Edensor, T. - Defamiliarising The Mundane Roadscape PDF

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DOI: 10.1177/1206331203251257
2003 6: 151 Space and Culture
Tim Edensor
Defamiliarizing the Mundane Roadscape
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M6Junction 19-16
Defamiliarizing the
Mundane Roadscape
Tim Edensor
University of Staffordshire
It is a popular and academic notion that routine driving along motorways signifies contemporary
alienation through a kind of serial non-space.The author counters these dystopian assumptions
about the character of this everyday pursuit by exploring his own experience of driving along Eng-
lands M6 motorway, showing how roads are enmeshed within unpredictable, multiple flows of
ideas, sensations, other spaces and times, narratives, and socialities. By critiquing notions that au-
tospace is inherently linear and featureless, that driving is asocial and desensitizing, and that the
quotidian is a realm of unthinking and automatic behavior, he shows how it is precisely in the realm
of mundane space-time that both homely familiarities and imaginative connections can be fostered.
Keywords: motorway; driving; everyday; autoscape; sensation; text and narrative
Because the British rail system has been in considerable disarray from some time,
more often than not, I drive the 45 miles from my Manchester home to my workplace
in Stoke-on-Trent. It is more reliable because the train timetable is somewhat fictional.
Surprisingly, the journey takes only about 50 minutes because the majority of the dis-
tance includes motorway travel, namely, the M56 and the M6. People often express
surprise, even indignation, that I prefer to travel by car, but I have come to realize that
I enjoy the journey. I look forward to these 50 minutes, and despite popular discourses
about the unpleasantness of contemporary car travel and the supposedly asocial prac-
tice of solitary commuting by car, the route is usually free of congestion and I do not
feel particularly alienated from the world. More to the point, rather than the soulless
experience often conjured up, I find my daily journey rich in mundane comfort and
sensation, replete with small pleasures and diverting incidents and thoughts. To cap-
space & cul ture vol . 6 no. 2, may 2003 151-168
DOI : 10.1177/1206331203251257
2003 Sage Publ i cati ons
151
ture this pleasant spatial and temporal routine, I have selected that part of the journey
that takes place on the M6, between junctions 19 and 16, in an attempt to convey the
multiple sensualities, materialities, topographies and psychogeographies, texts and
narratives that question myths about the supposedly dystopian nature of the com-
muters journey.
The routine daily commute by car has become a popular signifier of contemporary
alienation connoting work-bound single drivers detached from community and alien-
ated from their own nature, dulled by the compulsion to move swiftly and unevent-
fully toward their destination. Likewise, the motorway has been described as a defini-
tive non-space wherein a serialized functionality has replaced any potential for
communication and conviviality with fellow humans. Passages through airports, mo-
tels, shopping centers, and theme parks have been identified as generic kinds of time-
space, epitomizing contemporary forms of alienation and anomie, and motorway
travel is similarly assumed to produce dystopian effects on drivers and space. Although
not wishing to minimize the social and environmental impacts of burgeoning car use,
I want to reconsider the potentialities that inhere in the ritual motorway journey,
countering theoretical claims and popular cultural representations that reassert that it
is boring, sterile, and alienating. Taking my cue from Peter Merrimans (in press) sug-
gestion that driving is bound up with specific spatialities and ontologies as drivers in-
habit, use, and relate to their bodies, machines and spaces of transit in distinct ways,
I will explore how routine motorway travel can foster familiarity and modes of homely
comfort, provoke affective and imaginative connections to other times and places, fa-
cilitate kinaesthetic pleasures, and construct complex topographies of apprehension
and association. More broadly, I argue for an understanding of mundane travel that
does not merely involve linear passage through undifferentiated space in an allotted
space of time when nothing happens but always implicates other connections. This
necessitates recourse to a geography of flows, networks, and modalities that unfix rei-
fied characterizations of places and times, whether conceived as genius loci or serial-
ized surface and surrounds.
Dystopian Autoscape/Alienated Drivers
Depictions of car travel as inherently malign are legion. For instance, Henri Lefeb-
vre (1991) complained that the driver moves through an abstract, flattened space
and is concerned only with reaching a destination and therefore in looking about sees
only what he needs to see for that purpose. The route has accordingly been materi-
alised, mechanised and technicised, and the driver is able to apprehend only the spa-
tial qualities of functionality: speed, readability, facility (p. 313). Similarly, Richard
Sennett (1994) lamented that roadspace has become a mere function of motion, en-
gendering a tactile sterility and hence a pacified driving body that experiences rapid
transit without arousal, needing only to enact micro-movements. Although a desire
to move freely has been realized by those with enough time and money, this has tri-
umphed over the sensory claims of the space through which the body moves (p. 15).
This seems to accord with Marc Augs (1995) concern with identifying the prolifera-
tion of unstimulating and desocialized non-places wherein experiential connections
with space are mediated by signs, in the case of motorways, signs read through the
screen of the car. Realms of transit as opposed to dwelling, sites for communication
152 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 3
(with its codes, images and strategies) rather than affective and convivial language,
motorways, like other non-places, are contrasted with anthropological places that
are relational, historical and concerned with identity (pp. 107-108). These critiques
also resonate with notions of placelessness that suggest that spaces of transit and mo-
bility can generate neither feelings of belonging nor affective allegiance in contradis-
tinction to the rootedness of a more static and bounded sense of place (Relph, 1976).
Writers such as Baudrillard and Virilio offer a particularly negative opinion of the
automobile, identifying its fostering of pure signage and virtual experience endemic
to a postmodern era. Sean Cubitt (2001) captured Virilios dysfunctional car driver,
isolated from the world, transforming bodies into pure trajectory. The motorway is
apparently the scene of picnolepsia, the suspended consciousness of driving on auto-
pilot so that rather than delivering freedom, the car is a device for immobilisation
and subjection. Furthermore, the interior of the car is a non-space in its insulation
from the exterior world, and the roadscape itself is smeared across the windscreen,
devoid of detail, no longer a world of objects but a landscape flattened into a perpet-
ual and undifferentiated present. Here, the only features are signs (Cubitt, 2001, p.
62).
In their seminal article The City and the Car, Sheller and Urry (2000) opened up
the possibilities for exploring automobility as machinic complex, a complex amal-
gam of interlocking machines, social practices and ways of dwelling, and they refer to
the car driver as a hybrid assemblage incorporating spaces, objects, and signs (pp.
