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Working-Class Aesthetics and the Transgressive Chronotope of Demolition Derby
Billy Williams
Abstract
In order to understand the deployment of aesthetic experience within a working-class performance, this paper draws on ethnographic field research with participants and fans of demolition derby competitions in two regions of Arkansas. It attempts what Arnold Berleant calls a ‘social aesthetic,’ to discover within semiotic evidence foreclosures of identity that challenge orthodox rationality through an aesthetic parodying of driving and automobility. The paper uses the term ‘material integrity’ to describe how participants and fans of demolition derby understand authorized top-down opinions and the economic dynamics in which they participate. The multiplication of potential vectors of mobility within the frame of the derby arena simultaneously creates an aesthetic experience of mass and motion that transgresses the presumed elite, rational order of roads and their limited modes of productivity. As a ground-up spectacle and performance, demolition derby reveals the value of material integrity as an integral aspect of working-class identity.
Key Words
chronotope; critical ethnography; demolition derby; material integrity; social aesthetic; working-class aesthetics; working-class identity
1. Demolition derby as aesthetic experience
In what follows, I am interested in a working-class performance—locally staged demolition derbies—and the rhetorical uses they may have for participants and spectators. Demolition derby is best understood as an example of Dewey’s “aesthetic experience,” a dynamic process between subject and object with the goal of “recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living.”[1] According to Dewey, an aesthetic experience reveals the possibility of meaning by moving toward a closure, “an ending since it ceases only when the energies active in it have done their proper work.” However, he goes on, “this closure of a circuit of energy is the opposite of arrest, of stasis.”[2] His imagery of energy and circuits could be literally applied to describing the aesthetic experience of demolition derby. He even insists that “the intelligent mechanic engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his materials and tools with genuine affection, is artistically engaged.”[3] Though perhaps a bit romantic, this description of someone engaged aesthetically resembles the participants, especially the crews of mechanics, in demolition derby that I interviewed and observed during two years of local competition in two regions in Arkansas. After an ethnographic immersion in demolition derby communities, I found the specifically aesthetic aspects of the spectacle narrate a version of working-class identity, particularly a conspicuous rejection of elite rationality.
Rather than an innocent, derby-for-derby’s-sake aesthetic event, the locally produced performances embody meanings, or at least the field for certain limited meanings. Spectators and performers arrive in commuter cars to share in the aesthetic demolition of similar commuter cars. Simple object lessons might be drawn from the spectacle, such as you can still drive a car that’s dragging its own trunk assembly. However, I am more interested in what Berleant calls “the foundational significance and social uses of aesthetic perception.”[4] Rather than focusing merely on the cars as aesthetic objects, demolition derby invites participation in what Berleant calls aesthetic “contexts.” The “discovery” context allows “perceptual qualities and experienced meanings [to be] the center of attention.”[5] As I’ll explain, participants discover a perceptual pleasure in the sounds and sights and smells of collisions. In addition, a derby almost literally aligns with Berleant’s description of the “continuity” context of an aesthetic engagement: “the divisions and separations that we impose on experience to help us grasp and control it melt into continuities.”[6] There are no stop signs or traffic lanes in the derby arena. I want to understand the power relations and social conditions that this social aesthetic experience reveals.
To discover more about this aesthetic experience, I immersed myself in the culture of demolition derby performance in Springdale, in a distinct region called Northwest Arkansas, and White County, Arkansas. I attended these demolition derbies with longtime fans and spent time in the pit area talking to drivers and their crews and families, and observing their repertoires of behavior. I arranged longer interviews at their homes and places of work, where I asked them questions about their experiences in demolition derby and its place in the culture of their lives.[7] These interviews were expansive, often much longer than I had intended, as everyone was eager to talk about demolition derby. I would ask to talk for a half hour and the conversation would continue for an hour or more. One conversation went on for four hours, beer cans piling around our lawn chairs under summer shade trees. These conversations were about much more than smashing cars. They opened up vistas into the local foreclosure of identity and adaptation of more globally produced representations of working-class subjectivity, such as the yeoman pioneer and the “hillbilly.”
Demolition derby is an aesthetic experience traditionally as the performance is framed as a spectacle. The event is staged within specifically prepared arenas of compacted dirt, with earthen berms reinforced with railroad ties. There is a public address system and broadcast music. The derby is organized into frames of action called heats; in several preliminary heats, drivers try to survive and continue to the finals heat to compete for prize winnings. Once a car’s mobility is debilitated, it is out of competition; however, there is often a consolation heat for any driver whose team can successfully repair the car’s mobility. Dramatic personas emerge as drivers are recognized from previous derbies or from previous heats. Some personas are intentionally expressed by design choices, such as painted messages and symbols, and images and sawblade roof fins. On the hood of a young woman’s pink derby car that she called “Daisy,” a crudely spray-painted hand displayed a raised middle finger. She claimed its crude rendering was to disguise it as a flower if officials objected to its vulgarity. On the trunk deck were the letters “WFO.” During our interview, when I asked her what WFO stood for, she sheepishly looked at her father for permission. He delicately interrupted and answered for her, “wide f’in open.” Despite being fifteen years old and therefore unlicensed for the road, she was driving in her first derby to express an identity that I shall develop below, an identity of contempt for abstract rationalism.
