ABSTRACT
Relational event ontologies receptive to affect and the processes of experiential complexity open the way towards new conceptions of a ‘driver’ or ‘rider’ in traffic, viewed as outcomes of more primordial aesthetic influences. This chapter conceptualizes the notion of the ‘subject’ in traffic from within a more symmetrical, less anthropologically oriented perspective, drawing on Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of the ‘subject-superject,’ as both the feeler and the feelings present in the lures, mediations, and subjective aims of the Ho Chi Minh City urban traffic system, which constitute traffic experiences, and from which emerge value, meaning, and significance for traffic users. From this affective and atmospheric perspective, the profound and entangled relations between aims and purposes, and tacit skills and knowledge, embodied awarenesses, attunements, and what Dreyfus calls absorbed coping, are explored through traffic events in Ho Chi Minh City involving a range of different traffic users and vehicles.