738-739). Although they argued that cars coerce people into following particular rou-
tines and routes, Sheller and Urry also suggested that a web of connections enfold in-
numerable sensations and socialities into automobile experiences. Yet they seem to
concur that motorways are the quintessential non-places of supermodernity,sites of
pure mobility (p. 746). Moreover, they argued that the senses are impoverished as
sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures and smells. . . are reduced to the two-dimensional
view through the car windscreen, so that the environment beyond is an alien other
(p. 747).
I prefer to regard car travel as redistributing sensual experience, for (particular)
cars and journeys contain their own sensual capacities. Assertions that the world is ap-
prehended via a two-dimensional view through the car windscreen resonate with
other accounts about the dominance of the visual, virtuality, and the mediatization of
the world as well as the contentions raised above. Such versions suggest that levels of
detachment from immediate surroundings preclude irruptions of fantasy and reverie,
and they ignore the connections between immediate surroundings and a host of in-
tertextual and interpractical spaces, places, eras, and occasions. In the case of driving,
they neglect the ways in which individuals enfold elsewheres, pasts, and futures dur-
ing their journeys; concoct and rehearse narratives; and sensually apprehend the
world in ways additional to the visual. In John Urrys (2002) latest work on automo-
bility, he appears to contradict his earlier assertions in stating that
all forms of social life involve striking combinations of proximity and distance, combi-
nations that necessitate examination of the intersecting forms of physical, object, imagi-
native and virtual mobility that contingently and complexly link people in patterns of
obligation, desire and commitment. (p. 256)
Merriman (in press) adopts a historical approach to show how the M1 motorway
was planned, constructed, serviced, experienced, and regulated, revealing the multiple
D e f a m i l i a r i z i n g t h e M u n d a n e R o a d s c a p e 153
simultaneous and successive practices, discourses, experiences, imaginaries, authori-
ties, materialities, and spaces that centered on Britains first motorway as it evolved
from modernist icon to mundane fixture. Accordingly, he demonstrates that motor-
ways are far from featureless non-spaces. Similarly, I want to show how motorway
commuting is part of the process through which expanding mobilities establish a
more mobile sense of home. Over time, familiar fixtures and sensations of the journey
are folded together with other places, previous experiences, socialities, sensualities,
and stories, becoming woven into the totality of driving space-time. Rather than con-
sidering the motorway as a distinctive kind of linear route-way isolated in space and
time that conditions drivers to experience a distracted or bored state at one with its
supposedly featureless landscape, I suggest that the motorway is always part of a com-
plex series of flows and matrices that connect spaces, times, representations, and sen-
sations. Through becoming enmeshed within these social, material, and cultural flows,
drivers do not suddenly become the ahistoric, unreflexive creatures popular lore
would have us believe. This means that driving is an experience that combines tem-
poral diversities as drivers experience, for example, immanence, nostalgia, and antici-
pation. Likewise, within an enclosed space and simultaneously moving through space,
the modalities of spatial connection are part of the weaving of the journey. The sen-
sation of immediate immersion in the homely environment of the car may be super-
seded by a moving out to the familiar features at the roadside. Moreover, journeys sew
places together, and places are always intertextual anyway (Barnes & Duncan, 1992) in
that they semiotically and materially quote other places and are talked about and rep-
resented as kinds of space. Finally, these imaginative and sensual modalities are liable
to be disrupted by the contingencies of the journey.
Despite the innumerable existential permutations of driving, the form of mobility
consistently upheld as a means to escape daily constraints has been walking. Situa-
tionists foreground the derive as a means to subvert the commodified, spectacular, and
alienated contemporary city (see Sadler, 1998); Michel de Certeau (1984) cited the
possibilities of escaping carceral space through walking, fantasizing, and making ones
own path, and psychogeographers (Sinclair, 1997) use the walk as a method to inter-
rogate the spaces of the city in ways at variance to normative understandings. Such
pedestrian praxes always occur within the city, usually particular cities, indeed specific
areas of particular cities, and motoring is implicitly constructed as antithetical to these
liberatory and subversive tactics. However, I will suggest that marvelous, absurd, sen-
sual, unexpected, and social occurrences can equally be experienced in the mobilities
offered by routine commuting along the motorway.
Everyday Routine
In addition to spatial and practical associations, motorway driving includes the
quality of drivetime, which might be understood to epitomize mundane, everyday
time. Such a notion suggests that the quotidian is the realm of dull compulsion and
habit, boredom and oppression. Conversely, it is precisely in the routine practice of the
daily drive that the possibilities for transcending the banal exist. Recent commentators
have noted that the everyday, the realm suffused with habit, routine, unreflexive forms
of common sense, and rituals influenced by the rhythms and coordinating practices of
commerce and bureaucracy, paradoxically also contains the seeds of resistance and es-
cape from uniformity. For not only is the quotidian the sphere of a conservative reit-
eration of the way things are, but it is also susceptible to the intrusions of dreams,
involuntary memories, peculiar events, and uncanny sentiments. As Felski (1999)
commented, everyday life may be synonymous with the habitual, the ordinary, the
mundane, yet it is also strangely elusive (p. 15). Certainly, the everyday can partly be
captured by unreflexive, embodied habit, inscribed on the body, a normative unques-
tioned way of being in the world. The repetition of daily, weekly, and annual rou-
tinesin this case, how and when to driveconstitutes a realm of common sense
that resonates with the actions of others. On the road, as in other spheres of habit, a
sense of collective cultural identity may be grounded by people together tackling the
world around them with familiar manoeuvres (Frykman and & Lfgren, 1996, pp.
10-11), involving skilful interaction between car drivers in accordance with the regu-
lations and cultural norms of the road. I have shown elsewhere that these conventions
and codes can be shaped within national contexts (Edensor, 2002, in press). These skil-
ful habits minimize unnecessary reflection every time a decision is required, making
motorway driving seemingly automatic, and are part of a practical engagement with
the world.
