1 - Theorising Automotive Consciousness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
Summary
It is my aim, in the first chapter of this book, to demonstrate how driving is paradigmatic as well as formative of the way we think. By this I am suggesting that the way in which the mind travels through time and space on its everyday cognitive journeys – encountering a novelty here, a memory or an obstacle there – is figuratively similar to the way in which cars and their drivers engage with the temporal and spatial environments through which they pass: probing, pausing, advancing, reversing and, of course, changing direction with the flick of an indicator light. The automobile, long regarded as a prosthesis of the human body (Thrift 2008 [2004]; Dant 2004), may thus also be thought of as a prosthesis of the human mind.
The rapid succession of thoughts that present themselves to a driver's consciousness – directed now towards the past, now towards the future, and prompted, in both cases, by a perceptual encounter with the present – first occurred to me when I was working on my essay ‘Driving North, Driving South’ in the late 1990s (Pearce 2000). Although, at the time of writing, I never thought of this as an essay ‘about’ driving, its publication coincided with the birth of the Mobilities research centre at Lancaster (CeMoRe) and a seminar presentation to this group caused me to reflect that this was an area of research that I might pursue further. Sadly, other commitments meant that I was unable to do so for another decade: indeed, it was 2010 before I wrote about driving again and 2012 before this book was conceived. Such time lags are, of course, unremarkable in academic scholarship: the wide-ranging professional duties of academics mean that the gestation, writing and production of books often take this long. However, what lends this anecdote a thought-provoking edge is the extent to which the experience of driving in Britain has, itself, changed during this fifteen-year period.
Throughout the 1990s, when my parents were still alive and I had first started working at Lancaster University, I made frequent trips ‘down the road’ to Cornwall. From the mid-1990s onwards, I also started driving up to Scotland on a regular basis and, in 1998, bought a small cottage there which meant that all vacations and several weekends also involved a drive in that direction.
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- Information
- DrivetimeLiterary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness, pp. 1 - 50Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016