Environmental affects: NASCAR, place and white American cultural citizenship

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Environmental affects: NASCAR, place and white American cultural citizenship Rebecca R. Scott

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Department of Sociology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA Version of record first published: 04 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Rebecca R. Scott (2013): Environmental affects: NASCAR, place and white American cultural citizenship, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, DOI:10.1080/13504630.2012.753342 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2012.753342

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Social Identities, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2012.753342

Environmental affects: NASCAR, place and white American cultural citizenship Rebecca R. Scott* Department of Sociology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

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(Received 14 October 2011; final version received 13 November 2012) What are the cultural logics linking anti-environmentalism with social conservatism and pro-corporate politics? An investigation of NASCAR (the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) reveals the ways in which this sport embodies a relatively common American structure of feeling and corporeal relation to nature. Industrialization and neoliberal globalization have attenuated place-based identities, ecological affordances and subsistence strategies. As an expression of white American cultural citizenship, NASCAR manages this economic and ecological insecurity through a rearticulation of patriarchal familial commodity consumption and mobility. The evacuation of residual meanings and practices tied to specific ecologies makes the heteronormative nuclear family the privileged site for the type of consumption that signifies national belonging. An expectation of mobility underlines this detached consumption and also constitutes an appropriation of national territory. NASCAR thus represents a genre of American cultural citizenship that is implicated in the cultural politics of environmental protection and other public goods. Keywords: environment; affect; whiteness; place; automobility; NASCAR There’s not much that’s postmodern or postindustrial about a stock-car race. (Wright, 2002, p. 278)

Although global environmental crisis is arguably a defining characteristic of our time, a dualistic understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature in Western culture often obscures how this crisis is linked to our everyday lives. Nonetheless, especially since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, ‘the environment’ has become a site of cultural politics. A backlash against environmental protections and renewable energy has been articulated with a political discourse of ‘reclaiming’ conservative American cultural citizenship that also opposes social programs, civil rights protections and higher taxes for corporations (Condon, 2011; McNulty, 2011; Reynolds, 2010). For example, Tea Party members (constitutional ‘originalists’ who identify with Revolutionary War patriots) are more likely than other Americans to regard climate science suspiciously. What are the cultural logics at work behind the linking of anti-environmentalism, anti-social welfare and pro-corporate politics? Undoubtedly, big coal and oil producers work hard to frame the discussion in terms of jobs versus the environment. Fossil fuels are embedded in *Email: [email protected] # 2013 Taylor & Francis

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economic structures in the United States, so this framing looks like common sense. But fossil fuels also afford a number of embodied affects characteristic of white American cultural citizenship. The effectiveness of this framing may stem as much from these attachments as from economic logic. As expressed by a Tea Party member, ‘They’re trying to use global warming against the people . . . It takes away our liberty’ (Broder, 2010). The environment referenced in the title reflects not the usual targets of conservation such as national parks, but the terrain of everyday life, specifically concerning those embodied practices that constitute our interactions with the world. This redefinition of the environment as being where ‘‘we live, work, play, and worship’’ forces us to consider the connections between our bodies, everyday practices, and environmental destruction (Stein, 2004, p. 1). This relentlessly contextualized environmentalism reveals the spatial organization of the humannature relation, in the sense of placemaking, place identity, and the cultural meaning of places, implicating relations between humans as well as with nonhuman nature (Scott, 2010, p. 216). Accordingly, this article investigates the articulations between speed, brands, and homogenized, abstract imaginations of space, which characterize a specific American structure of feeling (Williams, 1977) where automobility and familial consumption in a national field of play is experienced as ‘our liberty.’ Considering the material world through the lens of affordance enables an understanding of how culture literally takes place in the interaction between bodies, other matter, and space (Carolan, 2009; Gibson, 1986). For example, far from being merely incidental, something as ordinary as wearing shoes and walking on pavements where our steps leave no trace is implicated in the sense of detachment from nature that characterizes Western cultural forms. Furthermore, this shoe-based detachment was historically valorized as a sign of European superiority (Ingold, 2004). Similarly, the car is an affordance, a literal vehicle of consumerism, wedding mobility to consumption and to a version of freedom. A 2010 television commercial for Dodge relies on and deploys this logic. In a field, a line of British Redcoats from the Revolutionary War prepares to fire their muskets when ‘patriots’ in tricorn hats driving Dodge Challengers swerve into the scene. The cars skid to a halt, scattering the Redcoats, and the voiceover comments, ‘America got two things right: cars and freedom’ (Dodge, 2010). The productive non-rationality of the commercial signals an excess of affective signification resting in the characters, the landscape, and the cars. Here, affect underlines the practical consciousness of bodies in place–that is, located in nature and the built environment
in order to think about the ways that practice produces meaning at the same time as it is materially enacted in relationship to other bodies and space. Thus the signs (logos) and the material pollution that characterize our time are the products of ‘the same soiling gesture’ of appropriation (Serres, 2011, p. 41). In other words, the guise of self-ownership that constructs the ‘boundedness’ of liberal embodiment is an iteration of the appropriation of the American continent by European settlers (Cherniavsky, 2006, p. xxii; Harris, 1993). Although historically ‘white,’ its whiteness does not essentially derive from some characteristic of ‘white’ bodies. Rather, it represents a form of possessive individualism, originally reserved for white male bodies, and only partially and conditionally granted to others, which has historically formed the basis for liberal citizenship in the United States (Cherniavsky, 2006, p. xv). The self-possession of this liberal subject is constructed

