The car is everywhere. The success of motorization is explained by the adequacy between a commodity and the aspirations of individuals, in connection with the rise of consumption and the appetite for urban mobility. Autonomy car or automobile alienation?
The place taken by spending and rules related to cars in the demands of the yellow vests and the very place of their first gatherings, the roundabouts, recall the centrality of the automobile in our society. Strangely, it has aroused little interest among sociologists, who have approached it through the lens of the city, consumption or deviance.
Yoann Demoli and Pierre Lannoy, sociologists at Versailles-Saint-Quentin and the Université libre de Bruxelles, have acquired a great familiarity with this subject, which allows them to propose a synthesis taking the automobile as a point of observation of society. They offer, in a small, dense and well-constructed book, an overview of a century of sociology on the automobile, essentially in France and the United States.
The mechanisms of automobile diffusion
The book begins with a retrospective overview of the process of diffusion of the automobile, since its creation in the second half of the XIXe century. The diffusion is vertical, from the wealthiest classes to the most modest, and long, despite significant variations between European and American societies (in the United States, we move more quickly from the machine of exploit to the leisure vehicle, then to the tool of daily routine). In Europe, this threshold is located during the Trente Glorieuses, years of very high motorization.
Beyond economic analyses that can make the individual a passive and determined agent blending into a mass, the authors try to explain the social logics behind this diffusion. The success of motorization is explained by the adequacy between what manufacturers offer and the aspirations of individuals, in connection with the rise of consumer culture, democratic individualism and the appetite for urban mobility.
Following in the footsteps of Barthes, who had taken the DS of Citroën as an object of study in its Mythologies (1957), and Bourdieu, the authors use the notion of distinction. The values attached to the automobile at its beginnings, such as refinement and independence, “give travel back the status of a noble activity” (p. 24). They then show how “the added social value of the acquisition will decline with the reduction in its price and its diffusion in society” (p. 25). The completion of this distinction, for some, seems to be the renunciation of the automobile, to which symbolic profits would now be associated.
The transition to “all-automobile” during the XXe century demonstrates the capacity of the “road-engine complex” to impose a “technical discourse that is supposedly objective, but in reality socially biased” (p. 34). The prevalence of this discourse largely explains the current blockages. The “automobile bloc”, according to Alfred Sauvy’s expression, has integrated negative externalities, long compensated by positive internal effects, that is to say the benefits gained by individuals.
The colonization of the imagination
The motorization of societies is the result of social, industrial and political conditions, but also of a cultural construction. The colonization of the imagination is quickly mentioned, in the tradition of Pareto from 1917, by the role of cinema which would have deserved some examples. Television, apart from advertising which contributes to perpetuating the sexual division of tasks, and music are not mentioned. The analysis of the mentions of the Ford T in the blues (price and solidity) would allow to qualify its negative representations. More recently, the car has acquired in hip-hop a status of symbol of success. Some artists produce music primarily intended to be listened to in the car, the well-known case of Dr Dr.
The authors provide an overview of automobile uses and highlight the persistence of social disparities, despite the vertical and horizontal diffusion of motorization and the intensification of equipment. They show that social position, gender and age retain an important role, with choices also resulting from the combination of different projects (residential, family, professional) and the mastery of different constraints. They rightly state that “an individual’s uses do not necessarily correspond to their representations” (p. 51). The passages on the choice of models and colors, or on the “tailgate activists”, are very stimulating. As Hervé Marchal says, “the automobile is much more than a simple commodity and a simple means of transport” (p. 29).
Integrating the spatial dimension into the analysis of societies provides a more detailed understanding of the debates on the place of the automobile. Its current decline in cities goes hand in hand with the maintenance, or even reinforcement, of its role in peri-urban and rural areas. The perception of the difficulty of a daily journey is not only linked to its length or its arduousness, but also to its feeling – as a constraint or an opportunity placed in the context of a social position and trajectory.
The transformations of the city appear intrinsically linked to the automobile, from the ” walking city » to the automobile city, passing through the « transit city » of public transport. The spatial spread that the automobile allows connects territories that are varied in their forms, their social characteristics and their functions. The car is a link, but also the means of avoiding social and spatial otherness. SUV constitute a textbook case, with their lifestyle linked to peri-urbanization and intensive consumption of space.
The impossible exit from motoring
In a recent contribution to the site AOCthe authors extend their work by putting the blockages into perspective: “Individual desires for conversion are confronted with spatio-temporal constraints that are prohibitive to change.” Incentive policies have
on the other hand, it makes invisible and unspeakable the existence of both profound divergences in the relationship with the automobile and unsatisfactory gaps, for some, between their aspirations and the real possibilities of reducing their use of the automobile.
They therefore advocate a return to a political debate, and not just a technocratic one. They intend to dismantle the mechanisms of the domination of a narrative that has favored the very conditions of motorization, without departing from a scientific approach based on theoretical reflections as well as on very numerous empirical data. These resources are sometimes critical, like Ivan Illich (let us add Jacques Ellul).
One might regret that the book remains incomplete or vague on Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy, or on the link between Ford’s rural origins and his conception of the automobile as a commodity (p. 8). Non-European societies are only given a few mentions, despite the interest presented by Japan, China or societies that are still not very motorized.
This synthesis is nevertheless a success. The cover and its motorway (which seems to lead without hindrance to a sunny future) sum up quite well certain aspects of the book and the paradoxes of the automobile. The caption of this image nevertheless seems dubious to us, evoking “rush hour on the M25, Hampshire”, while the traffic seems measured for this orbital road which goes around Greater London… without going through Hampshire!