Ideology, Scale, and Mobility
Mobility seems a chaotic thing—chaotic in the sense that moving things are often chaotic in the way we experience them. Stationary, sedentary life, on the other hand, is hard to see as chaos. Some might say that little of interest can be said about what links the movement of blood in the body and movement of jet planes around the globe. The fact of movement, skeptics might suggest, is both obvious and uninteresting. What connects mobility at the scale of the body to mobility at other scales is meaning. Stories about mobility, stories that are frequently ideological, connect blood cells to street patterns, reproduction to space travel. Movement is rarely just movement; it carries with it the burden of meaning and it is this meaning that jumps scales. It is this issue of meaning that remains absent from accounts of mobility in general, and because it remains absent, important connections are not made. Writing on mobility remains either very specific (about commuter patterns, migrations, or dance for instance) or maddeningly abstract—the kind of work that talks of points A and B. Connections need to be made between the determinedly different approaches applied to the different facets of human mobility listed above. I am inspired here by Daniel Miller, who in an entirely different context, wrote that it was his belief that, “in the present the social sciences would benefit considerably from any theory that managed to clarify connections between features of our world that too often seem like isolated fragments whose simultaneous existence is no more than fortuitous.”15 As Miller points out, this is a dangerously unfashionable enterprise in the post-poststructural world we move in, but one that nonetheless needs to be attempted if we are to avoid simply telling stories to each other with no relevance beyond their own confines. My aim, then, is to provide a way of thinking that traces some of the processes that run through the different accounts of human mobility at different scales, and ties them into a single logic without negating the very important differences between them.