In addition to the folk decorations of the cars, the cars are physically adapted to perform in the spectacle. The only required adaptations are the removal of the glass and the welding of the doors. An important aspect of the culture of demolition derby seems to be the idea that competing requires no special expertise or skill; however, all of the participants that I interviewed spoke of “building” their cars for the competition. All of my consultants had made material changes to their cars to perform the stylized movements of the arena, rather than the orderly movements for which they were originally designed. Some adaptations were invisible, such as welding the spider gears of a differential to give a car posi-traction drive. Others, though, were visible, such as the use of industrial gas-fracking pipes for roll bars. The most common and especially spectacular modification is the directing of the combustion chamber exhaust from the manifold straight up through the hood of the car. Without mufflers, the cars are extremely loud, with occasional bursts of unconsumed fuel flaring from the stacks. The cars are built for their aesthetic impression even more than for competitive advantages. In fact, one of the most contentious topics among derby drivers and fans is professional team driving.[8] Northwest Arkansas drivers perceived the White County drivers as more “professional” and organized into teams; “the big boys,” one driver called them. The White County drivers were aware of this prejudice and resented it, though I admit their investment into competitive advantage was greater than in Northwest Arkansas.[9] “We ain’t in it to lose,” one White County driver maintained. Even he, though, admitted that he and his friends all painted their cars the same black and yellow scheme. “They know it’s us,” he joked about the cars’ apian colors. “We’re gonna sting ya.” Despite their practical claims, even the “big boys” were interested in putting on a good show.
Unlike other aesthetic performances, though, demolition derby is distinctive in important ways. First, it is intentionally produced by nonprofessional aesthetic practitioners. There is an almost militant commitment to local production of the spectacle. In both Northwest Arkansas and White County, the organizer was an employee of the city or county, and all of the sponsorship was provided by local businesses. Second, the experience incorporates both distant and proximate senses; The cars are seen and heard, of course, but smell, taste, and even touch can be engaged when the chemical processes of the cars are opened within competition. Burning gas, steam, and smoke can drift into the spectators’ space. Last, and most important to my discussion below, demolition derby is characterized by organic choreography, as the cars move in space deformed by other moving and immobile cars. Mass and motion are combined into a kind of kinetic sculpture, with multiple simultaneous movements within the frame. Because of this distinction, the spectacle encourages a gestalt perception of the experience. When asked about attempts in the past to televise demolition derby, an attempt to commodify like NASCAR, one driver pointed out that it would never work. Sounding like an aestheticist commenting on the tyranny of the rational gaze, he claimed, “I want to watch what I want to watch, not what you want to show me.” The camera cannot frame the energy of the derby arena into rational narratable segments; it must be experienced live.
An important aspect of demolition derby’s representations both in its foreclosure of identities and in its aesthetic and affective productivity is a conspicuous rejection of elite rationality. Put simply, drivers and fans enjoy the fact that the intentional colliding of automobiles does not make sense; it’s crazy. In one of the few analyses of the spectacle, Susan Falls gives drivers and audiences credit that they are aware of “the joy of being contrary.” She goes on to say—rightly, I think—“people’s lives are transformed in small but significant ways as a result of participation.”[10] My conversations with drivers and fans revealed a “joy of being contrary,” a joy that transcends their participation in demolition derby. The question, though, is contrary to what? The arena is an aesthetic space of flux and flow, not of mere anomie but of potential. As such, it opposes the very epistemic foundations of Western enlightenment embodied in the rationality of the road. “Rednecks” and “hillbillies” read order differently.
2. The road and abstract rationality
Bakhtin steals the term ‘chronotope,’ literally meaning time space, from mathematics and physics, but he applies it “almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely)” to describe the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.”[11] He explains how notions of the relation between space and time and the body had changed from the ancient to the Enlightenment, especially from a body closed spatially and temporally to a body opened up, sometimes literally. I am using the term to think about the ways that dominant epistemic assumptions become manifest in the administration of space and time, in the road and traffic, for example. By road chronotope, I mean to invoke the concrete space-time administration of the official road and traffic laws. In this way, the road is not merely a metaphor for abstract rationality; rather, it is a particularly concrete metonym (perhaps asphalt metonym). Roads, especially modern roads, are not natural paths of exchange and wandering; they are planned according to rational administration. Roads attempt to draw in the consciousness of drivers the very self-control that the Enlightenment intends overall.
