For the first issue I edited with Document Journal, I organized a feature which returned to Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (essays on a variety of cultural myths—the striptease, the Tour de France, Einstein’s brain, wine, gangsters, marriage, etc.—mostly published as magazine columns in the ’50s). It features critics including Chris Kraus, Natasha Stagg, Taylore Scarabelli, Journey Streams, Geoffrey Mak, and Philippa Snow on a wide range of topics. I took up one of Barthes’s original essays titled “The New Citroën.”
You can read them all here, and my debut as an automotive reviewer below.
When Citroën released its C4 Cactus in 2014, US outlet Car and Driver published a review subtitled “Jean-Paul Sartre, your car is ready.” Sartre serves as shorthand for France’s apparently atmospheric philosophical rigor, contra the mental lassitude of the anglophone petty bourgeois. From this “dek,” as we call the subtitles in the trade, one gathers that Car and Driver’s editors assume their readers have a glancing knowledge of philosophy, so long as it dates back half a century, or, if not, being able to think, “‘Jean-Paul’ sounds pretty French.”
Apart from a Mandela-effect situation—wherein some people believe, with no proof other than an English-original text whose authenticity likewise has no proof, that Sartre, a lifelong anti-imperialist, drove a Dodge Dart—the philosopher’s only connection to automobiles I know of is a connection in name only: the Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTRE) project, a European Commission-funded—though primarily Swedish and Spanish endeavor—to engineer electronically inked car platoons.
As for this compact crossover SUV’s Gallic themes, the C and D critic concludes: “Like raw-milk cheese, the Cactus will never come to the States, but it’s something you should be able to talk about at dinner parties. Pretentiously, of course.” (We all have word counts to meet. Working writers of the world unite!)
Nothing should disillusion Anglo-Americans from their pretensions about purported French intellectualism than this 1,000-kilo diesel-powered pod. A drowsy, bug-eyed bubble, the C4 Cactus boasts all the athleticism of an out-of work linebacker. Thick black brackets line its middle headlights (who can say why the front has three sets of lamps), and shiny black glass stripes branch from the rear window, cutting perfectly useless four-inch ribbons over the rear buttresses. Goading the eyes like a proverbial train-wreck, across the four doors on either side stretch polyurethane “Airbumps,” puckered spans that, allegedly, prevent minor dings during city driving. The needles of this so-called cactus, I guess.
As is the case of the triple headlights, the Airbump is not functional in the sense of having an immediate physical use that couldn’t be better addressed otherwise. Rather, it is functional in effectuating a visual vernacular common to cars of all calibers, as well as running shoes, overly cladded “gentrifier apartment” façades, or electronics marketed towards gamers—a quasi-sci-fi aesthetic vocabulary which advertises its distinction not by being “high performance,” but through the baroque performance thereof— a functionless ornamentation not unlike C and D’s referring to “Citroën’s recent époque de malaise” in an appeal to Continental credibility.
But maybe I’m being too harsh. As another likely fabricated quote attributed to Sartre goes: “Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.”