Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 23 (2025)
Abstract
In order to understand the deployment of aesthetic experience within a working-class performance, this paper draws on ethnographic field research with participants and fans of demolition derby competitions in two regions of Arkansas. It attempts what Arnold Berleant calls a ‘social aesthetic,’ to discover within semiotic evidence foreclosures of identity that challenge orthodox rationality through an aesthetic parodying of driving and automobility. The paper uses the term ‘material integrity’ to describe how participants and fans of demolition derby understand authorized top-down opinions and the economic dynamics in which they participate. The multiplication of potential vectors of mobility within the frame of the derby arena simultaneously creates an aesthetic experience of mass and motion that transgresses the presumed elite, rational order of roads and their limited modes of productivity. As a ground-up spectacle and performance, demolition derby reveals the value of material integrity as an integral aspect of working-class identity.