Stillness in a Mobile World

David Bissell, Gillian Fuller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415572620
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135146344
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This edited collection of essays on the conceptual, political and philosophical importance of stillness is positioned within a world that has increasingly come to be understood through the theoretical and conceptual lens of movement.

With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the diversity of this collection illuminates the multiplicity of ontological and epistemological registers through which stillness moves: from human geography to media studies, cultural theory to fine arts. With the help of luminaries such as Deleuze, Bergson, Barthes and Beckett, this book interweaves cutting-edge theoretical insight with empirical illustrations which examine and traverse a multitude of practices, spaces and events. In an era where stasis, slowness and passivity are often held to be detrimental, this collection puts forward a new set of political and ethical concerns which help us to come to terms with, understand, and account for (im)mobile life.

Stillness in a Mobile World in an essential source of reference for both undergraduate and post-graduate students working within disciplines such as cultural studies, sociology, mobility studies, and human geography.

1 Stillness unbound

David Bissell and Gillian Fuller

Spectrums of still

On the evening of 27 March 2007, Yang Wu, the owner of the building on number 17, Hexing Road, Yangjiaping, Chongqing, appeared on the roof of his building. This was his seventh day on his ‘island’. About two hours before, this owner of the so-called ‘most awesome nail house in history’ appeared at his window and made his characteristic move – holding his fist tightly – and yelled: ‘I want to speak to the mayor!’¹

Figure 1.1 The ‘nail house’ of Chongqing.

Source: ‘zola’. <http://zola.fotolog.com.cn>

Thus begins another account of the most famous ‘nail house’ in China, the home of Yang Wu, in which the politics of rapid urban redevelopment distilled into an image of a lone house moated by the empty tracks of activity. The story of the Yang's refusal to sell their home to property developers and the accompanying images of the stranded house became a major news story in China and continues to circulate online, capturing, it seems, a public desire for something that seems increasingly elusive and perplexing: a pause, a stilling in the ineluctable activity of daily life. At first sight, it may seem counter-intuitive to offer an image of tensile precariousness as an impression of stillness when a semantics of calm and retreat usually descends on still. For the nail house, still is tense, tenacious and ambivalent. A rupture in the rhythm of a ‘globalizing’ life that became a figure of obdurate resistance. The Chongqing nail house is an instance of wilful unmoving: a stilling that took a stand.

The necessary footloose detachment required for the mobile life is emphatically challenged by a house forming a caprock atop an urban mesa that reveals a collision between two temporal scales: the geological and the supermodern. Structurally fused with the earth, the nail house literalizes the sedentary metaphysics of fixity – a staying in place – that, for mobility scholars, stands as a counterpoint to the nomadic metaphysics of flow.² Unable to be mobilized into a trajectory (in this case, down), the nail house stilling introduces a tension into a movement assemblage of urban ‘renewal’. Denying the momentum of the machine they stand out.

Someone who has been standing a long time expresses a capacity for endurance and resistance, either because, like a tree, he [sic] stands firmly in one place, or because he allows all of himself to be seen without fear or concealment. The stiller he stands . . . the more impressive he is.³

For Elias Canetti, the power of the stilled body (whether standing or sitting) emerges in its display of vulnerability. A closing down of its potential for movement or defence. Certainly in the case of the Yangs, their capacity for endurance and resistance was matched by their visibility: a position which ambivalently gains its power through material precariousness (and media-fed by novel and arresting images). The ‘stand’ taken by the Yangs enacts, on one level, a stark reversal of a sedentary metaphysics that casts mobility as a threat to bounded (and necessarily parochial) notions of place, territory and belonging. In this case, ‘staying put’ generates as much suspicion as the threatening mobile outsider of the sedentary metaphysics: the refugee,⁴ the tramp⁵ and the asylum seeker.⁶

However, not all figures of stillness present such stark options or such readily legible images where stillness forms some kind of rebuttal to the dromomania of contemporary society. Indeed what is perhaps so illuminating (and familiar) about the figure of the nail house is how stillness is so often conflated with a reductive understanding of resistance where to be still is to resist and to stand against movement, with all the determination that this entails. This is a striking still. But it is one that feels almost caricatured in its relational framing, aligning, on the face of it, the vulnerable residents of the house against the cold and indifferent forces of urban development. Certainly the entrepreneurial and media-savvy Yangs themselves trouble such simple framing. Yet the trajectory of this caricatured stillness gains its familiarity in the way that it wraps itself around a dualistic narrative of protest and resistance.

