Addendum: The Domestic World and the Car

The discussion that we have just brought to a close has been confined in its essentials to the domestic environment, to the dwelling-place. The private realm of the household is indeed where the vast majority of our everyday objects are to be found. The system nevertheless extends beyond the domestic interior -- notably to an external item which itself constitutes an entire dimension of it: the motorcar.

The car epitomizes the object, perfectly illustrating every trait we have described: the rendering abstract of any practical goal in the interests of speed and prestige, formal connotation, technical connotation, forced differentiation, emotional cathexis, and projection in phantasy. Here more easily than anywhere else we may discern the collusion between the subjective system of needs and the objective system of production. I shall return to these points later. For the moment I want to emphasize the importance of the car's place within the system as a whole.

The automobile is a complement to all other objects considered together; each of these in its particularity appears merely partial in comparison with the automobile -- not only because it is less complex, but also because it does not occupy its own specific position in the system. Only the domestic sphere as a whole (furniture, appliances, gadgets, etc.), as structured by the major distinction between interior design and atmosphere, holds a position comparable in value, in its relative coherence, to that of the car. True, at the level of lived experience the domestic realm, with its multiplicity of tasks, functions and relationships, is far more significant than the `realm' of car-related activity. Yet it is undeniable that at the level of the system it no longer constitutes anything more than one binary pole of the global system, the other being cars.
[p. 66]

Travel is a necessity, and speed is a pleasure. Possession of a car implies more: the driving licence is a sort of passport, a letter of credit from an aristocracy whose domain is the very latest in engine compression and speed. Disqualification from driving is surely tantamount to an excommunication, to a kind of social castration. [55]

Without going so far as to treat the car as a modern version of the old centaurian myth of a fusion between human intelligence and animal strength, [56] one may certainly describe it as a sublime object, for it opens a parenthesis, as it were, in the everydayness of all other objects. The material that it transforms, namely space-time, cannot be compared to any other. And the dynamic synthesis of space-time that the car offers in the shape of speed is likewise radically distinct from any kind of normal function. Movement alone is the basis of a sort of happiness, but the mechanical euphoria associated with speed is something else altogether, grounded for the imagination in the miracle of motion. Effortless mobility entails a kind of pleasure that is unrealistic, a kind of suspension of existence, a kind of absence of responsibility. The effect of speed's integration of space-time is to reduce the world to two-dimensionality, to an image, stripping away its relief and its historicity and in a way ushering one into a state of sublime immobility and contemplation. `Movement', says Schelling, `is merely the search for repose.' Beyond a hundred kilometres per hour there is a presumption of eternity (as also, perhaps, of neurosis...). Security founded on the sense of a world beyond or a world prior to this one is what nourishes car-induced euphoria, which has nothing of an active tonicity about it; rather, it is a passive satisfaction, albeit one accompanied by ever-changing scenery.

This `dynamic euphoria' serves as an antithesis to the static joys of family life and immovable property, and opens a parenthesis in social reality. Chris Marker's film Le joli mai presents the confession of one person among millions of others for whom the automobile represents a kind of no-man's-land between workplace and family home, an empty vector of pure transport: `I have no more good moments,' he says, `except for those I spend between my house and my office. I drive, I drive.
[p. 67]
These days, though, I am not happy even then, because there is too much traffic.' It is not simply that the car rivals the house as an alternative zone of everyday life: the car, too, is an abode, but an exceptional one; it is a closed realm of intimacy, but one released from the constraints that usually apply to the intimacy of home, one endowed with a formal freedom of great intensity and a dizzying functionality. Home means a regressive attachment to domestic relationships and habits, whereas the intimacy of the car arises from an accelerated space-time metabolism and, inextricably, from the fact that the car may at any time become the locus of an accident: the culmination in a chance event -- which may in fact never occur but is always imagined, always involuntarily assumed to be inevitable -- of that intimacy with oneself, that formal liberty, which is never so beautiful as in death. The car achieves an extraordinary compromise, for it makes it possible to be simultaneously at home and further and further away from home. It is thus the centre of a new kind of subjectivity, but a centre bounded by no circumference, whereas the subjectivity of the domestic world is strictly circumscribed.

