ABSTRACT
The chapter by Andrew Dawson examines driving a car as a practice that facilitates and mirrors states of consciousness, enabling the driver to wrest control over, work upon and refigure senses of being. This is in marked contrast to the way in which, within current ‘automobilities scholarship’, a Marxian narrative still dominates, car driving being seen as engendering a controlled body, a de-individualised subject-position. Critiquing such a narrative, the chapter charts the frequent drives undertaken by Dawson in the company of Mira Celić between Tuzla and Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, portraying the personal relationalities between driving, consciousness and being. Through driving, it appears, Mira Celić purposively resists current collectivising political projects of ethnic-nationalism, escaping into a more comforting world of both privacy and Yugoslavism. In cars, people are ethnically un-differentiable beings who share the phenomenology of driving and the choreography of traffic. The being or self that Mira Celić inhabits while driving her car cannot properly be regarded as an outcome of ideological interpellation, the chapter urges, nor as an aspect of an actor-network that determines that self's assembling. Rather, as different states of consciousness manifest themselves in different stages of her journeying, Celić works out who she is and who she wants to be and gets to feel ‘well’ again in post-war Yugoslavia. Her car is her private sanctuary, and the roads, landscapes and day-scapes she traverses while driving provide Mira Celić with a reminder of her existential power.
