162: James Flink's The Automobile Age

In James Flink's The Automobile Age, the automobile, and its attendant complex of technologies, mass-production techniques, industrial development, roads, economic and public policy, and changes in American "lifeways" resulting from "mass personal automobility," are central to the history of capitalist development in general and to American history in particular.  Flink's materialist approach combined with the scope of this book - he attempts to cover the rise and fall of the Automobile Age in its social, technological, business, and global contexts, from the turn of the last century to the early 1970s - make it both a fascinating history of automobility and an argument for human agency even in what looks like global domination by the car.

Flink's narrative covers many of the canonical topics within industrialization and automobility: the Fordist system of mass production/ mass consumption; transformations in social relations and the landscape as a result of automobility; Sloanism, bureaucracy, and flexible, style-based mass production;  global automobility coupled with competition from Europe and Japan; and social and environmental critiques of automobility combined with the "world car."  He discusses these processes by carefully tracing technological diffusion within the technological system of the automobile.

128: Tim Cresswell's On the Move

In On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, Tim Cresswell explores mobility - which he defines as "meaningful movement" - at a variety of scales and in a variety of places in the (mostly anglophone) West.  Pulling from case studies that range from Frederick Taylor's time and motion studies to British ballroom dancing to the LA Bus Riders' Union, Cresswell argues that mobility is "both center and margin - the lifeblood of modernity and the virus that threatens to hasten its downfall."  While the "mobility turn" had been taking the humanities by storm since 1996, this book is the first to interrogate what mobility is rather than defining it against what it isn't (place, boundedness, foundations, stability.)

For Cresswell, mobility is actually three mobilities that mutually constitute one another.

• Empirical mobility is the actual movement of people, things, birds, etc.; it is the closest to actual movement and thus the most abstract (because it traces displacement, not necessarily the meaning of displacement.)  
• Representations of mobility are the photos, literature, philosophy, etc., that capture mobility and try to make sense of it, usually in ways that are ideological.  They might link mobility to freedom, transgression, creativity, life and so on.  They reproduce mobility and interpret it according to a particular worldview.
• Experienced mobilities are mobilities that are practiced, embodied, ways of being in the world, as well as how we experience and feel about mobility.

Mobility is both subjective and objective, and the perspective from which we experience/ study mobility has a lot to do with how we interpret it.  Because mobility is both subjective and objective, it is also both socially constructed and universal, in the sense that everything moves, and the interplay between this universal fact of life and a particular movement within a particular context gives that movement meaning.  Mobility is thus a "necessary social production," and a way of inextricably integrating geography with the politics of social life.

Cresswell's writing style is wonderfully clear and engaging, and his many case studies, as well as his brief history of the development of mobility into an individual right in the modern capitalist state, cover mobility at a variety of scales ranging from the individual to the workplace to nation, empire, and the placeless place of the Shiphol Airport.  The only thing missing, maybe, is a study of imperial movement from the perspective of the colonized, with some attention to the relationship between labor migration and uneven development.

118: Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that far from being a passive act, consumption, whether as use of an object or space, “ways of operating,” or art/ “ways of making” (combination, selection, cut-and-inversion), is a kind of spatial production.   

Building on (but rejecting) Foucault, Bourdieu, Kant, and others, de Certeau conceives of the physical world as divided into two classes: those with power and capital who are in control of space and production, and those with neither, but who exercise their agency by taking advantage of opportunities and consuming creatively.  The powerful side of things is also the scientific, the rational; this side creates static places of power, characterized by rational utopian uniformity, legibility, clarity, strategy, and centralized control.  The weak consumers take advantage of cracks in the rational system of these places; dependent on time, these peripatetic storytellers (walking and narration are inseparable) combine the fixed elements of the city/story with memories and inventions triggered by circumstance and audience to subvert the rational powers and create something new.

99: Domosh & Seager's Putting Women in Place

In Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World, Mona Domosh and Joni Seager show that space and place are both gendered and integral to the construction of gender.  In providing an overview of feminist geographical scholarship (up to 2001), they argue that this gendering has historically (and is currently) integral to processes of segregation, dominance, and resistance, in places like work and home as well as in the actions of everyday life.  Further, they situate this discussion of gender and geography within both local urban historical geographies in Western Europe and the US AND a structural analysis of global gender issues.  Their book is divided into six parts:

Home: history and analysis of a space almost universally associated with women.  Focusing on England and the US form the 17th century on, they show how the emerging capitalist system separated the male world of production from the female world of reproduction, from the Victorian cult of domesticity to mid-century suburbia.  They then interrogate the raced and classed connections between notions of domesticity and turn-of-the-century social engineering projects aimed at "Americanizing" urban working-class and immigrant women and rural Native American women.

