Mobility, Space and Culture

Peter Merriman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415736985
• eBook ISBN: 9781136903380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the past ten to fifteen years there has emerged an increasing concern with mobility in the social sciences and humanities. In Mobility, Space and Culture, Peter Merriman provides an important and timely contribution to the mobilities turn in the social sciences, encouraging academics to rethink the relationship between movement, embodied practices, space and place.

The book takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon theoretical and empirical work from across the social sciences and humanities to provide a critical evaluation of the relationship between 'mobility' and 'place'/'site', reformulating places as in process, open, and dynamic spatial formations. Merriman draws upon post-structuralist writings on space, practice and society to demonstrate how movement is not simply practised or experienced in relation to space and time, but gives rise to rhythms, forces, atmospheres, affects and materialities which are often more crucial to embodied apprehensions of events than sensibilities of spatiality and temporality. He draws upon detailed empirical research on experiences of, and social reactions to, driving in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain to trace how the motor-car became associated with sensations of movement-space and enmeshed with debates about embodiment, health, visuality, gender and politics.

The book will be essential reading for undergraduates and postgraduates studying mobility in sociology, geography, cultural studies, politics, transport studies, and history.

1
Introduction

Mobility, space and culture

What is it to travel? How can we best think it in terms of time and space? … you are not just travelling through space or across it…. Since space is the product of social relations you are also helping … to alter space, to participate in its continuous production…. Space and place emerge through active material practices. Moreover, this movement of yours is not just spatial, it is also temporal. The London you left just half an hour ago … is not the London of now. It has already moved on.

(Doreen Massey)¹

Movement is made up of time and space…. Time and space, as Kant reminded us, are the fundamental axes around which life revolves – the most basic forms of classification. Certainly any material object has to have coordinates in time and space. Movement, as the displacement of an object from A to B, involves a passage of time and, simultaneously, a traversal of space. Time and space, however, cannot be simply taken for granted in the consideration of movement. Time and space are both the context for movement … and a product of movement.

(Tim Cresswell)²

When space-time is no longer entered but instead created, it becomes possible to think the body-world as that which is generated by the potential inherent in the preacceleration of movement … the displacement itself – the movement from a to b – is not what is essential about movement. Movement is the qualitative multiplicity that folds, bends, extends the body-becoming toward a potential future that will always remain not-yet. This body-becoming (connecting, always) becoming-toward, always with.

(Erin Manning)³

With the recent resurgence of writings on mobility and movement, social space and social time, process and practice, relationality and topology in the social sciences and humanities, there have emerged a range of attempts to rethink movement and mobility as not simply occurring in or across space and time, but as actively shaping or producing multiple, dynamic spaces and times. As early as 1991, the geographer Doreen Massey argued that places must be conceptualised as dynamic and open nodes that are in process, being cross-cut by a diverse array of productive movements which embody a complex geography of power relations.⁴ Likewise, the geographer and mobilities scholar Tim Cresswell has repeatedly stressed that social scientists need to examine ‘the production of mobilities’, focusing not only on the social and political meanings of a diverse array of mobilities but also examining how mobilities actively shape and produce (social) space and time.⁵ Massey, Cresswell and a host of others have actively drawn upon relational, post-structuralist and processual approaches to society, space, time and mobility to move away from absolute notions of Euclidean and Newtonian space, time and movement towards more social and relational conceptions, but despite their successful ejection of a simple geometrism, mobility and movement are still frequently positioned in an essential and foundational relationship to space and time (see the quotations above). To put it another way, while abstract, geometric conceptions of space and time are rightfully exposed as socio-material constructions which are perpetuated in all manner of spheres of life and underpin many predominant ways of thinking, acting and assessing the world, there is little attempt to challenge the a priori positioning of space and time as the primordial, ontological vectors, grounds or measures of extension through and in relation to which movement, life and events unfold. Mobility and movement are positioned as important, but they are frequently thought of as functions of space and time. In contrast, I seek to suggest a way forward which does not seek to apprehend events – and, in particular, movements – as if they necessarily unfold in or produce ontologies situated in space and time (or space-times), and I map out an approach which seeks to reveal how other primitive ontological constituents continually erupt into being and are no less important to situating the unfolding of particular events. Movement, affect, sensation, rhythm, vibration, energy, force, and much more, then, might be taken to be fundamental to understanding how life unfolds, and we might even go as far as to suggest that space-time is a Western fiction, a series of stories we like to tell ourselves, which in turn structure how we think about the world. To paraphrase Bruno Latour, writing in a very different context, perhaps there have never been space-times.⁶

