Factories are now like ships: They mutate strangely, masquerade, and sometimes sail away stealthily in the night in search of cheaper labor, leaving their former employees bewildered and jobless. And cargo ships now resemble buildings, giant floating warehouses shuttling back and forth between fixed points on an unrelenting schedule. Allan Sekula Freeway to China (Version 2, for Liverpool) There's no breath, There's no ventilation. 'Cause there's too much traffic. Archers of Loaf Telepathic Traffic One of the most uncanny aspects of the start of 28 Days Later is what it does to London streets. Awakening naked and bewildered amid the chaos of an abandoned hospital, the man we will come to know as Jim stumbles out into the early morning sun, only to find the city deserted. ensuing sequence confronts us with views alien to the cameras, the film frames, the monitors of CCTV: Westminster Bridge, empty except for some waste paper and a scattered cache of souvenir replicas of the Westminster Clock; a classic red double-decker on its side in Bridge Street; the brooding, claustrophobic architecture along Whitehall, free for once of the rush and press of political business; Piccadilly Circus, abandoned but for an ominous archive of missing persons posters. Major arteries in one of the world's most relentlessly congested, riotously fluid cities left vacant, made desolate--what on earth has happened to all the traffic? Soon enough, the streets come back to a kind of life, as day turns to night and the zombies focal to the plot resume their rampage. making of zombies in Danny Boyle's film begins with a laboratory accident: animal liberationists aiming to rescue captive monkeys instead manage to release the rage virus on an unexpecting public. Thus the film unfolds its premise through a grim joke about traffic: only zombie apocalypse--the apotheosis of road rage--can solve cosmopolitan congestion. But the question in 28 Days Later is not merely ironic. As vehicles for the rage virus, Boyle's zombies put contagion, and more pointedly the prospect of contagious feeling, into circulation. At stake is affective traffic, a concept and a problematic decisively consequential in biopolitical times. (It's no accident that the zombie has re-emerged in contemporary culture as a paradigmatic figure for thinking about biopolitics--see Antonio Negri's The Political Monster and Chris Harman's Zombie Capitalism but also AMC'S Walking Dead.) In 28 Days Later, the in affect not only routes events on screen; it also drives us, putting our attention to work and our affects in motion (as all cinema will; see Beller). A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid's celebrated memoir about neo-colonial Antigua, is a very different kind of text from 28 Days Later, but it too brings rage to bear on questions of movement. Furious, Kincaid's narrative persona directs her tightly wound anger at the narrative's implied reader, a touristic you oblivious to the many kinds of systemic violence that produce and maintain Antigua as an island paradise. What rage as a vehicle allows Kincaid to explore are the contradictory dynamics that structure modern mobility--not at all a common experience or shared ontology in the globalizing moment but, instead, a differential regime through which the immobilization or forced mobilization of very many enables, indeed purchases, the free flow of very few. Thus in Kincaid's treatment rage serves more as limit than conduit, interrupting so as to highlight the differentials at play within trafficking cultures. Both Boyle and Kincaid incite us to face traffic--to reckon what it can mean to move or be moved, to shift, cross, merge, trade, transact, stall, block, slow, stray, infect, break down, erupt. demands of that challenge also constitute its promise. Why traffic now? question provokes another: Where would we be without traffic? …
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Dec 27, 2010
Kati Lindström 
Open Access