4: David Gartman's Auto Opium

This book took a while, mostly because I'm a sucker for Marxist histories of the auto industry.  Something about reading Marxist language makes me feel like I'm cracking a secret code (exciting!)  Also they usually tie up their narratives so neatly, like the end of a Dickens novel (comforting!).  Yes, I'm a huge nerdo.  Anyway.

Gartman argues that automobiles are the opiate of the masses.  He's not saying that we're all fools for being tricked into buying cars and staking our identities on them - that's for the bike activists to claim.  Instead, he's saying that people who claim cars as a part of their identity are effectively taking a happy pill: they're focusing on the pleasure they get from owning, driving, maintaining - consuming - a car to distract themselves from their crappy, dissatisfying jobs.

The process by which people's identity gets shifted from work to car consumption goes something like this.  Back at the turn of the (last) century, as Ford's assembly-line style manufacturing increased the pace of work and parsed it into smaller and smaller pieces, workers became detached from the final product, and eventually work stopped being the thing that workers staked their identity on.  But when they revolted against this deskilling, Ford was wise: he raised their pay to $5 a day.  Apparently workers were psyched - they could feed their families!  Buy houses!  Buy Model T's!  Go to movies!  And they stopped complaining about their crappy jobs, because they were being paid well, and being paid well meant they could buy all the things they'd always wanted but couldn't afford.

They bought cars, which made Ford happy, because more people buying cars meant that he could produce more cars and make more money.

The thing was, the cars the working people could afford in the teens and twenties didn't look anything like the cars that rich people drove; they looked like they were cobbled together by a bunch of different people (84, to be exact) from a bunch of disparate parts into a big rectangular box - which, of course, they were.  Luxury cars, on the other hand, were still made using craft production, which meant that each car was assembled, fitted, and tuned by a single mechanic.  They were aesthetically pleasing, with organic lines that made them look like a unified whole.

As it turns out, people who spend all day doing menial tasks at an assembly line don't want to drive around in something that reminds them of how much they hate work when they're not at work.  Hence, when Alfred Sloan at GM started styling mass-produced cars to have the streamlining and unified design of luxury cars, working people were SUPER psyched.  Finally, they wouldn't have to drive around in some rattletrap that stank of assembly line, and, even better, someone might mistake them for a richer person than they really were.  Genius!

Sloan and his stylists were geniuses in other ways, too, namely in the invention of planned obsolescence and product hierarchies, both of which were designed to encourage consumers to buy newer or better or more cars than they needed.

The whole styling thing worked to increase consumption of cars because, according to Gartman, people who have dead-end, menial, unproductive, bureaucratic, or otherwise dispiriting jobs increasingly seek the personal satisfaction, pleasure, and self-worth they should be getting at work in the objects they consume.  And they know that buying things isn't going to make them happy like good productive labor would, but they do it anyway, to ease the pain.  Hence opiate.

It stopped working in the 60s, when people started to catch on that they were working ever harder in ever more degrading work conditions so that they could buy increasingly expensive cars that weren't actually making them happy. So they revolted, both economically and culturally, and at the end of the 1960s, Fordism was dead.  Unfortunately, consuming to fill a void was not. 

I'm too tired to add much in the way of analysis right now, but I will say that I suspect that the many car enthusiasts in my life do get a lot of pleasure from working on, shopping for, and driving their cars, and that for all I know their cars may well fill a need that jobs don't.  However, I've never thought of them as building cars that represent "'freedom from the superfluous adjuncts of styling-for-obsolescence'" or working on "humanizing the alienated products of capitalist mass production." Oh, Marxists.

3: Massey & Denton's American Apartheid

2 for 2 today!  Huzzah!

As the title suggests, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass is both sociological (the "underclass") and a bit polemical ("apartheid") about the relationship between black urban poverty and the "American institution" of the black ghetto.  Their book is clear, easy to read, and incredibly strident in its arguments.  They're also well-supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a Guggenheim grant, a Faculty Development Award, and the National Opinion Research Center, which means that they had enough money to hire plenty of researchers and analysts.  And it shows: the depth of research in this thing is impressive.

