“War on the car” rhetoric has been common in Toronto over the past few years. Such a phrase comes from the deployment of a particular form of rhetorical combat which positioning the car as the battered victim of mean-spirited bullies who call for alternatives to the one-driver-one-car commuter model simply because they hate the freedom that cars represent. The kind of hyperbole represented by terms like “war on the car” presumes that the car is the de-facto centerpiece of urban living and any encroachment, no matter how minor, on its dominance of the city streets, is an abhorrent assault on decency and the traditional lifeways of post-industrial mankind. Thus calls for bike lanes in Toronto and critical recognition of how much noise and pollution and stress and congestion is added to the city by the flow of car traffic is ‘the war on the car.’
Zack Furness’ book, One Less Car(borrowing his title from the popular pro-bike sticker seen on frames and racks)
investigates the dominant discourse surrounding cycling, particularly in the context of American cities wherein cycling is primarily a form of recreation. Zack Furness is an assistant professor of cultural studies at Columbia College in Chicago. He has gauged ears and tattoos, by the way, and after seeing his photo it occurred to me to check on whether or not he appears in a new (2012) Autonomedia book titled Punkademics, about punk university professors (including a contribution from my Trent University comrade, Alan O’Connor), and as it turns out, Furness edited that particular volume.
One Less Car presents a dual approach to an investigation of contemporary cycling and politics. The first is to look critically at the history of representations of the bicycle in popular culture and interrogate the discourse on the subject. So, for example, according to Furness, the bicycle has been portrayed as a children’s toy with a primary function of preparing the young to become drivers. Connected to that then, is the representation of adult cyclists in specific forms of American popular culture as stunted in maturity (Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and The 40 Year Old Virgin).
Otherwise, cycling is for the impoverished or for people who shirk a social responsibility to purchase a car. These kinds of images produce a normative understanding of cycling as fodder for humour, but an absurd choice of transportation for a real-life American adult.
The second phase of critiquing the popular discourse is for Furness to cite all of the pundits who denounce urban cycling for whatever reason. So many of the arguments Furness quotes are basically by people simply appalled that the road they use as auto-drivers should have to be shared with anyone else. The arguments are typically of a “know your place” variety that presumes that an existing order of privilege is also fundamentally correct, and that the vulnerable who are threatening to put a minor strain on that privilege are, in essence, selfish. For example, Furness cites one pundit who claims that a hypothetical (child) cyclist crushed under the wheels of an SUV is a threat to the driver’s safety and not the other way around. This sort of argument emerges in a cultural environment where driving is always presumed as safe and cycling always presumed as dangerous, even though the invention and popularization of the automobile has unleashed a holocaust of death and injury, and the one major threat to the safety of cyclists is the exact same thing that threatens that of drivers - that is other reckless and inconsiderate motorists. The other side to the analysis of the dominant discourse is the culture of radical cyclists: critical mass participants, bike co-ops, and things like that. Modes of bike usage that revel in the ‘other’ status of the urban cyclist. Much of Furness’ book is about explaining critical mass and he quotes frequently from Critical Mass inventor and chief theorist, Chris Carlsson, as well as other cycling intellectuals such as Microcosm Publishing founder/Bipedal, By Pedal zinester Joe Biel. The section on critical mass subjects the monthly ride to the same rigorous critique as other aspects of the broader cycling discourse, although Furness is clearly sympathetic to the event and its underlying sentiments.
Just before the start of the 1960s, and into the first couple years of the decade, a number of books were published that took a critical eye to American society during one of its most prosperous periods. Such books included The Organization Man(1956)by American sociologist William H Whyte, that critically analyzed the behavior of American corporate executives, The Death and Life of Great American Cities(1961) by freelance writer and urban critic Jane Jacobs, that critiqued the contemporary design of urban centres and their effect on quality of life, and Rachel Carson’sSilent Spring (1960), a book that inspired the environmental movement with its descriptions of the harmful ecological effects of certain industrial practices. Growing Up Absurd (1956), Paul Goodman’s 300 page discussion of contemporary life and its effects on burgeoning masculinity in mid-century America may be added to this list, especially as it played a role in inspiring the radical 1960s.
Paul Goodman (1911-1972) was a radical leftist intellectual polymath who left behind a large body of literature when he died. He was a prolific writer who had produced a number of works of fiction, drama and poetry. Most of his work, however, was critical commentary and cultural analysis, on a myriad of subjects, delivered from a far-left perspective. Goodman has been mentioned in Andrew Cornell’s article A New Anarchism Emergesas one of the writers who kept American anarchism vital during the mid-century period when far-left politics were at a low ebb in the United States. Goodman wrote for a number of leftist magazines, publishing articles in which he discusses the mass media, sexuality, politics, social behavior, and the arts. Out of Goodman’s large bibliography, Growing Up Absurd is probably his best known work, and the text that gave the author his reputation as a first-rate social critic.
In this book, Goodman identified a decline in the possibilities for young men in the United States during the 1950s. Much of his analysis is focused upon what he considered to be the poor quality of employment positions that were available to young men at that time. Goodman argued that, while a young man (the author operated under the presumption that masculinity was at stake, young women, according to the author, may still find life satisfaction in motherhood) may have opportunities open to them, the capacity for these opportunities to offer life satisfaction to them is nonexistent. Many work occupations were/are unskilled or driven by business principles that empty them of their apparent usefulness because they become isolated from Goodman's thesis for the text is that there were few avenues for an adult male to realize their masculinity in 1950s American society.
Goodman also argues that society has (essentially) become a machine of interactive mechanisms oriented towards production, and this has resulted in a withering of the aspects of life that once gave it meaning including community, education, and democracy. Because Goodman was primarily focused on the effects of this society upon the quality of life for young men, he determined that delinquency, gang life (cf. Street Corner Society by William H Whyte for more concrete analysis of this social phenomena), and the arts (as represented by the Beats) became the major realms in which young men may find community and self-satisfaction. That young men would turn to such outlets in order to feel useful is problematic to Goodman, however, who explains his sympathy to the need of youth to feel useful as they become adults, but also argues that such outlets in fact interrupt development and maintain the subject’s adolescent state.
Goodman’s text basically predicted the youth culture of the 1960s. Growing Up Absurd analyzed the socio-cultural conditions that gave rise to the Hippies, and what’s more Goodman’s political writings contributed to a body of far-left literature that influenced the New Left. Goodman calls for a restructuring society oriented away from the technocratic strictures of isolated production towards the building of communities that enhance the experience of living. It appears that many of the conditions Goodman described have continued, possibly even accelerated, where a division from work and community has lead into crises like the currently ongoing financial meltdown and a Graduate student bubble. Numerous other crises of youth have emerged with the acceleration of the consumer society as individuals try to construct their identities based on brand associations and through image manipulations via social media. All of this suggests that Growing Up Absurd can be read as a text that divined the cultural ground for the new social forms of the 1960s, but also that aspects of the text are still relevant as cultural analysis.
