Ubiquitous Articulation: Car Inscription, Materially Heterogenous Networks and the Everyday

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UBIQUITOUS ARTICULATION 1 Ubiquitous Articulation: Car Inscription, Materially Heterogenous Networks and the Everyday As a point of departure this account relies upon the recent work of both Latour and Law in their articulations of the relevance and methods appropriate to actor-network theory (ANT) / material semiotics approaches to contemporary social analysis. Specifically, it begins with the understanding that social composition is achieved through the necessarily ongoing performance of connections between materially heterogeneous actors. To briefly work through the preceding idea, albeit backwards, an actor is understood to be the “moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it” (Latour, 2005, p. 46); action is not located in the actor, according to the well-worn agency-structure dialectic (nor, for that matter, is agency particularly relevant to this concept of action). Rather, it is understood to be dislocated, distributed and relativistic. Materially heterogeneous describes the stuff of actors. They may be people (human stuff), but may also be any number of other sorts of things- physical objects (formed steel, macadam, four- colour process self-adhesive laminated plastic strips, etc.) as well as corporations, discourses, myths and so on. Finally, necessarily ongoing performance of connections underscores the foundational dynamism, the requirement of the ceaseless activity of forming connections and tracing networks (or work-nets as Latour prefers), that informs this understanding of what it means to call something social. Rather than a theory as such, the material semiotic approach is a “sensibility to the messy practices of relationality and materiality of the world” (Law, 2009, p. 142); an “empirical version of poststructuralism” (p. 146), and as such results in a partial, contingent and temporary account. Because such accounts are in effect so many stories told, they necessarily also “enact realities and versions of the better and the worse, the right and the wrong, the appealing and the

Transcript of Ubiquitous Articulation: Car Inscription, Materially Heterogenous Networks and the Everyday

UBIQUITOUS ARTICULATION 1

Ubiquitous Articulation: Car Inscription, Materially Heterogenous Networks and the

Everyday

As a point of departure this account relies upon the recent work of both Latour and Law

in their articulations of the relevance and methods appropriate to actor-network theory (ANT) /

material semiotics approaches to contemporary social analysis. Specifically, it begins with the

understanding that social composition is achieved through the necessarily ongoing performance

of connections between materially heterogeneous actors. To briefly work through the preceding

idea, albeit backwards, an actor is understood to be the “moving target of a vast array of entities

swarming toward it” (Latour, 2005, p. 46); action is not located in the actor, according to the

well-worn agency-structure dialectic (nor, for that matter, is agency particularly relevant to this

concept of action). Rather, it is understood to be dislocated, distributed and relativistic.

Materially heterogeneous describes the stuff of actors. They may be people (human stuff), but

may also be any number of other sorts of things- physical objects (formed steel, macadam, four-

colour process self-adhesive laminated plastic strips, etc.) as well as corporations, discourses,

myths and so on. Finally, necessarily ongoing performance of connections underscores the

foundational dynamism, the requirement of the ceaseless activity of forming connections and

tracing networks (or work-nets as Latour prefers), that informs this understanding of what it

means to call something social.

Rather than a theory as such, the material semiotic approach is a “sensibility to the messy

practices of relationality and materiality of the world” (Law, 2009, p. 142); an “empirical version

of poststructuralism” (p. 146), and as such results in a partial, contingent and temporary account.

Because such accounts are in effect so many stories told, they necessarily also “enact realities

and versions of the better and the worse, the right and the wrong, the appealing and the

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unappealing” (p. 154). The critical aspect of this approach, therefore, is an openness to the

possibility of assembly, and of assembly otherwise. Such is the work of writing of the risky

account, or, assembling the social (Latour, 2005).

