12 March 2009: "Reflecting on my Life Choices"

This post is about transportation alternatives. The key to understanding Carles' discursus here is the photograph, an image of a malfunctioning programmable traffic sign instructing drivers to take an alternate route. On the surface, Carles plays with the metaphoric resonance, the irony of regarding the imperative to develop a heterogeneous self-concept as an impersonal bureaucratic command issued literally in foot-high letters in the street to every passerby. The craving to become unique is in no way unique; it is in fact a mandatory prerequisite for social participation, for the efficient traffic flow of souls through the urban grid.

Carles rehearses a litany of ways in which we may be socially constructed, a series of interrogative "Did I" statements that reinforce the provisionality of identity in the flux of social forces. But cued by the initial frame of the photograph, a few of these statements carry an additional inflection. For instance: "Did my parents drive a minivan?" Not only is this a comment on how parents' obsessional concerns about safety afflict the ego in development in a childcentric culture, as well as a marking of how parental conformity to prevailing consumption norms circumscribes a child's potential personality; it is also a critique of a culture trapped in path dependency, rigidly reliant on the private auto as a mode of transportation. Within such a society, the avenues of personal development will inevitably have too many passing lanes, and will be restricted access, of course.

This motif is reinforced by the question: "Was I ’sad’ about the OJ Simpson verdict?" In other words, what emotional effect did it have to observe the culture unify itself around an interpretation of events that reconfigured race-inflected murder and an attempted flight from justice as an extended and especially lavish commercial for a particular brand of sport-utility vehicle? What was society's verdict on that particular process of radical redefinition? What of the aporia of moral condemnation? Carles is clearly concerned with the intergenerational effects of the minivan as cultural signifier and as moral vacuum, "driving" the development of subjectivity in an environment in which transportation/identity alternatives are at once mandated and foreclosed.

Conceiving the nexus between automobile-ridden society and the very possibilities of social reproduction, Carles comments, "Don’t want to ‘have a family’ and ‘live in suburbia.’" Starting a family has become contingent upon having the transportation available -- the auto -- that makes it possible to live in the only space deemed authentic and appropriate for the raising of middle-class children -- "suburbia." Carles pulls at the thread that binds this Gordian knot: "I think I would enjoy stuff like ‘falling out of love with my wife after she had 2 kids’ and ‘resenting my kids for being lil ass holes’" The way to destroy the car-centric culture and the tyranny of the auto is to destroy the childcentric culture and the cult of the nuclear family. This is the "alt route" available if only we would switch to more environmentally sustainable modes of transport; Carles proposes an "all-terrain vespa."