| The significance of the highway in America cannot be overstated. Hundreds of thousands of miles of highway stretch across the country, not to mention forty thousand miles of federal interstate. More than just a concrete path for motorized vehicles, the arrival of the highway marks a cultural event that has dramatically transformed the subjects, places, and motions of 20 th Century America. This project contends that the possibilities and limitations of modernity in America are inextricably linked to the highway's circulation. America's overriding drive for greater mobility—as well as the rhetorical circulation of the highway's effects—mandates a consideration of the highway as a machine.; Emphasizing the time period surrounding the 1956 Interstate Highway Act and the 1973 oil embargo, my argument is that a machinic rhetoric is necessary to talk about how events and arrangements such as the highway operate. Chapter one focuses on how the highway machine arrived on the heels of the railroad as part of an American national imaginary, propelled by federal funding and the strength of a pro-highway lobby. Chapter two addresses some of the subjects and identities revolving around the highway machine, including the driver, the mobile Mother, the fatal body, and the traffic manager. Chapter three diagrams the multi-dimensional places of the highway machine, showing how the segregation of groups through selective housing and transportation policies made the highway an enabler of the suburbs as a place of white privilege and institutional racism.; Chapter four accounts for the motions of the highway machine, charting how Ford's automobile empire spawned a sense of industrial purpose that began to link mass production and consumption to the (in)security of the state. Chapter four also notes how the highway machine's growing dependence on energy resources contributed to an intersection between circulation, globalization, and security. Chapter five concludes with the contention that an engagement with some of the people, places, and motions that are attached to, and constitutive of, the highway machine calls for further diagrams of circulation and modernity in America in terms of machinic rhetoric. |