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against the dispossession and objectification of other people and non-human nature (Plumwood, 1993). Challenged by multicultural redefinitions of national identity, often based on alternative understandings of place (e.g. Aztla´n), whiteness has been central to the reactionary project of cultural citizenship that claims to represent the ‘real’ America (Bebout, 2012). Whether it is understood as the fetish of white southern ‘rednecks’ or as a sport with general appeal, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) represents the aesthetics of white American cultural citizenship. Its ‘we’re cultural citizens too’ claim to white particularity may reflect the crisis of the liberal subject in light of the increasingly widespread insecurity of neoliberal globalization and the growing environmental crisis of late fossil fuel society (Cherniavsky, 2006, p. 40; Miller, 2007; Urry, 2011). The charisma of NASCAR helps manage economic and environmental insecurity through a rearticulation of white southern cultural forms and a reappropriation of national territory, linking free-market fundamentalism, anti-labor politics, and a decreasing investment in public goods (including environmental protection, civil rights, and reproductive freedom) to whiteness (Maclean, 2008; Moreton, 2009; Newman & Giardina, 2011, p. 117). My argument draws on a number of popular texts making claims about NASCAR, primarily Fixin’ to git: One fan’s love affair with NASCAR’s Winston Cup, by Jim Wright, NASCAR† For dummies†, by NASCAR driver Mark Martin with Beth Tuschak, NASCAR nation: A history of stock car racing in the United States, by Scott Beekman, One helluva ride: How NASCAR swept the nation, by Liz Clarke, ‘Southern culture on the skids: Racetracks, rebels, and the decline of NASCAR,’ by Ben Austin in Harper’s Magazine, and several scholarly works by NASCAR fans and critics. I also reference research I conducted on another project, when I was struck by
but unable to fully analyze at the time
the seemingly naturalized articulations between trucks, rural white American cultural citizenship and an objectifying orientation to nature. Each of the popular texts I examine takes on the task of explaining NASCAR to uncomprehending outsiders in ways that typify representations of the sport. By exploring these claims and their trajectories, I intend to evoke the affective reverberations between NASCAR’s white-coded American cultural citizenship and the corporeal regimes that shape the normative American relationship to nature. Hence each section is an approach to the question from a different direction, shifting between a consideration of place, corporate logos, fossil fuels and American identity, in an effort to trace the buried linkages that connect divergent social categories and practices (Sandoval, 2000). A word on NASCAR and nature What does feeling American have to do with the environment? To the extent that the ‘NASCAR nation’ represents a politically effective zeitgeist (Derbyshire, 2003), it seems worth exploring the question of how this fossil-fuel heavy motor sport resonates with everyday ways of relating to nature. The human/nature dualism that structures most Western accounts of society reflects longstanding biases in Western culture that lead to the conceptual exclusion of everyday life, cultural forms, and some human bodies from ‘nature’ (Latour, 1993; Plumwood, 1993). Rather than an objective field external to human social organization, I am considering nature as

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something we ‘do,’ a category co-produced through embodied practices taking place in space, including consumption. The logics of these ‘corporeal regimes’ are not normally the subject of conscious thought, but are reflected in the built environment, bodily hexis, and commonsense statements such as ‘nature needs to be protected’ (Bourdieu, 1998; Carolan 2009, pp. 3, 8). For example, air conditioning in such places as museums has contributed to an ‘uncanny sense of stasis’ in which the museum’s contents are decontextualized and eternalized, while signs of embodiment such as perspiration are ‘unsightly’ (Hitchings & Lee, 2008, pp. 252, 261). NASCAR is one of the most highly commercialized sport leagues in the United States, if not the world. Beyond a strictly political economic reading of corporate domination, however, what is there to say about the logo-saturated visual field of NASCAR? Why, rather than protesting this brand saturation, do NASCAR fans have a reputation for being loyal consumers of the brands that sponsor their favorite teams (Levin, Beasley, & Gamble, 2004)? NASCAR’s affective comfort with the brand, culminating in a brand-driven fandom, where a fan might even follow the brand rather than the driver (Wright, 2002, pp. 234
237), reveals something about the productive convergences between motorized power, the American imagination of space, and a notion of freedom identical with commodity consumption. NASCAR distills some of the most extreme elements of American neoliberalism (Newman & Giardina, 2011). It can also be read as a radical demonstration of ‘White American cultural nationalism’ (Kusz, 2007). Here, however, I am more interested in unpacking the banality of NASCAR, its imbrication with the ordinary acts of ‘self abstraction,’ from body and nature, upon which liberal personhood is constructed (Berlant, 2008, p. 114). Jim Wright’s remark quoted in the epigraph suggests that NASCAR represents something quaintly traditional. But rather than representing a holdover from the past, patriarchal ‘family values’ and racial hierarchies are intrinsic to the economic forms that characterize twenty-first century globalization, where the processes of life are commodified and ‘value is produced by modulating affect’ (Cherniavsky, 2006, p. 40; Clough, 2007, p. 19; Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 364). As Wright points out, the popularity of NASCAR ‘reveals a nation becoming more like the South, not the South becoming more like the rest of the nation,’ a state of affairs that ‘beg[s] for some sort of explanation’ (2002, p. 31). Cars produce a bewildering array of affects ranging from delight to boredom to terror. The speed they permit is a generative echo of both the ‘speeding up’ and ‘flattening out’ sensation of modern life. Speed homogenizes space, and is itself a commodity, and in this homogenizing landscape, branded commodity consumption is increasingly a key site for the performance of intimacy and identity. A focus on domestic economies makes consumption part of a sanctified and strengthened patriarchal family, while actually existing ‘property’ is increasingly impossible, in the sense of dwelling in relationship with the ecological affordances of a given place (LaDuke, 2005, p. 184). As the Earth approaches its ecological limits, property ownership becomes less a sign of liberal personhood than a privilege of capital. In this context, corporate logos replace actual ‘property’ (usufruct rights in land, for instance) as the means of prosthetic embodiment and participation in the nation (Berlant, 2008; Serres, 2011, p. 66). Familial consumption feels like self-sufficiency and reaffirms the heteronormative nuclear family as a basis for stability in the midst of environmental, economic, and cultural insecurity (Moreton, 2009, p. 279). This cultural citizenship is ideologically enacted within an abstract (voided) territory

