The crash of emotions: Socio-material landscapes of guilt in automobility

Experiencing automobility necessarily includes socio-material interactions in which the potential for road crashes or near-misses is ever-present. Rather than viewing road crashes as mere physical collisions, this paper understands them as socio-material encounters in which emotions – particularly guilt – play a constitutive role. Drawing on ethnomethodological go-alongs and interviews with persons who have been involved in crashes in Central Europe, we examine how guilt emerges in road crash situations and how it relates to the larger system of automobility. We show that guilt emerges as deeply intertwined with responsibility, as a rationalized, individualized, and human-centred practice. As such, guilt saturates (Ahmed, 2014) the whole system of automobility, which becomes sticky through various objects and socio-material relations such as police reports, crumpled car bodywork, or the reporting of guilt to (significant) others. In this way, we argue, automobility effectively normalizes systemic violence. Yet, navigating guilt also involves contesting its individual and human-centred forms—this is done mainly through highlighting the socio-material complexity of the road crashes, such as wet roads or road layouts. Despite these contestations, structural forces often remain silenced, allowing guilt to function as a mechanism that conceals the systemic violence entangled with automobility.