Cars (Have You Ever Stopped to Think Who's the Slave and Who's the Master?)

Sleeve for the single 'Cars' by Gary Numan 
from the album The Pleasure Principle  (Beggars Banquet, 1979) 

Click here to play on YouTube

 

I. 

 

After a recent post, someone sent me the following email:

'I don't know who Peter Sloterdijk is, but, one thing's for sure, this so-called philosopher knows nothing about the history of horses, nor how they are still being exploited and abused by human beings even today - particularly those within the racing industry. His overly-fanciful observation on post-historical horses leading lives of leisure at their own pace may have been intended to be amusing, but it ultimately serves to distract from the continuing cruelty and hardship faced by many animals. I suspect this well-paid German professor spends more time riding around in a BMW than he does caring for horses, so should stick to speaking of what he knows - money and machines!'

 

Now, I don't know if my correspondent's suspicions are correct, but, funny enough, Sloterdijk does quite often speak about cars and their cultural and philosophical significance; as symbols, as commodities, as expressions of identity, etc.

 

II.

 

In a 1995 interview [1], for example, he argues that the driver and motor vehicle form a unity in much the same way as previously man and horse formed a unity, as symbolised by the figure of the centaur; that man is always imagining himself as faster and more powerful than he is. The car, in other words, is not simply a means of transport; it is also a means of intoxication. 

But it is also a means of regression, says Sloterdijk, for the car is also a kind of womb, or uterus on wheels and many drivers become aggressive on account of this. For regressed individuals often feel the need to childishly assert themselves; revving their engines, attacking the space, running red lights, dangerously overtaking others, etc., proving they are kings of the road. 

That's why perfectly reasonable people often become raging maniacs behind the wheel and why there will always be fatal traffic accidents; "cars are connected with a kind of archetypal violence" that is immune to all the road safety propaganda in the world. 

 

III. 

 

In a later interview [2], meanwhile, Sloterdijk develops his theory of the car and the reason for its irresistible (quasi-religious) attraction for so many people:

"The car is a machine for increasing self-confidence. [...] The car gives its driver additional power and reach. [...] I think we have to see the vehicles of humans in the first place as a means of idealization and intensification, and consequently as a kinetic anti-depressant. The big demand for automobility certainly comes from people who want the vehicle for increasing their radius of action and capability. [...] Two out of three movements are escapes: people drive to their lovers, they take trips to the countryside and on holiday, they go visiting, or they use their car for letting off steam. We could almost think people use the car as revenge on the heavy demands of settledness."   

Whilst I understand that, I tend to agree with D. H. Lawrence that, ultimately, the soul needs to travel naked and light and on her own two feet along the open road - not by car. I also agree with Deleuze who insists that the most important trips are measured in terms of intensity, not distance covered, and that the true nomad moves even when standing still.

Sloterdijk knows this, I think, which is why he acknowledges that people who belong to more magical cultures "achieved their exalted feelings with soul journeys, and no driving licence exists for that". However, Sloterdijk - himself a motorist - concedes that:

"The automobile can also take us to places we have never visited before. It is not just the means of regression [...] it can also give us access to new, open places, it can also be a medium of coming-into-the-world. [...] If they were only a means to re-create a womb-like situation and return to an inner world, then they would merely be 'homecoming vehicles'."

But cars are not just that; they can also be a means for many people of making a great escape or exodus of some kind, though this undoubtedly requires more than a Sunday morning drive to Homebase. In fact, one might suggest - like Ballard - that what it requires is not so much a car ride as a car crash; i.e. something which "harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status" [3] into a single event. 

Commenting on the delirious, sacrificial aspect of driving, Sloterdijk notes that road deaths will never result in a call for the banning of cars; "because mobility is actually the occult kinetic religion of modernity". Thus, at present, there's not the slightest chance of restricting the desire to build still more roads and manufacture still more vehicles, no matter how many lives are lost, or how much damage is done to the natural environment. 

 

Having said that, even the age of the horse eventually passed ... 

 

Notes

[1] Peter Sloterdijk, 'Uterus on Wheels', interview with Walter Saller, in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 23-24. The line quoted from is on p. 24.

[2] Peter Sloterdijk, 'We're Always Riding Down Maternity Drive', interview with Mateo Kries, in Selected Exaggerations, pp. 40-48. The lines quoted are on pp. 42, 43, and 47.  

[3] J. G. Ballard, 'Sci-Fi Seer', interview with Lynn Barber, in Penthouse, Vol 5, No. 5, (May 1970), pp. 26-30. Click here to read in full.

Readers interested in this topic might also like to read David Gartman's essay entitled 'Three Ages of the Automobile: The Cultural Logics of the Car', in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 21, Issue 4-5, (October 2004), pp. 169-195.   

Hold Your Post-Historical Horses! It's the D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post 2020

Detail from an original artwork by James Walker / Izaak Bosman (2018)

See D. H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage: click here

 

 

According to D. H. Lawrence: "While horses thrashed the streets of London, London lived" and in losing the horse - with the arrival of motor vehicles - we have lost ourselves. 

 

For horses - as real flesh-and-blood creatures and not merely as symbols that roam in the "dark underworld meadows of the soul" - give us lordship and link us directly to the surging potency of the living cosmos, or what Lawrence sometimes refers to as God [1]. 

 

But what Lawrence doesn't mention is the great horse manure crisis of the 1890s. By this date, London and other large cities around the world faced the very real prospect of being buried beneath huge piles of horseshit. 

 

On average, a horse will produce between fifteen and thirty-five pounds of faeces each day. So when you have tens of thousands of these animals transporting people and goods around a city the scale of the problem is significant. 

 

(I'll not even mention the two pints of urine that every horse pisses out each day; nor the fact that many working horses who died on the job were often left to rot in the street before eventually being carted away.)

So whilst Lawrence might abhor the motorised traffic that has crushed all the living adventure out of London and which now rolls on massively and overwhemingly, going nowhere [2], it's worth considering the excremental reality of horses.

Further, it might help horse lovers out there to also reflect upon something pointed out by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk:

"Incidentally, there are almost as many horses today as there were in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, but they have all been reassigned. They are almost all leisure horses, hardly any workhorses nowadays. Isn't it an odd comment on today's society that only horses have achieved emancipation? Humans are still work animals just as they always were [...] but the horses standing in German paddocks today are all horses of pleasure, post-historic horses. Children stroke them and adults admire them, and we feel very sorry for the last workhorses we see now and then [...] All the other European horses have managed to do what humans still dream of - horses are the only ones for whom historical philosophy's dream of a good end to history has become reality. They are the happy unemployed that evolution seemed to be moving towards. For them, the realm of freedom  has been reached, they stand in their paddock, are fed, have completely forgotten the old drudgery and live out their natural mobility." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 101-02.   

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Why I Don't Like Living in London', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 121.

[3] Peter Sloterdijk, 'We're Always Riding Down Maternity Drive', interview with Mateo Kries (1999), in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis, (Polity Press, 2016), p. 44. 

 

I'm not entirely convinced that what Sloterdijk says here is correct; for example, there were an estimated 3.3 million horses in late-Victorian Britain, whereas in 2019 there were, according to the British Equestrian Trade Association, around 847,000 horses in the UK (down from 946,000 in 2015). The fact is, with the coming of the automobile, most horses were put out to graze - or sent to the knacker's yard. 

 

For an equine journey through human history, see Susanna Forrest, The Age of the Horse, (Atlantic Books, 2016): for further details on both book and author, click here.