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through these branded technologies of the self in a manner that simultaneously constitutes a gesture of imperial appropriation (Braun, 2007, p. 25). In other words, when the extraction, processing and consumption of fossil fuels endanger place-specific ecological practices, the question is not of ‘jobs versus the environment’ but rather different ‘natures’ constituted by differing corporeal regimes. The jobs-versus-environment formula is the effect of a set of corporeal practices based on dualisms of human/nature and mind/body (Carolan, 2009). Never as abstract as the category ‘economic’ makes it sound, the commodity system works through the affective structures of gender and race (among other things) to shape the way we understand place, subsistence and privacy (Gaard, 2004). This can also be theorized in terms of two contrasting ways of thinking about place
first, place understood as a materially extant relation, co-produced through local affordances and cultural practices, and secondly, place understood in terms of abstract, national space in which commodities are naturalized as livelihood (Lafebvre, 1991; Scott, 2010, p. 99). Automobility and place ‘Cars embody, express and enable all the great American values: freedom . . . mobility, independence, self-sufficiency, status, leisure, control, speed, mastery, sensuality, affluence, power’ (Wright, 2002, p. 33). How does the materiality of cars contribute to the production and performance of these concepts? Quite clearly fossil fuels have enabled a degree of technological control over non-human nature, the maximization of productivity, urbanization and population growth, and the creation of leisure time and mass consumption (Sovacool, 2009). The seemingly endless supply of oil in the early twentieth century also afforded an imagined future of unlimited economic and technological expansion (Mitchell, 2009). These connections are materialized in the practices of everyday life. For instance, while doing fieldwork on another project in West Virginia in 2008, I heard many stories about high gas prices, which were above $4 a gallon in some places. This was experienced as an unwarranted hardship, and people’s comments often reflected the American sense of entitlement to cheap mobility (Huber, 2009). One remarked that remaining in an unpleasant job to keep up payments on one of these highly popular large pickup trucks
as well as to fill it with gas (to get to work)
represented on a larger scale a cycle of indebtedness similar to the company store system from early coal mining days. Nonetheless, the trucks seem to be worth it; they represent something important enough for people to make rather large sacrifices in order to own one, and owning one signifies power, legitimacy or success, even belonging to an imagined fraternity of providers (Vavrus, 2007). Perhaps the common use in rural America of the official sounding ‘vehicle’ to refer to one’s personal automobile demonstrates the importance of cars and trucks to people’s identities. People made comments such as, ‘He’s done well; he’s got a truck in the garage,’ or as one proudly told me ‘I keep my wife in a new vehicle, and she never has breakdowns’ (Scott, 2010, p. 74). Around the same time I noticed that many vehicles sported a sticker with the number of their owner’s favorite NASCAR driver. For example, a number 3 identifies the driver as a fan of Dale Earnhardt, Sr., ‘the Intimidator,’ who died in a crash during the Daytona 500 in 2001. Number 88 signifies Dale, Jr., his son. Truck culture is articulated with the cultures of other motorized sports as well, ranging from four

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wheeling, to dirt biking and motorized fishing, in addition to racing. Besides the obvious connections to fossil fuel consumption, motor sports represent an embodied affective disposition that is taken for granted in everyday life. First, these are spectacular sports that emphasize speed as a pleasure, often in terms of a way of relating to space and nature. In addition, as noted, they operate within a visual field saturated with brand logos. These two characteristics suggest how everyday American nature/culture is animated by fossil fuels. Speed was integral to modernism, as novels, movies and roller coasters incited people to speed, and trained people in the mental and physical dispositions to enjoy speed (Duffy, 2009). Indeed, the physical sensation of speed is a significant new disposition of modernity; as Jim Wright put it, ‘the faster I go the freer I feel’ (Wright, 2002, p. 33). Meanwhile, Hollywood has promoted an American frontierlike imagination of space in which fixed, static places lose prestige, and pleasure, security and desire become located in motion through the symbolically empty landscape (Barnes, 2010; Duffy, 2009). Motorized speed necessarily affords an ability to lay claim to space, as it allows the sufficiently privileged driver entry (theoretically) to any part of the American continent. Importantly, this mobility and claim to territory is symbolically white and has historically been a white privilege (Barnes, 2010; Braun, 2003). In these representations the speeding car signifies American progress, the taming of the wilderness, where the white masculine subject traveling through the empty but spectacular landscape lives the American dream (Urry, 2000, p. 62). In this imagination of space, slowness is ‘the new horror’ (Duffy, 2009, p. 67). Static spaces and situations become increasingly linked to backwardness and to the abject, while security is increasingly seen as a pipe dream, but more likely to be found in motion than in the old family home (p. 69). In this way, the car enables the requirement of mobility for the neoliberal subject, a form of commodified embodiment ‘where to be inaccessible, or unattractive, to capital is to . . . await extinction’ (Cherniavsky, 2006, p. 41). The severing of citizenship from place has environmental consequences. At the same time as stasis was increasingly read as abjection, the car became the ultimate commodity fetish in American culture
the experience of driving and riding in a car is part of its magic and its appeal. On a physical level, the driver’s body must be simultaneously hyper-alert and relaxed, reclining in a mobile easy chair, rocketing through space. The hybridity of the driver-car prosthetically expands the driver’s body into the shape and size of the car while insulating him or her from the elements and from unwanted publicity (Dant, 2004; Urry, 2006). Duffy remarks that driving recreates in real space and time the experience of consuming images in film. As an inherently ‘heterotopic look,’ the driver’s gaze through the windshield of the car others the passing scenery (Duffy, 2009, p. 164). This gaze produces an understanding of nature as spectacle, where the car insulates the driver from the environment it passes through, and ‘sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures, and smells’ are reduced to a two dimensional view (Urry, 2000, p. 63). The car is a technology of modernity’s visual epistemology as it educates the body in observation without participation, and generates a heightened state of alertness that simultaneously decreases attention to particularities and detail. At the same time as exterior reality is flattened by the view from inside the car, places are homogenized; speed demands conformity for easy access, and historical or idiosyncratic features of the landscape

