<nettime> Backseat Driver

[Jordan Crandall via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

That old Fleetwood her family once had, it seemed inseparable from the arrangement of the household, the order of its relations, the means of its clarity. Riding in the back was always her preference in those days, and when she imagines her parents it is always from that position, their heads silhouetted against the curve of the road before them, the landscape flashing past. 

It was easy to manage a back-seat spot at first. There were usually more than two family members riding in the car, each of whom preferred to ride up front. If there were other people involved she would linger among the group until the front passenger seat was filled, then hop in the rear.  

She took great care to conceal her preference from her siblings, especially her stealthy rival, her chimeric twin, who was quick to pick up on such proclivities and find subtle ways of foiling them.  

These efforts were unsuccessful. Her devious twin had contrived a stratagem, a maneuver that involved hopping into the front passenger seat and then, under the pretense of having forgotten something, exiting the front row and slipping into the back at the very moment that she was preparing to enter it from the opposite side. Thereby forcing her, last one out, to take the vacated spot.  

When she would glance back through the side-view mirror on these occasions -- covertly, so as to not lend any sense that the battle had been lost -- she would find her devious rival engaged in an impersonation of her so uncanny it seemed rehearsed. Infused with an undercurrent of self-gratification that tormented her all the more.  

She developed countermoves. As the car raced at high speed down the highway, she would quietly push the power button on her armrest to lower her side window, and through this very subtle act, so small and inconspicuous that she could pretend not to notice it at all, let loose a punishing airstream that blew away the artifice and sent her rival's hair lashing out in all directions, like tongues of flame from a gaseous orb.  

A thunderous force was now hers to command through the simple manipulation of a switch.

Over the roar of the current came a howl that would implore her to stop, a voice no longer characterized by its typical equivocation but singularly urgent and precise, its bearer convulsed in a form that seemed at once less and more than its image, identifiable on the outside yet riddled with an excess that was difficult to pin down, reduce to a perspective, resolve to the force of a singular being.

Why struggle for position, she came to realize, when you could reorient the field of play, modify the dynamics through which the position is formed. Orchestrate a choreography of displacement, a means of shuttling between the front and the back.

The stratagems engineered by her devious twin began to assume a higher level of sophistication as time wore on, especially on the longer trips to unfamiliar places, which happened all the time because of their father's frequent need to move between jobs, or having a job that required him to move frequently, whichever it was. Hidden motivations were to be unearthed, the unspoken and often unconscious desires and aversions that fueled the behavior of others, in ways that accommodated contradictions rather than resolved them with uniformity.

For her, these pursuits were best carried out in the background where they ran without notice, invisible as a choreography yet also very real, tangible as a vehicle that you enter and ride with, inhabit and write with, disembark from and return to again. 




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