The
North Circular is by its very positioning an ambiguous road, its beginning and
end mysteriously transforming at some point into its opposite partner the South
Circular. This may reveal something of the binary nature of town planners, who
have clearly abandoned the spatial qualities of the four points of the compass
opting instead for the top / bottom opposites of North and South as if London
were a flat piece of paper that could be folded neatly in half. The result of
this is the strange experience of falling round the sides of
One
could develop this analogy further by viewing the North Circular as an ‘active spontaneous line’ as described
by Klee[2] where
its route, marked on a map is articulated by action, or as Leibniz states,
describing the inherent movement contained in any apparently straight line: ‘ There can never be a straight line without
curves intermingled’[3] This is
certainly true of a rush hour drive round the North Circular where even
proceeding along a straight dual carriageway requires the minute curves of
constant lane changing in order to make any progress at all.
The
North Circular acts as a ‘virtual road’ in the sense that it is made up of a
number of smaller local roads assigned this performative role. Presumably
should the need arise due to building development, new roads could be elected
to ‘be the North Circular’, fulfilling the same task of guiding a flow of
constant traffic around an agreed sense of perimeter. This enables the ‘A 406’
– clearly marked on the surface of the road, to escape a static sense of
‘objectness’, transforming it into more of a Deleuzian ‘objectile’ (related to projectile) … ‘no longer defined by an essential form, but reach(ing) a pure
functionality…where the object assumes a place in a continuum by variation …-
it becomes an event’[4].
It is almost as if the North Circular is a migratory path selected by mass
experience through a variety of needs bringing into place a continuum route
that is named belatedly by planners.
The
‘event’ or physical experience of traveling round the North Circular in a car
can perhaps offer Deleuze’s ‘point of
view’ through the windscreen as a way of perceiving the ever moving,
transforming ‘objectile’ of the A 406 route. A static single viewpoint or even
series of ‘as they are happening’ viewpoints does not equip the driver to
anticipate, react and navigate the spatial flow of both traffic and route.
Rather a driver that operates treating the immediate view and necessary
positional adjustments on the road in direct relation to the movement and flow
of the journey as a whole would probably be more successful – ‘What can be apprehended from one point of
view is therefore neither a determined street nor a relation that might be
determined with other streets, which are constants, but the variety of all
possible connections between the course of a given street and that of another’[5].
In
many ways the North Circular ‘envelopes’ the contours of the north of London,
holding within it the folds of junctions, slip roads and underpasses,
stretching out across a multiplicity of areas and access roads, causing
planners to develop series of traffic lights to accommodate its integral flow
and movement. Perhaps it acts as the container or ‘soul’ of
The
continual envelopment and extension through dynamic interaction is replicated
in the internal landscape of the driver, in the soul or ‘Monad’ – ‘a state of One that envelopes a multiplicity,
this multiplicity developing the One.’ This
soul or subject is what occupies ‘the point of view’ and has the function of
‘enveloping and developing’ so every fold or layer of the journey; every
sideways spatial adjustment or loop through an underpass is folded into the
drivers experience becoming part of the driver. This may explain the common ‘driving
amnesia’ experienced when repeatedly taking the same route. Often drivers will
comment on no memory of having driven to work except for the last few seconds
of arriving. The external landscape having been so folded into the internal one
in the manner of coloring into pastry, that it has become an integral part of
the structure of seeing and reacting.
In
the same way that the route is folded into the driver, the driver is the
articulation of the North Circular – bringing it into being by performing the
event of the journey. The driver and the route forming a double loop as route
becomes event and driver becomes or embodies route – a mobius strip.
To conclude, by joining the final thought to the first one
and completing the circle… the ambiguity of having no clear beginning or end
underlines this infinity of possibilities: ‘The
entire world (North Circular) is the
infinite curve that touches at an infinity of points, an infinity of curves …
and the entire world (North Circular) is
enclosed in the soul (- that navigates it)’[9]. In traveling this unfolding road, what has
opened up is a multi-layered labyrinth of possibilities, coinciding and gliding
over one another in flows of never to be repeated momentary connections.