Recent empirical-oriented studies that employ a material actor-network / material

semiotic approach include accounts of gardening (Hitchings, 2003), automobility (Urry, 2004)

and the driver-car (Dant, 2004), birdwatching (Prior & Schaffner, 2011), and industrial bagged

salad production (Stuart, 2011). Some of the existing work on bumper stickers has examined

relationships between sticker messages and social status (Case, 1992), emotional qualities of

messages and race / income (Newhagen & Ancell, 1995), political affiliation and bumper sticker

display (Endersby & Towle, 1996), trans-national identity negotiation and bumper stickers

(D’Alisera, 2001), as well as the possibility of the deployment of a Habermasian public sphere

through bumper sticker display (Bloch, 2001). What I hope to achieve in the following account is

a plausible tracing of continuous connections from the network of automobility, extended

through the driver-car and the bumper sticker, outward to networks of the virtualization of

obituaries and remembrance notices and the cultural production of breast cancer.

A brief note on aesthetics: Discussing the meaning of constructivism, Latour suggests the

metaphor of the construction site, a visitor to which, standing in the mud and taking in all the

busy details of human and machinic activity, the diverse materials and as-yet unfinished

structures, may be “struck by the spectacle of all the participants working hard at the time of

their most radical metamorphosis” (p. 88). This feeling is contingent on the explicitly unfinished

status of the project, and is never accessible once the project is finished, or becomes a house or

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skyscraper ostensibly1. Up until that point, the construction is a performance, and witnessing it

should permit the observer the “troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be different,

or at least that they could still fail” (p. 89). While I am not about to presume the exhilaration of

the reader as she or he works through the following, I have tried to present the following account

through a combination of experimental, rhizomatic and hard-hat required sensibilities. I do hope

it proves complete and stable enough- at a minimum- not to collapse upon the reader.

Automobility and the Driver-Car

Dant (2004) remarks it is surprising that sociology has largely ignored the automobile as

a “component of social being and social action in late modernity” (p. 61). This, despite the car’s

profound role in mediating and transforming patterns of social connection, with effects ranging

from the restructuring of industrial production, the mobilization of consumption-oriented

lifestyles and the redistribution of physical and psychological geographies of time and space.

Dant argues that the driver-car assemblage deserves particular attention as a “species resulting

not from chance mating but a product of human design, manufacture and choice.” (p. 62).

Important to his discussion about the driver-car is a review of the concept of affordances.

These are the relational, invitational valences that allow human-object interactions, and through

which a material-semiotic network is made extensible. Affordances may be positive or negative.

To take the car as an object example, one if its positive affordances might be the way it allows

me to traverse the several hundred kilometers between my home in the city of Montreal and my

summer vacation the coast of Maine in just a few hours, whereas the trip by foot, bike or mule

1 Latour (2005) differentiates between ostensive and performative definitions, the former includes things one may point to and say ‘that is a {such and such}’ and that remain even when their observer disappears from its view; the latter “vanishes when it is no longer performed” (p. 37).

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would take much longer. On the other hand, one of its negative affordances might be the way I

become responsible for a stream of partially-combusted hydrocarbons that stretches across

southern Quebec and half of New England. Affordances, however are not naturalistic features of

objects, particularly in the case of human-made ones, which are quite clearly designed. Design,

does not completely account for an objects affordances either, nor do affordances translate into

use. Rather, design, affordances and use (as well as re- and alternative- uses of objects) network

and inform each other, over time, and through what might be termed a practical dialectic, or what

Wakkary and Maestri (2007) partially account for through in their discussion of the

resourcefulness of everyday design. Conceptually, however, affordances alone cannot “offer any

account of the dynamics of relations between humans and objects; [...] that they change over

time and according to social context” (Dant, 2004, p. 69).

Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Dant proposes embodiment as a second

important concept in thinking about the driver-car, which, according to this definition, is a form

of communication with and an orientation to the world:

human beings carry into each moment, is 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 (p. 72).

The mutability of embodiment suggests Latour’s (2005) metaphor of plug-ins, or the

‘downloadable’ fragments of know-how, competences that do not “come in bulk any longer, but

literally in bits and bytes” (p. 207). It is the accretion or layering of plug-ins that composes the

individual subjectivity, but also that allows a person to carry on, to perform their lives, to act.