Michel Foucault reveals how the Enlightenment episteme is characterized by its historical ordering of nature into hierarchical categories. Arbitrary arrests of nature, according to Foucault, are leveraged as modes of historical power. The Enlightenment ordering of nature is a polemical discourse. Foucault even uses the imagery of streets and roads in summarizing this Enlightenment episteme: “The entire system of grids which analyzed the sequence of representations (a thin temporal series unfolding in men’s minds), arresting its movement, fragmenting it, spreading it out and redistributing it in a permanent table, all these distinctions created by words and discourse, characters and classification, equivalences and exchange.”[12] These grids, though, were actually trying to create and maintain an order and exert power over the human subjects that traffic them. The built environment’s grid of streets became the chronotope of rationality. The ultimate goal of this grid, according to Foucault, is to exert power over the self without the need of overt physical violence. Famously using Bentham’s penitential space of the panopticon, Foucault explains, “there is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints.” Instead, he continues, “an inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself.”[13] This interiorized gaze works because of people’s fear of the opinions of others, but—as I shall explain below—drivers and fans of demolition derby do not care about being judged by outside “elites.”
Following Foucault, Cotton Seiler reveals how automobility has been involved in the creation of specific modes of individualism throughout the twentieth century. Using the language of Foucault’s teacher Althusser, Seiler describes the roads as the product of an apparatus: “The driving subject moves along grooves created, surveyed, and administered by that apparatus, and is also legible to it through the various modes of enumeration—driver’s licensing and insurance, for example—connected to the nation-state and corporate capitalism.”[14] Indeed, for most of us, our first interaction with the authority of the nation-state was going to the local revenue office or DMV for our first license. An act that we read as liberating actually registered us as a legitimate subject to the state. Rather than focusing on the car, Seiler analyzes the meanings of driving itself, especially self-control. As driving became more legitimate and legislated, a license to drive required an ability to control the machinery of the automobile; driving became, Seiler claims, “a fosterer of self-control.”[15] He argues that the establishment of the interstate highway system was an ideological strategy of the Eisenhower administration to provide evidence of the freedom that individuals in the United States could exercise. This freedom was only apparent, though, as the system also “obscured their function as disciplinary structures through which the cold war state…’made possible’ the autonomous individuals it required (original emphasis).”[16] The built environment of midcentury America articulates the gaze of Bentham’s eighteenth-century panopticon.
In Northwest Arkansas especially, the development of the chronotope of rational mobility has transformed the landscape. Beginning in the 1980s, wide, blacktop lanes were laid just west of Fayetteville, Springdale, and Rogers, cutting through bucolic cow pastures and spanning idyllic creeks. Initially a by-pass, Interstate 49 now cuts through the Boston Mountains south of Fayetteville. According to the Interstate 49 Coalition website, it will “create a comprehensive transportation grid that will enhance the movement of food, goods, energy, and people to and from anywhere in mid-America and the rest of the world.”[17] Like the building of state highways in the 1960s that paved the escape of isolated hillbillies to the bean fields, orchards, vineyards, and canneries of Springdale and Rogers, Interstate 49 allows flows of global capital through Northwest Arkansas. The increasing traffic and diversity that all of my consultants noted are a direct result of federal and state highway policy, policies that benefitted the Northwest Arkansas “big three” corporations. J.B. Hunt, a trucking company, obviously benefitted from the improved infrastructure. Though Walmart is ostensibly a retailer and Tyson a chicken processor, their real innovations and the secrets to their successes are the former’s ability to transport the products of cheap, off-shore labor and the latter’s ability to transport the products of cheap, imported labor. All of this productivity, which traffics capital through the area that my informant Dale called “a stupid amount,” flows along an international grid of highways, the chronotope for Enlightenment rationality.
When I asked Ralph, a driver with more than forty years of demolition derby experience, how he normally drives on the streets, he smiled and replied, “I have noticed sometimes when I’m backing out of a parking space”—at this point, his family, all derby drivers themselves, began laughing sympathetically—“I swear to God, I wanna just floor that thing and take out about ten cars in the other row.” Instead of evidence of built-up frustration with traffic, Ralph went on to explain, “And not because they’ve done anything or I’m not upset, I mean, it’s just the way it is. It’s weird that you feel that way.” His phrase, “just the way it is,” describes a kind of demolition derby consciousness distinct from the road chronotope. Ralph’s son, Rendell, added, “Coming down Olive Street [that leads from Interstate 49 to their neighborhood], it goes from four lanes down to three.” He is describing the very limitations on freedom that roads in general exert. “And I always think,” he went on, “that dumbass in the right lane’s going to cut over, and I’m always prepared as soon as he does, I’m going to curve into him and take him out, you know [more sympathetic laughter around the table]. Hadn’t had the opportunity to do it yet, but if it happens in my truck, it’s going to happen.” “You definitely get the urge,” his brother Lonnie put in, “to just kinda push people out of the way.”
