 selected writings |
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Rights of Passage The road, the car, the street are the locus of daily experience in the developed world, shaping lives and creating dream scapes that accord with nothing previously imagined. The American road is offered up by the collective imaginary as the promise and precondition for the possession of "all good things." Created by entwined economic and political necessities — the material distribution of commodities and the free flow of military armaments -- the road system of American Cold War capitalism helped engineer the social and the cultural. The development of the interstate system in the 1950s flung a vast web across the continent, setting the postwar world into motion, inventing new locations, new businesses, new tracts of homes, and a universe of new things to stock those homes — in capital's ceaseless need constantly to make and remake the physical world. The twin dreams of escape and of possession are foreclosed by the advancing sameness of the landscape called into being by the advancing progress of the road — revealed now as process rather than object. (Romans, building Roman roads, also dreamed and built Rome everywhere along those roads.) This mirage of liberation has as its unintended endpoint the redundancy of the entire world, demolishing place and time in favor of space. The constant renewal of the surface gloss of objects and images eschews
the laborious work of construction demanded by that most concrete and
fatal of metaphors, the road itself. Together, the glossy and the stolid
are the orb and the scepter of the present kingdom of desire. |
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""Roadwork," from Rights of Passage, a book engendered by the exhibition, "Transitions and Digressions." Rights of Passage is now unavailable commercially
(because of difficulty with the distributor). |
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