Dant expresses embodiment primarily in terms of the joining of the driver-car and its

performance of motility. But embodiment may also be understood as an affordance itself (an

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affording actor), that permits an opening or connection of the visual field of the driver-car to the

semiotic field of the network of automobility (of which the driver-car is otherwise partially

constitutive).

Effects of such connections are fluid, multidirectional and ramifying. A fairly straight-

forward example of an initial connection may be taken from an experience that was related to me

by a collaborator-informant. H*** was driving when he saw a bumper sticker that read I ♥

Waterboarding, a reference to one amongst the range of torture and interrogation techniques

recently employed by the CIA and other U.S. government agencies and contractors on prisoners

in the so-called War on Terror (Kreisher, 2008). While recounting the experience, H***

suggested that on reflection he could not be certain the sticker was not meant ironically, but that

at the time he was so angered by it that he accelerated violently, exceeding the speed limit in

order to pass the other car immediately. When I asked if he recalled any details about the make

and model, or its driver, he replied again that he was so overwhelmed with rage and the desire to

get away from the other car he did not allow himself even to glance at it as he sped past.

What does this brief anecdote suggest in terms of material semiotic network formation?

First, the connections that form the network of automobility include the possibility of dimensions

(actors)- of primary concern here is what I term the textverse2- that are not included by Urry

(2000) in the “interlocking dimensions” he argues constitute, and should serve as the basis of the

study of the “hybrid social and technical system of the car” (p. 57). Among these dimensions are

the way in which an automobile “provides status to its owner/user through the sign-values with

which it is associated (speed, home, safety, sexual desire, career success, freedom, family,

2 A wordplay I hope to invoke the docuverse, although it is a concept not constrained to a designed file system; rather, it is meant to evoke the ever expanding, discursive universe of semiotic texts which is operatively inseparable from the ever multiplying world of material objects.

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masculinity)” (p. 57), as well as the way it acts as the “dominant culture” sustaining “major

discourses of what constitutes the good life” and providing “potent literary and artistic images

and symbols” (p. 58). However, neither of these dimensions allows for the unschematized

development of connections between automobility and other networks. Second, the bumper

sticker, through its particular affordances (inexpensiveness, ubiquity, ease of application, topical

plurality, pithiness, and hypertextuality3) as well as those it shares in assembly with the driver-

car (primarily motility and as a consequence geographical / temporal distribution and public

formation) does articulate such connections.

In Loving Memory of...

Dylan Dunbar, who loved the outdoors died when he was 19 years old. Buck was 23

when he died in 2004, as was J.K., who played hockey. Peter R. Betts was 62 and Lived to Ride.

J.P. Gordon raced under the number 02. William Greenwood, who was a veteran of the 82nd

Airborne Division of the United States Army and a member of the American Legion, was an

octogenarian when he died. I can recite these facts, not because I know any of the deceased, or

because I read their obituaries in a newspaper, but because I read bumper stickers dedicated to

their memory4.

As a genres of the bumper sticker go, the memorial is an emergent one; earlier work done

in the U.S. (Case, 1992; Newhagen & Ancell, 1995; Endersby & Towle, 1996; D’Alisera, 2001)

does not treat personal memorials. Following the events of 11 September 2001 a genre of Never