What they are describing is the deployment of demolition derby driving skills in the context of the road. The line between the arena and the road is perforated not by impulses of aggression but by the intentional deployment of a different consciousness of automobility. “I have felt like that too,” Ralph contributed. “You see somebody that looks like they’re going to do something stupid, you just get prepared for it, and I’m not an idiot. I know it’s not going to hurt me and [it will] scare the shit out of him, I bet.” Though none of them had ever done it, it seems they all had fantasized about turning the road into the arena, not out of frustration but as an expression of greater control of an automobile. Ralph knows how to “scare the shit” out of drivers without demolition derby driving skills. His grandson Dennis explicitly explained the skill that distinguishes derby drivers: “knowing how it feels to get hit.” While for most of us collisions are unfamiliar and repulsive, derby drivers embody the material flow of matter and machines, letting it carry them along. Rendell’s brother Lonnie claimed proudly, “You just know how to do things in a car, such as sideways. It prepares you for craziness.” Despite the best-laid plans of the Enlightenment reformers, craziness or a lack of order persists in the flows of matter and experience. The distinct consciousness of the demolition derby arena affects their conformity, at least in fantasy and confidence, to the rules of the road, the chronotope of rationality.
Such transgressive automobility also recalls the aesthetics of the “WFO” graffiti on a young women’s pink “Daisy” car. Remember, the letters stand for “wide f’in’ open.” Debbie had driven in her first derby, in Springdale, even before receiving her fully legitimate driving license. When I asked her and her father how she drives on the roads, I expected her to demur. While he complimented her as “actually a very, very good driver,” he admitted, “Every once in a while, she wants to get that, get foot happy.” As evidence, she added, “Last week, I decided not to stop at a stop sign. I just like kinda Dukes of Hazzarded around it.” Her neologism using the title of the CBS television series as a verb reveals her model for automobility, the law-flaunting “good ol’ boys” and their Confederate battle-flag bearing stock car. Importantly, though, Bo and Luke Duke fled the pursuit of authority, Rosco P. Coltrane, through an undeveloped rural space where the gaze of authority is thin. “Good thing it was on a back road,” Debbie admitted. Her father Nelson feared, though, that the gaze was increasing. “Where we live at,” he explained, “the state troopers, they got to where they’d sit up there at the gas station, because people, everybody [would ignore the stop signs].” The authority of the county and state traffic patrols is concomitant with the grid of roads and highways that divide up the rural White County space. Nelson explained that grid: “You got Highway 157 that, you know, turns right there, and Highway 385 that comes into it, and then the other way is just a little ol’ back roads. If you’re going north on 385 to 157, you don’t see nobody sittin’ there. To get on to 157, you just cruise through it. They [county and state patrols] got to where they’d just sit right there.” Rather than insisting his daughter obey the official regulation of the intersecting roads, Nelson seemed to be warning her of the policed grid of a reactionary authority. The self-control expected by the Enlightenment reformers and the twentieth-century engineers of automobility has not been fully interiorized by Debbie and her father. Their experience in the demolition derby arena seems to have something to do with that subversive driving consciousness. The potential vectors of the arena leak into the circumscribed space of the road.
3. The arena: “WFO”
If the regulated road is the chronotope for Enlightenment rationality, then the demolition derby arena is a chronotope of transgression. The action of the arena moves across boundaries, particularly those grids that characterize rational highway design specifically and the Enlightenment episteme generally. Outside the berms of the arena frame, space is circumscribed into rational vectors that not only divide space into private productivity (home, school, factory, mall, and, if you don’t productively fit into those spaces, the prison or hospital) but also divide human time into those limited productive activities and social relations. Inside the berm, on the other hand, after the countdown that begins the derby, potential vectors infinitely multiply. This potentiality of pathways is what makes demolition derby driving different from driving on the road. With so much potential, strategies of rational control lose their expediency. As Debbie put it, “It’s nothing like you think from them stands.” Instead of a rational plan of attack and defense, drivers must negotiate irrational affect spontaneously arising out of the experience. “Once you get hit,” Debbie explained, “you get mad.”
