A critical evaluation of the so-called mobility paradigm

Transcription

1 A critical evaluation of the so-called mobility paradigm Over the last couple of decades or so in the social sciences there has been said to be a feeling of mobility in the air (Thrift 1996). This feeling can be said to have been captured and articulated into a new mobility paradigm by John Urry in his book Mobilities (2007), which, although making reference to other important authors (e.g. Cresswell, Dant, Sheller), will be taken here as the definitive text on the matter. In his book Urry sets out to conceptualise, promote and ultimately establish a movement-driven social science, based on the belief that contemporary society is largely organised around practices which involve various forms of movement of people, ideas, information and objects. Therefore the point of departure will be to look at the critique offered by the mobility paradigm of orthodox amobile social science, and subsequently the alternative theoretical and methodological landscape that it proposes. Having outlined its core tenets the usefulness of its insights will then be demonstrated by critically applying them to notions of reflexive modernity and individualisation, showing how they can help pursue a deeper understanding of social networks and intimate relationships in contemporary society. Discussion will then turn to some of the critiques levelled at this mobility-focused outlook, in particular in regard to claims that rather than becoming more fluidly mobile some aspects of society are in contrast becoming fixed and entrapped. Finally, having critically evaluated the paradigm, it will be concluded as to whether we should heed the call for this paradigmatic mobile transformation of the social sciences. One of the foundations of the mobility paradigm according to Urry is the contention that, historically, the social sciences have predominantly focused upon geographically propinquitous social phenomena which involve more or less direct face-to-face social interaction (Gane 2004; Urry 2007). He therefore concludes that much social science is based on the assumption that to exist socially is to be in the immediate presence of others, a presumption he terms a metaphysics of presence (Urry 2007:47). According to Urry and others, however, social life always involves a continual process of shifting between presence and distance. Moreover, in contemporary society many social connections are not based upon proximity but multiple forms of imagined presence occurring through objects, people and information travelling, carrying connections across, and into, multiple other social spaces (Castells 2001; Gane 2004; Urry 2007). Hence presence is seen as intermittent, dependent partly upon the multiple interdependent technologies of travel and communications that move objects, people, ideas and images across varying distances and scapes (Appadurai 1996; Cresswell 2006; Urry 2007). Therefore it is clear for Urry that by narrowly focusing only on direct co-present interaction, a wealth of other sociologically relevant phenomena are missed. Thus he wants to shift our focus to see how society has

2 become ontologically mobile, and that these processes of mobility have compelled people to live in spatially stretched and time-compressed ways that can only be properly examined by embracing a mobile turn (Urry 2004). In addition, Urry s other main charge against orthodox social science is that it has been amobile (Sheller & Urry 2006; Urry 2007). That is, it has largely ignored the complex assemblage between the five interdependent mobilities he identifies as producing social life: the corporeal travel of people for work, leisure, family life, migration and escape; the physical movement of objects to producers, consumers and retailers; the imaginative travel facilitated by media images of places and people; virtual travel often in real time thus transcending geographical and social distance; and communicative travel through personto-person messages via messages, text and mobile telephony. In order to understand these mobilities Urry draws heavily upon Simmel, in particular his notion of the will to connection, to claim that much social life and hence the perceived need to travel stems from the continued importance ascribed to face-to-face (and, indeed, body-to-body) sociality (Urry 2007, 2012; see also Goffman 1990). In fact, Urry takes this further to claim that mobilities are often about duties, about the obligation to see the other, perhaps considered the burden of mobility, and thus he claims that it is these reciprocal obligations between people that are the stuff of life, of how organizations, friendship networks, families, work groups, political organizations perform themselves as such across space and over time (Urry 2007:11; see also Bærenholdt 2012). This suggests that it is perhaps becoming impossible to live now without becoming mobile. Hence it is also consequently becoming impossible to investigate social life without addressing the effects of mobility. And as Urry rightly reminds us, part of this investigation includes examining the enduring material infrastructures that actually enable mobility. Therefore another fundamental aspect underlying the mobilities paradigm is the contention that we need to reconsider the orthodox belief in social science which treats social life as being independent from the realm of objects (Adey & Bevan 2006; Dant 2004; Gane 2004). For Urry (2007), rather, part of the heterogeneity of social life are the various material objects (including technology) that directly or indirectly move or block the movements of objects, people and information. Thus it is argued to be necessary to examine the many ways in which relationships between objects and people are assembled and re-assembled across time and space (Dant 2004). Crucial for understanding these relationships is the concept of affordance. That is, the idea that people do not simply just encounter a set of objective things in the environment but rather that different objects, relative to the particular human organism and its senses and technologies, provide different options that constrain/facilitate behaviour along certain possibilities (Michael 1996; Urry 2007). So for instance Dant talks of the driver-car assemblage, whereby [n]either the human driver nor

