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Mobility and the Social (Dec 2001)

Mo'bile a. Movable, not fixed, able to move. [F f. L (moveo move)]. Mobi'lilty. n.

The term "society" has traditionally referred to clearly bounded nation-states, and studies have often focussed on what unified or fixed these totalities. But recent attempts to refocus the study of society have given rise to studies of sociality and sociability: problematising notions of unity, purity and order (Albertsen and Diken 2000) and turning attention to mobility.

Horizontal and Vertical Modernity

In the work of Bourdieu (1977) and Luhmann (1987) the unity of the social is challenged by notions of differentiation. Despite significant differences in their approaches, both theorists deny the need for an overall coherence or unity to society. Bourdieu's fields and Luhmann's autopoetic systems are self-governing spheres of interaction and "autonomous in the sense that external impacts are selected by the system or transformed by the field itself. Luhmann employs an auditory metaphor, "resonance," Bourdieu a visual one, "refraction," for this internal-external relationship" (Albertsen and Diken 2000:3).

Modern society, according to Luhmann (1987), is characterised by highly specialised, self-sustaining and prescriptive systems which serve identifiable social functions. For Luhmann, society is nothing but reflexive, self-recursive communication. The social still constitutes a whole, but one without centre or unity, where systems sit side-by-side, differentiated by function and stabilised communications.

Bourdieu's (1977) modernity is differentiated into fields of practice where differentiation occurs between the powerful and powerless. Society is therefore an ensemble of fields, each internally differentiated and bounded by both internal and external struggles. So again the social constitutes a whole, but one comprising different and competing fields of social interaction.

Ambivalence and Heterogeneity

The definition of society elaborated by Bataille (1997) combines homogeneity with the notion of heterogeneity. For Bataille, heterogeneity comprises everything that homogeneity excludes or marginalizes. According to Albertsen and Diken (2000:7-8) "Any heterogeneous social element is defined by its intensity and the affective reactions through which it breaks the laws of homogeneity, as in the cases of excess, delirium, madness and violence. But this is not all; elements that appear to be constitutive of homogeneity can also belong to heterogeneity… [and at the same time heterogeneity] is what escapes, or what flows in and through homogeneity."

Bauman (1998) reiterates the importance of heterogeneity and also emphasises ambivalence. He locates ethics at the centre of social behaviour, but an organic ethics based on facing ambiguity and making moral choices, rather than one based on an external rule-set or system. In this way, Bauman (following Levinas) replaces the notion of society with one of sociality: the interpersonal negotiation of ambivalence and heterogeneity. He is concerned not with what holds us together (society) but with the morality that emerges in social interaction.

Habitat and The Stranger

Bauman (following Simmel) invokes the concept of habitat. Away from society, and towards sociality, habitat is a complex system; the context in which agency operates. Habitat is where sociality takes place, a territory characterised by indeterminacy and ambivalence.

Simmel's (1971: 143) stranger "comes today and stays tomorrow… [and is] an element whose membership within the group involves both being outside and confronting it." Bauman uses the concept of the stranger to demonstrate that sociality consists of belonging to more than one category: always ambivalent, contingent, inconsistent and indeterminate. Neither fixed nor clearly bounded, sociality is hybrid and heterogeneous. Accordingly, for Bauman, the social can only define itself against its strangers.

Chaos and Complexity

The concept of ambivalence is not characterised solely by chaos or complete indeterminacy. Rather, ambivalence suggests a continuum between chaos and order - contingent mixtures of the two.

Complexity can be understood as the potential for emergent (spatio-temporal) order in complex and unpredictable phenomena. According to Thrift (1999:33) "the chief impulse behind complexity theory is an anti-reductionist one, representing a shift towards understanding the properties of interaction of systems as more than a sum of their parts."

Lessons to be learned from notions of chaos and complexity include the "primacy of processes over events, of relationships over entities and of development over structure" (Ingold 1990:209).

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".

Metaphors of Mobility

At this point, let us briefly outline several metaphors of mobility which may be used to describe the social.

The Nomad (the human)

Concerned with lines of flight, nomads characterise the state of de-territorialisation. "The nomad has no points, paths or land… If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterwards as with the migrant…" (Deleuze and Guattari 1986:52). And neither is there a fixed point from which the theorist departs and then returns.