Demolition derby has enough of a history for traditions of what can be called meta-aspects that can improve chances of success. Though some self-nominated “professional”[18] promoters allow significantly altered cars, armored with extra sheet metal and reinforced frames, to compete against each other, the only allowable armoring technique at local derbies is called creasing, a process of hammering curved body metal into denser angles. The aesthetic consequences of this technique are the reverberating peals of sledgehammers in the pit area and the less recognizable models of the cars. A ’72 Impala looks different when its curves are hammered out. A facility in repairing automobile mechanisms is the most valuable meta-skill, as cars disabled in preliminary rounds can be repaired to compete in a consolation round. The winner of the consols continues to the finals round with the other prelim winners. Though usually not visible to the spectators, as this repair goes on during other preliminary rounds, the organic activity of the crews can be impressive and demonstrates what Nadine Hubbs identifies as “working-class communication,” in which “the group optimizes its cognitive powers by relying on group thought processes and implicit, non-verbal exchange.”[19] No one seems to be in charge assessing the needs or directing the actions of the workers. Everyone seems just to know what to do. This acuity, which is an extension of working-class skills, seems to justify the lack of rules and enforcement. Some drivers are known for their abilities to recover from a preliminary loss to get into the finals, where the prize winnings, usually for the top three finishers, can be achieved, so there seems to be a meta-game. These meta-aspects are circumscribed, though, by the aesthetic values of the spectacle. Too much armoring produces cars that are so foreign to commuter cars that the spectators are alienated. They boo the entrance of cars that look overbuilt.
Of course, there are rules that drivers must follow, so the arena is not a space of complete anomie. The most important rule, and the only one that prescribes possible vectors, is the prohibition from colliding with the driver’s door. In many ways, especially because of its importance for safety, that prohibition is the only rule that drivers think about inside the berm. As Debbie’s dad, Nelson, pointed out, “The only thing that you gotta watch for is that driver’s door shot.” Otherwise, he said, “you can run wide open.” Even that rule, though, is open to interpretation by the judges. “If you look at both cars,” Nelson went on, pointing at the cars on the trailers nearby, “they both took driver’s door shots last night. If they actually see it, you’re supposed to be black-flagged [disqualified] immediately, but like they say, it’s a derby.” Nelson explained the vagaries of enforcing the prohibition. “If you lock your brakes up and you’re trying to stop,” he admitted, “that’s one thing, but a lot of times they don’t. And so many people use that driver’s door for a shield, and if you’re caught shielding with the driver’s door, you’re supposed to be black-flagged [disqualified].” Because there are no rules regulating engagement, every car is simultaneously engaged with every other car. Though individual battles emerge out of the activity, those battles are interrupted by intentional or accidental engagements with other battles. Such potentiality makes judging difficult. Nelson explained, “I have judged before, I mean, down home we’ve had other derbies other than just the county fair, and I’ve knowed the people that’s put ‘em on, and because I’ve drove in ‘em, I’ve went and judged ‘em, and it’s hard to call, a lot of stuff is hard to call. You know, was that deliberate or, well, let’s just go out there and give ‘em a warning the first time.”
John, the NWA derby organizer and one-time judge, admitted the same subjectivity in rules enforcement. In Springdale, he admitted, none of the volunteer judges, who observe the action from just beyond the earthen berm and communicate with drivers with flashlights and semaphores, had driven in derbies themselves. When I attended the driver’s meeting with Ralph and his family before a derby in Springdale, I noticed the informality of the directions to the drivers. The chief judge admitted the futility of his crew’s charge. “There’s going to be one happy guy [at the end of the night],” he predicted, “and twenty-nine not so happy.” He preemptively apologized for missed judgments, complaining, “We ain’t got enough manpower to [catch every violation].” The only rules that were reinforced were the prohibition against hitting the driver’s door, of course, and the prohibition against sand-bagging, meaning avoiding contact so as to preserve the utility of your car. Ralph, who had complained in our interview about drivers who tried to damage his car even after he had broken his flag to disqualify himself, trying to prevent him from returning for the consolation round, spoke up, saying, “If your stick’s broke, quit running into the guy.”[20] Only one other rule was raised by a driver, and it reveals something important about the automobility of the arena. A driver asked whether it was permitted to strike a car that had rolled onto its top in order to roll it upright that it might continue to compete. The chief judge looked around at other shrugging judges and concluded that if they wanted to, another driver could “roll you over and go.” Wheels in the air, in the arena, is not necessarily prohibitive of automobility. Both sides of the car, top and bottom, maintain the car’s legitimacy. Such extraordinary spectacle is precisely the distinctive aesthetic feature of demolition derby and its most transgressive. Upright orientation is a boundary that is crossed in the arena.