3 the car acting apart could bring about the types of action that the assemblage can (2004:62). He seeks to emphasise how it is only in bringing their capacities together that the driver-car enables a range of new humanly embodied socialities, of commuting, family life, leisure and so on (ibid; see also Urry 2004:28); highlighting how this symbiotic relationship has reconfigured the relation between place, space and the mobility of people and objects (Sheller & Urry 2003). This focus on the various assemblages between objects and humans also draws attention to the significance of systems that distribute people, activities and objects in and through time-space (Urry 2007:51). Urry refers to these as mobility-systems, and claims that historically most societies have been characterised by one major mobility-system which is in an adaptive relationship with that society s economy. In the contemporary developed world it is often automobility which is the dominant corporeal mobility-system (Sheller & Urry 2003), although there are some notable exceptions such as the canal system of Venice (Kellerman 2012). Nonetheless Urry (2003, 2007) argues that there cannot be movement without context, without something to push off from, and so he proposes the idea of a dialectic between mobility and moorings (Hannam, Sheller & Urry 2006). That is, that complex systems of mobility require solid, static systems of immobility in order to function (Adey 2006; Urry 2003). So, for instance, mobile machines such as cars, trains and computer connections all presuppose overlapping and varied time-space immobilities such as roads, train tracks and power lines (Urry 2003). Moreover Urry (2003:125) claims the most powerful mobility machines require the largest moorings, with the airport being the most obvious example requiring the vast (relatively) immobile workforce and infrastructural resources of the airport city (Cidell 2013). Therefore the mobility paradigm seeks to examine and understand these interdependent systems of immobile material worlds, as for Urry these are what structure the mobility experiences that make possible the socialities of everyday life (Urry 2007:19). As we have seen the mobilities paradigm contains many diverse aspects, yet it is fundamentally united in its concern to make social science mobile. As such I would contend that its main strength, in bringing previously neglected issues of mobilities to the fore, is that it can offer a valuable (and now unavoidable) mobile dimension of analysis to other more established areas of social theory. This can be demonstrated by looking at how aspects of mobility can inform conceptions of reflexive modernity and individualisation, in particular in relation to social networks and intimate relationships.

4 According to some theorists, over the past few decades we have experienced a societal shift towards what has been called reflexive modernity (Beck, Giddens & Lash 1995). It is argued that through the processes of reflexive modernisation more and more areas of social life have become disembedded from the hold of tradition and social structure, so that people must now choose their own paths, they must construct a do-it-yourself biography (Beck 1992, 1995; Elliott 2009). Aspects that were previously governed by tradition or taken-forgranted norms have now become a matter of agency, and so must be reflexively planned, rationalised and deliberated over. Or, as Giddens puts it, we have no choice but to choose how to be and how to act (Giddens 1995:75). Similarly for Beck (Beck 1995; Beck & Beck- Gernsheim 2002:4), in the absence of the certainties provided by industrial society s social structures, individuals have now become individualised and thus must design and construct their biography, identity and social networks for themselves. However I would argue such influential theories fall prey to the a-mobile thinking outlined earlier, as they underestimate how aspects of mobility can be significant in and of themselves (Sheller & Urry 2006). Therefore, for me, their views can be developed by drawing on ideas taken from the mobilities paradigm. For instance, as Urry (2012:25) points out many aspects of networked individualism, which can be seen as a corollary of individualisation, stem from technologies which afford mobility (both physically and virtually). Thus in accordance with Beck he claims that individuals are becoming the engineer of their own ties and networks (ibid:25), who can stay connected no matter where they are and even while on the move (one only needs to think of the new aptly titled Everything Everywhere mobile phone network to see evidence for this ethos of perpetual connectivity). In this sense individualisation becomes even more deeply individualised, as not only are people separated from the givens of social structures but also, in an age of ubiquitous mobility, of social networks based on locality and geography. So that people are now able to, and indeed must, reflexively construct and maintain their socialities more or less at a distance via more or less intensive mobilities (Urry 2012). Thus it is the mobilities paradigm which directs us to examine how aspects of mobility add to the complexity of peoples personal communities (Pahl & Spencer 2004). In addition, this connection between mobilities and reflexive modernity can also be seen by looking at intimate relationships. In reflexive modernity individuals are required to actively engage, negotiate and renegotiate with the complexity of choices available in their intimate relationships (Bauman 2003; Elliott 2009), and so these become less about tradition and more about the plurality of choice; which has resulted in an increase in relationship experimentation, reflected in the growing widespread acceptance of co-habitation, same-sex couples, divorce and so on (Elliott & Urry 2010). According to Giddens (1991:81), this has opened out the mobile

