à-vis the map and

geographic space. The deployment of GPS technology, on the other hand, is synchronous,

symmetrical technology that requires its user to signal6 their location in order to access the

geographic data necessary to plot their position and course. The real-time exchange of geo-

spatial positioning and virtual recreation of this space in an abstract form functions as a

transaction of intelligibility, a techno-ideological interpellation (Althusser 1994) that renders the

subject visible to the technologized gaze7, both externalized and internalized, but more important

renders the subject not lost, where to be lost is to lose access to intelligibility according to the

discursive terms of productivity (however relatively defined these terms may be in the immediate

instance). It is entirely possibly, of course, to ‘have’ a location on a GPS screen and still not

know where you are or how to get where you want to go. Software generally corrects for this

disjunction by automatic route re-calculation, if and when established waypoints are missed,

which ostensibly allows the driver(-car) to indefinitely forestall entering into a lost or

unintelligible state.

According to Rose, processes of translation accounts for the continuity of flow of

knowledge-power between centres of power and specific, autonomic micro-practices of self-

government. The schematic theorizations that proposes governmental policy would be realized

directly from centre to subject are inadequate in advanced liberal regimes “committed to the twin

projects of respecting the autonomy of certain ‘private’ zones, and shaping their conduct in ways

conducive to particular conceptions of collective and individual well-being” (48-49), thus the

“proliferation of independent authorities” (49), amongst which Rose enumerates doctors,

managers, parents, etc. I add drivers to this list, but should clarify the expertise I locate in drivers

as translating actors is not a question of driving skill or mechanical aptitude8, but rather one of

being entrepreneurs (138) of their own mobility. This may account, partially, for the relative

absence of efficient, collective modes of transit, such as rail travel, in North America versus

6 Technical details of GPS... 7 In this case highly ramified and interpenetrating technological, economic ideological systems; automobility is the

focus here, but the 8 The number of highway accidents and fatalities


Europe. The features of geographical distance and population density are also at issue here, but

with the exception of particular enclaves (Metro North, PATH and LIRR trains in the greater

New York area; the Acela Express along the BOS-WASH corridor) highway travel is generally

preferred in material and discursive terms. Perspectives in the national (United States) discourse

on the federal funding of Amtrak that argue against subsidization of transit almost invariable

ignore the dramatically larger subsidization of the national interstate highway network. It is not

my intention to elaborate a point-by-point comparison between these two modes of

transportation, but rather to illustrate the discursive favor afforded to automobility as a mode of

translation. Mobility achieved through automobility is understood as the unschematized

networking and extension of private zones: the public-private partnerships9 that build and

maintain road networks, the multi-national corporations that build the vehicles and supply the

fuel necessary to keep the vehicles operating, the garages and mini-marts that service the cars

and drivers along the way, the cultural imperatives to earn and keep moving, the trajectory and

space occupied by the driver-car, and so on. This list is by no means exhaustively enumerated

nor substantially elaborated. It should, however, give a sense of the multiple ways in which

knowledge-power flows are translated through automobility as a modality of subjectification. Put

another way, translational technologies of government enable the deployment of non-state

authorities in order to make possible government at a distance10, “through opening lines of force

across a territory spanning time and space” (50).

In technology Rose appropriates and adapts a central Foucauldian concept (see above).

Following my brief discussion of Foucault’s technologies of the self I have used the term to

general effect in the preceding discussion without explicitly clarifying Rose’s meaning for the

term. In brief, Rose has in mind assemblages of power, thought, practice and technological

artifacts (e.g. mobile phones, cars) oriented toward governmentality and organized, more or less,

9 For example, the A-30 in Quebec 10 Heaven is high and the emperor is far away (天高皇帝远 / 天高皇帝远), which can no longer be said about

contemporary America, despite the fact that in terms of distance and hospitableness the geographical space between Los Angeles and Washington D.C. is comparable to those between Beijing and the most remote corner of the Yuan Dynasty, the period from which this proverb is reputed to come. If this seems a nonsensical comparison, so much the better, as it should serve to emphasize


with the “aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects

[…] ‘human technologies’ in that, within these assemblages, it is human capacities that are

understood to be acted upon by technical means” (52). The critical emphasis is that all

technology requires the “inculcation of a form of life” (52), and the combination of human bio-

social-cultural componentry with technological componentry (hardware and software) yields

recursively self-modifying possibilities while remaining constitutive of a particular form of

