ABSTRACT
With a title inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s ‘What is an event?’ the character of traffic event/objects is further explored as affective atmospheres, and temporalities and spatialities that amalgamate both new and old patterns of practices, materiality, affordances, and are infused with eternal objects ingressed into concrete actualities. The complex concrete processes and events, which constitute the experience referred to by the abstraction ‘car’ or the phrase ‘driving a car,’ as well as the more abstract, timeless, and eternal ideal of ‘car,’ are increasingly influential in the traffic system in Ho Chi Minh City. As a fluid outcome of the past and the future, occurring within a traffic system that is profoundly dynamic and paradigmatically in transition, the abstraction ‘car’ is viewed as a blackbox, a gathering of complexities that, in Vietnam, merge the existing patterns of motorcycles, bicycles, and even river transport.
