Mobilities?

One of the pleasures of intellectual life in Sydney is talking to Anna Munster. The other day, In our usual, weird synchronistic way, we had independently decided to write something on mobility and were both wondering how mobile mobility really was. (I've also written a little about mobility here and here and it would be great if others could post links to their own thoughts).

I guess it's not so surprising, as this seems one of the two mains question concerning mobility. The other is the one we posed for the New Mobilities Workshop, namely: How can the relation between new technologies, new media and mobility be so constitutive and at the same time indeterminate?

Although both questions are meant for mobile media, I suspect they apply across the board.

Of course one could easily argue that the entire history of philosophy and aesthetics has been about mobility (even if a lot of this has been "via negativa" in the attempt to carve out some stability in the flux). As with most interesting "new" topics, everything has always been about them. So what's different now?

Well, first I think that we're kind of giving up - some willingly, other not - on the whole "things are really stable" behind all the flux thing. We're even, slowly, giving up on the idea of "things" perhaps. As we realise how "mobile" everything is, we think, act, create in terms of mobility. This changes everything.

Secondly, perhaps paradoxically, I don't think this means that there is "more mobility" in the world. What has been reconfigured are the ecologies of perception in which we think, act, create with regard to a mobile world. We work more with mobility than againsts it.

Thirdly, this leads to changes in and between other ecologies involve the collapse of certain fundamental "regimes of pseudo stabilisation" as they face their entropic demise - the new forces of migration, the climate, and, on the other hand the rise of pseudo sciences in which no one believes but, crucially, many feel compelled to practice (the disruption to "stability" here lies precisely in the gap between belief and practice). If there is any stability today, it seems a metastability within intersections of different kinds or levels of mobility.

Bergson writes that "intellectual effort" is the effort in working dynamically across levels of consciousness, not just taking in what is given simply in ordered images. It seems that this effort is magnified today in the ongoing need to reconfigure metastabilities across levels and layers of mobility. On the other hand, in a world in which stability is an ecological metastability, we can perhaps begin to understand how some events might not be quite as open to further ecological distruption as others. Some mobilities are more mobile than others.