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are reduced to glyphs on highway signs, signaling consumption opportunities (Auge´, 1995, p. 96). Auge´ argues that ‘non-places’ (hotels, airports, highways) are void of meaning and identity, relationships and history, and are characterized only by simple economic exchange. To an extent, this formulation echoes the two versions of place mentioned above. However, the relationships that are characteristic of commercial encounters are not meaningless, rather, they are saturated with affect (Moreton, 2009; Stewart, 2007). The appellation ‘non-place’ underlines a lack of groundedness in place-based identities, as Auge´ points out (i.e. cultural, traditional or familial ties), but it also signals the lack of ecological groundedness afforded by mobility. At the same time, non-place is marked by the need to demonstrate ‘one’s innocence’ (Auge´, 1995, p. 102). Acts of commodity consumption or selling labor are inherently meaningful because they construct the individual’s relation to the space, as well as demonstrating one’s right to inhabit the space. Automobility has contributed to the division of space into the gendered zones of work and home, production and consumption, and to the geographic dispersal of families and social networks, increasing people’s dependence on cars (Urry, 2006). What this means in everyday American middle-class life is that more and more often, interactions follow the logic of the non-place, rather than the place. More and more interactions with other people, material cultures, and nature, are simplified to reflect a relatively unified purpose: traveling to work, working, procuring food, experiencing entertainment, getting some fresh air. Many of these activities take place in locations devoted to the purpose, where other potential encounters or relationships are marginalized or avoidable. This alteration of social life cannot occur without altering ‘nature,’ or that sense of the material world we make through practice. Traditional forms of ‘women’s work’ such as childcare and food preparation have been very much place and community dependent, firmly located in ecological processes. This ‘hidden, invisible and cyclically forgotten labor’ that has long constituted the rationale for the association between women and nature has increasingly been taken over by business models and commodity forms. Although correlated with greater freedom for women, this increasing commodification of formerly non-commodity forms of ‘women’s work,’ is also an effect of the increasing flexibility and disposability of labor, requiring more people to work longer for lower wages with less job security (Schor, 1991; Staples, 2007, p. 132). This increasing flexibility necessarily increases the sense of detachment from specific ecological settings. The field of required automobility encompasses the territory of the nation; between 1995 and 2000, about half of all Americans moved at least once (Chen & Rosenthal, 2008). An instrumentalist understanding of geographic migration reflects the common-sense notion of American space as a kind of abstract commodity (Lafebvre, 1991). Here, one place is exchangeable for another, based on quantifiable characteristics. On the popular lists of best places to live, places as dissimilar as Eden Prairie, Minnesota and Columbia, Maryland are compared and ranked according to mostly quantitative measures of ‘housing affordability, school quality, arts and leisure, safety, health care, diversity, and several ease-of-living criteria’ (Money Magazine, 2010a; 2010b). In this type of representation, national space is imagined as a free field for the movement of labor and capital.

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The right of a member of the labor force to move around in national space to maximize market opportunities (and the expectation of such) is an increasingly important, racially inflected, element of US citizenship (Johnson, 2011). The performance of this national abstract space evacuates everyday life of specificity
the non-commodity meanings, ecological practices and relationships that make sense of places
in both positive and negative ways. It can certainly be liberating to leave a small town where community pressures are an oppressive force. Yet mobility among mostly abstract places, places that compete to attract businesses and labor on the basis of quantifiable characteristics, also represents a ‘spreading precarity,’ a deepening ‘condition of dependency’ (Berlant, 2011, p. 192). As an environmental relation, migration requires intensive consumption, and makes non-commodity forms like interdependent social networks, barter, gardening, or other DIY practices difficult or expensive. This evacuation of residual meaning and ecological context from everyday life also transforms the resources available for forging identities; relationships and commodities become a more significant element of identity formation. Through this displacement of ecological place-based forms of social reciprocity, the affective registers of heteronormative nuclear family life become the privileged location of this citizenship through consumption (Berlant, 2011, p. 222; Probyn, 1998). Environmental affects ‘We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world’ (Deleuze, 1992, p. 6). When we come back to the logo-saturated visual field of NASCAR, it is clear that brand logos are not experienced as an inessential add-on to the sport, but are actually rather central to the NASCAR experience. Fans respect corporate sponsors as the patriarchs of the ‘NASCAR family,’ who make it all possible (Wright, 2002, p. 36). And in light of the growing dominance of a few big teams, Wright remarks that often, there is ‘a race within a race,’ as loyalists to Home Depot can watch their car compete against their corporate rival, Lowe’s, with the ‘personalities’ of the brands making the racing more interesting (pp. 236, 237). The emotional tenor of these references to loyalty, family, and competition signal the articulations between the spectacle of NASCAR and the practices and affective dispositions of everyday domesticity. Rather than a simply social relation, domesticity based on the heteronormative nuclear family is a way of thinking about the corporeal engagement of the selfpossessed liberal subject with nature. Environmental justice perspectives elucidate the ways in which domestic arrangements shape our relation to nature through the breadwinner/caretaker family structure, middle-class norms of privacy, hygiene and consumption, and the ideal of the independent individual, among other things (Gaard, 2004; Scott, 2010). Conversely, the naturalization of these cultural forms ‘is achieved in part through historically and geographically specific relationships with nature’ (Loftus, 2012, p. 104). For example, traditionally male-dominated industries such as mining have helped construct the modern family though the institution of the company town, which isolates nuclear family units and enforces unequal gender dynamics (Gibson-Graham, 1996). Part of the appeal of stock car racing, according to Wright, is that the cars look like ordinary cars (Wright, 2002, p. 34). The NASCAR race takes an extremely