The opening quotation by Erin Manning hints at one possible way forward, for in approaching movement and the event through the philosophical writings of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Brian Massumi, she traces how movement must be understood in terms of ‘pre-acceleration’: ‘a way of thinking the incipiency of movement, the ways in which movement is always on the verge of expression’, with the becoming-sensing-body possessing an elasticity-in-movement and ‘a polyrhythmic preacceleration whereby what is felt is becoming-movement more than cultural spacing’.⁷ Manning, following a long line of philosophers of process and movement, emphasises the indivisibility and ‘wholeness of movement’ which prevents any simple attempt to divide or carve up these movements.⁸ But despite her insightful comments on the ways in which ‘we move not to populate space, not to extend it or to embody it, but to create it’, and how ‘our preacceleration already colors space, vibrates it’,⁹ embodied movement is repeatedly situated in relation to the privileged concepts of space and time (often as space-time), and the philosophical and scientific orthodoxies which both underpin and provide a departure point for processual and poststructuralist thinking remain in view. What I am seeking to do is to outline a processual approach which does not automatically assume that we apprehend events in terms of intensive effects and experiences of spacing and timing. Movement is primary – the ‘primary movement’ of folding¹⁰ – and in the remainder of this chapter I discuss some of the implications this has for how we think about movement and mobility in the social sciences and humanities.

Molecular mobilities

no rest is given to the atoms in their course through the depths of space. Driven along in an incessant but variable movement, some of them bounce far apart after a collision while others recoil only a short distance from the impact.

(Lucretius c. 55 BC)¹¹

Mobile ontologies and nomadic metaphysics are nothing new. For ancient Greek thinkers such as Heraclitus, Archimedes, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius, movement, flux and change were at the heart of physical processes and the unfolding of events.¹² Lucretius, in particular, espoused an atomist world-view where atoms and bodies restlessly move in a ‘vacant’ or void space,¹³ and he describes a world where ‘everything flows’ and ‘solid bodies are just exceptionally slow moving fluids’.¹⁴ Lucretius’ world is one where matter, nature, society and sensation all emerge through a cascading, torrent-like, laminar atomic flow, in which there is a ‘declination’ of atoms, a ‘productive and destructive’ turbulence, a ‘space-time of flickering and decline’.¹⁵ Lucretius’ incessantly mobile world might appear strange to contemporary observers – a primitive interpretation of processes that has little relevance to today’s high-tech world – and this tradition has largely been abandoned by modern science. Nevertheless, Lucretius’ thought has been important for a range of influential philosophers of process, movement and becoming since the late nineteenth century, from Henri Bergson through to more recent thinkers such as Michel Serres, Jane Bennett, Deleuze and Guattari, and Prigogine and Stengers.

In 1884 Henri Bergson published an annotated edition of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura while he was teaching in Paris,¹⁶ and the influence of his thinking was readily apparent in Bergson’s influential books Time and free will (1889), Matter and memory (1896) and Creative evolution (1907), where Bergson developed his characteristic approach to matter as ‘perpetual becoming’ or ‘a perpetual flowing’,¹⁷ and movement is seen to possess a ‘unity, indivisibility, and qualitative heterogeneity’.¹⁸ Movement becomes aligned with ‘perpetual becoming’, a between-ness and an unfolding, and in the Bergsonian-Spinozist philosophy traced out by Gilles Deleuze the elements comprising things are ‘distinguished solely by movement and rest, slowness and speed’.¹⁹ Likewise, as Elizabeth Grosz, Marcus Doel, J.D. Dewsbury, Nigel Thrift and other Deleuzian thinkers have pointed out, space is dynamic, open and emergent, not a point but a fold:²⁰