5 nature of self-identity. However what Giddens perhaps fails to notice, despite his work on time-space distanciation, is that this increased experimentation is not simply about the proliferation of choices but it is also, and significantly, about the opening of potential relationships that occur across varying distances, in different locations and at different times (Elliott & Urry 2010). As such Elliott and Urry (2010) propose the concept of mobile intimacy to describe the recent explosion of explorations in flexible intimate relationships occurring at-a-distance, such as commuter marriages and weekend couples (Holmes 2006, 2010), facilitated by the availability of various mobility-systems such as the internet, the (driver-)car and cheap air travel. They maintain that if theorists of reflexive modernity had appraised the role of mobilities more systematically, then perhaps they might have seen how identities and relationships have become not only individualised and reflexive, but also undoubtedly mobile. Thus I would argue it is becoming increasingly impossible for sociology as a discipline to maintain any analytical purchase on the contemporary social world without addressing the challenges and directives proposed by the mobilities paradigm. However, despite offering many useful insights, the propositions of the mobilities paradigm are far from being universally accepted and have been challenged on several fronts. For example some have criticised mobility theorists for portraying a view of the world that is a lot more fluid, open and mobile than may be the case (Shamir 2005). Moreover Bauman maintains that while there has been a promotion of unimpeded freedom of movement for dominant elites, at the same time there has also been an imposition of even tighter restriction on movement for the rest (Bauman in Gane 2004:23). This mobility gap is also echoed by Shamir (2005), who contends that in the era of globalisation mobility is still a scarce resource reserved for a small social stratum while the overwhelming majority of the world remains more or less permanently immobilised. Similarly Turner (2007) claims that while Urry is correct to emphasise global flows and networks as key features of the modern world, in a post-9/11 age it is often the case that rather than becoming more porous states are increasingly defending their borders with greater rigor. (One only needs to think of the recent furore surrounding the supposed huge influx of Romanian migrants into the UK following their entry into the EU, or the close the borders rhetoric associated with UKIP, for evidence of this). Thus he and Shamir counterpose the mobilities paradigm with the concepts of the enclave society and the paradigm of suspicion, which seek to highlight the fact that far from becoming a freely mobile world there are still instances where movement is actively inhibited, entrapped or contained. Nevertheless, in response to such criticisms I would suggest that even issues of immobility and enclavement are still aspects which are fundamental and intrinsic parts of the mobilities paradigm; as for Urry (2007:43) it is not only movement but also potential

6 movement and blocked movement which are constitutive of economic, social and political relations. Thus it seems to me that by highlighting the importance of mobility in the contemporary world, the mobilities paradigm necessarily opens up space to examine the instances where there is immobility, unequal access to mobility, enforced mobility and so on. Indeed it could even be said that had it not been for the efforts of Urry and others in putting forward this paradigm, then these debates between mobility versus enclavement would not even be on the agenda. Furthermore even if we are to accept the charges of Turner and Shamir, that inter-national mobilities are increasingly inhibited, this does not negate the occurrence and proliferation of the more everyday intra-national mobilities that now undoubtedly constitute large aspects of social life, as demonstrated in relation to social networks and intimate relationships. And which only by critically embracing the directives of the mobilities paradigm can we effectively come to sociologically investigate. To conclude, as we have seen the fundamental premise of the mobilities paradigm is to conceptualise, promote and ultimately establish a movement-driven social science. Its point of departure is to critique and transform the apparently a-mobile nature of orthodox social science. Thus the mobility paradigm invites us to explore how much of social life in contemporary society is increasingly based on an interplay between presence and distance, involving various forms of mobility afforded by different mobility-systems. Having distilled the paradigm into its key constituent parts, it was then contended that its crucial significance lies in the extra mobile dimension it adds to sociological analysis. Thus it was demonstrated how the conceptions of social networks and intimate relationships informed by Beck and Giddens had failed to adequately consider the effects of mobilities, and in doing so ignored how these have not only become individualised and reflexive but also mobile. Critique of the mobilities paradigm was then put forward in the form of Shamir and Turner, who contend that rather than becoming more mobile some aspects of society are arguably becoming more enclaved. However such charges were countered by suggesting that issues of immobility and enclavement should be seen as intrinsic aspects of a mobile outlook, and indeed are equally as important to examine as mobility itself. Moreover, for me, it is only in building an alternative mobile landscape that we can attain the necessary methodological and conceptual tools required to understand these topics further. So in essence, it can perhaps be said that while Urry s formulation of a mobility paradigm may not be perfect, by putting mobility firmly on the agenda it is certainly a significant step in the right direction.

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