WORLD CAR WORLD SOCIAL
WORLD CAR WORLD SOCIAL
By Maryse PERVANCHON, published by L'Harmattan, SOCIAL LOGIC collection. ISBN : 2-7384-7635-X
Published in bookstores since the summer 1999, and always available or accessible control your bookseller.
An insect with wings on its back
The wing is a natural support for ascent. Iconic image of former Adler and Samson brands, it signals elevation, the flight towards the celestial conquest, another way to transcend our human condition. Bright promise of a new destiny, the outstretched wings of the owl and the stork were also used by the Voisin and the Hispano-Suiza. BMW has kept an acronym from this period which represents an airplane propeller so schematically that it is barely recognizable.. The Mini Austin Cooper continues to wear wings widely deployed on its crest to better escape its gravity. If you let your imagination run wild, you will notice, that the capital D tipped, three-dimensional and tapered which serves as the emblem of the latest Japanese brand, Daihatsu, can also see a wing. Donkervoort, Dutch Lotus replica, Venturi and Hobbycar in France, Lexus in the USA, Morgan in Britain or Skoda in Czechoslovakia also sport birds or open wings. “The spirit of ecstasy” as the statuette that adorns the Rolls-Royce is called, maybe it's the sublimated bird, unless it is already the perfect image of the archangel. For the car, undeniably these wings are the expression of serenity, of a certainty of access to absolute truth, the plenitude of which can only fill us.
These pages are not for commercial purposes, but let's say more for promotional purposes, you are invited, like any good self-respecting vehicle driver, out of your favorite element, and watch you from afar, behind the wheel of your car.
How did the car become a total social object, an exemplary figure, a mediating form that gradually changed our relationship to the world ?
Asking this question amounts to trying to show that in the world of forms that make up our daily, the car today is the shape of the world. Beyond the modern tool, the car poses the whole problem of the relationship to space and time as a place of objectification of our existence. In our industrialized societies where risk-taking is a model of behavior, the car allows us to symbolically combine the straight line and the curve, i.e. the rule and its exception, as in an erotic vertigo. And there is aesthetics in these equivocal games, in these walks between paradise and the promised land, in this possibility of deviance which necessarily includes the accidental. This well-identified rolling object constantly puts us back in confusion, in the acceptance of the undifferentiated life-death. The multicausality of road accidents is only the reflection of the multiplicity of signs, symbols and myths to which they refer us. They are the interface between our “feasible” and our “desirable”.
A work of 300 pages, consisting of the following themes :
First part
What does the car give us to experience on a daily basis? ?
Autonomy and freedom, terror and death. The speeches of women and men insist on this, the observations show it, and the dreams for those who tell them are an interpretation : the car drives us in ambiguity. At the wheel we go from fear to pleasure, and vice versa, in a kind of oscillating movement which resembles this famous Moebius strip which one can traverse while passing without realizing it from below to above, from outside to inside.
Second part
If these paradoxical sensations are possible it is because the car is an authentic carrier of images and figures of the imagination., so much more than just a transport object. It is the support of a rather wild bestiary which takes us to the gallop of horses, gives the power of the lion or the bull, harasses or stings like insects before making us go through the mirror to better reach the fall. But she just as capable of lifting us up, to enlighten us to bring us to the superhuman and to heroism by combining. It is an active element of our imaginary power : its fantastic function is undeniable. We remain the weapon at the foot.
Third part
But it takes us even further into the order of the symbolic. : having it makes us feel. She's like a second skin. Our appearance is his and vice versa. We talk about it in the first person singular.. Its space describes us. In the social game it has become a sacred object. sacred car ? holy car and fucking car !
Fourth part
The circle and the wheel probably have a lot to do with it : it also serves our mythical time and we renew with it the eternal history of pilgrim and traveling peoples and makes us participate in the mythical maintenance of a Golden Age and a return to origins. It also serves our myth of progress. And if the power of any mythical system is to confuse time and death then no longer doubt it is the vehicle of myth.
Part Five
She is the shape of the world : a "total social object". It lifts the world and contaminates it at the same time. And yet difficult to accept to do without it. Even China won't save it.
What to conclude ? What to conclude ?
Towards what tends all the illusion of our senses at the wheel ? to NOTHING I answered.
What is the meaning of this physical and psychic stretching that we indulge in while driving? ? precisely NOTHING, nothing but a diversion of meaning, common sense, on the right path to reach infinity, another finitude, that of death perhaps that we end up finding in an ultimate playful appropriation.
Maryse Pervanchon
self-portrait
After twenty years of research as a psychologist in the field of road safety, and psychotherapist specializing in mental imagery, is currently a sociologist, lecturer at the University of Toulouse II le Mirail, and researcher at the CERS laboratory in Toulouse.
