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Autopia or Autogeddon? Recent Books on "Car Culture"
Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr, eds. Autopia: Cars and Culture. Reaktion, 2002.
Daniel Miller, ed. Car Cultures. Berg, 2001.
Mikita Brottman, ed. Car Crash Culture. Palgrave, 2001.
In his editor's introduction to Autopia, a collection of essays on the cultural history of the automobile, Peter Wollen echoes British author J. G. Ballard in posing a critical choice between "Autopia," an enthusiastic embrace of the freedom and autonomy allegedly conferred by car ownership, and "Autogeddon," an anxious acknowledgement of "the automobile's dark side-car crashes, road rage, congestion, environmental damage, oil slicks, urban sprawl, car bombs and many other scourges" (10). To this list of scattered complaints he might well have added the following, more systemic indictments: the unchecked growth of powerful industries (big oil, big steel) at the expense of public transportation, the ongoing atrophy of communal space, and the increasing privatization of social experience-trends initially centered in the West but now global in their scope and implications. If not the essential cause of these massive changes, the automobile was most certainly their key agent, thus suggesting that a study of the motorcar might provide a unique platform from which to assess an entire century of cultural transformation.
While the goal of Autopia is indeed, as Wollen asserts, "to understand the complex ways in which the car has transformed our everyday life and the environment in which we operate," an analysis that also involves "assessing the pros and cons of the automobile as a social and cultural force" (11), the book's composite structure-an anthology of 36 new and reprinted pieces, some full-fledged essays, some excerpted fragments-undermines this impulse to comprehension. A wide-ranging mosaic of perspectives, the book suffers from the typical shortcomings of any such assemblage: lack of integration, unevenness of coverage, and questionable apportionment of space (flaws also evinced by the other two volumes under review here). Autopia is further hobbled by its specific format: designed as a coffee-table compendium, with glossy pages and an impressive array of illustrations, it clearly assumes a popular audience whose level of education and attention span mitigate against specialized vocabularies and lengthy analyses. The need to appeal to such a readership likely also explains the book's title, which plumps for...