Suspending the belief: Active Suspension and Dant's Driver-Car
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I just finished reading an article by Tony Dant, The Driver-Car, in which he explores Latour's actor-network theory (ATN) in the realm of the automobile. I found this to be a great starting point for my final paper.
So what exactly am I writing about? Drawing from an earlier blog post, I'm going to be unpacking the use of computerized, 'active' suspension systems in formula one and the controversy that led to their subsequent banning. I'll get to some gritty details in a moment.
ATN derives from the Social Construction Of Technology tradition, which acknowledges that technological innovation is in part shaped by social conditions. There are networks, which encapsulate the human and non-human actors (latter- actants) and the social conditions which permit and shape the actors within. A car for example requires a network including roads, gas stations, gasoline! (Dant, 2004 p. 68).
Dant then understands how human actors and automobile technology must function together in a way that forms the driver-car. This is a specific collaboration where the human actor and car need one another to function, although the human can still exist autonomously, though not as a driver. The driver-car is a type of assemblage.
Another point that is compelling is Dant's discussion of the driving field. For those of you who have driving experience, there is a field by which you understand the oncoming outside world when driving. Obviously there is the ever-necessary visual field, but there's more. Consider the resonance of the engine and vibration in the pedals when it's time to shift gears. When you brake for a stop light, consider how you monitor the stoppage power through the forward inertia and the vehicle pitching forward. This all form our field for driving, very much an engagement with the vehicle in many ways. So what if certain components of this field were eliminated from the equation.
The ATN discusses delegation, where certain tasks of human actors are instead performed by a technological action. This is a form of translation according to Dant, as the objects perform particular scripts that act as intermediaries for actors (p. 70). What is the point? Active suspension basically works like this: A normal car's wheels are connected to the car through a system including a spring coil and an oil-filled shock absorber. When the wheel runs over a bump in the road, the wheel is pushed upwards to dampen the shock of the bump on the chassis and quickly springs back down (rebounds) to keep the car stable at speed. With active suspension, the springs and shocks are replaced with a hydraulic suspension system connected to a computer and monitoring equipment. It is designed to keep the car perfectly stable at all times.
Discussing active suspension and other banned for 1994 innovations. From Grand Prix Review '93 (Autosport), 1993
So how do driver's respond? Normally one would feel a bump on the road, or the car pitching during acceleration and braking, rolling as it turns a corner. The driver now loses this component of his field; the task is delegated to a computer and hydraulic system. This is inasmuch as in 1987, when a driver's rear tire began deflating, the suspension compensated for the drop in ride height on that corner of the vehicle, masking what was going wrong with the car mechanically.
From Autosport, July 30th, 1987
The technology was banned after 1993 in part of a controversy that the driver simply wasn't doing enough, well, driving. Technological innovation is governed by social forces. The social network of Formula 1 stated that drivers needed to be responsible for the car to a certain level, one that was not satisfactorily met by the current state of driver aids embedded in the vehicles. This is where I acknowledge a limitation in Dant's article: He does not seem to go into the electronic monitoring technologies that are commonplace in road vehicles, like all the gauges in the dashboard. With technology like active suspension, he does not elaborate on how this kind of delegation practice can dramatically alter the driver-car assemblage. The driver is now less attuned to what the car is action doing at high speeds. Moreover, what happened after the technology was banned. I need to research further into specifics, but there were complaints about how many 1994-spec cars were designed around active suspension systems, suddenly having to revert to a 'passive' (spring) system. Driver's were unable to adequately monitor the erratic handling of the cars that would have been compensated by the computer and were prone to crashing.
I am fascinated not merely by the presence of a socially-guided assemblage of car and driver, but how the delegation to computer changes the very essences of driving. Then, in plucking out these technologies, how is this assemblage altered again when a task for a computer system is in turn delegated to a human actor? Simply put, we cannot just replace the driver with a computer or vice-versa, the assemblage here is a much more delicate phenomenon.