However, as Felski (1999) has suggested, everyday life is a term that is deployed by
intellectuals to describe a non-intellectual relationship to the world that is synony-
mous with an inauthentic, grey, aesthetically impoverished existence (p. 16). Yet
everyday practices are not solely robotic but possess multiple other potentialities, for,
according to Gardiner (2000), the quotidian is also polydimensional: fluid, ambiva-
lent and labile (p. 6) and contains transgressive, sensual and incandescent qualities
(p. 208). Likewise, Harrison (2000) said that in the everyday enactment of the world
there is always immanent potential for new possibilities of life (p. 498). Routine prac-
tices are open ended and fluid, evoke a sensuous becoming that is constantly attach-
ing, weaving and disconnecting; constantly mutating and creating (p. 502). Moreover,
the everyday is not only that which embraces homogeneous practices and experiences
but also contains broken patterns, non-rational and duplicitous actions, irresolvable
conflicts and unpredictable events (Silverstone, 1994, p. 7). Thus, the immanent ex-
perience of the everydaythe fantasies, stories, oddities, disruptions, lines of flight,
and sensual intrusionscomplements habitual experience. And as an exemplary form
of expanding social and cultural mobility, habitual car travel increasingly involves
confrontations with forms of otherness that are liable to disrupt routinized experience
and practice, throwing into sharp relief constructions of normative automobility
(Frykman & Lfgren, 1996).
Sudden shifts of perspective can render mundane events and fixtures surrealistic
and arbitrary, and it is precisely the routinized journey that opens up such possibili-
ties. The piling up of repetitive events, sights, and iterations offer opportunities for
prolonged speculation, imaginative interpretation, and complex relationships to
evolve. Moreover, unreflexive driving along the same route permits time for wide ru-
minations detached from the matter at hand.
How might routine commutes by car on the motorway be defamiliarized? In what
follows, I will provide an account of part of my own journey to work. The aim is to
shown that mundane journeys are both irrefutably individual and social as they accu-
mulate resonances of our own journeys, spaces, stories, and sensations and those of
others. That is, we might conjecture that constellations of collective experience con-
stitute something akin to a structure of feeling shared by motorway drivers in general
and commuters along particular routes more specifically. First, I will explore the jour-
neys autoscapes; second, I will account for some of the diverse embodied, sensual, and
social experiences of the journey; third, I will refer to the abundant texts and narra-
tives of the motorway.
Autoscape
As I have inferred, the motorway autoscape is a far from featureless, boiled down
space; rather, it possesses its own aesthetic and material qualities. Admittedly, at first
glance, the view ahead seems to consist of the shifting rectangles and hexagons of the
rear end of vehicles, hemmed in by the homogeneous green lateral strips of verge and
embankment. In additionand in accordance with Augs (1995) observations about
the signs advertising proximate attractions that claim historical or cultural signifi-
cance on Frances motorways, exemplifying the non-spaces that turn motorists into
spectators or consumersas I turn off the motorway at junction 16, there is a big
brown heritage sign advertising two large garden attractions. Is this what it has come
to: the countryside figured as a series of markers in an oasis of blank space? As I have
discussed, it has commonly been assumed that motorway driving has promoted
modes of apprehending the world, which distance drivers from the passing world.
Framing the outside through the windscreen, traces of work, domesticity, history, and
agriculture pass in a blur, detaching drivers from traces of lives in the process of being
lived. But when you get to know a journey, familiar sights crowd each mile, are reas-
suring signs of continuity and subjects for speculation, becoming axes of orientation
after a period of immersion in sound or reverie.
Moreover, the linearity of the road also dissolves as monuments, signs, and sur-
prises form a skein of successive and overlapping features, enveloping the motorway
in a web of associations. This is a topography of possible sights and destinations that
reference other spaces and times because motorways are spaces of material, imagina-
tive, and social flows. Journeys are full of moments of brief copresence as vehicles con-
vey different bodies at different speeds, constituting myriad excursions of varying du-
ration, distances, purposes, and destinations. Tourists, commuters, commercial
travelers, visitors to family and friends: the innumerable permutations. Where are they
all off to? Some going south to become mired in the jams of Birmingham, others
north to languish in the stretch around the Thelwall Viaduct along which flow 140,000
vehicles each day. Besides these moving vehicles and their human cargo, a host of
other intersecting flows and channels pass under and over the motorway accommo-
dating moving beasts and birds, planes, canal barges, trains, and other motors.
Drainage systems, rivers, electricity cables, telephone wires, and mobile phone masts
crisscross the motorway bearing forms of energy and matter.
To develop this complex, associational, and folded geography, I will focus on the
immediate surrounds of the motorway, provide examples of imagined space, and re-
fer to the journeys highlights.
SURROUNDINGS
The embankments and verges are forms of those proliferating interstitial spaces
emerging out of contemporary functional landscaping, including beshrubbed round-
abouts and the low-maintenance plantscapes preferred in the design of the surround-
ings of industrial estates and retail parks. Parts are carefully maintained, but others
have become overgrown and littered with the vestiges of previous journeys: bits of
cars, soft drink cans, and scraps of all kinds. Like the persistence of patches of tarmac
that reveal repaired sections of the road, verges contain evidence of previous events:
burst tire remnants, bruised crash barriers, glistening particles of glass, and, some-
times, gouged-out sections of the embankment. Previously the focus of planning to
designate grass types and preferred plant species, and still subject to a low-level up-
keep, they are rarely intruded upon by anybody except motorists who break down and
await assistance. There is the impression that there is no knowing what lies within the
often dense foliage. Occasionally, I have seen squads of police hunting for unimagin-
able forms of evidence.
The verges are also the location for numerous containers, service sites, ducts, and
power points that are the business of motorway maintenance crews to understand and
install. These functional apparatuses bestow a mysterious shapeliness to the roadside,
carry their own aesthetic charge in sculptural forms comprising sets of gray metal
boxes, concrete bases set into embankments and tubular appendages.
Despite their proximity to fumes and noise, motorway embankments have become
renowned as environments attractive to certain kinds of flora and fauna. The vibra-
tions of traffic apparently cause earthworms to rise, which attracts rodents and small
birds to feed at the roadside, further encouraging birds of prey such as the kestrel.