subjectivity. Processes of rationalization function thusly, for example the GPS discussed above

or the E-Z Pass11 toll payment method. In the latter case, efficiencies are realized by driver(-car)s

on toll roads in terms of both time and cost. Use of the pass requires an system account linked to

a vehicle registration and credit card each of which may be understood as a form of techno-

ideological interpellation as suggested above; the subject’s intelligibility in one regime only

becomes possible through the inter-linking of already existing technological systems of

subjectification. As with the GPS, the most important technical operation here, however, is the

development of the logics necessary to the desired formulation of governmentality within the

subject, which is to say the orientation toward logics of efficiency, but through the “present-day

ethics of freedom itself,” which are not “antithetical to power and technique but actually the

resultants of specific configurations of power” (54).

Performativity

Latour (2007) suggests much existing sociological theory is blighted by the failure to

discern between ostensive and performative definitions of its objects. Ostensively defined objects

may be pointed to, in a literal sense, and are persistent beyond the fixity of the observer’s gaze.

By contrast, a performatively defined object “vanishes when it is no longer performed” (37), its

definition temporally bounded by its performance and its observation. It is in this sense Bell

(2007) observes the act of writing & (re-)reading acts as a performative intervention in the

the embedded, constituent, technological quality of the system of automobility in the production of American subjectivity. I owe Janna Clar a thank you for this translation and interpretation.

11 Technical details of E-Z pass


materialization of its object. In this essay, for example, it is through the theoretical observation

of the driver-car as a modality of subjectification within the system of automobility (which is

itself partially constitutive of a certain type of regime of governmentality) that the discursive

effects of automobility may be elaborated far beyond the putative limits of the network of roads

(local, national, international), tidily mapped (in print or virtually) and casually understood as so

much transportational plumbing. But performances of automobility also work in the opposite

direction, whereby the driver-car itself is materialized. Here, if perhaps counter intuitively, the

work of Judith Butler on gender may be instructive.

Butler (2011) draws attention to questions of the materialization of the body, by

theorizing “gender as the effect of productive constraint” (ix), an idea that invokes certain

consonance with Foucault’s and Rose’s work on discursive conditions of possibility and

intelligibility (discussed above). How does gender performativity relate to materialization? And

how is this relevant to regimes of automobility? I will have to defer a response to the latter

question until the end of the immediate discussion. As for the former, Butler first argues

construction must be redefined as “constitutive constraint” (x), through which performativity

operates, not as a “reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that

it names […] materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most productive

effect” (xii). Performativity in this sense is neither a discrete act nor a wholly self-conscious

dramaturgical gesture. Subjectification and gendering are, per Butler, mutually constitutive,

inextricable from one another; the “‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering,

but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves” (xvi). The physical

form (the matter) of the subject produced through iterations of constitutive constraint, in this case

what one might casually refer to as a woman or man, emerges only as a

process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter. […] construction is neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by the subject and culminating ins a set of fixed effects […] is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of the reiteration. (xviii - xix; Butler's italics)


More challenging than simply arguing gender is discursively constructed, Butler asserts

that sex, commonly understood to be grounded in ‘biology’ or ‘nature’. The misconstrual of

stabilized effects of fixity for natural ‘facts’ is consequential because it obscures the "folding of

power into the body" (Bell 2007, 15), thereby normalizing and privileging certain symbolic

encodings and resources, and ultimately establishing terms upon which a subject is produced as

intelligible within a given discursive regime. On the other hand, the “reworking of performativity

as citationality” (Butler 2011, xxii) that Butler proposes re-submits the question of the degree of

stability of such effects of fixity to examination, recalling that their construction through

performativity draws upon myriad material and symbolic resources. These resources themselves

are recursively (re-)produced as effects of the performativity and materialization. In more

general terms, subjectification may be understood to operate through the “reiteration of a norm

or set of norms […] it also derives is power through the citations it compels” (xxi-xxii). As Rose

(1999) argues with respect to forms of advanced liberal subjectification regimes, performativity

(citationality) modulates between, and requires, both individual and collective expressions.

While the individual subject appears as the product of a particular recombination of citational

possibilities, these possibilities are made intelligible as citable resources through an aggregation

of individual instantiations.