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ordinary experience, and accelerates and amplifies it into the extraordinary. This would be impossible if driving or riding in a car were not already a potentially exciting, pleasurable, experience. Wright notes that most drivers have pushed a curve a little too fast, and have experienced that thrill of risk that speeding entails. In the NASCAR race, ‘That fearful sensation of being on the brink of a disaster is something racers must confront every corner of every lap’ (p. 102). Like ordinary driving, a stock car race appears on the surface to consist of relatively boring, repetitive action. But the soporific effect of the engine noise and the repetition is checked by the inherent risk and the constant possibility of a crash. NASCAR amplifies the risk, technicity and pleasure of everyday driving to the extreme, and allows audiences to experience this power vicariously, through the Doppler-altered noise and the vibrating roar of the engines that drown out all other sounds at a NASCAR race. NASCAR also lends its charisma to the ordinary driving modern American life demands. Wrapped up as it is in masculinity, excitement and power, the car-centered spectacle of the NASCAR race does appear to represent something ‘so damned American’ (p. 25, emphasis in original). It is worth considering, then, the everyday experience of driving and what it entails. As noted, the ‘driver-car,’ or the machine-human hybrid that the car becomes in action is a kind of commodified body (Dant, 2004). Gendered logics further naturalize this hybrid embodiment. The desire for speed exemplified by NASCAR is only an exaggeration of the competitive (masculine-coded) need to get somewhere ‘quicker than the next guy’ (Wright, 2002, p. 33). Here, driving is an expression of a purportedly essential connection between power, technology and masculinity. Yet the car is not only an extension of the powerful (masculine-coded) body, but also of (feminine-coded) private domestic space and mothering. The car is instrumental in taking care of a family. In suburban, rural or small town life it features prominently in routines like shuttling the kids around, buying groceries and the like; the car has become ‘part of good mothering’ (Descartes, Kottak, & Kelly, 2007, p. 169). Through these gendered valences the car is integral to modern American domesticity. The routines of automobility, as well as the new mobilities that it entails, in the increasing division of space, keep this imaginary middle-class suburb-dweller at work and in her car longer, leaving her with less time for feeding her family, for cleaning her house, and for other domestic tasks. This increases the hectic pace of everyday life, especially for mothers who remain primarily responsible for childcare and other domestic work, particularly in middle-class families (Craig, 2006; Wall & Arnold, 2007). So while she picks up fast food from a drive-thru, in her grocery sacks will be snacks conveniently packaged to be eaten in the car, pre-peeled, cubed frozen potatoes for a quick mash, or perhaps a bag of frozen meat and vegetables to put into the crock-pot in a nostalgic iteration of her own mother’s previous adaptation to working outside the home. These convenience foods sit next to a sack of disposable toilet wipes, which are faster and easier than a cumbersome brush, disposable floor wipes, that save getting out a mop and filling a bucket with water, and innumerable other time saving commodities that promise to help a busy parent tenuously keep it together. The proliferation of commodities offers convenience and speed, but also love, normalcy and personhood (Berlant, 2008, p. 114; Cherniavsky 2006). Too busy to pack a lunch? Not to worry, because Lunchables are popular and the kids at school will recognize that brand name. Too busy to make cookies? Your child will feel just as loved with a perforated sheet of pre-made Toll House cookie dough.

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This increasingly hectic automotive domesticity reflects and enforces an abstraction from place and ecological processes. Accordingly, it is in this proliferation of corn syrup, plastics, disposables, and chemicals that the saturation of everyday life with fossil fuels and petro-chemicals is most taken for granted. This spectacle of commodities, mirrored in ‘vivid colors’ that are an important element of NASCAR’s ‘visceral appeal,’ (Reed quoted in Wright, 2002, p. 241) articulates American consumption patterns with modernity and freedom. The precarity of neoliberal life is a crisis for the self-possessed subject of liberalism, who is less and less able to rely on ecological affordances or actually existing property for survival. In this context, commodities signal personhood and safety. The piles of merchandise available in the racing teams’ stores set up around the track turn into a vast ‘end of season clearance sale’ when the championship series is over; indeed, hyperconsumption is a integral part of the NASCAR experience (Newman & Giardina, 2011, p. 76; Wright, 2002, p. 259). And when the Blue Angels fly overhead at a 4th of July NASCAR race, the logo-saturated visual field, in which one season’s STP sponsorship can be supplanted the next by Betty Crocker, becomes truly significant. ‘For a fleeting instant, you remember the legions of servicemen and
women whose sacrifices have kept this land free’ (Wright, 2002, p. 25). In this case, the military power of the United States is affectively linked to the abundance of commodities that signify freedom; the pleasure of purchasing fan merchandise is identified with familial brands and with the charismatic masculine power of the F-16s and racecars. The more covert effects of this kind of massive spectacle, such as discouraging dissent and asserting right through might, are barely noticeable under the cornucopia of branded goods. Hence, NASCAR doesn’t only amplify the experience of driving to the extreme, but it also reiterates this experience’s articulation with familial consumption, identifying on a visceral level the pleasure of speed with the type of embodiment the proliferation of branded commodities enable, and these with conservative social values (Newman and Giardina, 2011, p. 133). Nationally branded commodities promise homogeneity and standardized quality, and enable the abstraction of everyday practices from place and body (Berlant, 2008, p. 114). Like the race that is animated by the imminent ‘viewer attracting’ crash (Beekman, 2010, p. 111), these commodities are always already trash, awaiting disposal (somewhere) and replacement (by something). Within the abstract national territory, place is also a brand that is only as worthy as its latest value (Henderson, 2011; Serres, 2011). Commodified and disposable, the materials of everyday life are essentially the same anywhere, permitting a performance of national belonging and similarity in which everyday tasks are detached from the specificity of place, ecology and community, and centered on the heteronormative nuclear family. Similarly NASCAR’s national sponsorships abstract away from local places, local tastes and local products to center on the national. National sponsorship enabled the sport’s expansion into new markets, and also expanded the fan base nationally (Wright, 2002, pp. 228
236). At the same time, the identification of the sport with national brands such as Nabisco, Home Depot and Viagra inserts the corporate-dominated motorized spectacle of speed into the material details of everyday American life, further normalizing the consumption of branded commodities as livelihood. Today attendance is down at races and NASCAR may have overreached itself (Austin, 2010). However, the NASCAR brand, imagery and