3 The ability to invoke the textverse 4 See Appendix A - Memorial Stickers

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Forget flourished5, but these were topically oriented toward national discourse, rather than

evocative of the death of an individual friend or loved one. Roadside memorial shrines are fairly

commonplace in the northeastern U.S. These shrines typically appear at the site of a fatal traffic

accident and are usually composed of a small, white, wood cross, upon which the name of the

deceased it written, and which may be surrounded by flowers or other mementos. It may be that

the appearance of individual memorial stickers is related to the Never Forget genre and / or

roadside shrines, although to my knowledge no such relationship has been traced. While such a

project is outside the immediate focus of this account, it is nonetheless important, at a minimum,

to acknowledge already present semiotic ad perpetuam memoriam at work within the network of

automobility

~

J*** was trailing two young boys across the parking lot, bickering, tugging, shooting

imaginary lasers, racing. Her hands were full of grocery bags and her patience with the boys was

clearly at a low ebb. She approached at a car I had just stopped to look at, on the rear windscreen

of which was affixed a large circular decal (Image 1). I

had doubts about approaching her as she tried to herd the

boys into the car. I had recently recorded several of the

stickers listed above in the course of my field work, but

had not yet spoken with the owners of any of these cars, I

decided to take my chances. J*** told me a brief account

of her aunt, B***, with whom, of all her family she was particularly close. Her aunt became ill

5 Unfortunately, as I have discussed elsewhere (Goettlich, 2011), these stickers came on the scene more than a decade ago, appearing between the existing published work on bumper stickers and my relatively recent interest in the topic. D’Alisera, for example, notes the fact she finished her field work just before 9/11.

Image 1 - In Loving Memory

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with cancer, “fought hard against it for a long time” (J***, personal communication, 3 April

2011) and died. Several members of her family decided to have the decals printed as a way of

remembering her aunt, of “letting people know she was here, and how she died”. With

reservation, as if she was entirely sure she could trust a stranger with such an admission, J also

expressed the feeling that her aunt was still with her, looking over her and her boys. She did not

simply remember or miss her aunt, but she knew her aunt was present; not corporally, in the

sense that necessarily invokes human figuration, but real and present nonetheless. Despite my

apologies for intruding on what was clearly a difficult moment with her kids, she thanked me

instead, for “the opportunity to talk about my aunt, to share her life”.

There are two memorial notices for B*** on the website of the Burlington Free Press

(2009a, 2009b)6. In each of these she beams out from a pixelated, black and white photo, smile

wide, chin in hand. The first notice, originally published 27 May 2009, is addressed directly to

B***:

You will be remembered when the flowers bloom in spring, And, in the summertime with all the fun that summer brings. You will be remembered when fall brings leaves of gold In the wintertime remembered, in the stories that are told. You will be remembered each day right from the start For the memories that we once shared, Forever live within my heart. I miss you so much, my sister. The only peace I find is knowing that you are no longer in that pain. On the same page as this notice is note from a former coworker, posted to a virtual

guestbook. It speaks briefly their work together, the writer’s sense of loss and her memory of

B***’s smile. The second memorial notice was originally published on 25 December 2009. It

reads:

6 The Burlington Free Press is the largest local paper in the area in which I conducted this field work. It is owned by the Gannett Corporation, which publishes more than 80 other newspapers in the U.S., including USA Today, with a combined daily circulation of nearly 12 million.

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In Loving Memory of B*** 1959 - 2006 Those we love don't go away, They walk beside us every day, Unseen, unheard, but always near, Still loved, still missed and very dear. Merry Christmas, B***. In addition to these notices, an obituary for B*** appears on the Legacy.com®7 website

(Legacy.com®, 2011a)8. Legacy.com® is a media company that provides web-distributed

database software for obituary hosting and management to newspapers. It claims this software is

used to host the “obituaries and Guest Books for approximately 75 percent of people who die in

the U.S.” (2011b). Additionally, Legacy.com® operates memorial sites for specific groups and

events, such as U.S. war veterans and the September 11th attacks, as well as special interest

websites such as gadzoo.com, which is oriented to the world of pet ownership.

