7. Apparatuses of the Anthropocene.

In the literature on globalisation, the automobile is rarely mentioned, even though its specific
nature of domination is more systemic and threatening in its implications than what are usually
considered constitutive technologies of globalisation, such as cinema, television and the computer.
The key is not the car as such, but the system of these fluid connections. Automobility creates a
restructuring of time and space, which in turn creates the need for ever more cars. This works on a
combination of flexibility and coercion. Automobilism has irreversibly introduced social forms of
commuting, and the flexibility of the automobile has encouraged the making of more journeys.
Automobility is a source of freedom. Cars expand the possibilities of where they can go at any
given time, and therefore what they can literally do. The objective time of the modernist railway
order is replaced by a personalised subjective time.

In mythic language, the earth was known as the mother of the law. It has a triple root of law and
justice. The first is a fertile land to itself that allows for growth and harvest. The second is
the land that is cultivated and worked by human hands. It has fixed lines by which it can be
divided, to define fields, pastures, and forests. At this level, the norms and rules of human
cultivation of the land become discernible. The third is the solid land defined by fences,
boundaries, walls, and houses. Then the orders and orientations of human social life become
apparent. The sea lacks this apparent unity of space. The sea is free

What is the ontology of what is called automobilism? The ontology has always been political. And
scientific research is the ontology of politics. Ontological realism, by contrast, presupposes the
existence of an independent, already existing "reality" that is intact, not inscribed in worldly
practices. Ontology is not a word for being, or a mode of existence, but rather refers to a
discourse (logos) about the nature of being. Ontos, then, means precisely being, mode of being, or
mode of existence. Ontocracy refers to the form of government through which political power is
exercised in which power is directed toward the governance of being. That is, determining what is
real and what is not real. The ontosphere of automobility represents spatiality in terms of the
governance of being. A spatiality that is constituted through the routine violence of automobility,
which is also a consequence of dromocratic speed. That is, speed in a sphere where dangerous speed
is permitted. The ontosphere of automobility is a space of exception for violence. It is slow
because it is dispersed in space and time, causing environmental damage. It is epistemic because it
suppresses and hides identities, histories and knowledge. Violence within the ontosphere of
automobility is not a means to an end that can justify it, but a constitutive feature of a
spatially visible political and social order.

- Urry, John. 2004. “The ‘system’ of automobility.” Theory, Culture & Society 21: 25-39.

- Schmitt, Carl. 2006. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum
Europaeum. London: Telos. Part I, Chapter 1, (pages 42-49).

- Braun, Robert, and Richard Randell. 2023. “The Political Ontology of Automobility.” Mobility
Humanities 2(1): 07-22. https://doi.org/10.23090/MH.2022.07.1.2.007