The political potential of Butler’s work emerges through possibilities for alternative

citational deployments. Citationality does not function as digital reproduction, the exactness of

which may be verified through check-summing, nor is it directly analogous to systems of legal

precedent interpretation and deployment (in the very least there is no centrally endowed

magistracy that functions as absolute arbiter of such question), despite Butler’s use of legal

metaphor. Instead, because citation produces the ‘law’, it may also be possible to “‘cite the law

to produce it differently, to ‘cite’ the law in order to reiterate and coopt its power” (xxiii). The

‘laws’ Butler refers to are heteronormativity and phallogocentrism primarily, but the conceptual

work done on performativity / citationality is potentially appropriable to other regimes of

subjectification and materialization. Returning to the second question I posed above, how is any


of this relevant to regimes of automobility?, I will suggest a highly speculative and contingent

answer here, subject to further revision. Without intending to suggest any degree of equivalence

of influence in the production of contemporary American subjectivity between regimes of gender

and automobility, it would be nonetheless possible to substitute ‘automobility’ for ‘gender’

(literally and conceptually) throughout the preceding discussion without destabilizing its

theoretical significance. As I have hinted along the way, automobility operates variously as a

technology of the self, a technology of subjectification in advanced liberal governmentality

regimes and a performative citationality through which new, assembled bodies are materialized.

Perhaps, therefore, the task at hand vis-à-vis automobility is one of recognition (the clarification

rather than obfuscation of the enfolding of power into the body) in order to progress to a set of

conditions of possibility from which alternative citation would be itself a possibility.

Automobility

Automobility, suggests John Urry (2000), is the “hybrid social and technical system of

the car,” extensible through several “interlocking dimensions” including the ways in which a car

“provides status to its owner/user through the sign-values with which it is associated,” its work

as a dominant cultural vector sustaining “major discourses of what constitutes the good life,” and

providing “potent literary and artistic images and symbols” (57-58). Automobility is not simply

the theoretical area triangulated between driver, car and road. It is a material-semiotic network

of the highest degree of elaboration, comprising drivers, cars and roads, but also the subsidiary

systems and processes (historical, contemporary and speculative) that account for the presence of

the roads (including technologies of civil engineering and construction, Cold-War Ideologies and

debates over Congressional appropriation, etc.); the presence of the cars (including the long

history of Fordist and post-Fordist systems of automobile production in the United States, global

economic interests and power struggles over fuel type and supply, the environmental

consequences of auto proliferation, etc.); the existence of an automobilized subjectivity, neither

sufficiently explicable as the product of an absolute, unitary freedom nor a false-consciousness.


As I have suggested intermittently above, the driver, understood to be not just a person who

happens to have been trained (in the most neutral sense), and possibly certified, to know which

levers to pull and pedals to push while behind the wheel, but as one who is the product of various

techniques of subjectification, deployed as part of an advanced liberal regime of knowledge-

power (governmentality) through the ongoing (citational) performance of automobility.

A certain semantic ambivalence is encapsulated in the term automobility, one that should

be explored before continuing. Foucault (1988), discussing Plato’s first dialogue Alcibiades I,

comments on the dualism in incorporated in the reflexive pronoun auto (self), in that it means

“‘the same,’ but also conveys the notion of identity” (25). By substituting the Greek root for the

English equivalent, automobility becomes the calque self-mobility. Etymologically12, the usage

of automobile was established in late 19th century, where the auto- in automobile contrasted

directly to horse-drawn carriages (such carriages were clearly not self-mobile, sans-horse) that

were then beginning to share the road with cars. In contemporary usage, the self-mobile vehicle,

or the vehicle of the mobile-self is something of a misnomer, considering the systemic nature of

automobility. Not only does the individual rely upon the car and the systematic extensions of

automobility enumerated above, amongst others, for his or her mobility, but also the driver as a

subject is produced only through these techniques, materialized as a driver-car (more on that in a

moment). The subject, therefore, is anything but self-mobile when it comes to automobility. On

the other hand, the driving subject is only producible through mobility, which is at once a

performative citationality and a figurative (and sometimes literal) truth-telling/confessional

modality of the self with respect to space and time.

