putterings 489 < 490 > 491 index
to slice through a thicket of flying as well as puttering vehicles, metropolitan dreams of liberated flows
These are the highly adaptable capacities of people who serve as vital infrastructure. A driver’s abilities to slice through a thicket of flying as well as puttering vehicles, each weaving a trajectory of its own, across roadways that change from nine lanes to one, with barely any warning or graduated approach, are no less impressive than the skills of a surgeon.
— in section “Congestion and Bypass,” Neferti X. M. Tadiar, her Remaindered Life (2022) : 103 (?)
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the above is preceded by an evocative framing of traffic (and the fantasy of frictionless flow) —
...On the ground, we see the constant stymieing of metropolitan dreams of the free and easy movement — the liberated flows — of capital life, In place of uber-urbanization’s ideas of just-in-time, anytime, every time, unimpeded velocities of productive circulation, a surfeit of conflicting aims and modes of social existence, of daily battles for a parcel of an ever-diminishing ground of life, creates this nearly impassable congestion that forces the idling of everyone’s time. All this time wasted...
p 102 (?, scroll a bit up)
a result of search for “infrastructure” + “puttering.” Modern efficient hygienic infrastructure, enabled by capital/ism, juxtaposed with the “puttering” ways of local traditional societies not yet brought into the fold, as it were.
not yet enfolded in the project
and yet they have been enfolded in that project, from its start.
Neferti X. M. Tadiar
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