No other everyday object, gadget or appliance offers a sublimation or transfiguration of this order. Every functional object is overdetermined in its power, but such overdetermination is minimal in the spheres of household management and home ownership. Moreover, the house as a whole, except to the extent that it achieves self-transcendence by virtue of status or fashion, is not a recipient or bestower of value. (In fact a basic problem for couples is the common failure of the home to catalyse any such reciprocal valorization.) As opposed to the `horizontal' sector of everyday domestic life, cars and their speed represent a sort of `vertical' scheme, a sort of third dimension. [57] An `aristocratic' dimension, too, in that it is free not only from the organic constraints of existence but also from social constraints. Whereas the domestic world seems to fall back to a place on the hither side of the social, cars, with their pure functionality which depends solely on the mastery of space and time, appear to deploy their virtues somewhere beyond society. Indeed, relative to the social sphere, household and motorcar partake of the same private
[p. 68]
abstractness, and the binomial they thus constitute, when it is articulated with another, that of work and leisure, frames the entirety of everyday experience.

This systematic bipolarity (the car as eccentric relative to the household yet at the same time complementary to it) tends to map onto the sociological distribution of sex roles. Very often the car remains a male preserve. `Daddy has his Peugeot,' runs one advertising slogan, `and Mummy has HER Peugeots': the father gets the Peugeot car and the mother gets the Peugeot egg-beater, the Peugeot coffee mill and the Peugeot electric mixer. [58] The family universe is a universe of foods and multifunctional appliances; as for the man, he rules over the world outside, the effective sign of which is the automobile: he himself does not appear in the picture. The same distinction thus applies both at the level of objects and at the level of roles (and in the Peugeot world, significantly enough, both levels are in evidence).

This parallelism could scarcely be accidental, and indeed it corresponds to profound psychosexual determinations.

We have noted that speed is at once transcendent and intimate. It implies the mastery of space qua abstract sign of the real world, and the exercise of this mastery involves narcissistic projection. Think of the `erotic' significance of the car and of speed: by lifting social taboos and at the same time releasing us from immediate responsibility, the mobility of the car removes a whole set of resistances concerning ourselves and others: dynamism, brio, infatuation, daring -- all flow from the freedom of the driver's situation, a situation which also fosters the erotic relationship by bringing into play a dual narcissistic projection onto a single phallic object (the car) or a single objectified phallic function (speed). The eroticism of the car is therefore not that of an active sexual approach but, rather, the passive eroticism of narcissistic seductiveness in both partners, or of a shared narcissistic communion in the same object. [59] The erotic significance of the object here plays the same role as the image (real or mental) in masturbation.
[p. 69]

From this perspective it would clearly be wrong to see the motorcar as a woman-object. [60] The fact that advertising always in effect does so, describing cars as compliant, racy, comfortable, practical, obedient, hot, and so on, is a symptom of the general tendency to feminize objects, the woman-object being the advertising world's most effective persuasive device and social myth. All objects, cars included, become women in order to be bought -- but this is a function of the cultural system. The profound transformation of the car in phantasy is a different phenomenon altogether. Depending on the way it is used and its particular features (from the racing `spider' to the luxurious limousine), the motorcar may equally well be invested either with the meaning of power or with the meaning of refuge: it may be a projectile or a dwelling-place. But basically, like all functional mechanical objects, it is experienced -- and by everyone, men, women and children -- as a phallus, as an object of manipulation, care, and fascination. The car is a projection both phallic and narcissistic, a force transfixed by its own image. We saw above, in connection with tail fins, how the car's very forms connote this unconscious discourse.

Addendum: The Domestic World and the Car

Note from page 66: 47. It has occasionally been used as a penalty for procurers.

Note from page 66: 48. On centaur mythology and phantasy projections onto horses and cars, see the discussion of `Collecting' below.

Note from page 67: 49. Hence the familiar reticence of the average motorist with respect to car safety devices such as belts. Safety at home is fine, but the car is from this point of view something quite different -- the opposite of home, in fact.

Note from page 68: 50. Admittedly this man-car, woman-house correlation is tending to become weaker, in reality if not at the level of representation.

Note from page 68: 51. A glimpse of this relationship of narcissistic complicity established through an object or a system of objects has recently been offered, apropos of couples, in Georges Perec's novel Les choses, une histoire des années soixante (Paris: Julliard, 1965) [English translation by Helen R. Lane: Things: A Story of the Sixties (New York: Grove Press, 1967]. No doubt this is a normal feature of modern living-together: everything now conspires to make objects into the fodder of relationships, and relationships themselves whether sexual, marital, familial or microsocial) into a mere framework for the consumption of objects.

Note from page 69: 52. Some languages make it masculine, others feminine.