The confusion of judging a demolition derby comes from the fact that circumscribed vectors of mobility are completely removed. As we have seen, even the vectors of orientation retain potential mobility. Cars can move in any direction within the arena boundaries. When I first interviewed Kyle at his home on the east side of Springdale, he explained what the experience inside the arena is like. He admitted that speed was not an important factor. “When you’re out there on that kind of muddy track,” he said, “you don’t get over thirty mile an hour.” Congestion, though, keeps the action confusing. “You might have,” he continued, “uh, what, eight to ten, twelve cars sometimes, so this dude breaks down here and this dude’s like over here, and you…gotta fishtail around ‘em. I mean, you’re working the steering wheel all through that shit, and you’re trying to look. A lot of shit’s going on.” The action is confusing enough for the spectators who have to watch several simultaneous engagements. “Being on the track, it’s even more difficult,” he went on, “’cause there’s so much shit goin on. You’re focused on that car right there, and you go put it in drive to go after that car, he might be gone before you can get there.” Indeed, the cognitive demands exercised within the derby arena are not reversals of the cognitive demands of the road; rather, they are intensified versions of the same experiences. Hyperbole seems to be the means for parody. Kyle used the word ‘commotion’ to describe the action of the derby arena and offered more scenarios to illustrate how quickly willful movement must adapt to unseen collisions. “It’s just constant motion, movement,” he concluded. The aesthetics of constant motion appeal to the spectators as they take in the entire scene. The crowd cannot focus and cheer for any particular engagement, at least not until only a few cars remain in the heat. The crowd participates in this commotion, as engines, creasing metal, and cheers all combine into the aural experience of the commotion. There is no real narrative or logical order of events. The arena is an organic space and, at least insofar as vectors of mobility are concerned, an egalitarian space. There is a flow rather than an ordered series of events.
This fluidity of material in motion is a part of what Rendell calls “the show.” His son Dennis, the youngest driver in the family, recalled how his throttle became stuck in a heat. “It was a good show,” Rendell put in, “it was the second time, and he had said, you know, ‘I’m not going to hit the brakes this time; everyone gave me so much crap for slowin’ down when I was hittin’,’ he goes, ‘I’m not going to do it this time.’ And we were watchin’ him and it was like, ‘damn, he wasn’t kiddin’.” Everyone laughed, especially Dennis, as Rendell continued, “You know, he’s out there just roostertail the whole time, just hittin’ and bouncin’ off and hittin’ someone else. It was awesome, and then afterwards, he was like, ‘yeah, my throttle was stuck and finally I got scared and turned it off.’” “My front bumper was gone,” Dennis explained, “and I was impaling cars.” When I asked about the unpredictability of the arena, they all agreed that planning was futile. “It’s not even worth planning,” Rendell said to everyone’s agreement. “It’s all about adapting and reacting.” To put on a good show, though, Rendell claimed, “I like to pretend my throttle’s stuck open. Balls to the wall as much as I can. Whatever happens, happens.” Like Debbie and Nelson, Rendell and his family all drive “wide f’in’ open” inside the derby arena. Such automobility leads to the extraordinary spectacles that I mentioned above and in Kyle’s description of his friend’s driving around on top of a Cadillac. As an older NWA fan explained her experience, “With the first hit you think, ‘Oh!’ But pretty soon you’re thinking, ‘yeah, get ‘im!’” Fire and scalding steam spew from torn auto bodies. The cognitive demands require adaptation and reaction rather than rational planning and order. The fools are in charge in the arena.
4. The aesthetics of material integrity
The unique aesthetic experience of demolition derby, particularly the counter-rational chronotope of the arena, informs the meanings around which identity is foreclosed and living is made meaningful through what I call ‘material integrity.’ Material integrity is the approbative ability to make use of the material resources at hand, making-do. Unlike ‘self-reliance’ and ‘independence,’ terms that have come to describe mythical concepts more than material realities, material integrity emphasizes flows of material and value and relationships rather than abstract autonomous agents.[21] Material integrity is experienced as a living meaning by the senses, rather than simply as an idea like self-reliance and independence, neither of which exists for very long materially. Though it is a consciousness that might ignore structural advantages and historical privileges, it is not simply the result of what Stallybrass and White call “displaced abjection,” or “the process whereby ‘low’ social groups turn their figurative and actual power, not against those in authority, but against those who are even ‘lower’(original emphasis)”.[22] No one I interviewed expressed any explicit “displaced abjection,” never complained about the injustice of welfare, taxing the responsible to reward the lazy; however, their pride in material independence, being able to meet their needs through “home-made” industry, reveals a contempt for the kind of progressive liberalism in the tradition of Wilson and Roosevelt. At the same time, and more importantly I think, material integrity reveals a contempt of elite rationality and its aestheticized superiority. It is not so much Wilson’s League of Nations, with its projectionist ideology, that is contemptible as it is the silk top hat he wore at the League’s inauguration.