But this impressive stillness of the nail house – itself tethered to neo-capitalist narratives of futility and opportunism, and colonialist myths of noble savagery -occupies only one part of a spectrum of stillness that differentiates with the same granularity as the mobilities through which it is remediated and othered. Stillness is not just a gesture of refusal. Stillness punctuates the flow of all things: a queuer in line at the bank; a moment of focus; a passenger in the departure lounge; a suspension before a sneeze; a stability of material forms that assemble; a passport photo. Each of these stillnesses pulse through multiple ecologies with multiple effects. Yet, curiously, stillness is so often anticipated, more or less, as an aberration and thus a problem to be dealt with. A moment of emptiness or missed productivity, producing a hobbled subjectivity without active agency. In an epoch that privileges the mobilization of mobility, still has been stilled; turned into a stop that is just waiting to go again. Waiting to be re-moved.

This is where this book intervenes by asking: what is at stake in the stilling of still to a stop? In a world of transductive activity, how can it be that stillness has been rendered an ontological impossibility or at the very least denied its own ontology? Such a denial might hint at why stillness has the feel of being so extreme and so terminal a condition. But what would happen if we looked for the still that stood relationally through multiple sources rather than just through the lens of mobility and immobility, speed and slowness? What lessons could we learn from a pluralist, polyvalent still? So while not wanting to restore a stable and still ontology of fixity over the emerging politics of flow (as if that were possible or even desirable), nor to activate still in order to give it value, we want to ask: how did still come to occupy this malignant position in which vulnerability, endurance and emptiness are stripped of their power? How is it that stillness is so often teetering on the precipice of metaphysical oblivion and epistemological and political difficulty rather than teetering on the precipice of something else? In order to point to some suggestions, a little framing is needed. To begin with, this requires us to consider some of the theoretical underpinnings of ‘mobility’ as both a trope and technic in contemporary social and cultural theory.

Stilled relations

‘Mobility’ as both an empirical locus of study and an analytical tool to think with has surged to prominence across the social sciences over the past decade.⁷ Part of this emerges from the unequivocal reality that people, objects, images, finance and information within the most recent round of time-space compression are travelling at greater distances, speeds and intensities than ever before. In the process of anticipating, understanding, and accounting for the effect of these mobilities, scholars have experimented with and assembled a raft of new conceptual infrastructures which better attend to the dynamics of this globalizing world. Amongst these, metaphors of flow,⁸ liquidity,⁹ routes¹⁰ and complexity¹¹ underscore a world that can no longer be squeezed into sedentary understandings of living.¹² This conceptual labour has generated exciting new architectures to help us get to grips with mobilities in their dynamic interrelation. Tubes, systems, networks and assemblages all invite us to consider the intersecting geopolitical topologies, protocols and forms that are generated by and emerge through mobility. These conceptual architectures have illuminated a plethora of new organizational infrastructures, modes of governance, sorting techniques, and surveillance and control strategies that have given rise to distinctive imaginations of place, territory and belonging. As a consequence, our understanding of relationality, connectivity, risk, proximity, community and citizenship are evolving in profound ways.

But against this buzz of mobility and animation, a topology of stillness haunts the space of flows. Long before the latest global ‘slow down’, precipitated by the so-called ‘financial’ crisis, mobility scholars have recognized the significance of tracing the relational contingencies of mobilities and immobilities; or ‘mobilities and moorings’ to use John Urry's phrase.¹³ Critical here is firstly, an appreciation of how things on the move are reliant on vast, complex and relatively still infrastructures to sustain this movement. Secondly, a relational approach recognizes the unequal ‘power geometries’¹⁴ that are such a significant part of mobility systems whereby, put very simply, the speed of some comes at expense of the stillness of others. The networked logics that carry movement means that mobility is always contingent: the speedy movement of some is, to varying extents, contingent on the stilling of others. Paramount here is that speed and stillness within much mobilities research emerge as relational phenomena. As Peter Adey reminds us, ‘it is the differences in mobility that creates relative immobility’.¹⁵ And it is the leverage afforded by this relation that gives ‘mobility’ as a field of enquiry its compelling analytical purchase, opening up the possibilities of charting the constellations of power that give rise to differently-mobile phenomena.¹⁶ Within this relative immobility, things are not still at all. Apparently-still phenomena are always already in a state of ontogenic transformation; brought into sharp focus, for example, when we consider the processes of maintenance and repair that infrastructural apparatuses undergo.¹⁷ Still here is a momentary illusion, a spectre of perspective, and, most importantly, a relational effect of distributions of power. But an understanding of stillness that is generated through relative immobility is, however, just one conceptual exposition of stillness amongst many others. Stillness can be more than this. To be sure, we are certainly not arguing against relational approaches to mobile life. This book is emphatically not a veiled return to a metaphysic of sedentarism. Rather, we want to suggest that a sharpened understanding of stillness in all its valences can open up new appreciations of mobile relations.