The authors' argument is pretty straightforward: more than any other factor, race-based residential segregation creates the "urban underclass," a segment of the urban population so socially and spatially isolated from the labor market that they seem to have no chance of climbing out of poverty.  The primary instrument of segregation is the urban ghetto, and the residents are almost exclusively black.

Urban ghettos have been fascinating to me ever since I biked through them in Chicago in the early 2000s - I couldn't figure out why anyone would live in an intensely poor, dilapidated neighborhood when a much nicer one was sometimes just a few blocks away.  The two books that provided the strongest answers for me back then were Alex Kotlowitz' There Are No Children Here and William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears; the first provides an intensely human look at growing up in a Chicago housing project, and the second provides clear, well-supported structural explanations for the development and persistence of the ghetto. 

American Apartheid basically builds on Wilson's argument.  Wilson argues that shifts in the economy contributed to urban economic decline and the creation of new jobless ghettos. Discriminatory housing practices combined with discriminatory hiring practices concentrated black urban residents into poor, predominantly black neighborhoods, so when shifts in the economy (like automation in the auto industry, for instance) threw blacks out of work, whole neighborhoods went under.  Shops closed, community institutions left, and the ghettos became so thoroughly separated from the rest of society that they formed their own norms, expectations, and speech patterns.Seeing this decline, those families that could leave, did, which left the poorest residents marooned in inner city slums without employment prospects or transportation to jobs in the suburbs or other parts of the city. 

Massey & Denton add to this line of logic an emphasis on residential segregation.  If these same black people were living in integrated neighborhoods, the authors argue, their white and ethnic neighbors would probably still have jobs in an economic downturn, so their neighborhood institutions, shops, etc would be able to stay open, the neighborhoods would remain relatively stable and connected to the workforce, and those thrown out of work would eventually be able to find jobs again.  However, even in the late 1980s (when they were writing), most white people did not want black people in their neighborhoods, violence and intimidation was still rampant, and the Fair Housing Act was still really hard to enforce.  Thus, segregation was the key contributing factor to black isolation and poverty.  And since the authors see residential integration as the first step toward social integration, their solutions to these problems are stronger, more systematic enforcement of the Fair Housing Act and active dismantling of urban ghettos.

Since this book was written, several major changes have taken place: in an effort to break down the ghetto, cities like Chicago have replaced their massive (and massively deteriorated) public housing projects with mixed-income housing and city-wide HUD vouchers; the rise of a creative class sensibility has brought white middle class people to the ghetto in search of authenticity and cheap rent; and gentrification processes have massively transformed inner city neighborhoods in a kind of forced resegregation (from black to white.) 

Given these processes, does the residential segregation aspect of the urban ghetto still stand?  Or, more bluntly: have these processes of desegregation/ resegregation done anything positive for the plight of the urban poor?

virginity, guilt, and suburbia?

The virgin sidewalk – the physical embodiment of sprawl’s guilty conscience – reveals the true failure of suburbia, a landscape in which automobile use is a prerequisite to social viability.

Duany, Andres, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck.  Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.  New York: North Point Press, 2000.

social space: modernism as circulation, postmodernism as atomization and rootedness

The central problem for [architect Leon] Krier is that modernist urban planning works mainly though mono-functional zoning.  As a result, circulation of people between zones by way of artificial arteries becomes the central preoccupation of the planner, generating an urban pattern that is, in Krier's judgement, 'anti-ecological' because it is wasteful of time, energy, and land [...]

Krier contrasts this situation with the 'good city' (by its nature ecological) in which 'the totality of urban functions' are provided within 'compatible and pleasant walking distances.'  Recognizing that such an urban form 'cannot grow by extension in width and height' but only 'through multiplication,' Krier seeks a city form made up of 'complete and finite urban communities,' each constituting an independent urban quarter within  a large family of urban quarters, that in turn make up 'cities within a city.'

From David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990, p. 67

call for papers: western history association due 9.1.12

2013 Call For Papers
53rd Annual Conference of the Western History Association
9-12 October 2013, Tucson, Arizona

VITAL SIGNS: EARTH, POWER, LIVES

No region of the world has been more important than the West of North America in encouraging historians to take an environmental perspective on the past. Today that perspective has become global in scale and significance, and it is time to bring it back home for reassessing ourselves. The 2013 program committee invites proposals on the theme of checking the “vital signs,” those indicators of health and illness that societies as well as individuals need. They include such measures of well being as energy supplies and consumption, ecological and cultural diversity, the distribution of wealth and power, the ups and downs of climate, and the resilience of ecosystems and human communities.