ABSTRACT
This chapter puts forward the aims and goals of the book: to explore how we feel driving, rather than how we feel about driving. By way of an affective large-scale traffic event that occurred at the Hàng Xanh intersection, this chapter describes some of the dynamics and forces that characterize the traffic system of Ho Chi Minh City, suggesting the need for a phenomenological, relational, and more non-representational approach. This approach is then contextualized within the existing landscapes of traffic research, such as mobilities studies and affective urbanism, and less sociological approaches, such as those research approaches embedded in technological and algorithmic paradigms, such as computer modelling and simulations. From this perspective, the book’s investigative orientation is then outlined, namely, an attendance to the event and to the characteristic givenness of the experiential phenomenon. Finally, the book’s theoretical framework is outlined within the context of its project of the development of a metaphysics of experiential complexity.
