The automotive garage is the birthplace of entrepreneurial selfhood under late capitalism

Evidence

Consequentially, the car was often placed under the roof of the carport. The garage became not only a liminoid space connecting home and city but something akin to what philosopher Gilles Deleuze termed an any-space-whatever: “Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity… . It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What in fact manifests the instability, the heterogeneity … is a richness in potentials or singularities which are, as it were, prior conditions of all actualisation, all determination.” The carport, in allowing for placing the car elsewhere, made the garage a place of heterogeneous abstraction—generic, but not homogeneous, because its function became undefined. But one function, linked with the garage’s history as an interface that remade the home, integrating it with the city and divorcing it from community, was predominant: the birth of entrepreneurial selfhood. The garage became a site of subjectivation linked with the development of creative projects, illicitly or surreptitiously produced in hours stolen from the family and from one’s day job. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 198

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the garage as a Deleuzian any-space-whatever — a generic space whose lost homogeneity becomes pure potential for subjectivation.