The Legacy.com® guest book for B*** has been archived is no longer accessible to the

public. However, it is possible to re-publish the book at a cost of $29.99 for one year or in

perpetuity for $79.99. Directions on the subscription form encourage potential sponsors to

restore the book to public use:

consider restoring this Guest Book as a special give to the family [...] By purchasing a Guest Book sponsorship, you’ll be giving loved ones a place to express their feelings and share memories any time they’d like in the months and years ahead. Hume (2000) suggests that since their appearance in American newspapers more than

200 years ago, obituaries have provided a unique object through which cultural features and

aspirations may be interpreted: “indeed, newspaper obituaries not only reveal something about

what society remembers but also offer hints into what may have been ‘forgotten’ about the

attributes and values associated with individual lives” (p. 13). This is perhaps phrased too much

7 Legacy.com® currently markets itself under the slogan Where life stories live on. ® 8 While the memorial notices cited above appear on the Burlington Free Press website, the data are stored by Legacy.com and accessed through a Legacy.com search engine embedded in the newspaper website.

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in keeping with the grand narratives of America to appear at first to resonate deeply within my

account. However, Hume further suggests the possibility that obituaries may succeed in

collapsing of past-present, public-private divisions. Taken together, these ideas approximate a

significant aspect of the preceding account, which attempts to trace connections between

heterogeneous networks of loss and grief, automobility, virtualization, the logic of global capital

and ubiquitous media.

4Mom

K*** is a family acquaintance. Because I knew she had a breast cancer awareness license

plate, I interviewed her as part of an earlier project I conducted on car inscription. K***'s mother

died of breast cancer almost two decades ago when K*** was in her mid-twenties, and one of

K***'s friends recently had breast cancer as well.

My friend L***, a really close friend of mine from college was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 36, had gone through chemotherapy, radiation, double mastectomy, was being honored at this luncheon, she was the honoree for her amazing fundraising efforts for breast cancer so she invited me to come along because she knew, obviously, what had happened to my mom and my interest in doing breast cancer awareness and fundraising.

(K***, personal communication, 18 April 2011). It was at this luncheon that the state of Maine

publicly introduced the Breast Cancer Support Services

special license plate as a way of raising money for the

Maine Center for Disease Control, which splits the funds

between breast- and cervical-cancer research, awareness and support programs (Department of

the Secretary of State of Maine, 2008b). The state took up the program upon receiving a petition

signed by 2,000 citizens (2008a). The plate design features a pink ribbon is superimposed on a

Image 2 - Maine Breast Cancer Plate

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silhouette of the state of Maine, as well as the motto early detection saves lives (Image 2). The

special breast cancer plate costs $20 above that of a standard registration, while the vanity

version is $45 more than the standard plate. K*** says it was a “big thing that the fundraising

people have been trying to get going for years”. The event drew together government officials,

fundraisers, oncologists, breast cancer survivors and their friends and families:

It was very emotional for me that day, just being at the luncheon, listening to my friend L speak about her story and it was obviously reminding me of what our family had been through with my mom. K*** was not expecting to sign up for the special plate when she went to the luncheon.

She had car with a vanity plate9 when she was in college, but:

I don't generally like vanity plates. I think they're kind of, my own personal feeling is they seem kind of pretentious, they seem a little self-involved and I just, I had one previously and I swore I would never have another one […] but then all this happened, and that day I was feeling very caught up in the moment. And all of these women coming together for this amazing cause and my friend L***, and it all just came together. Later, she received the paperwork by mail to finalize the plate registration:

They said 'you can pick something' and I thought 'if I'm going to do a breast cancer plate, and I'm doing it for my mother I might as well put something on there to honor her'. I tried a bunch of different combinations, I tried the number 4 and Mom instead of T*** [her mother's nickname] and all those were already taken and so I came up with FOR T*** […] When I did the triathlon to raise money for breast cancer Tri For a Cure, that was the name for my own personal little team, 'For T***'. So that's what inspired me on the plate.

9 To clarify the nomenclature in use here: vanity and specialty plates are state-issued license plates that serve as a valid vehicle registration. Novelty plates are not. The license number of a vanity plate is decided by the car owner, but plate itself may be a standard issue or specialty issue one. Specialty plates are those that have a thematic background or sticker affixed as a way of promoting awareness about or raising money for a particular issue or cause. Depending on the state in question, the license number of a specialty plate may be issued by the state or chosen by the car owner.