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celebrity drivers have become ordinary, making the logo-saturated visual field less remarkable and arguably more acceptable in other arenas.

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Neoliberal nature This article was sparked by my wondering about the prevalence of brand logos in NASCAR. Sometimes these brands make sense, like STP, Quaker State, or Valvoline. But others seem a bit ridiculous in the context of the auto race
Viagra, Nabisco or Betty Crocker, for instance. In their proliferation, the logos become disconnected from the products they represent and simply signify the money of sponsorship. In an abstract national space in which place-based communities are endangered and devalued, commodity consumption becomes integral to personal identity; this is part of what enables the saturation of the public sphere with the logo, whose charisma animates otherwise meaningless objects (Klein, 2000). This brand saturation is amplified in NASCAR, where drivers’ bodies, vehicles and speech all serve to publicize their sponsors while maintaining their own personal brand (Clarke, 2008, p. 92). There is (seemingly) no possibility of embarrassment on the part of aging NASCAR driver Mark Martin, when he coolly reports in NASCAR† For Dummies† that he is now sponsored by Viagra. The money and logo are all that really matter; he is lucky to have a sponsor (Martin & Tuschak, 2005, p. 25). Neoliberal identity formations increasingly hinge on relationships with corporations and other non-national entities, such as churches (Moreton, 2009, p. 268). The role of the state in protecting the public interest is diminished in favor of the privatization of all resources, including human (Cherniavsky, 2006, p. 26). The complexities of political, social, and environmental justice are elided in favor of narrowly framed economic liberty (Di Leonardo, 2008, pp. 6, 7). Wages, which are the proximate source for all good things in this system, become a stand-in for the productive power of nature, clean water, air, and other naturally occurring useful things. This is why, for example, when offshore drilling for oil, fracking for natural gas, or mountaintop removal coal mining is threatened by environmental regulation, industry supporters and workers say things like ‘I love the environment but my family has to eat.’ Even if the wage doesn’t require the literal destruction of the environment, it often requires relocating, which as discussed earlier diminishes access to ecological resources such as forest products, gardens, and local knowledges that have historically helped people withstand economic insecurity (Pudup, 1990). As one West Virginian environmental activist put it, discussing ‘the logical product of neoliberalism,’ mountaintop removal mining, ‘Mountaineers are always free, and that’s because they can live on the mountains . . . if this economy failed today, people could live. But not if they destroy the mountains’ (McNeil, 2011, p. 2; activist quoted in Scott, 2010, p. 124). But the market discipline of the commodity economy is also deeply involved in the performance of subjectivity, pleasure, love and responsibility, as commodities teach us about the proper forms of family life and romantic love (Miller, 2007, p. 7). In this social formation, the privacy and physical mobility offered by the car is simply the first commodity among thousands. When a baby’s first sounds are engine noises, it signifies the beginning of a lifelong love for the car-commodity (Clarke, 2008, p. 55). The visual field of NASCAR, saturated as it is with the logos of familiar commodities, represents less an advertisement for particular items than a celebration