Dale, the NWA fan, took me cat-fishing at his friend’s private rural pond. Driving through the yard to get to the pond, we stopped to help his friend repair a coupling between his tractor and a hay mower. Together, we three struggled, trying different angles of leverage and different drill bits, finally repairing it sufficiently to continue mowing. During our fishing, the topic of presidential politics arose. It was early in the 2016 campaigning season, and he expressed approbation for the candidacy of Donald Trump. When I asked him why, he explained that, as a businessman, Trump knew how to keep businesses working. Instead of a tax plan or a foreign trade policy, he offered only the belief that a president must maintain working-class jobs, like his own at a local factory. This position is not another example of the French yeoman farmers picking a Bonaparte because of their belief “that a miracle would occur, that a man called Napoleon would restore their glory.”[23] Dale was not hoping for a miracle, but for an ability to continue the material integrity that he had just practiced by repairing the alignment of a mowing implement. Had I quoted the lines from Marx above or lined up articles of Robert Reich, my style would have been ridiculous, as ridiculous as taking the mower to a professional machine shop for repair (or hiring someone else to mow my field), as ridiculous as wearing a silk top hat to catch catfish. The style is ridiculous because it aligns with the paternalistic order of Enlightenment abstract rationality.
The third most displayed image within Arkansas derby culture is the Confederate battle flag (preceded by, in order, the Arkansas Razorbacks porcine mascot and the Christian cross; the fourth-most displayed was probably the Browning Arms logo). Northwest Arkansas voted against the state’s secession in the Civil War, so the flag only nominally flew there, but its meaning for the self-nominated “rednecks” that I interviewed grows from its associations with a confrontation with rational elitism. It is an attitude I saw in the signage in front of a local shop called Road Dawgs: WE HAVE REBEL FLAGS! In the wake of a racial mass murder in South Carolina, Walmart and Amazon stopped selling the image, but this local biker hangout was confrontational in its defense of an arbitrarily acquired style. Politically correct urban liberals were not going to tell them what to do. I must emphasize that this reading of the Confederate battle flag as a rejection of Enlightenment rationality, dismissing its historical representation of racism, is a reading born of privilege. The relative racial homogeneity makes it easier to claim that the flag is about “Southern Freedom,” as Kyle put it. The stylistic expression offends few locally, but the imagined offense of distant elites is the point of its display. More than anything, they are displaying to each other a common contempt for paternalistic rationalism, expressing what Arjun Appadurai calls an ethnoscape, “a term we might wish to substitute for earlier wholes such as villages, communities, and localities.”[24] Though Appadurai is interested in the ways these ethnoscapes transcend national borders and connect people along global lines of diaspora and capital flows, creating new hybrid identities, he is also interested in globalism’s challenge to the production of “locality,” which, he continues, “is not a transcendent standard from which particular societies fall or deviate. Rather, locality is always emergent from the practices of local subjects in specific neighborhoods.”[25] As my interviews show that drivers and fans are producing meanings according to intersecting or colliding contingencies, demolition derby articulates a locality.
Additionally, because it transgresses the foundational grids of Enlightenment rationality, demolition derby subverts global ideoscapes, Appadurai’s term for the flow of images, representations of ideas. “These ideoscapes are composed,” he writes, “of elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a chain of ideas, terms, and images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy.”[26] In demolition derby’s conspicuous rebelliousness, we see a locality consciously rejecting rigid definitions of the dominant ideoscape. Kyle’s defense of “Southern freedom” means, among other things but importantly, freedom to reject the rationality of elite paternalism. He is negotiating local and global definitions of freedom, sovereignty, and representation. In this way, he is explicitly subverting the “opinion” that, according to Foucault, eighteenth-century reformers counted on to make rational subjects of everyone. The idea that elite opinion judges demolition derby irrational and primitive, the stuff of “rednecks” and “hillbillies,” is one of the most important aspects of its appeal. Participation in the WFO ethos is like the digitus impudicus scrawled on Debbie’s pink Daisy car, but directed to distant presumptuous elites.
While modern financial capitalism imposes a rational world of things—products, producers, markets—actual lived economics (remembering the root word “oikos” meaning “home”) is more about flows of value and relationships in motion. Material integrity is a facility within flows and relationships. Demolition derby aesthetically removes the literal mobility (and therefore utility) of these cars and returns the scrap metal to flows of production. The spectacle enacts material integrity that characterizes working-class identity. Little of the experience of demolition derby would appeal to classical notions of beauty,[27] but then, that is its aesthetic point. When Friedrich Schiller claimed that “one will never err in seeking a man’s ideal of beauty thus, in the way in which he satisfies his impulse to play,”[28] he was authorizing the broadening of aesthetic consideration to the demolishing of commuter automobiles. Because the car is a material thing and an idea, it represents Schiller’s two necessary poles of human experience. Our attention in the arena is drawn to what Schiller calls “the compulsion of surplus, or physical play,” which, he explains, “represents the transition to aesthetic play.”[29] Piles of demolished auto bodies, frames, and engines populated the yard of a group of drivers—the so-called “big boys”—I interviewed in White County. One of them pointed out that the scrap metal in the yard would be turned into “Rolls Royces or something.” These moles of industry, fashioned for production and desire, are likewise nodes in this material flow, and the aesthetics of demolition derby place drivers within it. Through this flow of material and desire, Nelson and Debbie, like all the other drivers, drive “wide f’in’ open.”