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K “really loves” the plate. She says it looks good on her new car, and when she sees the

message FOR ***** it makes her happy. Occasionally a stranger will stop her and ask about the

plate, and she will share a small piece of her mother's story. Other times she will see someone

else's car on the road with a breast cancer plate:

I feel a sense of connection or camaraderie that probably on some level is false camaraderie, I don't know these people or their motivations for putting a breast cancer plate on their car. But when I see one I have a momentary sense of that feeling that I got at the luncheon, like there are people out there whose lives may have been affected and who were inspired enough to do something about it, or to somehow say, to mark that somehow, that it affected their life and to put it out there. She doesn't wave or otherwise try to signal these other drivers, but K*** says it evokes a

feeling in her similar to when she participates in a large fundraising event, such as the Tri For a

Cure. It is a profound feeling of shared struggle and loss, of “what happened with my mom

happened with other families”.

Before buying her new car, K*** put two bumper stickers on her old one. The first one

she got at the Tri For a Cure, which read Swim – Bike – Run. The second one was an anti-

George W. Bush decal. She removed this sticker following the election of Barack Obama in

2008. At the time of our conversation she didn't plan to put any other stickers on her car.

K*** concluded our conversation by saying:

I think my connection to my mom is so important to me, and the fact we lost her the way that we did, I do feel like that's just become a part of my identity in a way, the fact that she died, that fact that she had breast cancer has become, in its own way, a part of me.

~

Recently, Democrat Karen Bass of The United States House of Representatives

sponsored a bill that would establish a commission charged with “accelerating the end of breast

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cancer” (United States House of Representatives, 2011). The National Breast Cancer Coalition, a

lobbying corporation that coordinates a network of breast cancer advocacy groups in the United

States has set a deadline for the end of the disease on 1 January, 202010 (2011a).

The NBCC deadline website, featuring a rolling dial clock applet with bold white- on-

black digits in years, days, hours, minutes and seconds, counts down to the deadline. For a

donation of $20 per second, or $200 per ten minutes, supporters of the NBCC can have their

name or portrait- or those of loved ones- appear next to the seconds dial. Recent tweets from the

NBCC (2011c) alternately encourage potential donors to join a special Christmas shopping

promotion in Philadelphia11, to make tax-deductible gifts before the end of the tax year and to

“forget the holiday sweater, give something meaningful this year […] Put them On the Clock

today!...”, In addition to fund-raising, lobbying and group coordination, the NBCC aims to

develop a network of individual activists through the re-telling of personal experiences, the

dissemination of research findings and myth-busting (2011a, 2011b). For example, Myth #1 of

31 Myths and Truths is “monthly breast exams save lives”. According to the NBCC claim,

monthly breast self-exams cause increased anxiety amongst women and “unnecessary biopsies of

benign lumps” (2011a). Using National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data from 2003 Roth et

al. (2011) find that amongst survivors, nearly 60% of cases of breast cancer are first discovered

by methods other than the clinical mammogram. The American Cancer Society (2011)

recommends both self-exams and mammograms as means of early detection of breast cancer.

In reviewing the history of breast cancer activism in the U.S. over the last century, Lerner

(2002) details debates over research fund allocations with consideration of disease mortality rates

10 Breast Cancer Deadline 2020® 11 Of which 15% of sales will go to fund NBCC initiatives and operations.

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as well as some of the controversies that surround detection, prevention and treatment. Zones

(2000) extends this analysis by elaborating a political economy of breast cancer in which she

examines some of the “ways that people and corporations, through the U.S. market economy,

have benefited from the prominence of breast cancer as a means to create wealth” (p. 120).

