Abstract
Drivetime offers a new perspective on recent academic attention given to the car and automobility, drawing together theoretical arguments from cultural geography, psychology, and philosophy to understand the thinking mind within the experiences of the driving body. Within an academic context, the driven car has often been presented as a prosthesis of the human body. However, Pearce’s key contribution is to argue that driving should also be seen as a prosthesis of the human mind. The exploration of the mind in this book takes places through a melding of phenomenology and psychology to present the car journey or ‘driving-event’ as an important space for thought, mental development, and therapy. Pearce notes that ‘Driving through an external landscape can provide the means to travel through an internal landscape’ (p. 13), and she argues that driving can give rise to both heightened and altered senses of consciousness, with the actions of the car – reversing, stopping, and changing direction – resembling the human mind in the most habitual and mundane ways.
Pearce introduces the term ‘driving-event’ to define the context-specificity of a given driving experience, where external and subjective factors mean that the experience and result of each journey’s thought-space is different. These thoughts are habitual and unique, varied and not necessarily positive or pleasurable, but also often retrospectively consolidated so that one journey is associated with a particular thought process or decision. The book draws on both 20th century literary examples and personal and auto-biographical reflections to elucidate the approach, making for an accessible read, and affording an interpretation of arguments in line with the reader’s own driving or passengering experiences.
The book opens with a detailed theoretical discussion and introduction of Pearce’s approach to driving and the notion of an automotive consciousness, positioning it within the context of automobility research over the past decade. Following this there is an interlude, as Pearce presents an auto-biographical narrative of particular personal driving events, reflecting upon her own experiences during two distinct periods. The first, in the late 1990s, paralleled the preparation of an earlier text on automobility, and the second was during the preparation for this book, allowing Pearce to outline the personal context for her theoretical approach and to provide a topical discussion of the changing face of motoring in Britain. Following this, the book is split into four separate but theoretically concurrent chapters – Searching, Fleeing, Cruising, and Flying – each exploring the different ways and contexts in which our minds work during different ‘driving-events’. Drivetime is not just a thought-provoking book for scholars of the car, but also a 20th century memoir that details key moments in automobility history. Pearce concludes that the discussions of 20th century driving-events undertaken in Drivetime present us with a new way of understanding both the recent past and present thought-space of the car as well as what may come to replace it.