Bauman (1993) notes that nomads do, in fact, follow (seasonal/traditional) paths and prefers to use the metaphors of the vagabond and the tourist. A vagabond is a nomad without an itinerary and a tourist "pay[s] for their freedom" to move and to make meaning (Bauman 1993:241). Perhaps more importantly for Bauman, vagabonds and tourists move through other people's spaces - and moral proximity becomes separate from physical closeness.

The Tourist/Traveller (another human)

But nomadic and travel metaphors have been criticised by feminist and other theorists. Clifford (1997:33) seeks to liberate travel from a history of "European, literary, male, bourgeois, scientific, heroic, recreational meanings and practices". Joniken and Veijola (1997) argue that if masculine nomadic/travel metaphors are re-coded as homeless drunk or sex tourist, their prestige is undermined.

Cresswell (1997:377) suggests that the nomad is "unmarked by the traces of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and geography". And Wolff (1993) challenges notions of unbounded and ungrounded movement, when there clearly exists differential access.

The Ship/Car (the object/machine)

Gilroy (1993) evokes the image of the ship as a container in which the "Black Atlantic" moves: slave ship journeys always involved (mobile) circulations of people, things and ideas through space and time. Ships were the "mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed spaces that they connected," themselves active in cultural production (Gilroy 1993:16).

For Sheller and Urry (2000a:739) the car, or more appropriately, the car-driver is a "hybrid assemblage, not simply of autonomous humans, but simultaneously of machines, roads, buildings, signs and entire cultures of mobility".

The Lobby (the place)

Seeking to move away from metaphors of dwelling, which may imply stasis and fixity, Clifford (1997) suggests the metaphor of hotel lobby - being away from home, in movement, in ambiguity - and then argues instead for the metaphor of the motel. Morris (1988:3) explains that motels "memorialise only movement, speed and perpetual circulation;" the motel then represents "neither arrival not departure, but the 'pause'".

Braidotti (1994:18-19) also focuses on the "places of transit that go with travelling: stations and airport lounges, trams, shuttle buses and check-in areas. In between zones where all ties are suspended and time stretched to a sort of continuous present".

Fluidity/Flows (the state of being)

In contrast to Castell's (1996) network society - a system of interconnected nodes - fluidity is riskier, less secure.
Urry (2000:38-39) represents the social as global fluids, characterised by channelled, yet uncontained/unpredictable/ volatile movements. And yet a fluid "can be distinguished in terms of the rate of flow, its viscosity, the depth, its consistency, and its degree of confinement" (Urry 2000a:32).

In this sense, "topological variables are external limits which give a level of predictability to flows across a surface… [and flows] are measured with respect to other bodies and materials in movement" (Shields 1997:3-4).

Bibliography

Albertsen, N. and B. Diken. 2000. What is the Social? Available online at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc033bd.html

Bataille, G. 1997. The Bataille Reader. London: Blackwell.

Bauman, Z. 1993. Postmodern Ethics. London: Blackwell.

Bauman, Z. 1998. What Prospects of Morality in Times of Uncertainty. Theory, Culture and Society 15(1): 11-22.

Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Braidotti, R. 1994. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cresswell, T. 1997. Imagining the Nomad: Mobility and the Postmodern Primitive. In G. Benko and U. Strohmayer (eds) Space and Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. London: Verso.

Ingold, T. 1990. An Anthropologist Looks at Biology. Man (25):208-229.

Joniken, E. and S. Veijola. 1997. The Disoriented Tourist: the figuration of the tourist in contemporary cultural critique. In C. Rojek and J. Urry (eds) Touring Cultures. London: Routledge.

Luhmann, N. 1987. The Evolutionary Differentiation between Society and Interaction. In Alexander, Jeffrey C. et.al. (eds) The Micro-Macro Link. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp.112-131.

Morris, M. 1988. At Henry Parkes Motel. Cultural Studies 2:1-47.

Sheller, M. and J. Urry. 2000. The City and the Car. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24(4):737-757.

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

Simmel, G. 1971. The Stranger. In D. N. Levine (ed), On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 143-49.

Thrift, N. 1999. The Place of Complexity. Theory, Culture and Society 16(3):31-69.

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.

Wolff, J. 1993. On the road again: metaphors of travel in cultural criticism. Cultural Studies 7:224-239.