For us, one of the most striking expositions of stillness in contemporary society is its enrolment into a particular relation whereby it is discursively Othered. Sometimes this is an Other that is longed for. A desire for still might be the relational Other of the everyday freneticism of neo-capitalism: a desire that is only exacerbated by its seeming unattainability. Durations of ‘break’ from work, in the form of a siesta, a weekend, a holiday could be apprehended as stillnesses sanctioned by capital and compliant with the needs to recharge and re-energize the body to respond to the demands of working life. Yet just as illusory as the efficiency of wilfully-directed activity (and in lieu of the demands that increasingly saturate ‘leisure’ time), wilful stillness might be an equally difficult achievement. Ruminative, anxious mental churning, stoked by the seemingly ceaseless demands and responsibilities that encumber contemporary life, might prevent this longed-for ‘switching off’. Long ago, Montaigne was instructive on the difficulties of being still. His desire for a peaceful idleness was prevented by the gnawing restlessness of his mind which ‘bolted off like a runaway horse, taking far more trouble over itself than it ever did over anyone else; it gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities, one after another’.¹⁸ It seems that today, for many, a desire for stillness remains. In response to the difficulties that a temporary stillness interspersed with the demands of productive work presents, the desire to bow out of the relentless and often-ugly rat race of capital accumulation for more prolonged durations is immortalized in many channels of popular culture, where idleness and rest are among the chief characteristics. Consider here the fables of those enervated bodies who surrender high-octane city-careers to retreat to the sanctuary of the remote hillside farmstead. But a configuration of life that embraces these stillnesses is, paradoxically, a figure of envy and suspicion. This is a still life that feels at once seductively uncomplicated and frustratingly gratuitous; throwing into sharp question, as it does, the legitimacy of many of the drives that sustain many everyday working lives that are supposed to be so vital. For how can life emerge through the cessation of accumulation, intensification and promotion?

This power of stillness-as-Other is even more pronounced when we consider the ways in which it is frequently appropriated as a morally-good gesture of moderation. This co-option of still by a moralising agenda relies on a similar antagonistic relation with movement. In a world where ‘miserly thinking’ dominates¹⁹ and where value has been assigned and rigidified, excess is scorned. This excess is often conflated with movement. We hear the call to save, store, reign-in and moderate where movement is accused of being a force of erosion, attrition and degradation. Movement-as-excessive strains scarce resources in a frame where resources are self-evident and have inherent value. In an era possessed by the horrors of resource finitude,²⁰ an ethic of restraint is exacerbated in a world where abundance has retreated, freeze-framed by advancing deserts, cracked soils and denuded pasture. Movement is morally dubious as this excess is achieved at the expense of sustainability. The sustainability thesis of miserly thinking is attracted to still. The imperative to ‘be still and move only when it is absolutely necessary’ appeals to a sovereign subject who has the capacity to actively reflect on and adjudicate their being in the world. This subject, stilled by a virtuous guilt generated through critical reflection,²¹ is rewarded with the promise of enhanced ‘quality of life’; a promise that takes recourse to the parochial sedentarism of community, to the bronzed nostalgia of halcyon days of old. This deferential Aristotelian morality of moderation asks us to ‘be still and see what joy this will bring’.

As two familiar expositions of stillness, they demonstrate that rather than being just an effect of distributions of power, stillness has a capacity to do things, illustrated by its potency as a figure of desire and as an imperative for a moral life. In each of these expositions, still is packaged as a solution. It becomes conscripted into the logic of a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Stillness unbound
• Part I Technics
• 2 Communities
• 3 Materialities
• 4 Suspensions
• Bibliography
• Index