Paola Ehrmantraut
“Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and Reordering of
French Culture” by Kristin Ross.
This article starts by tracing the identification of the car
manufacturing and the factory worker, following the history of the Renault
plant at Billancourt. Influenced by MaoÂ’s cultural revolution, many intellectuals went to this factory
to “encounter the people” (17). Due in part to the attention the intellectuals
paid to this plant, Billancourt became central in the
social debate about the new paths that modernization and industrialization were
opening in the French society. The automotive worker came to represent
metonymically the entire working class, and the factory plant in Billancourt, the site of tensions that reflected the
different approaches to postwar economic development.
The article goes on to explore the problematic relation of French
culture and the automobile from the 1950Â’s until the middle of the 1960Â’s. In
this era, the car came to symbolize the different attitudes to the state-led
modernization in the post war. The car was surrounded by a complex and prolific
discursive web, that in many ways anticipated its mass
consumption. The myths these discourses about cars, mobility and modernization
created were futuristic in nature, since they circulated before the actual cars
massively circulated the streets. The myths were furthered reinforced by films
that showcased the advantages of capitalism. Ross explains that “The postwar
screens of
Ross traces some of these myths created by the discourses. Since they
reflected contested views on what the car had come to represent, these myths
were unstable points of conflict. First, the car came to incarnate the myth of
mobility, speed and independence. The new economic conditions of the industrial
modernization required a mobile work force, and so the car fused with the
displaced worker to give birth to the “available man”, the worker who could be
relocated to satisfy the needs created by the free market ideology. The anxiety
created by this model was represented in movies and popular literature by the
recurrence of the car accident, bringing to light the most destructive
consequences of modernization.Â
As the car became an actual presence in everyday life, the trope of the
unique speeding car paired with its obliteration in unexpected crashes, gave
way to a more static account of the car experience. The myths in relation to
the car continued to show conflicting images. On the one hand, the car became
fraught with images of separation and social dissolution. On the other hand, more
compensatory myths started to give value to the interior of the car as a
sanctuary of peace for the overwhelmed commuter, who in the idle hours of the
traffic jam could find time for himself, sheltered from domestic or workplace
pressures. Ross summarizes: “A miraculous object, the car can compensate for
the destruction it has created” (55)
In class, I would like to discuss possible answers to two rhetorical
questions that Ross posed in the article: “Does the postwar modernizing process
act to suppress the memory of the suffering and destruction that must
inevitably accompany it? How can one best avoid the knowledge of the social
costs of one’s own privilege in the present moment?” (63) She also points out
that “the massive myth production hides the realization of the existence of a
huge population left out of the modernization process” (64). Who are excluded
and what level of participation do they have in the modernization process of
the postwar