Other species, such as lapwings and herons, often fly over the road. Recently, a large
bird of prey soaring above neighboring fields was a frequent sight. For a few weeks, I
had not seen it, but then I noticed a sorry mess of blood and feathers on the hard
shoulder. My mood was then transformed when I subsequently saw the raptor wheel-
ing through the sky once more. Motorways have also proved to be a channel for kinds
of vegetation, notably the usually coastal Danish Scurvy Grass, and the ecological pos-
sibilities have been expanded in certain locations where bordering ponds have been
dug to counteract traffic pollution while sustaining populations of newts, water voles,
and butterflies. Subterranean hedgehog passages have been devised, and roosting
boxes to attract bats have been set up under bridges. Likewise, native flowers and trees
have been planted along verges. Perhaps in the future, a proliferation of motorway-
friendly species will encourage the potentially hazardous pursuit of motorway bird
watching, where existing roadside rookeries and heronries will be supplemented by
rare species and verdant arboreal scenes, attracting the admiring gaze of the motorist.
IMAGINED CHESHIRE
The journey from junction 19 to 16 takes place wholly in Cheshire, the southern
border of that county coinciding with the point at which I depart the motorway.
Cheshire connotes a host of associations that are borne out by electoral results, news-
paper gossip, particular publications, and styles of architecture. The dearth of large
suburban houses on the outskirts of Manchester sends a section of that citys bour-
geoisie into Cheshire. The soap stars and footballers of the northwest remove them-
selves to the Cheshire flatness. The Beckhams, Ken Barlow, David Soul, Christina and
Neil Hamilton, together with businessman and right-wing politicians, dwell in de-
tached baroque excesses and install garden ponds and statuary. The glossy magazine
Cheshire Life provides a style guide to interior decoration, and a plethora of lifestyle
experts are ready to assist with consumer and design choices. A key annual event is the
Cheshire Show, in which Cheshire folk are able to situate themselves as the opposite of
the urban northwest. Suspicions that the Countryside Alliance is well supported here
was confirmed when a large hoarding was placed in a field adjacent to the motorway
advertising the Liberty and Livelihood March in London in September 2002.
SPECTACLES
At night, huge searchlights, placed in the middle of a field, guide aircraft toward Man-
chester Airport.
There are glimpses of Cheshire mere through thick, scrubby trees. On the western side
lies Shakerley Mere, now a nature reserve where migrant wildfowl visit in winter and fish-
ing takes place. Occasionally Whooper swans and Canada geese pass over the road. The
surrounding woodlands were felled during the Second World War to supply local indus-
trial and domestic fuel, and this subsequently denuded landscape was bought by British
Industrial Sand Ltd. in the 1960s. Sand was excavated for the production of colored glass
until the supply was exhausted later on in that decade. Donated to the county, the area
was reafforested and flooded to create a recreational area. On the eastern side of the M6
lies a mere of similar origin solely used for fishing, and adjacent to it there is a holiday
village of mobile homes and chalets called Woodlands Park.
At one point, pylons cross the road, causing the radio to crackle.
Two railway bridges cross the road, and one tunnel goes beneath. One line connects Man-
chester and Chester, one Crewe and Manchester, the other, Stoke-on-Trent and Crewe.
Passing underneath is the Trent and Mersey Canal, completed in 1777, which links the
Bridgewater Canal near Runcorn with the River Trent, 93 miles away. Designed by the
great canal engineer James Brindley, it was one of the earliest major canals in the coun-
try. Further up the M6, after Lancaster, the Lancaster Canal is bisected by the motorway,
preventing travel by boat.
Some mornings a herd of cows slowly cross over a footbridge on their way to milking.
Mow Cop lies off to the east of the motorway approaching junction 16, a ruin atop a
craggy peak. Originally built in 1746 as a summer house for a wealthy local family, the
Wilbrahams, the castle-like structure, fell into disrepair. Mow Cop is renowned for the
large 19th-century gatherings of Primitive Methodism. One day, a brilliantly lit crag
shone out of the surrounding gloom of an impending storm. Biblical images of fervent
worship came to mind but were transformed by the track playing on my car stereo, an
enthusiastic offering from Oliver NGoma from Gabon, which transformed the mental
scene into wildly jiving Methodists.
There are a series of polythene houses, a large shed, and a fleet of lorries where
beansprouts are grown and transported.
In the midst of the countryside lies a huge hangar storing the products manufactured by
Buchan engineering company: steel-banded jacking pipes, caisson rings, prestressed
bridge beams, filter beds, footbridges.
This summer, a crop of vibrant sunflowers grew right next to the southbound carriage.
The motorway passes over a dell, which on the east side accommodates a small, bright
pink church that looks like something Hansel and Gretel might visit. St Philips Church
of Hassall Bank, made out of corrugated iron, was moved from a previous location in Al-
sager to its present location in 1883, in pieces by horse and cart. One of a series of pre-
fabricated churches assembled from kits and intended primarily for missionary work, St
Philips is also known as the Tin Tabernacle. On the other side of the motorway lies the
old half-timbered Hassall Green station for the Salt Line, a railway route chiefly con-
cerned with transporting salt excavated in northern Cheshire, which is now a footpath
passing under the motorway.
Sometimes through the trees, the big dishes of Jodrell Bank intercept alien messages and
send out signals to distant galaxies.
These sights seem to point to the changing uses of rural Britain: the rise of tourism
and leisure, the relocation of industry, and the widening scope of agriculture. But
more broadly they are familiar, reassuring points of orientation and sites to which the
drivers imagination may extend as a sort of virtual travel.
As I will further elaborate below, the space of the motorway during a routine jour-
ney is enmeshed in a complex network of heterogeneous associations, not merely
those that are visually and cognitively apprehended but a host of affective and sensual
linkages. In addition to the more noteworthy attractions cited above, there is a host of
apparently unremarkable rural features beyond the verge: pollarded trees and copses,
hedges and fences, old and new barns, green fields and fallow land and streams. These
entities can be apprehended through an imaginative engagement of the senses, where
remembered sensations about what it feels like to be below a tree, next to a stream,
atop a fence can form part of involuntary memory. For bodies can remember the feel
of the cold, heavy rain that batters on the windscreen or the moist foliage of the au-
tumnal wood as drivers imaginatively grasp spatial externalities.
