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Cover of Traffic Jams

Traffic Jams

by David R. Cole

Material cultureMaterialismAutomobile travelPhilosophyTraffic congestionPetroleum industry and tradeLifeMatérialisme

This dead letter presents an exploration of the immanent materialism of Deleuze & Guattari as theorised in A Thousand Plateaus as a means to analysing everyday life. The evidence consists of art, film and objects from life that relate to and suggest the complex ways in which we are affected by traffic jams. Reciprocating substrata of everyday life build upon the unconscious, and show how the abstract turbulence of everyday life forms eddies and flows that may be followed and understood. The immanent materialism of Deleuze & Guattari is a philosophical construction that leads to the formation of ?plateaus? as they were executed in A Thousand Plateaus. The plateau of this dead letter is [21 October 2011: the Petro-Citizen] and is populated with traffic jams, car crashes, global environmental concerns and the psychological and sociological contingencies that accompany the petro-citizen. Connections between the strata that make up the plateau of the petro-citizen will deliberately be left as open-ended and speculative to show how the petro-citizen functions as a flagrant construct in everyday life, which includes the desire for petrol and explains the resulting panpsychic petro-politic

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For young readers

Book data: Open Library