The American Cancer Society12 sponsors a number of events and initiatives ranging from

the Relay for Life® to Daffodil Days®. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure®13 franchises a race

series under the banner of Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure®. The Maine Cancer Foundation

(2011a) operates an event in this series under the name Tri for a Cure – Maine Women's

Triathlon, that, in its 2011 running raised 1.1 million dollars. For the 2012 edition of the Maine

race, individuals will be required to raise a minimum of $350 dollars in order to participate,

while those who raised more than $2,000 in 2011 will be given priority registration rather than

being drawn in a lottery. Businesses are given the opportunity to partner with the MCF, with a

range of promotional exposure and other benefits, for sponsorship fees ranging from $1,000 to

$50,000 (2011b). It was through participation in Tri for a Cure and Making Strides Against

Breast Cancer® events that K*** first got involved with breast cancer fundraising.

Perhaps K***'s account exposes, if only partially and very particularly, the difficulty of

losing a loved one to breast cancer, of living through the loss and attempting to guard that

person’s memory. But it also suggests the possibility of tracing a material-semiotic network of

breast cancer as social assemblage that potentially accounts for more than individual experience

against the backdrop of a dualistic opposition between disease as natural phenomenon and

12 The ACS currently markets itself under the slogan The Official Sponsor of Birthdays®. 13 My use of the ® symbol here (and above) is not meant to be facetious or obnoxious despite its apparently relentless repetition. Each appearance of the symbol indicates an established trademark (U.S.), which should help to indicate, if not adequately trace, the relationships between the missions of these organizations and the protection of their brands as a means to continually insure their access to and engagement with capital flows. This process is an important actant in the both of the actor-networks I am attempting to sketch.

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medicine as scientific discipline, set against one another by a putative “war” (Zones, 2000;

Lerner, 2002; Salik, 2011). What follows, then, is not meant to be comprehensive, but a very

tentative sketch of what such an approach might include. Furthermore, my goal in attempting to

begin to write such an account is intended simply to implicate a wider network to which the

hypertextuality of a bumper sticker or vanity plate affords connection, thereby illuminating the

extensibility of the network of automobility.

Conclusion: Follow the Actors

Latour admonishes would be ANTs14 to “follow the actors themselves” (p. 12). I have

tried to remain faithful to this slogan in writing the preceding account. I have attempted to take

an apparently unassuming group of actors, what I term car inscriptions- including bumper

stickers and vanity plates- and begun to elaborate some of the connections through which these

actors connect and articulate flows of meaning to afford the construction of other materially

heterogeneous networks. So what of it? What relevance has this exercise to the everyday, which

dangles from the title high above but has barely been noticed until now? Following Latour, the

social is not an ether, some magical material of which the mere invocation accounts for action

and meaning without further examination. The social is assembled, constructed by the

performance of materially heterogeneous networks and flows. In the present account 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 performance of material semiotic networks,

14 Despite bristling at the awkwardness of the moniker actor-network theory, Latour enjoys the metaphor of its acronym ANT, to describe the industry required to trace the “endless number of mediators” (p. 40) in writing in the “painful and costly longhand” (p. 11) of an actor-network account.

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geographically and temporally distributed, doing the mediative and constructive work upon

which the realization of the everyday relies. The bumper sticker communicates a loss, but it also

hypertextually indicates pathways elsewhere that, if the invitation is taken up, draw together

networks composed of all material of actor.

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References

American Cancer Society. (2011). Breast Cancer. Retrieved from http://www.cancer.org

Bloch, L.-R. (2001). Setting the public sphere in motion: The rhetoric of political bumper

stickers in Israel. Political Communication, 17(4), 433-456.

Case, C. E. (1992). Bumper stickers and car signs: Ideology and identity. Journal of

Popular Culture, 26(3), 107-119.

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Appendix A - Memorial Stickers

A.1: Dylan L. Dunbar, 1991 - 2010 A.2: Buck, 1981 - 2004

A.3: J.K., 1985 - 2008 A.4: Peter R. Betts, 1947 - 2009

A.5: J.P. Gordon A.6: William Greenwood, 1094 - 2010