Space in itself, space outside these ruses of imagination, is not static, fixed, infinitely expandable, infinitely divisible, concrete, extended, continuous, and homogeneous, though perhaps we must think it in these terms in order to continue our everyday lives…. Space, like time, is emergence and eruption, oriented not to the ordered, the controlled, the static, but to the event, to movement or action.²¹

It is here that thinkers such as Bergson and Deleuze and Guattari depart from the earlier materialism and atomism of the Epicureans, for while Lucretius’ physics is built around the turbulent movements of primordial, indivisible atomic elements, Bergson rejected this base materialism in his own philosophical writings,²² while Deleuze and Guattari combine a Lucretian understanding of movement, flux and turbulent flow with Spinoza’s anti-essentialist and anti-substantialist thinking on elements, assemblages, power and affect:

Spinoza’s approach is radical: Arrive at elements that no longer have either form or function, that are abstract in this sense even though they are perfectly real. They are distinguished solely by movement and rest, slowness and speed. They are not atoms, in other words, finite elements still endowed with form. Nor are they indefinitely divisible. They are infinitely small, ultimate parts of an actual infinity … depending on their degree of speed or the relation of movement and rest into which they enter, they belong to a given Individual, which may itself be part of another Individual governed by another, more complex, relation, and so on to infinity…. To every relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping together an infinity of parts, there corresponds a degree of power. To the relations composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there correspond intensities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act; these intensities come from external parts or from the individual’s own parts. Affects are becomings.²³

Deleuze and Guattari’s worlds, then, are in constant movement, flux and becoming, but their nomadic philosophy – along with other strands of processual, post-structuralist and non-representational thinking – has been criticised for approaching the world as constituted by incessant movements. These criticisms have focused on a number of themes, but I want to focus on two here.

First, a broad range of scholars have criticised the unproblematic and wholesale adoption of fluid, mobile and ‘nomadic metaphors’ by philosophers, cultural critics, literary theorists and anthropologists ranging from Michel de Certeau, Ian Chambers and Rosi Braidotti, to James Clifford, Zygmunt Bauman, and Deleuze and Guattari.²⁴ Nomadic theories appear to have multiplied in the humanities and social sciences as scholars have increasingly turned to anti-essentialist and post-structuralist thinking, and there has been an emerging interdisciplinary interest in themes such as migration, diasporic cultures, cosmopolitanism, mobile communications technologies, performance, globalisation and post-colonialism. For feminist scholars such as Janet Wolff and Caren Kaplan, as well as mobilities scholars such as Tim Cresswell, there is a danger that nomadic theorists generalise and homogenise the movements of diverse subjects, as well as romanticise the lives and transgressive movements of subjects such as the nomad or migrant.²⁵ Uncritical celebrations of the incessant movements constituting the world are said to be in danger of diverting our attention away from the task of identifying the complex politics underpinning the production and regulation of mobilities,²⁶ but while this is a potential danger, it is not a necessary outcome of such an approach. The world may be in constant movement, flux and becoming, but this does not mean that these movements are flat, linear and uniform. Movements and becomings may be approached as qualitative multiplicities, and they are clearly underpinned by diverse political strategies.²⁷

This criticism can be closely related to a second one, which is that a focus on movement, mobility, flux and change overlooks the importance of fixity, stability and stillness in the modern world.²⁸ Now, it is important to note that immobility, stillness, stability and fixity are clearly not the same things, and neither can they be easily or unproblematically thought in binary opposition with movement.²⁹ It is here that I depart company with recent thinking within mobility studies which has frequently approached this problem in terms of the relationship between ‘mobilities’ and ‘moorings’, i.e. ‘the necessary spa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• International library of sociology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Mobility, space and culture
• Part I Mobility, space and place
• 2 Unpicking time-space Towards new understandings of movement-space
• 3 Mobility, place, placelessness
• Part II Driving, culture and embodiment
• 4 Driving sensations and embodied practices
• 5 Gendered driving bodies
• 6 Governing driving subjects
• Part III Conclusion
• 7 Spatialising mobile cultures
• Notes
• Index