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On Fluidity and Flow (Nov 2001)

According to Law (1996) actor-networks can often deal with inconsistency and complexity, but there remains a tendency towards drawing things together: controlling, limiting and mastering disorder with the network.

Challenging ANT, Mol and Law (1994:641) argue that the "social doesn't exist as a single spatial type. Rather it performs several kinds of space in which different 'operations' take place… There are other kinds of space [where] neither boundaries nor relations mark the difference between one place and another. Instead, sometimes boundaries come and go, allow leakage or disappear altogether, while relations transform themselves without fracture. Sometimes , then, social space behaves like a fluid".

Drawing on the notion of flow from the work of Deleuze and Irigaray, Shields (1997) explains that flows are spatial, temporal and, importantly, they are also material. "The significance of the material quality of flows is that they have content, beyond merely being processes… Flows signal pure movement, without suggesting a point of origin or a destination, only a certain character of movement, fluidity and direction… It is not that they are relational between objects or fixed points - which are taken as immutable mobiles - but they are the being of relation" (1997:2).

Mobile Sociology

Urry (2000:2) claims that material transformations "are remaking the 'social,' especially those diverse mobilities that, through multiple senses, imaginative travel, movements of images and information, virtuality and physical movement, are materially reconstructing the 'social as society' into the 'social as mobility'".

According to Urry (2000b:193) "scapes are the networks of machines, technologies, organizations, texts and actors that constitute various interconnected nodes along which flows can be relayed... [and there are] two different kinds of such networks, global networks and… global fluids".

Global enterprises are networks characterised by "technologies, skills, texts and brands [that] ensure that more or less the same product is delivered in more or less the same way in every country in which enterprise operates… from one node in this global network to the next" (Urry 2000b:193-194). Global fluids are the "heterogeneous, uneven and unpredictable mobilities of people, information, objects, money, images and risks, that move chaotically across regions in strikingly faster and unpredictable shapes" (Urry 2000b:194).

Urry (2000:18) seeks to "develop through appropriate metaphors a sociology which focuses upon movement, mobility and contingent ordering, rather than upon stasis, structure and social order".

Mobile Geographies: (dis)locating local and global, public and private

Notions of scale, of localities and globalities, should remind us that spaces are performed, that distance is created. That is, alongside geographical space and temporality are "alternative kinds of material relations and alternative kinds of spaces" (Law and Hetherington 1999:9). Relations produced in materially heterogeneous performances have spatio-temporal effects: intersections and interferences also produce asymmetries. In other words, objects and subjects are always interpellated in particular ways (Law 2001).

Sheller and Urry (2000b:2) argue that "increasing recognition of the social importance of mobility across places and movement through space has begun to transform conceptualisations of the public. But less critical attention has come to bear on the private as a fluid network, which is also mobile through space." But above all, they are interested in how individuals and objects cross the boundaries between public and private, and how the private manifests itself within the public and vice-versa.

So individuals and collectivities perform difference, multiplicity and mobility. But mapping these performances brings a series of assumptions to the table: that scale and size are given in the order of things; that maps might represent something real; that whatever is mapped has a definite form or singularity (Law and Singleton 2000). In this sense, a map "turns out to reflect not only a model of representation which depicts trajectories and pathways, the nodes and the lines of a network, but a complementary model of depiction to do with compartments: that is, to do with regions and with boundaries between the regions. So we have two cartographic visions… suggest[ing] that the two are interfering with one another… [so] we will need multiple maps, with multiple points of entry. Then we will have the job of seeing how these multiple maps partially connect with one another" (Law and Singleton 2000:10).

"Perhaps there is simply something diffuse about the object itself… Perhaps it simply slips, slides, and displaces itself. Perhaps its boundaries move about from one location to another, and do not stay still. Perhaps they ebb and flow…" (Law and Singleton 2000:14).

Hillis (1999:134) claims that "our participation in the social imaginary is intimately connected to the mutable power of metaphor." He notes the prevalence in Western cultures of visual metaphors - after all, seeing is believing.

Now imagine "there is a building - or a story about a building - which is an allegory. An allegory for? An allegory for that which cannot be told. That which cannot be held together. That which cannot be represented within any of the traditions of cartography, compartmental, trajectorial, or for that matter tidal… Allegory is about what cannot - or has not - been told. Or drawn. Or mapped. It is about excess. It is about figure as opposed to discourse. It is about alterity. It is about motility. It is about the presence of absence, or the absence of presence" (Law and Singleton 2000:17). Allegory is about compartments and trajectories that create partially connected (sometimes invisible) realities. "In which case knowing is as much about feeling and sensing and smelling difference, as it is about telling or drawing. It is as much about appreciating the textures of performance, or performing, of reading between the lines, as it is about the lines themselves. It as much about evoking as it is about describing. The art of evoking" (Law and Singleton 2000:18).

The Moveable Crowd

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Latin mobile vulgus means the moveable or excitable crowd.

Canetti (1998) offers an explanation of the ways crowds form, develop, and dissolve, using taxonomies of collective (masse) movement as keys to the dynamics of sociality and sociability. And Canetti's crowds are performed as collective multiplicities, actual and virtual, de-differentiated and always already present.

For Canetti (1998:17), the most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge: "Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge which creates it." This moment is one of de-territorialisation, when we are freed from the burdens of distance; but during a discharge the crowd is also an illusion, in danger of dissipating and being re-territorialised and closed. The destructiveness of crowds is an attack on all boundaries, and de-territorialisation makes possible the crossing of boundaries. To this, Canetti (1998:22) adds the eruption: the sudden transition from a closed to open crowd, the crowd overflowing. So the performances that bind the crowd may also push the boundaries of the crowd until it disintegrates.

"The crowd is open so long as its growth is not impeded; it is closed when its growth is limited… The stagnating crowd lives for its discharge… the process here starts not with equality but with density… In the rhythmic crowd… density and equality coincide from the beginning. Everything here depends on movement" (Canetti 1998:30). The rhythmic, or throbbing crowd is characterised by a specific state of communal excitement: "the means of achieving this state was first of all the rhythm of their feet, repeating and multiplied," not moving, but gathering intensity at one place and creating frenzy (Canetti 1998:31). In this sense, the stagnating (closed) crowd is always becoming the rhythmic (open) crowd.

Bibliography

Canetti, E. 1984. Crowds and Power. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Hillis, K. 1999. Digital Sensations: Space, Identity and Embodiment in Virtual Reality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Law, J. 1996. Traduction/Trahison - Notes on ANT. Available online at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/stslaw2.html.

Law, J. 2001. Machinic Pleasures and Interpellations. Available online at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc067jl.html.

Law, J. and K. Hetherington. 1999. Materialities, Spatialities, Globalities. Available online at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc029jl.html.

Law, J. and V. Singleton. 2000. Allegory and its Others. Available online at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc051jl.html.

Sheller, M. and J. Urry. 2000b. Mobility and the Transformations of Public and Private Life. Paper submitted for the American Sociological Association Annual Conference 2000.

Shields, R. 1997. Flow as a new paradigm. Space and Culture 1:1-8

Urry, J. 2000. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge.

Urry, J. 2000b. Mobile Sociology. British Journal of Sociology 51(1):185-203.