20 March 2002
Society relies heavily upon having an efficient means of transportation available. Students and employees use transportation on a daily basis when commuting. Trade becomes pointless when the cost of moving goods exceeds the value of the items. Developments in transportation have a profound effect on society, making life and business function more smoothly. Those who use such developments gain a measure of power by attaining a greater freedom of movement. Whoever dictates what developments occur holds even greater power, for that person or institution then controls the distribution of power. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the automobile has been the dominant means of transportation in the United States. Driving has become both a discipline and an ideology, for most people today have been molded into accepting driving as the ideal form of transportation - not perfect yet, but heading in the right direction. A common view of the future displays "flying cars" as the fate of transportation, where the form of the vehicle has changed while the personal nature of the transportation which defines driving has not. To maintain driving as such a discipline, a model of power is evoked which Michel Foucault calls "panopticism." In his essay, aptly titled "Panopticism," Foucault presents a model where an institution may achieve its goals by employing enforcement, surveillance, and another form of discipline which holds these three things together. Institutions which have an interest in maintaining the discipline of driving - automobile manufacturers, local police departments, and the Transportation Department, among others - each employ the panoptic model to keep this ideology alive.
Driving offers greater freedom of movement and more choice in destination than many other means of transportation, such as riding the bus, taking an airline flight, or car-pooling. Driving becomes a means of avoiding the discipline of time: there is no need to consult a schedule or a coworker whenever one must travel. Instead of being subjected to the stark discipline of the clock, the driver falls into a far more subtle discipline. Driving has every appearance of being a complete void of discipline simply because of the vast freedom offered. Yet driving is something which people must be trained in, a mold into which one must fit as a means of functioning in society. If a person cannot drive, either by inexperience or lack of a vehicle, he or she is severely impaired in the ability to work and run life's errands. The requirement to drive is so strong in American society that a driver's license functions as the de facto means of identification, even though not everyone is required to possess one. By molding and shaping people into accepting the idea that driving is necessary to modern survival, driving is established as a discipline, despite the fact that driving offers an escape from other disciplines that are much more obvious. The popularity of driving can then be explained, in part, by the appeal of avoiding discipline.
Automobile manufacturers make use of this appeal by presenting their vehicles as symbols of freedom and rugged individualism. Commercials for sport utility vehicles show their automobile as being perfectly capable of handling the toughest mountain passes, as though their owners would actually risk scratching the paint on such an expensive vehicle. Sports cars are often filmed on open country roads far from the obligations of city life. Rarely is a car commercial set within a city. Each of these methods creates an imaginary ideology of the automobile as a means of escaping the humdrum of everyday life. This triggers a panoptic discipline where people are put in the habit of purchasing or leasing the newest vehicles which conform best to the present ideology. Surveillance of purchase patterns is used by marketing departments to test the effectiveness of the presented ideology in maintaining this discipline. Manufacturers do not have the power to force the incessant purchasing of new cars on consumers, yet enforcement is still achieved by incentives from yet another institution: the government. By creating and funding a transportation infrastructure tailored specifically to the automobile, the government makes it very difficult for another mode of transportation to enter the market. This deficiency in the ability of automobile companies to complete the panoptic model within their own means causes a huge dependance on the government to supply the final key.
Government agencies throughout the United States have many reasons for supporting the role of the automobile in modern society. Licensing of both drivers and vehicles creates both a source of revenue an another means of panoptic power. Police provide both surveillance and enforcement of driving laws by patrolling the road system and issuing tickets to offenders of the law. Drivers discipline themselves into following the "rules of the road" for fear of the police car which may be hiding behind a large bush or around the next corner. Foucault says of the creation of the police as an institution:
... the type of power that it exercises, the mechanisms it operates and the element to which it applies them are specific. It is an apparatus that must be coextensive with the entire social body and not only by the extreme limits that it embraces, but by the minuteness of the details it is concerned with. Police power must bear 'over everything'... (323)Enforcement of driving law becomes an excellent tool for extending such extreme limits to police power. Many criminals accused of crimes unrelated to driving are caught by the police first because of some small driving violation. In the United States, police are denied the level of surveillance described by Foucault - citizens are protected against unreasonable search and seizure. Only after a person has been deemed guilty of a crime, even a minor traffic violation, can a search for contraband or a criminal record check can begin. Such an extension of power gives governments a huge incentive to support the ideology of driving.