Sensing and Socializing the Motorway
As discussed above, Sennett (1994) argued that driving desensitizes bodies. But is
car traveland most notably motorway drivingreally so numbing? Instead, might
new forms of sensuality evolve through interaction of human and machine and be
better conceptualized as part of the ongoing redistribution of sensory experience. The
engagement of the body in and with machine extends the sensorium to produce a
feel for the roadwhich is never merely visualto instinctively know, for instance,
the appropriate speed to drive at and whether the car is in the right gear. The inculca-
tion of a driving disposition typified by the gradual learning of a sequence of minute
maneuvers becomes part of second nature, especially prevalent during the routine
journey. This embodied, habitual disposition is not necessarily experienced as numb-
ness but may be sensually apprehended through the tactility of the steering wheel, the
play of the foot on the accelerator, or the evocative sound of a change in the road sur-
face. Thus, the road becomes a taskscape (Ingold & Kurttila, 2000) in which knowl-
edge of driving pertains to instinct as a practical, largely unreflexive undertaking. Bau-
drillard (1996) hyped this seemingly effortless mobility as unrealistic and a kind
of suspension of existence (p. 66), and yet it affords a range of reconfigured experi-
ential possibilities.
This feel for the road is also constituted by the specific affordances of travelthe
qualities of the car and the roadthat instantiate their materiality. The distinct sen-
sations afforded by the qualities of particular cars are shaped by such factors as the de-
gree of elevation off the road; the suspension; the material, shape, and comfort of the
seating; the rate of acceleration; the maneuvers required; and the feel of the dashboard
instruments. The unreflexive ways in which such apprehension usually occurs make
such homely and quotidian experiences difficult to describe. Perhaps we are most
aware of them when they are disrupted or when we travel in unfamiliar vehicles or
drive abroad. These familiar sensations mesh with a compendium of sensory experi-
ences built up over time through driving on the same stretch of road that variously de-
pend on the time of driving, road conditions, climate, and mood.
Although driving has undoubtedly contributed to the redistribution of visual ex-
perience, this does not obliterate other ways of apprehending the world. Thus, the mo-
torway journey is full of smells, sounds, and tactilities, producing a corporeal sociality
that inheres in the intimate relationship between bodies and cars and the spaces
through which they move, the distinctive roadscapes, particular models, road textures,
and driving conventions and habits. This accumulation of experience through ritual
reveals driving to be a process, and so we might consider ourselves as becoming driv-
ers rather than subjects who have already achieved that status. This chimes with Har-
risons (2000) observation that the everyday is replete with forms of distracted, tac-
tile knowing, a habitual apprehension of space and practice but potentially also a
fluid, sensual, and emergent understanding that escapes analysis. He explained that
sensibility and feeling are in touch with an outside because they are constantly at-
taching, weaving and disconnecting; constantly mutating and creating (p. 502).
The sensual modulations of the journey are many and varied. Cones channel cars
into temporary narrow lanes, which require concentration to maneuver, but then
swerve back into the mainstream simulating the frisson of a fairground ride. Some-
times, the car dips toward the hard shoulder, banking down toward the ridges, which
rudely disturb any reverie with a rapid rhythmic rat-a-tat-tat. Gusts of crosswinds
temporarily disrupt composure, even more so when large trucks pass by with a jolt in-
stigating a firmer grip on the wheel.
The sensualities of the road also involve communicative styles of driving to consti-
tute interactive choreographies that utilize expressive gestures, driving styles, and
flashing lights (see Dant & Martin, 2001, p. 156). Together with the affordances of cir-
cumstances, particular occasions emerge from road conditions.
Wednesday evenings, football season: The road is crammed with agitated fans hoping for
European success, tense in anticipation and often gripping the wheel anxiously as the
moving throng slows down. How far will a parking spot be from the ground? Will there
be a chance to savor the prematch atmosphere, have a pint or a pie, recalibrate the nerves,
and settle into your seat so the spell of the car can fade?
Wet winter journey: A foamy film of 10-foot high mist. White light shimmering on the
road in the wet. At night, the tail lights bleed into the wet tarmac, suggesting a tropical
sunset or a luscious fruit punch. The swish of the cars through rain and muffled sounds
ahead.
Summer traffic jam: On a warm summers day, drivers surrender to the inevitability of a
long wait. Some, frustrated, sit inside, drumming wheels and dashboards; others open
doors, chat, lounge at the roadside. A sudden burst of motion ahead causes people to
scurry back into cars, wind windows up, and start ignitions.
Late night journey: In the dark, the illuminated windows of the houses close to the road
seem to promise unparalleled cosiness and warmth, convivial gatherings of wine-
warmed intimates sharing animated conversation. The car seems lonely, an impersonal
space bereft of comfort.
Besides these contingent occasions, the habitual comfort of routine driving permits
diverse ways of inhabiting the car to emerge, routine socialities that coexist with the
imperatives of the driver to pay some attention to the road.
Intimacy can be fostered in the enclosed space of the car, for with no possibility of
going anywhere, the attention of companions is distracted only by the exigencies of
road conditions, and often, the journey can enable a prolonged discussion and nur-
ture a sense of closeness or discomfort (Dant & Martin, 2001, p. 152). It is a time when
things can get said. Alternatively, the craze for CB radios as an on-road community
and now the prevalence of mobile phoning fill the journey with the jabber of those not
immediately present and the resonance of ones own voice.
Solitarily, a space for contemplation is enabled by an interlude in which no deci-
sions about how to fill in time are required. A relaxed awareness of road conditions
cultivates a disposition toward thinking, planning, rehearsing encounters, and fanta-
sizing, which becomes second nature, a part of the motorway drivers habitus. Ac-
cording to recent events, drivetime may become a period in which we can celebrate or
grieve (Dant & Martin, 2001, p. 151). A host of actions that would be inapposite or
embarrassing in other spaces may be carried out in the homely seclusion of the car,
such as swearing or nonsense talk, loud singing, or face pulling.
