Cars are celebrated as the technical and symbolic epitome of modernity but are also heavily implicated in the making of climate change, imbricated within a seemingly all-powerful global capitalist system. What can an anthropological analysis of traffic in urban areas tell us about the enduring strength of this system? While cars in Beirut are both desired and necessary to move about, strong feelings of frustration are taking shape among residents and commuters who face the ever-congested roads of the capital city daily. This mounting frustration indexes an emerging ‘structure of feeling’ towards everyday automobility that has created explicit and concrete desire for alternative mobilities, particularly public transport, which scholars of automobility had pronounced dead. In this light, while cars remain objects of desire, in Beirut as elsewhere, an ‘excess’ of automobility – of modernity, we might say – is in fact weakening the dominance of cars, exposing a potential brittleness previously undetected. Acknowledging this process forces us to reconsider our modernist assumptions about the inevitable predominance of cars and offers hope for alternative mobility futures.

中文翻译：

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现代性的“过度”：世俗的流动性、政治和城市的改造

汽车被誉为现代性的技术和象征性缩影，但也与气候变化密切相关，与看似无所不能的全球资本主义体系密不可分。对城市交通的人类学分析能告诉我们什么关于这个系统的持久力量？虽然贝鲁特的汽车既需要也需要移动，但每天面对首都日益拥挤的道路的居民和通勤者正在形成强烈的挫败感。这种日益增加的挫败感表明了一种对日常汽车的新兴“感觉结构”，这种结构已经对替代交通产生了明确而具体的渴望，尤其是公共交通，汽车学者已经宣布这种结构已经死亡。在这种情况下，虽然汽车仍然是欲望的对象，但在贝鲁特和其他地方，汽车的“过剩”——我们可以说是现代性——实际上正在削弱汽车的主导地位，暴露出一种以前未被发现的潜在脆弱性。承认这一过程迫使我们重新考虑我们关于汽车不可避免的主导地位的现代主义假设，并为替代移动未来提供希望。