The most prominent effort on the part of governments in the United States to support driving has been the construction of the Interstate Highway System. A join venture between the states and the federal government, which each bearing half the cost, the Interstates greatly favor the automobile by making travel by car comparatively easy, especially for long range travel. Even within cities, Interstates prove essential in the daily commute. Benefits to the state include improved commerce and models of power such as those created for the police. For the federal government, the benefit is much more subtle. Aside from the political popularity which stems from endorsing the driving ideology, the federal government benefits by gaining a measure of power over the states. The Constitution of the United States authorizes Congress to regulate commerce "among the several states" (Article I, Section 8), which encompasses the funding of Interstates highways used in commerce. However, to receive that funding, the federal government is able require that each state agree to follow guidelines on certain unrelated matters. For example, this has been especially effective in creating a federal education policy, where the federal government has no stated power to enforce such a policy. Enforcement takes a contractual form instead. Surveillance arises when each state prepares a report of its success in implementing federal policy, and a discipline arises where each state is willing to do anything to prevent the transportation money that it rightfully deserves from being funneled into other states. Foucault sums up this phenomena best:
And, although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforce, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines the limits that are traced around the law. (331)The federal government capitalizes on the power behind the ideology of driving as a means of exercising a power which it does not actually possess.
The role of the contract becomes important here, for a state can only become involved in this model of power by common agreement. Incentives are used to initiate the contract - a state would seem foolish to give up the huge sums of money and power associated with driving. Unfortunately for the state, the federal government plays the dominant role once the contract is signed. There the funding originates and there the attached policy is formed. Foucault explains that this is typical when a panoptic model of power is combined with a contract:
... the way in which it is imposed, the mechanisms it brings into play, the non-reversible subordination of one group of people by another, the 'surplus' power that is always fixed on the same side, the inequality of position of the different 'partners' in relation to the common regulation, all these distinguish the disciplinary link from the contractual link, and make it possible to distort the contractual link systematically from the moment it has as its content a mechanism of discipline. (Foucault 331)The state is disciplined into accepting transportation contracts without regard to the effects on its sovereignty. The contract is then distorted into something to which the state no longer agrees to for the merits of the contract, but instead because it is what the state has been doing since Interstates were first constructed. The state thus exercises self-discipline.
Countless disciplines have formed around the automobile, not the least of which is driving itself. These disciplines greatly obscure the merits of the automobile as a means of transportation. The success of the automobile in modern society is easy to measure - almost everyone owns a car or truck of some kind. But determining how much success stems from the actual superiority of the automobile over any other mode of transportation becomes very difficult. An ideology of driving has formed not from debate of its merits, but from the disciplines that have strengthened the role of the automobile throughout the twentieth century. Arguments can certainly be made for and against the automobile - alternatives such as public bus systems, monorails, and even the return of trains have been proposed and implemented, but never with as much success as the established driving ideology. Either the arguments in favor of such systems are flawed or somehow their superiority is not realized because of the difficulty in upsetting the current system. Which of these possibilities is true cannot be determined so long as the government persists in dictating transportation policy, for its policy is subverted to models of power which serve a completely independent agenda. Even car manufacturers rely upon the government to provide the infrastructure - the road system - without which their product would be completely useless. The ultimate power over transportation has been usurped by the government, and that power has been abused.
Foucault, Michel. "Panopticism." Academic Discourse: Readings for Argument and Analysis. Gail Stygall, ed. New York: Harcourt, 2000. 307-335.