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of the market itself, which signifies freedom, as well as the commodified embodiment that is a key element of the cultural citizenship it represents. This ‘fetishism of consumption’ happens in a heteronormative, white-coded space that identifies the patriarchal family with the ‘NASCAR family’ (Williams & Connell, 2010, p. 368; Wright, 2002, p. 36). The seamless repetition of motorized speed, logo, and family form naturalizes the familial citizen-consumer as the ultimate expression of a neoliberal relationship to nature (Moreton, 2009; Newman, 2007; Probyn, 1998). Neoliberalism extends the condition of ‘nature’ in Western modernity (valueless unless owned) to the liberal subject. Non-commodity choices are hard to read as rational decisions in the US context so dominated by consumer culture. Despite the traditional centrality of independent family farms to the American cultural imagination, off-the-grid ways of life are typically understood as evidence of insanity or poverty by the mainstream, rather than viable alternatives. Water provides an example. As a naturally occurring resource, water has traditionally been freely available, affording inhabitation of a place, either via surface access or a well. Fossil fuel extraction and other industrial activity have largely eliminated this possibility in the US, in some cases ruining aquifers that had been in use for centuries (LaDuke, 2005; Scott, 2010). Hence, relying on well water is increasingly read as a sign of poverty, rather than ‘independence,’ and water distributed in plastic bottles represents safety and normalcy (Wilk, 2006). Despite the reigning framing of freedom as having choice between options, not choosing
or refusing commodities
is less and less feasible. Dominant forms of subjectivity depend so thoroughly on commodity consumption that a minimal level is necessary to maintain personal dignity and that appearance of directed willfulness that stands for personhood (Williams, 1991, p. 219). What is most disturbing is that the dependence of the commodity system on fossil fuel extraction reinforces the market discipline of mandatory commodity consumption. When naturally occurring useful things (i.e. land, water, sea life) are destroyed through the production of fossil fuels, people are forced into a deeper dependency on the market to provide necessities like clean water, food, and safety (Szasz, 2008). At the same time, exploitative economic relationships and branded commodity consumption carry familial and patriarchal affective valences that make them meaningful and charismatic (Moreton, 2009; Retort Collective, 2005). NASCAR once again provides an exaggerated metaphor for this state of affairs. Noting its inherent American-ness, Jim Wright heralds NASCAR as a most democratic sport (2002, p. 38). But NASCAR is actually a highly hierarchical organization, run by the France family, dictatorial and adamantly anti-union from the beginning (Beekman, 2010, p. 72). The drivers are ‘self-made men’ but depend on their corporate sponsors to survive in the sport (Wright, 2002, p. 241). Because ‘speed costs money’ NASCAR is more accurately described as a millionaire’s sport (p. 232). African American and women drivers have been excluded in large part through the withholding of corporate support (Clarke, 2008, pp. 235, 239). Dale Earnhardt, Sr., possibly the most famous NASCAR driver of all, owned his ‘persona,’ but not his car. Even his aggressive personality became a wealth producing resource for NASCAR and his corporate sponsors (pp. 92, 93). Wright notes that NASCAR’s association with ‘campers, hunters and outdoor sportsmen (and women) of all sorts’ makes it seem like an ‘everyman’ kind of sport (Wright, 2002, p. 158). The RV campgrounds set up around a NASCAR race are

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‘[villages] reminiscent of small town life elsewhere in America’ (p. 237). This reference to elsewhere (nowhere) enlivens the experience through nostalgia for an ideal community. But a typical racing weekend costs between $400
$500, and the price can go up with the inclusion of extras such as a scanner for listening to the teams’ communication, or a ‘pit pass’ that allows fans access to the backstage areas of the race. The pit pass is one element of NASCAR that marks its athletes as extraordinarily ‘accessible,’ yet this access is itself a commodity (p. 38). Not only do the races, transportation and lodging cost money, but, Wright suggests, no selfrespecting NASCAR fan would show up at a race without the proper gear. For example, the norm for Jeff Gordon fans (in 2002) was to wear only clothes purchased that season (p. 251). Like the rest of corporate America, NASCAR is increasingly dominated by a few large teams, but the simulated ‘mini-competitions’ between brand rivals still give the fans something to get excited about (p. 237). Of course most fans, those who can’t afford tickets, transportation, lodging or gear, are even more detached, and watch from home on TV. This is why I disagree with Wright when he comments, ‘there’s not much that’s postmodern or postindustrial about a stock-car race’ (p. 278). To the contrary, NASCAR’s hierarchical commodity culture appears to be a distillation of some of the most marked characteristics of contemporary American life. NASCAR’s spectacle represents an exaggerated version of the severing of the possessive individual from his ecological context by means of commodification; the hyperreal rurality of the race supersedes nature and community at the same time as it mines the rural south for charisma (Newman & Giardina, 2011, p. 82). NASCAR’s celebrity drivers are not only commodified as athletes, but they also bear excessive commodification through the corporate logos of sponsorship. Their exaggerated white southern cultural citizenship is perhaps a way of managing the disintegration of the liberal white subject (Cherniavsky, 2006, p. 108)

Places, brands and the environment Interestingly the identification of NASCAR with the white south is a bone of contention in some accounts of the sport. Where critics see NASCAR as a neoliberal spectacle of mostly-rural ‘white cultural nationalism’ (Kusz, 2007; Newman, 2007) fans of the sport are more likely to call this association a ‘stereotype’ (Hugenberg & Hugenberg, 2008, p. 637) or to link the sport’s association with white southern culture to a ‘Yankee hiatus’ (Wright, 2002, p. 223). Wright downplays the displays of white southern culture, such as the Confederate flag, at NASCAR events (p. 83). Similarly, Hugenberg and Hugenberg don’t even mention the presence of Confederate imagery, and instead argue that NASCAR exemplifies (generic) American values of all kinds, not only macho ones like individualism, hard work, self-reliance, patriotism and faith, but also ‘feminine’ values such as cooperation (Hugenberg & Hugenberg, 2008, p. 248). At the peak of NASCAR’s national popularity, around 2006, NASCAR dads and the NASCAR nation of George W. Bush were nonetheless relatively easy to target as a ‘reactionary white racial project ’(Kusz, 2007, p. 77). As Kusz argues, NASCAR claims to be racially neutral, but it is actually structured by race, as the race tracks provided a de facto white-only space in the post-civil rights south (Beekman, 2010, p. 76). For its defenders, however, NASCAR (like America) is