Billy Williams
dr.b.g.wms@gmail.com
After teaching philosophy in Upstate New York, Dr. Billy Williams lives in Southern California with his partner and their daughter. He has advanced degrees in English literature (MA, University of Arkansas) and Cultural Studies (PhD, Claremont Graduate University). Like preparing an ’82 Ford Fairmont Futura as a demolition derby car, he is working on developing his dissertation on working-class identity to monograph depth.
Acknowledgement
I appreciate the thoughtful and detailed advice from the reviewers of Contemporary Aesthetics, especially in challenging me to develop the notion of material integrity to more fully distinguish the concept from similar terms.
Published on October 18, 2025.
Cite this article: Billy Williams, “Working-Class Aesthetics and the Transgressive Chronotope of Demolition Derby,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] John Dewey, “Art as Experience,” in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. 2nd Ed, ed. Steven M. Cahn et al (Wiley Blackwell, 2020), 361.
[2] Dewey, “Art as Experience,” 368.
[3] Dewey, “Art as Experience,” 358.
[4] Berleant, Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (Imprint Academic, 2010), 195.
[5] Berleant, “Ideas for a Social Aesthetic,” in Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (Columbia University Press, 2005), 27.
[6] Berleant, “Ideas for a Social Aesthetic,” 28.
[7] I interviewed thirteen consultants in Northwest Arkansas, including the organizer of the demolition derby, and seven consultants in White County, Arkansas, including the organizer of the event. Though everyone assured me it wasn’t necessary, I have changed their names.
[8] At one event, I saw a fan in a tee shirt that read, “Team Driving Is For Pussies.”
[9] Another important difference between NWA and White County was the reading or imagining of class hierarchies. In White County, drivers referred only to classes they perceived as above them, but NWA drivers referred only to other classes they perceived as below them. This difference existed in both their comments on class identity per se and on various repertoires associated with class (fly fishing versus cat fishing, for example). This difference may be attributed to the greater flows of capital in NWA with JB Hunt, Tyson, and Walmart. The economy of White County is characterized by itinerate extraction and rural retail, both more subject to precarity. The White County drivers thought NWA drivers looked down on them, and indeed, NWA drivers seemed to. In some ways, the advantages that NWA drivers attributed to White County drivers were based on the latter’s being even more working class than NWA drivers (access to salvage yards, for example). I explore this difference in “Demolition Derby, Working-Class Identity, and Capitalist Geographies.” Journal of Working-Class Studies. Volume 8, Issue 1, June 2023.
[10] Susan Falls, “Creative Destruction: The Demolition Derby,” in Motorsports in American Culture: From Demolition Derby to NASCAR, ed. Mark D. Howell and John D. Miller (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 68.
[11] M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press, 1981), 84.
[12] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Vintage, 1970), 303.
[13] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-
1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (Pantheon, 1980), 155.
[14] Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 9.
[15] Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 45.
[16] Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 104.
[17] “History,” Interstate 49 National Coalition, effective 2002, http:www.interstate49.org.
[18] None of the participants in these “professional” derbies makes a living from their derby participation. Everyone has day jobs, many of which, such as auto mechanic and machinist, involve skills that can extend to the derby arena. No promoter or organizer exclusively makes a living from demolition derby. There are no national authorities establishing and maintaining rules and enforcement. The rules have emerged traditionally through non-canonical processes. It is a folk spectacle and competition.
[19] Nadine Hubbs. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (University of California Press, 2014), 79.
[20] Though his pronoun use was confusing, his message to the other drivers was clear: don’t continue battering a disqualified car. I recalled his comment when a driver continued to hit his grandson’s car even after he was lodged on the berm, to the boos of the crowd.
[21] Ralph Waldo Emerson’s use of the famous phrase was more about a spiritual or intellectual independence rather than material self-sufficiency. “Insist on yourself; never imitate,” he wrote. Thomas Jefferson’s notion of self-reliance, though more concerned about material being, was more of a policy to keep manufacturing out of Virginia to avoid the “mob” that would not make good citizens.
[22] Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Cornell University Press, 1986), 53.
[23] Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Surveys from Exile: Political Writings Volume 2, ed. David Fernbach (Verso, 2010), 239.
[24] Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 64.
[25] Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 198.
[26] Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 36.
[27] The day after I attended my second derby in Northwest Arkansas, I visited the Alice Walton-funded Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in its fancy Moshe Safdie-designed digs in Bentonville, where I saw John Chamberlain’s Swannanoa/Swannanoa II. To the uninitiated, the art work looks like something you might find lying around a White County yard after a derby.
[28] Friedrich Schiller, On The Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Keith Tribe (Penguin, 2016), 56.
[29] Schiller, On The Aesthetic Education of Man, 107.