A popular routine is to immerse oneself in sound. I suspect that the 1950s image
of families clustering around a wireless has been superseded by the lone motorist
tuned in to the car radio as the preeminent captive audience. Driving time is shaped
by listening strategies, perhaps combining listening to music, talk radio, or prere-
corded story tapes, according to contingencies of road conditions or mood. For in-
stance, I usually listen to the radio news bulletin just after setting off. A deep aural en-
gagement relies on driving on automatic pilot, fostering a homely sense of intimate
privacy through the exclusion of external sounds and the car engine. The use of sound
may be part of an everyday, habitual praxis of reflexive management of self and envi-
ronment (DeNora, 2000), wherein music playing reinforces tastes and pleasures or is
used to cheer up or prepare for an important encounter at work. Music is a resource
or template against which styles and temporal patterns of feeling, moving and being
come to be organised and produced in real time (DeNora, 2002, p. 111). Music also
potentially transforms or transcends the mundane through conjuring up important
occasions or periods of ones life, promoting daydreams, and engaging the body to
perform whether through tapping a rhythm out on the steering wheel or enacting
small seated dances. Yet music need not only cultivate inward and expressive practices
but also enhances visually apprehended space in passing, which may become animated
with the often-ineffable sentiments and sensations provided by music. The qualities of
particular music may be selected to provide particular sensations, but these are apt to
slip their moorings as they mesh with the contingent affordances of driving and the
outside conditions and spaces, as evidenced in the example of Mow Cop above. For
me, a driving rock track sounds great when driving fast, but when stuck in a jam, the
resonances alter, and a lighter sound would better suit the scenario. Likewise, a bass-
heavy dub reggae track might sound magical during a nighttime journey, whereas it
loses some potency during a cloudy day. Likewise, certain music engenders the desire
for speed, whereas other styles are suited to a more leisurely progress. As DeNora
(2000) declared, music possesses a host of cultural and individual associations; its
power derives from its intertextal relation to many other things (p. 28). Modes of au-
ral engagement produce socialities despite the solitude of the driver, socialities that
connect drivers to the world via current affairs on the radio through news reports, or
cause them to anticipate problems itemized in travel bulletins and connect listeners to
musical trends and situate them within taste groups.
Text and Narrative of the Motorscape
On contemporary roadscapes, as in cities, space is full of signs, not only those em-
bodied in styles of architecture, landscape design, and memorialization but also words
in the form of instructions, advertisements, and slogans. In addition, as I have already
inferred, space is invariably storied by its situatedness amidst a sea of imaginative, ma-
terial, and social associations, whether it is familiar terrain or not. In this section, I will
identify some of the parts of text that fill up the motorway and explore how it is a nar-
rated space, the locus of narratives about the road. Although resources from popular
culture invest the endless stretches of American highways with romantic associa-
tionsnotably through road movies and folk balladsthe British motorway has been
distinctly underrepresented within popular culture. With the exception of a couple of
art movies (including Chris Petits Radio On) and Leo Sayers old hit song Moon-
lighting, there are thus few resources at hand to reenchant the motorway as an event-
ful space of possibilities and the daily commute as an occasion rich with social and
imaginative allusions. Nonetheless, there are a host of words and stories that surround
motorways.
ROADTEXT
The road is full of text, not only the signage that directs and instructs but also the
play of text displayed on an endless procession of trucks and lorries that clog up the
slower lanes. The names of companies and their products resonate vibrantly with
imagined landscapes, institutions, pasts, futures, social processes, and characters.
Eddie Stobart, a transport company established in Carlisle but threatening to set up
operations elsewhere in Europe, is ubiquitous, having dramatically expanded its oper-
ations in recent years under the direction of the eponymous Eddie, a moralistic Chris-
tian with an eye for profit. Stobarts trucks are followed by a curious collection of en-
thusiasts known as Eddie watchers, who drive hundreds of miles to collect the names
of his many wagons, each bearing the name of a different woman.
The increasing prevalence of Norbert Dentressangle, Ego Boniface, and other con-
tinental names threaten the British transport industry, a vehicular invasion that her-
alds a coming Euroland in which flows of people, goods, and vehicles across borders
will multiply.
On the other hand, trucks branded with the venerable name of P and O conjure up
a vanished colonial age of steamer travel and convey the exciting voyages of provin-
cials in the colonial era, a schoolbook geography detailing the movement of exotic
commodities from far-flung locations.
Then there is an infusion of brand names that indicate futuristic associations, con-
cepts dreamed up in offices, containing goods that move between indeterminate in-
dustrial estates: Vitafoam, Contranta, Zenith, Omega, Mincrete, Panzas, Banex, Ge-
olistics, Norpak, Fixt, Tex, Scan, Tetrad, Plasway, Erf, Tilcon, Mondi, Granflex, Scotlee,
Kammac, Bap. No surnames are attached to these concerns, denoting impersonal cor-
porate strategies.
These are complemented by more traditional names: Baybutt of Burscough; Brian
F. Curran, Halifax; Longs of Leeds; Chigride Motive Power; Boughey, Ellis and Ever-
ard; McCarthy International Distributing and Warehousing; McBurney Transport;
Ken Abram Ltd; and F. Swan and Sons. Often based in old industrial towns, these
names conjure up a series of images, for instance, of old, provincial, industrial land-
scapes replete with cozy images of small familial firms that are an integral part of their
local economies rather than cutting-edge international companies. Maybe they plied
their horses and carts around their environs before turning their transport businesses
into lorry haulage. The old-fashioned typeface used for these names consolidate the
suggestion of fading British industry and the tough but honest managers and workers
who operate them. The place-names associated with these enterprises evoke an imag-
inary geography of old brick warehouses and service depots, greasy tarpaulins, boiler-
suited workers operating in muddy yards in the decaying industrial quarters of north-
ern Britain.
Web sites are inscribed on vehicles, and, increasingly, large vinyl canvases stretch
across lorries bearing the images of giant sausages, olives, oranges, and apples or large
logos based on heraldic designs, castles, or saltires. Promotional culture and the max-
imization of advertising relentlessly colonizes spaces untouched earlier. The parade of
well-known brands and outlets on lorries brings to mind the retail landscapes in
which we shop, the supermarket shelves, corner shops, and the high streets. In addi-
tion, phrases advertise goods and services:
The UKs No 1 Pressure Diecaster
We Bring Comfort to Your Life
Driving to Deliver
The Careful Movers
Part Attack
Building a Better Environment
Nevertheless, on the United Kingdoms roads, in comparison with the roadscapes of
other countries, advertising hoardings are conspicuous by their absence except for the
logos of commercial vehicles and car stickers. However, this may be changing as farm-
ers search for ways to maximize revenue. Recently, a sign has been erected in a wheat
field adjacent to the road advertising the virtues of electronic banking with the Co-op;
a now crumpled hoarding for Talke Retail Park lies in a field, and a banner advertises
woodland for sale.