Rose’s (1999) account of governmentality does not privilege materiality, however neither

does it ignore the materiality through which power-knowledge flows are articulated. In fact, in

several instances Rose draws upon the work of both Bruno Latour and John Law, work that is

broadly situated within the field of actor-network theory / material-semiotics. As such, the

discussion that follows regarding the assembly of the ‘social,’ while giving greater consideration


to materiality, should not seem entirely incommensurate with Rose’s account. According to this

account, the ‘social’ was invented in the second half of the 19th century, as a result of the

focalization of power-knowledge on then-emerging social problems. What he terms the “moral

order” was thus “mutated into a reality with its own regularities, laws and characteristics […]

that gradually came to be termed ‘social’” (114). While Rose emphasizes the processes of

investment of “social obligations” (134) in the formation of the social citizen, I have argued

elsewhere (Goettlich 2011), following Latour (2007), that any viable theorization of the social

must minimally include an account of the articulated, ongoing performance of connections

between materially heterogeneous actors. That is to say- and this is admittedly a very actor-

networky assertion- the so-called ‘missing masses’ (Latour 1992) must be accounted for.

Identifying the things that constitute these masses is less difficult than theorizing how

connections between the various (materially heterogeneous) actors are established and conducive

to power-knowledge flows. I have suggested the term articulation to address this conceptual

question:

articulation operates in two senses of the word: the flexible, multi-directional or multi-valence joining of things, as well as the attempt to formulate a specific utterance, verbal or textual. Car inscriptions operate as genre of ubiquitous articulation, a mode of performance of material semiotic networks, geographically and temporally distributed, doing the mediative and constructive work upon which the realization of the everyday relies. (Goettlich 2011, 16-17)

Dant (2004) has commented on the conspicuous absence of examination of the

automobile as a “component of social being and social action in late modernity” (61), and argues

that the assembly of the ‘driver-car’ deserves particular attention as a “species resulting not from

chance mating but a product of human design, manufacture and choice.” (62). As I have

suggested above, this assembled ‘species’ is a certain kind of materialized effect, one that

emerges through iterative, citational performances, particular to a certain type of regime of

governmentality. Such a regime requires a highly elaborated system of automobility predicated

12 Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed, s.v. “automobile”


upon a mobilized subject, which is to say a subject that is produced / materialized in mobility.

Dant’s theorization of the assembly of the driver-car rests upon the paired concepts of

affordances and embodiment. Affordances are relational potentialities through which material-

semiotic networks are made extensible. An affordance is, in some respects, similar to an

articulation, however affordances will more frequently (although not always) have an ostensive

character. They may also be, depending upon the immediate state of the normative frame of a

given discursive regime, construed as positive or negative. For example, I frequently rent a car to

make an obligatory bi-weekly trip13. Having completed the journey, but before returning the car

to the agency I might decide to run an errand or two, driving, that I would ordinarily accomplish

walking or riding public transit. On the one hand, the affordance of efficiency is exposed, but on

the other I will have contributed to the pollution of the planet. In this example, pollution would

be a negative affordance and efficiency a positive one. In fact, more times than not, efficiency is

the motivating affordance behind the rental in the first place; a Greyhound Bus would also get

me to my destination. The bus affords a lighter environmental impact, when the stream of

partially-combusted hydrocarbons it emits is divided by the total number of passengers and

aggregate distances travelled. On the other hand, the bus only runs on certain, inconvenient

schedule (a decidedly negative affordance). In the North American context efficiency is

generally a token of intelligibility, whereas the consequence of pollution is not (or at least not

yet). Lastly, affordances are not ‘natural’ qualities of an object. The brief application of the

‘genealogical imagination’ should bear this out; the things in question are artifactual, which is to

say human-constructed. The wide-open spaces of the American west might appear to contradict

this assertion, in which geographical distance might appear to be an affordance of ‘place’, but

those spaces are always only (have always only been) traversed by subjects of a particular

regime of mobility. This does, however, raise the question as to whether, or perhaps rather to

what degree the naturalization / obfuscation of relations of power-knowledge are affordances of

13 I do not, at the time of writing, own a car. The round-trip in question is approximately 300km and takes four hours.


technical systems? I do not have more than a provisional answer, but in very general terms the

work of Butler, Foucault and Rose, as discussed above, would appear to support the claim.

