Reader Mailbag #003

Omissive Channel,
I happen to have heard that you recently saw John Carpenter’s Christine.
a.) Is this true?
b.) What do you think about the social mechanics of L.A’s freeway system?
Yours,
Wheelie in Manchester


Dear Wheelie,
First of all: yes.
Regarding the second, I’m not exactly sure about the nature of question but I’ll do my best. You’d have to understand however, that Santa Cruz is the closest I’ve ever even been to L.A so I can say definitively that I don’t have any working experience of how the psychological entrails of the Los Angeles freeway system functions on a daily basis, but after reading a relevant chapter of Reyner Banham’s “4 ecologies,” I can say that his analysis shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with Hobbes.

More after the jump...

Concerning the freeway and our interaction with it atop suspension, I suppose you could argue for the efficiency of public transportation but it’s the illusion of freedom imminent in a car-carried culture that, as Banham suggested, seems to foster the psychological well-being of millions and eventually ensure what is a smooth ride I might one day take from here to the tar pits in Le Brea. This simple, communicative constriction of freedom looks to be a corollary to what Paul Churchland described as the “gridded open” of not only Western democracy, but the neural outlay of the human brain as well. Churchland’s advocacy of eliminative materialism ostensibly seeks to snuff the rampant squeals of colloquial metaphysics still present in neuroscience and psychology but I couldn’t help but hitch those ideas to a question about the clockworks of the American freeway.
Feeling, meaning, and belief are, for Chuchland and others, merely arbitrary “folk” classifications -- mistaken signifiers in a common diorama of conscious life, however familiar. Eliminativists would argue the illusory nature of these classifications, relegating them to misunderstood manifests of higher-order neurofunction (i.e. phantasms). In terms of a motorized culture, we may transpose these classifications onto exactly each and every anecdote, “scarifying” story and wrong turn; every “accident” and badly executed lane-change finds lysis, melting into a single misfire of popular psychology.
Specifically, as regards our freeways and highways, we’re talking about a ruthless systemic geography, forged, guided and maintained passively not by citizens per se, but by their counterparts in the institutional realities of labor and city planning acting through our adherence. As citizens (or drivers) we’re aware only a few of the strict and finite set of rules governing the realities’ relative positions and not aware of the economy as a whole. So-called anomalies are a function of the system, a “feature” if you will.
Putting it this way, it’s easy to see any matrix of road as a specific mode of alienation, not unlike a kind of Taylorism. To argue the freeway into a shape of a conveyor belt doesn’t take a lot of imagination exactly, it’s only that the dynamics unfurl to a complexity of not only magnitude, but of sentiment and legend.
So if that’s the city, what about the “open road” of the interstate or its innumerable tributaries leaking eastward, fractalizing into an unfamiliar, rural, half-dirt vascular writhing out over the map unchecked but by single or double-consonant significations like MM, crossed like net? In the same way that, technically at least, one could witness the birth of the cosmos (had they a telescope powerful enough), the spidered drift of the mass-use roadways into the greener lands of steadily decreasing population density should be more-or-less akin to bearing witness to the economic regression of western civilization, to the gasping feudalism of the 13th century, I bet.