Somewhat differently, sprayed onto bridges across the national motorway network
are the slogans of political campaigns urging support for foxhunting and relief on fuel
taxation. Also serially reproduced and daubed on two bridges crossing my journey is
the elliptical Gouranga Be Happy. The phrase is a Hare Krishna mantra and could
be proclaiming the virtues of this religion. Alternatively, it may be part of a promo-
tional campaign for the computer game Grand Theft Auto, a new edition of which
was imminent at the time the slogans started to appear. In the game, points could be
accrued by mowing down a group of Krishna devotees, a reward known as the
Gouranga bonus. Such slogans can cause us to imagine or perform as part of a dis-
tracted mode of being on the road. As one correspondent to the Guardians Notes and
Queries section reports, Ive seen Gouranga on a flyover on my way to and from
Manchester for the last 6 years. . . . Needless to say it becomes something of a ritual to
shout Gouranga in a deep bass voice every time I drive under it
(www.guardian.co.uk). Text can thus engage in various ways: by rolling sounds around
our tongues, playing games with meanings, or incorporating words and phrases into
made-up songs.
Narratives of the Road
All journeys resonate with the memories and experiences of other journeys, those
of the past and those still to be completed, and the notion of pure immanence that
some dystopian commentators refer to disembeds the motorist from their own mo-
toring history, a history that for Britons of a particular age is likely to encompass the
era of premotorway travel with its systems of garages and transport cafes, notorious
accident black spots, and locations for traffic jams. Individual experiences and stories
intersect with those of others, producing a collective imaginary of car travel in Britain.
The narratives of others journeys, representations, and stories about motorways
and roads and other motoring experiences are exchanged between motorists as gossip
and tale-telling. The stories of commercial travelers and sales personnel, lorry drivers,
maintenance staff, traffic police, motorway service workers, and coach drivers; docu-
mentaries about improper and dangerous driving practices; and news stories about
road accidents and traffic reports mean that motorways are always already storied
spaces, replete, for instance, with themes of romance, arguments, and problems with
cars. For instance, Keele service station was an important part of the symbolic geog-
raphy of Northern Soul fans from the 1970s as they plied between the Tunstalls
Golden Torch club and the Twisted Wheel in Manchester (Ebrey, 2000). Again, this
highlights how motorways are connected in infinite ways to other spaces and events
and are part of the flows of adventures, family obligations, and routines of work and
leisure.
I will focus on stories about hitchhiking that reinvest the motorway as a narrated
space, a form of representation found in the gossip and folklore that surrounds hitch-
hiking. Social fears that extend from the malevolent roadscape testify to wider con-
cerns and specters, in which the hitchhiker, as exemplary stranger, is unpredictable
and potentially dangerous, is an often uncanny other to the responsible motorist, is he
who haunts the verges and the slip roads with evil in mind. The ubiquity of very sim-
ilar slip roads and service station exits across the motorway network produce familiar
geographies in which mythic stories can be located. And the quality of such caution-
ary myths is that they can happen anywhere and everywhere and tend to be translated
into local contexts. Accordingly, they are related across the entire motorway network
in localized versions, haunting the M6 and meshing with my own experiences of
hitching and those of friends.
Twenty years ago, I often traveled over my current daily route as a hitchhiker. Be-
longing to a network of friendships between individuals who temporarily dwelt in
large cities across the United Kingdom, finding casual work or signing on unemployed
before moving on again, we hitched as a normative mode of travel. Bristol, Birming-
ham, Manchester, Brighton, Oxford, London were all connected by motorways and
became part of this network of urban nomadism. Hitchhiking was common, and ar-
riving at slip roads and service stations, there would usually be several other hitchers,
some with thumbs aloft, others seeking more specific destinations as indicated by the
rough chunks of cardboard with deep, biro-inscribed names of towns. Hitching eti-
quette dictated that you should form an orderly queue and there should be no queue
jumping. Once Mick Channon, the international footballer, gave me a lift, and I was
struck with the dilemma about whether to acknowledge his fame, deciding finally on
an affected ignorance by observing small pleasantries about the weather and his flashy
sports car, but this was mainly unnecessary because his attentions were directed to his
blond, female companion. Other notable encounters were with a predatory vicar and
a Village People fanatic, and these stories intersect with the strange traveling compan-
ions of friends: the man who refused to speak at all, the religious cult leader, the Chris-
tian desperately attempting to convert his pick-ups to the true path, the Isle of Wight
Festival veteran who invited his companions to roll up the most enormous spliff.
The story that recurs to me most often is one in which a friend and I, homeless af-
ter a couple of weeks of sleeping in woods, parks, and empty garages on a voyage north
from Southampton, hitched a ride from Durham with the vague idea that Newcastle
might provide us with opportunities for very cheap accommodation, as turned out to
be the case. The man took pity on our penniless plight and decided to give us a tenner
to help us on our way but with the proviso that we would learn from his charitable
gesture and do likewise, assisting anybody who needed a helping hand. Yes we would,
of course we would, and thanking him profusely, we stepped from his car. As we
humbly waved him goodbye, we were gripped with an almost satanic sense of guilt.
For from this same driver, before he had kindly given us money, we had stolen a few
notes that lay on the floor at the back of his car. Stumbling away remorsefully from the
roadside, the money weighed heavily on our conscience, but we were too impover-
ished to do anything honorable. This sum provided a much needed deposit for a flat.
These stories intersect with those heard while hitching, from drivers, or those that
became part of the repertoire of other hitchhikers.
An ugly skinhead, furious at his lack of success, flings the thick metal chain that he coils
around his wrist in the direction of the umpteenth driver to ignore his plea for a lift. Glad
to escape the attention of the lout, and sure that the car has suffered no damage, the
driver continues on his journey until he becomes aware of a clanking on the passengers
side. Stopping to investigate the cause of this racket, the driver notices that the chain has
lodged in the door handle. . . and attached to it is a meaty hand, torn from its wrist.
