On the supposedly opposite end of the motorcycle-riding spectrum from the Hell’s Angels was a booming market of affluent youth. The genetic outcome of normal suburban breeding, the baby boomers comprised the first youth culture. In We Gotta Get Out of This Place (1992), Lawrence Grossberg argues that youth signifies change and transition, and the space that opens up between childhood and adulthood is struggled over, usually in ways that involve, “excessiveness, an impulsiveness, a maniacal irresponsibility” on the part of youth.” [1] In response to this undisciplined behavior, an attempt is made to construct youth as a more productive population. Grossberg, leaning heavily on Foucault’s notion of biopower states, “Youth was a material problem; it was a body—the body of the adolescent and the social body of the baby boom—that had to be properly inserted into the dominant system of economic and social relationships.” [2] In other words, each youth had to be disciplined through various apparatuses, like school, church, and home, in order to create a social body that would be economically and socially productive.

 

Most of the academic work in this area centers itself around rock music and the various attempts to censor or weaken the supposedly sexually explicit and socially degenerative beat and lyrics of early rock music. [3] Less importance has been placed on other youth activity of the era. Yet the explosion of motorcycle use among youth in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s faced similar attacks. Ultimately, highly focused policy initiatives were aimed at curtailing the mobility of youth and were legitimated through the rhetoric of safety. A quotation from Motorcycles in the United States, a U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare pamphlet published in 1968, sums up a number of assumptions not only about motorcyclists, but about the danger they represent to the social body as well as youth’s personal bodies: “As an Auto Driver . . . Remember, the vast majority of motorcyclists are not the dirty, rough-neck, out-law types that get the bulk of motorcycling publicity. Most motorcyclists are young, between the ages of 17 and 24. Many are college or high school students or people just starting their business careers. Most are very nice young people who are unfortunately not sophisticated, experienced motorcyclists. By recognizing that many motorcyclists may not be fully skilled, you can take extra caution and avoid possible accidents.” [4]

 

The above quotation attempts to ease drivers’ fears of motorcyclists, or at least a specific sort of motorcyclist, while at the same time accepting the fact that if they were dirty, smelly outlaw types, then it would be A-OK to ride them off the road or, at least, disregard their well-being. However, we (the normative automobile driver) are trying to make these nice young people experienced, like the dirty, smelly ones, so that they will be safe. But who then is creating the problem? The angered hick in Easy Rider who shoots motorcyclists? or the untrained youngsters?

 

The real enemy here is a form of mobility that functions as the other to automobiles, which is being accessed by two supposedly different, yet equally disruptive populations. The problem that both groups pose is to some extent the same. It is the problem of disciplining an undocile population. The historical model that Foucault proposes for disciplinarity is that of the confined space: the hospital, the school, and ultimately the prison. However, these are populations whose relation to mobility, not their relationship to confinement, is the problem. The key aim of policy initiatives is thus to somehow produce a more docile motorcyclist or, as some would have it, outlaw the practice altogether.

 

What is unique about biopolitics is that, first, it depends upon the production of knowledge to validate the normative standards by which populations can be measured, and, second, policy initiatives are mandated to bring the population up to snuff. As noted earlier, automobiles were the normative standard by which safety measures were established. Motorcycle deaths should never come close to the per-mile deaths of  automobile drivers. But, as long as they are higher, they can be made the object of intense disciplinary regulation. In a general sense, since motorcycling is a less efficient mode of transportation and less useful to commerce, it can be outlawed. It is only when it becomes a highly fetishized object of middle-class consumption in the 1980s that it is granted a semblance of mainstream acceptability. In the scenario described here, the real question is why, during the late 1960s, was extensive attention paid to motorcycling as a dangerous activity? As discussed in earlier chapters, there is no ground zero against which either safety or risk can be judged. Instead, acceptable limits are created to validate or invalidate various activities. These limits are quite variable from one time period to another and across different activities and different cultural contexts. It is easier to ignore, and in some instances to relish, [5] motorcyclists’ deaths when the riders are thought to be “dirty, rough-neck, outlaw types” than when they are thought to be the progeny of postwar suburban bliss. This may help explain why there was a shift from acceptance of 1,103 motorcycle deaths in 1949 to outrage in 1964 when there were 1,118 deaths; in those same years, the number of registered motorcycles rose from 478,851 to 984,760. The number of deaths increased only 1.3 percent while the number of bikes increased 105 percent. [6] What changed was not the actual risk of riding a bike; in fact, it was seemingly only half as risky, judging from the increase in actual bikes on the road in proportion to the slight increase in deaths. What changed was, first, that who was riding seemed to be changing, and these new middle-class youth riders mattered; second, such concern gained momentum following the publication of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed and the public hearings and safety mandates that quickly followed. [7]

 

Notes