“Truckworld,” 1999, themepark magazine and ed. Anthony Hoete “Reader of the Aesthetic of Mobility”.

“Man’s identity is residential, and that is why the revolutionary, who has neither hearth nor home, hence neither faith nor law, epitomises the anguish of errancy … The man without home is a potential criminal”, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, 1793
“They even say there are families who drive around on these roads in their mobile homes without ever leaving”, Jean Baudrillard America, 1988
“It is more or less like living in your own house … a real mobile home”, Jack, Thurrock Services, Essex, December, 2000.
We are familiar with the zenning of the motorcycle articulated by Robert M. Prisig. There are the hymns to the muscular momentum of the train sung by the Italian Futurists with backing tracks performed by Kraftwerk. The celebration of the aeroplane emerges with lyrical energy from the notebooks of Le Corbusier and the writings of Saint-Exupery. The notion of the car emerges as simultaneously a mechanism for isolated existential agonising and for collective communication / communion is commemorated in Kerouac and condemned in Ballard. Even nautical vessels have had their enthusiasts, revealed as much in ship’s incorporation into Art Deco aesthetics and modernist architecture as in the more rudimentary boat’s persistence as a literary and cinematic device to encapsulate the purported conflict between the individual and ‘the elements’. The truck, however, does not yet seem to have acquired the elevated aura that has attached to alternative forms of transport.
This is not to say that the truck is bereft of imaginative association, rather that the associations it attracts have rarely scaled the rarefied heights to which other vehicles have ascended. In the early 70’s, numerous popular songs and films celebrated the truck as a symbol both of a certain bearded sexual liberty and of a blue collar middle-fingering to government. Yet not all explorations of trucks and trucking have conformed to an ideal of heterosexual resistance to authority, and memorable exceptions can be located. The autobiography of black science-fiction author Samuel R. Delany turns the moving rig and static trailer of the long-distance lorry into perverse spaces of spontaneous sexual encounters far removed from Kris Kristofferson’s shampooed locks. Moreover, the strange cinematic enterprises Duel and Trucks, both of which orchestrate their narratives around the pursuit of humans by apparently autonomous lorries, indicate the cultural traffic is not all travelling in the direction of a salutation of the truck.
Nevertheless, the correlation between trucks and narrowly-defined sexual and political freedom resonated through the 70’s and into its succeeding decade with sufficient volume for the UK satirical series Not the Nine O’Clock News to offer the world their song “I Like Trucking and I Like to Truck” in 1984. Indeed, this notion of trucking persisted in the regular TruckFests held throughout Europe, complete with country-rock stages and the fiercely competitive ranking of the airbrushed exteriors of lorry cabs and trailers whose designs evoke a limited repertoire of Americana imagery. Away from the world of ‘glamour trucking’, the political dimension has also been maintained with European haulage drivers — particularly French and British — drivers engaging in various demonstrations against perceived threats to their professional survival.
Having spent some time talking to truck drivers about their experiences, it becomes clear that irrespective of the coherence of any concerns relating to fuel taxation, theirs is by no means the carefree existence that the vernacular representations of trucking imply. Despite — and sometimes paradoxically because of — European Community directives that impose rigorous parameters on the working day, the truck driver’s routine is an extraordinarily arduous one. According to my interviewees, weeks when the driver is away from home from between four and five days are typical, a factor which provoked one driver to declare that this was “only really a job for loners”. The period spent travelling is one in which the drivers are prone to a variety of ailments from acute boredom, through prolonged stress to potentially serious lumbar problems (these latter inspiring the purchase of Scholl back massagers that can be connected to the cab’s cigarette lighter when the driver’s employers have not already supplied such a device). The onerous working day, which routinely extends from driving to completing paperwork and discharging responsibilities for loading and unloading stock, is exacerbated to the extent that it is conducted under the scrutiny of various forms of surveillance: the tachometer that provides a diagram of the journey’s speeds and stops and is audited externally with the results being fed back to the driver’s employers and, potentially, the transport regulators; the monitoring of various aspects of vehicle safety; and the customs police endeavouring to thwart the smuggling of goods and people that may have been surreptitiously inserted into the trailer. Should any individuals defined by the British press and government in the offensive language of ‘illegal immigrants’ actually manage to circumvent the carbon dioxide checks conducted in Calais and stow on board the truck to the UK, the driver will be liable for a £2, 000 civil penalty if he or she was unaware of their presence and criminal sanctions if he or she was. It is not, however, only the intervention of official bodies about which the drivers need to display vigilance. The value of the goods being transported (one driver I talked to regularly ran loads in excess of £250,000) meant that trucks were additionally subject to illicit attentions. “If you park up in a lay-by, you can guarantee that when you wake up in the morning your [trailer] curtains will have been cut”. That many of the contracted UK lorry-drivers I spoke with were either on or just above the national minimum wage, necessitating that their income needed to be supplemented by overtime, determined that the cumulative pressures of the job were in no way alleviated by financial compensation.
As Paul Virilio announced in The Aesthetics of Disappearance, “to go nowhere, even to ride around in a deserted quarter or in a crowded freeway, now seems natural” and it is tempting to portray the lorry driver travelling on just such a road to nowhere; to see the driver as a romantic nihilist- nomad with “neither hearth nor home” and nothing to lose. There are those who have succumbed to such a temptation and have, like Robert Harbison in Eccentric Spaces, declared that “roads progress towards the conceptual, and faster roads smooth out the scenery; borders of interstate highways are regularised, perhaps an epitome of what all roads strive for — to be nowhere, only to be going”. Yet from my perspective, such an interpretation simply does not ring true of the stories recounted to me by the drivers I encountered. Rather than travelling to nowhere, the drivers had already in a sense arrived since rather than being dislocated from domesticity, they had laboured to established a surrogate habitat within their own cabs. “It is more or less like living in your own house … a real mobile home”. The cabs I explored were replete with a variety of creature comforts — comfortable beds, fridges, televisions, CB radios, microwaves, convection cookers, blinds, wardrobes and other storage ‘cubbies’ — and were isolated from the ground by their elevation and from the environment by their powerful air-conditioning, heating and noise-reduction systems. However, although homes in almost every functional sense, the cabs were rarely ‘homely’ in the sense of exuding an individualised comfortability. Rather than being confronted by swathes of pornographic material that my condescending conscience had anticipated, the most ribald images on display involved pages of stylised lorry photographs removed from issues of Trucking International or Truck and Driver. This absence of overt customisation was explained as a regrettable consequence of my interviewees’ status as contracted employees who therefore possessed none of the decorative independence afforded the owner-drivers, who were free to ornament their vehicular space according to their own imaginations. Nevertheless, a subdued and transient personalisation was occasionally affected in the cabs: a posed photograph temporarily attached to the sun visor, a commemorative ashtray velcroed to the dashboard (and thus able to be removed upon arrival at the depot), a football scarf discretely folded on top of a spare set of overalls.
Perhaps such subtle encroachments into the sterile space of a confined compartment amount to a precursor of a future definition of ‘home’ from which our contemporary accommodation will appear redundantly baroque in comparison. For the moment, however, let us indulge in another interpretation of the truck, one that accords it the prestige other transportation has already secured and let us rework Roland Barthes’ meditations on the ship in Mythologies into a meditation on the truck. “An inclination for [trucks] always means the joy of perfectly enclosing oneself, of having at hand the greatest possible number of objects, and having at one’s disposal an absolutely infinite space. To like [trucks] is first and foremost to like a house which is absolutely perfect on account of its unremitting enclosure, and not at all to like vague voyages into the unknown: a [truck] is something that you live in rather than something that you travel in.”