A driver picks up a woman and puts her hold-all in the boot. The woman is unusually
taciturn despite the chatty promptings of the driver and then he, too, turns silent when
he notices that the womans forearms are thick and hairy and then that unmistakable
stubble is only partially covered by thickly caked foundation. Furiously worried by this
disclosure, the driver affects concern that the vehicle is veering out of control, jerking the
steering wheel to give the illusion of danger. Perhaps a rear tire is punctured. So he pulls
into the hard shoulder and asks his burly passenger to get out of the vehicle to check. At
once, he screeches away, pulling the door to only after gaining significant distance from
the stranded figure. Breathlessly driving on for a couple of miles, he pulls into a service
station to check the contents of the hitchhikers bag. Sure enough, it was with a monu-
mental sigh of relief that he withdrew a heavy, bloodstained axe, having escaped by the
skin of his teeth.
Never pick up women hitchhikers, especially in pairs. A trucker friend of a friend had
picked up two young and attractive female hitchers, and the journey seemed to be inci-
dent free until they neared their drop-off point. Then the girls suddenly turned into
malevolent creatures, threatening that they would contact the police to allege that the
driver had attempted rape unless he immediately gave them 50 pounds. The driver, ter-
rified of the ramifications of failing to consent to their demands, paid up as they departed
from his cab. The dnouement of this parable? And so. . . that is why I never pick up
women, no matter what they look like.
The motorway is thus a space of fantasy within with cautionary and moral tales
that extend the possibilities of danger and infuse the fabric of routine. These stories
become localized and individualized, mutate, and are embellished in their ongoing
narration, as they weave social fears and fantasies into space, attaching them to spe-
cific and generic spaces. Yet it seems as if they have led to the virtual eclipse of hitch-
hiking as a mode of travel. Feeling that I have dues to pay, I occasionally pop into serv-
ice stations to see if there are any hitchers, but they are no longer a common fixture
on the slip road.
Conclusion
I have argued that routine motor travel should be conceptualized as a process of
becoming, foregrounding affective and sensual experience of place, and focusing on
the flow of experience rather than assuming such experience is desensitized, a stasis of
being disconnected. The performing car driver is an embodied, expressive, and im-
provisatory subject, apt to become enfolded within externalities. Memories, sensa-
tions, desires, fantasies, interpretations, stories, and bits of knowledge constitute po-
tential multiple lines of flight throughout a journey. Such experiences are less likely to
be cognitively apprehended but may imply a body that is a site of surfaces, affects and
desires that perceive and connect with other planes of existence, energies and affects
(Fullagar, 2001, p. 174). Unlike more spectacular forms of travel, themselves resonant
with possibilities, I have emphasized that the routine familiarity of space-time em-
bodied by the daily commute opens up its own experiential possibilities, refuting con-
ceptions that everyday mundane practices are inherently dull, unsensual, and alienat-
ing. Indeed, routinized practices offer peculiar opportunities by virtue of their being
performed as second nature, freeing up experience to other stimuli or providing
repetitive sensual, imaginative, and spatial comforts.
What is fascinating about car travel is that drivers and passengers move toward des-
tinations through space within the homely micro-environment of the car, a process
that may foster inward travel through reverie and nostalgia, yet it can also enable
imaginative and affective travel toward other spaces outside the car. The empathetic
attachments whereby drivers move out and toward passing spaceswhether textual
or realhighlights the limits of representational understanding of (dystopian) space,
for such imaginative travel toward spatial externalities momentarily retrieves sensa-
tions and produces affect. This, counter to assumptions about the asocial and empty
experiences of car driving and the autoscape, is also well exemplified by Bulls (2001)
assessment of a drivers listening strategies. He maintains that the aural script of driv-
ing time is imposed upon those mundane and routine periods. . . thereby reclaiming
and transforming them (p. 199) so that routinized experience becomes overlaid with
individual listening strategies and habits. Over time, varied emotional geographies of
driving on the motorway may become grounded in familiar sensory experience, and a
topophiliac (Tuan, 1974) disposition toward the daily succession of spaces, places, and
landscapes built up over time emerges. Moreover, the assumed linearity of motion
through straight space is complicated by the ideas and sensations provided by exter-
nalities on and off the road and the proliferation of human and nonhuman flows of
energy, matter, and beings that flow through and across the road through a variety of
elements. Similarly, more immaterial flows of ideas, semiotics, and stories from else-
where and other times colonize and socialize space. Disembedding processes (Gid-
dens, 1991) that thin out localities are reembedded in more stretched-out spaces such
as along transport networks. Alternatively, the deterritorialization performed by mo-
torway construction is superseded by the reterritorialization, a process constituted by
lines of flight as well as by points or nodes (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 52) as auto-
mobility continually weaves together new temporalities and spatialities. Driving in-
stantiates a sense of flow but also seeks out anchoring points in the passing landscape.
Routine driving generates a flow of experience that moves inward and outward,
folding together places, people, stories, performances, and sensations over time. Dri-
ving mingles distance and proximity, presence and absence, past and present and fu-
ture, human and nonhuman, the sensate, imaginary and rational, subject and object,
producing geographies of heterogeneous associations (Murdoch, 1997). As Merri-
man (in press) has suggested, if we broaden an analysis of the socialities of the mo-
torway by moving away from immediate face-to-face human interaction and incor-
porate the nonhuman, dystopian versions of alienated being lose much of their force.
Indeed, experience is institutionalized and performed around signs, service stations,
and a host of infrastructural fixtures, in addition to roads and cars. These materiali-
ties exist within wider institutional and administrative frameworks and thus are al-
ways already social. Moreover, they enable driving cultures and the identities of dif-
ferent motorists to evolve by virtue of being differently enfolded into distinct routines.
By drawing on my own driving experiences, I have tried to demonstrate the fluid
boundaries that exist between individual and collective driving experiences, where in-
dividual particularity meshes with a sociocultural structure of feeling. Finally, my ar-
gument is not intended to minimize the very real environmental and social effects of
motorways, but a realistic understanding of the pleasures of driving is essential if in
the future, alternative forms of transport are to be championed. At present, anticar
campaigns fulminate about the alienated state of drivers, whereas an appreciation of
the complex socialities and materialities of driving bypass such simplistic moralizing.
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Tim Edensor teaches cultural studies at Staffordshire University. He is the author of
Tourists at the Taj and National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. He has also
written widely on the sociology of tourism, Scottishness and the film Braveheart, walking in the
country and city, and social performances. He has established a Web site on British industrial
ruins and is presently working on a book on this theme.

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