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not essentially racist but rather ‘haunted’ by the stereotype of racial exclusivity (Hugenberg & Hugenberg, 2008, p. 637; Wright, 2002, p. 55). Despite these protestations, representations of the regional subculture of the rural white south are undeniably a large part of the NASCAR experience. Even without reference to the actual south, these signs of southern culture animate NASCAR, giving substance to many of the values it is said to represent. For example, much of NASCAR culture seems animated by a powerful nostalgia for by-gone drivers and races, past glories and feats of daring, in a seeming iteration of southern culture itself (Austin, 2010, p. 64). Driver Richard Petty, known as ‘the King,’ was ‘equal parts Andy Griffith and Elvis Presley’ (Clarke, 2008, p. 43). However, while the loyalty to the patriarchal heroes exemplified by the NASCAR fandom gains meaning through its articulation with the tropes of white southern masculinity, in practice this loyalty is applied abstractly to the sponsoring corporations that make the races possible (Vavrus, 2007). Similarly, NASCAR-speak is characterized by folksy masculinist metaphors or macho regional idioms like ‘if it ain’t rubbin’ it ain’t racin’,’ and ‘fixin’ to git.’ Sometimes these idiosyncrasies are overtly mean-spirited in their assertion of white southern regional hetero-masculinity, as in the group that called itself Fans Against Gordon, because as a Californian, Jeff Gordon was seen as an outsider (Wright, 2002, p. 155). Sometimes the hetero-masculinist subtext is slightly more subtle, as when Wright himself comments that some of the women at a NASCAR race look like they’ve been ‘rode hard and put away wet’ (p. 53) The presence of female fans and a few female drivers is said to make the sport ‘not sexist’ (p. 79) but the commonplace ‘Gentlemen start your engines’ or ‘Gentlemen, let’s get it on,’ as well as the newer ‘Boys, have at it’ (Austin, 2010, p. 60) indicate a particular kind of competition, based on a particular subject whose cultural context is distinctly white, masculine-centric, southern and rural. This southern white content and context is understood to be in tension with the national ambitions of NASCAR, as evidenced by the protestations of supporters who minimize the association (Wright, 2002; Hugenberg & Hugenberg, 2008). Accordingly, currently NASCAR seems to have overreached, abandoned its southern ‘roots’ and hit its maximum growth (Austin, 2010, p. 62). Perhaps the problem is that in so far as the NASCAR brand carries the place-meanings of southern white patriarchy, it is a charismatic brand with the ability to gain loyalty in a national context. Yet the more of a national project NASCAR becomes, with race tracks in California, New York, and other places, the less meaningful the brand becomes and the more obvious the instrumentality of its corporate sponsors. This tension between the marginality and centrality of places in the making of American culture is characteristic of the affective relationship to place and nature that I’ve been describing. The popularity of place-based brands like L.L. Bean or Ocean Pacific expresses this contradiction perfectly. Specific places and ecologies (minimally, the representations of such) make up the substantive content of American national identity (much as the independent white homesteader was thought to be the ideal citizen), while American cultural ideals and the exigencies of the neoliberal economy require these places to be left behind. The same tension is echoed in Walmart’s gendered corporate structure, where the low-wage hourly employees (often women) represent the hometown face of the company, adding affective value to outsourced globalized production, while the managers and executives (often men) must be willing

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to relocate at a moment’s notice (Moreton, 2009, p. 56). This racialized and gendered evocation and displacement of ‘home’ is a distinctively American structure of feeling, and the car has become central to the performance of this national disposition. Oh there’s no place like home for the holidays, ‘Cause no matter how far away you roam, If you want to be happy in a million ways, For the holidays, You can’t beat home, sweet home.

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Take a bus, take a train Go and hop an aeroplane Put the wife and kiddies in the family car For the pleasure that you bring When you make that doorbell ring No trip could be too far I met a man who lives in Tennessee, He was headin’ for, Pennsylvania, and some homemade pumpkin pie. From Pennsylvania, folks are travelin’ Down to Dixie’s sunny shore, From Atlantic to Pacific, Gee, the traffic is terrific. (THERE IS NO PLACE LIKE) HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS Words and Music by Al Stillman and Robert Allen Copyright # 1954 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

The evocation and displacement of place in the American national imagination stems from an impossible expectation of mobility, a requirement to transcend place, nature, and bodily entanglements. However imaginary, this call to displacement in American national culture leads to a ‘haunting’ by the old homeplace (Gordon, 1997). The nostalgia for homeplace erupts in several ways. One of these is the now naturalized connection between holidays and travel; it is a commonplace that airports and roadways will be crushed with travelers during major national holidays, as ‘everyone’ heads ‘home’ for the holidays. Another way this haunting takes place is the use of this nostalgia in branding and marketing. Like NASCAR, many brands play on place-attachments and place-meanings that evoke images of historical places, times and subjectivities (Hinrichs, 1996; Van Ham, 2002). National citizenship is a prosthetic body that expands the citizen-subject to potentially fill the space evoked by the song ‘Home for the Holidays’ in a similar way as the driver-car prosthetically expands the body (Berlant, 2008; Dant, 2004). The drivercar both performs and demonstrates this ownership: ‘from Atlantic to Pacific, gee the traffic is terrific.’ The over-loud performance of this genre of citizenship destroys ecological resources, impacts human health and happiness and makes alternative or traditional place-based subsistence practices legible only as a new form of cultural capital or as abjection. Increasingly, participation in the economy demands our ability to imagine inhabiting any national place or space without attachment to any. The genre of cultural citizenship exemplified by NASCAR manages this condition of precarity

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through an articulation with the same affective dispositions of white-supremacist heteropatriarchy that justified the colonization of the American continent. A stock-car race can therefore be considered an amplification of certain everyday affects that resonate with American corporeal practices, white patriarchal family values and spatial imaginaries. The extraction, processing and consumption of fossil fuels endanger many of the place-based subsistence practices that have constituted particular forms of American culture. The global material flows fossil fuels enable threaten the self-possession of the liberal subject. But the mobility and consumer choice they make both possible and necessary represent a structure of feeling that is characteristic of white American cultural citizenship, in which the patriarchal nuclear family form endows market exchanges with affect and meaning. These morallytinged consumption practices iterate the linkage between corporate power, automobility and white claims to the American continent. Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Patty K. Allen and Music Sales Corporation for permission to use the lyrics from (There Is No Place Like) Home for the Holidays.

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