Dant draws on the work of Merleau-Ponty in the elaboration of embodiment as the second

key concept in the formation of the driver-car. Embodiment is a form of orientation,

communication and connection to one’s surroundings that “human beings carry into each

moment […] not simply given at birth but is perpetually modified […] an orientation of the

whole body to the world through which it moves. What is perceived in the visual field is

complemented by the kinaesthesia of the body and its trajectory as a whole “ (72). The weighted

sensation of settling into the seat during a brief, powerful acceleration, or the slight accumulation

of g-forces while rounding a corner at speed attest to the pleasurable possibilities of the

embodied driver-car. On the other hand, assemblage into the driver-car exposes the sensorial

body to other applications of power that are not at all pleasurable or 'empowering'. The sickening

sensation of being late for an appointment and pulling into a street blocked by a garbage truck on

its rounds attests to this. Similarly the frustration of running errands here and there, getting in

and out of the car every few minutes (perhaps buckling and un-buckling the kids) draws attention

to the corporeal displeasures felt when the embodied connections of driver-car is destabilized.

Finally, the most salient effects of the embodied driver car, this automobilized subject into which

these particular formulations of power have been enfolded, may be felt if only momentarily

while accelerating along an entrance ramp into freely-flowing highway traffic, that the system

and all its possibilities for the realization of freedom become available to the driver-car. At this

moment it would seem no place in the network is inaccessible to rational calculation; from

Montreal San Diego is only so many hours, so many gallons of gas and so many turns (or

prompts from the GPS) away. But the particulars compress, it is the sensation of freedom and

possibility that is evident. Such a moment is true. It is coherent within a certain regime of

automobilized subjectification and yet is also an effect of the subjectifying processes themselves.

Conclusion


There are a number of important oversights in the preceding account. First, it does not

take into consideration gender, sexual orientation, other contested identity performances as they

may contribute to, or ramify the subjective formation of the driver-car14. Second, the discussion

presumes access to automobility, although for many Americans this is not the case. Poverty,

illness or infirmity, religious beliefs and so on may be cause for exclusion from automobility.

Third, it is not a genealogy of automobility, which is an altogether larger project. Rather, it is an

attempt to apply certain theorizations of power, embodiment and performativity to the system of

automobility generally. I also have in the back of my mind the more specific intention of

extending these theorizations into the relatively limited field of studies on bumper stickers, the

object of my ongoing research. By way of conclusion I will make a few remarks on this subject.

The existing literature on bumper stickers (Case 1992; Kriznar 1993; Newhagen and

Ancell 1995; Endersby and Towle 1996; Bloch 2001)15 has tended to treat their display as an

expression of identity without explicit reference to the particular regimes of power/knowledge

through which such identities would emerge. For example, Bloch (2001) treats bumper sticker

display in Israel as manifest demonstration of the mobilized revitalization of the Habermasian

public sphere. It is not my intention to exhume or revive the Habermas vs. Foucault contentions

here (or elsewhere, for that matter), but in contrast to Bloch, it appears to me the Foucauldian

side of the divide may be more productive in terms of formulating a useful analytics of

automobility. Another problem throughout this literature is the treatment of identity as having a

relatively high degree of natural fixity, which is not to say it is treated as immutable, but rather

identity is not in any way theorized as emerging through modes of performative citationality.

Power, likewise, is treated as a form of accumulated capital (some have it, some don’t) rather

than flows of productive constraint.

Refocusing the discussion of the driver-car with respect to bumper stickers is also

potentially fruitful. While Dant (2004) articulates embodiment primarily in terms of the joining

14 I identify as a man (white, heterosexual, married, middle-class) and for better or for worse I write from a

perspective.


of the driver to the car through a set of affordances and the performance of mobility,

embodiment may also be understood as an affordance itself (an affording actor), that permits an

opening or articulation of the visual field of the driver-car to the discursive field of the network

of automobility (of which the driver-car is otherwise partially constitutive).

In this sense, bumper stickers may afford the development of connections between

automobility and other networks or "diagrams of power" (Bell, 4), thus further rendering the

subject (driver-car) intelligible within a regime of freedom of expression / self-formation.

However, this is not so much a contribution to the re-democratization of the public sphere (not

least because automobility is not uniformly accessible to the citizenry) as it is a re-instantiation

(citation) of the conditions of possibility for obligatory freedom, a micro-technology of the self.

The particular material affordances of the bumper sticker- they are inexpensive and easy to put

on the car (and can be removed, if desired); they are ubiquitous, topically plural, discursively

hyper-textual and can be custom made or self-produced- illustrate their ’suitability’ as a mode of

inscribing our ‘selves’ within the contemporary network of automobility.

15 This list is not exhaustive, but it is reasonably representative and certainly adequate for the immediate

purposes of illustration.


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