ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a putatively recent phenomenon that has an unexpectedly peculiar relation to the car. It describes instances of how the phenomenon of road rage is, to use Bruno Latour’s phrase, ‘purified’. The chapter considers a number of discourses that have appeared in the media and that have attempted to contextualize road rage historically, cross-culturally or micro-socially. It suggests that there are places where people do grasp and overtly articulate, albeit in partial and fragmentary ways, the role of the car in road rage. Another set of comparisons again contextualize road rage, this time in relation to different forms of rage. The chapter examines a number of ways in which, in accounting for road rage, the hybridity of cars and persons is at once assumed and filtered through modernist dichotomizing or purifying discourses in which the human emerges as the explanation of road rage.
