From disaster to disaster

“From 1789 onwards, throughout the 19th century and the great revolutionary upheavals of the First World War, the thesis put forward by urban people was: The streets belong to the people” (Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Communication). In the 20th century, Le Corbusier’s thesis came into effect: “We must kill the street.” Streets were invaded by vehicles, and the crowds of pedestrians on the streets gradually disintegrated and evaporated. Berman compares Baudelaire’s experience of the boulevard in the city with Le Corbusier’s experience of the city on the highway. Despite being only half a century apart, the city had been radically transformed; the relational boulevard, which brought together forces ready to explode at any moment, had given way to the highway, the space of speed. “The perspective of the man in the car would give rise to the paradigms of twentieth-century modernist urban planning and design” (Berman). The vehicle-man, a part of the mega-machine who experiences the city only as images flowing from the windows of his car or on a screen, is a part of the mega-machine. The images do not touch his body, they do not create any emotion in his body, his senses are dulled.

What did Terence of Rome say? “I am human, and nothing human is foreign to me.” Even the worst things that happen to a person soon become human. We live in the worst of all possible worlds, and we quickly get used to everything. People also get used to being treated like vehicles. The rules of vehicle traffic now apply to human interactions. The ordinary act of walking, like pressing the button at a traffic light to cross the street, suddenly becomes a transaction between vehicles: “Your request has been received, please wait.” We wait for the request to be approved. The Kafkaesque feeling you experience when you have to deal with government offices is now experienced by a disembodied voice the moment you make a move to walk through the streets, which are supposed to be democratic. As bureaucracy spreads from the dark corridors of the state and takes over the streets, the metallic sounds that interrupt daily life have multiplied, and we have become accustomed to them: “Please wait!” Whenever we gather in public spaces to demand our rights, the same metallic voice is heard: “Don’t wait!”

Lucretius argued that a new world could only emerge when one of the atoms falling parallel to each other strays from its path and collides with another. However, this is not the case on the highway. Highways, like the boulevards of the past, are spaces not of relationality, but of speed. When vehicles violate their lanes and collide, conflicts of ownership emerge, not relationships. What matters on the highway is the destination, not the path or journey. To reach their destination as quickly as possible, the accelerating atoms must never come into contact with each other. Encounters on the road can prevent, or at best, delay, the goal. Capitalists transform the earth into a space of speed to dismantle the relationality of the ecosystem. How can the space of speed be transformed into a space where a yet-to-be-existing, incomplete people can emerge? The creation of another world is only possible through the blockage of the highway and the direct reunion of bodies shedding their armor. There are countless ways to block a highway.

A highway blockage is often the result of a natural disaster . Or it can be artificial, as when the 1990s direct action group Reclaiming The Streets blocked a highway and transformed it into a carnival plaza. In any case, a highway blockage is called a disaster. Highways are avenues of control. They are not bodies roaming freely on highways, but data. Highways are built for the accumulation, proliferation, and dissemination of information. “Information is precisely a system of control… a system of control of the imperative sentences in force within a given society” (Deleuze). A highway blockage can be a disaster for power because it disrupts control, but it can also create the conditions of existence, of embodiment, for a people who do not yet exist. When a highway is blocked, a community is built as bodies touch each other. But it doesn't last long. As soon as they hear the news of the highway's opening, the bonds between them evaporate, and they rush to their vehicles and speed away from each other. We can only see each other from disaster to disaster. The disaster must be made permanent.