Abstract

Mobility as Poison and Cure

Work

Love

What exactly are the new technics of mobility? Can we even pin them down? Are mobile media media technics in the old sense, like film or tv (with their own disciplines, their own established forms of mediation)? Or do we need to rethink the whole question of mediation? How do we map the new technologies and techniques of mobility, along with the social processes, individuation of collectivities or subjectivities they make possible? What modes of living - of work and loving - come into being in a mobile world? What are the new relations between experiment, model and experience in life, work and love?

In reality, mobility is today both poison and cure. Increased mobility, and new mobile techologies are given as the solution to the problem of mobility itself. In such a context, what are the new relations between social collectivity and new mobile media?

To what extent do mobile technologies (and concepts, techniques of mobility) allow us to become mobile in what might best be called an experimental way? To live, love and work in a better way?

On the other hand, to what extent is the proliferation of new technical and social practices of mobility swept up in something like the "mobilization" described by Isabelle Stengers (in The Invention of Science)? This is a mobilization now found in the arts and social sciences as much as the physical sciences, in art itself as much as science (even as the borders between the all these blur). For Stengers, "mobilization" accompanies the very real, experimental "proliferation of practices" [114] in science. In that these practices inevitably depart from the old, a "mobilizing model", along with a series of rhetorics, is designed to recapture them. In "mobilization" a model (or series of models) is mobilized to maintain "order in the ranks of researchers" and "arm them against what would otherwise disperse their efforts" (something like mobilization might even be found in the "models" of social relations within the naming of the "Creative Industries" - that is of course the risk taken by the term and the discipline). These models re-affirm certain disciplines against that which escapes them. There is a price to pay. As Stengers asks, "what knowledges and practices will be destroyed, or prevented from being invented, in the name of what must be called a 'mobilizing belief' - namely, the faith in a future where the body will show that its rational representatives were indeed right"?.

Many questions follow this contest between invention, experiment, mobilization and capture. What modes of living survive? What are the forms of suffering found within the contested flows of the new mobilities. If, as Freud noted in Civilization and Its Discontents, "The communal life of human beings had ”¦ a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love”¦", what are the precise conditions of work and love in the new mobilities? Are the intertwined fates of love and work the two key issues within the new mobilities?

First - work. Psychoanalyst of work, Christophe Dejours, has suggested that suffering is the very essence of working. This is a particular kind of suffering. Here "suffering" "means bridging the gap between prescriptive and concrete reality". This definition of work perhaps allows us to rethink the relations between technics, the prescriptive reality of models or "mobilizations", lived experience and the necessity of experiment. As Dejours puts it -

I love this definition because it rings so true of the experience of work, its mediation of model, demand and contingency - contingency not only in the sense of changing circumstances but of a changing change itself which evades models. The questions that arise? What are the gaps that must be bridged between prescriptive and concrete reality in a world immersed in the models, practices and concrete if fluid realities of mobilities? Who and what are put at risk in order to maintain social order in the new space of flows? And if the new mobilities for the first time begin to take note of the complexity of relations between virtuality and actuality, if only because they capitalise on them, does this only mean there is more work to be done? More bridging the gaps that keep opening up in the production of the real? In short, is "concrete reality" a lot less "concrete" these days (or ”¦ is concrete reality more fully revealed as a fraud by the new technics of mobility)? Does the new mobility demand a new materialism while drawing attention to the poverty of the old (one that still informs so much disciplinary work, so many models of mediation, so many demands in the workplace)? Or does the new mobility demand an ongoing reconciliation of prescription, model, and variation - a reconciliation that is at best partial and always unravelling?

If this sounds apocalyptic, the case is the opposite. Despite the new "mobilizations" that accompany contemporary mobility, there might be many aspects to the suffering or bridging gaps between prescription and concrete (if both virtual and actual) reality that are liberating. If so, in what sense would we mean "liberation" here? What would a genuine social or artistic innovation using mobile (or dynamic) media be? Is it just a question of creating forms of mobility escape mobilization? How are these to be nurtured? Is it time for the individual again, released by the new mobility, even for the collective individual? Does it depend totally on context?

Is this simply a question of practice (although of course questions of practice are never simple, especially in this context)? What are the concrete (a "concrete" taking account of both virtual and actual) alternatives within the new mobilities in terms of social organization, individuation and concrete modes of living?

One practical solution that is already underway: Let us list and share the new practices and principles. Databases should - more than they perhaps do - form nodes of replication of these practices - not just classification and conservation. Technical "life" and social life should support each other productively (while leaving behind the overcoding mobilization of "productivity"). Is that what mobile media are really for, even if such practices and principles are always also "mobilized" in the service of the new dot.coms?

Or are we so busy liberating ourselves with mobile media, or just "bridging so many gaps" that they open up - in short, overworking - that we are lost before we begin? Should we be refusing this work (even as, in sociable media, it masks itself as leisure)? Franco Berardi, in returning to an older refusal of work in Operaism, suggests that -

Are we then, addressing the wrong questions in trying to pin down the nature of new media (as I asked at the beginning - "What exactly are the new technics of mobility?")? Is there too much "work" being done on this kind of question. Is constantly going back to this question a misplaced suffering, even if the question itself is not intrinsically incompatible with the questions of work and love? Would it be better to ask clinical questions of mobility - that is, questions of diagnosing the health or available capacities in a situation. Would this diagnostic approach allow that mobility might well be the cure to its own problem, in the right circumstances?

Perhaps this is a question of therapy. In Sydney in 2004, Berardi finished a talk by remarking -

This "therapy/activism" might engage - in a "clinical manner" - with the embodied individuation of network experience (here the value of the like of Gerard Goggin's interest in disability and contemporary media). In simpler terms this might be to question the "relation" between mobility, the "compulsion to work" and the "power of love" described by Freud (of course, this is not a questioning that needs to take place in Freudian terms). Anna Munster frames such questions this way in Materializing New Media -


So far much thinking about mobility has made much of this a secondary issue, if one at all (even if work and love are in fact, in everyday life, the "material differences" produced in a new way by mobile media). It has been more concerned with dealing with the situation as a to and fro between stasis and change, that is mobility. Social effects become a much measured (somewhat secondary) measure of this to and fro ("64% of those surveyed about their mobile phone use said ”¦"). However, even if one is thinking - perhaps necessarily - in these terms, things are more complicated than is often allowed. Mobile media technologies - and the modes of life they are in symbiotic relationship with - are themselves constantly moving, evolving. As Brian Massumi puts it, "change changes"constantly (Parables for the Virtual:10). This is a difficult - if not impossible - fact for disciplinary forms of knowledge, models, rhetorics and other "mobilizations" to digest (not only in the academy, but in the workplace, even in relationships outside of work). This perhaps explains our rather torn - at best ambivalent - thinking about mobile media. No discipline, no model, no rhetoric can ever capture the mobility of mobility. Indeed, we inhabit this enhanced and increasingly self-reflexive "changing change" by working the gaps between theory and "concrete reality". In this context we should perhaps be aware that our very thinking through of mobilities (whether in the serviced of social innovation or the established "Creative Industries") is "cognitive labour" in Dejours' sense. Although again, despite its demands, work does not inhabit this changing change alone. It does so in a series of tense relationships with the problems of "social affection".

It is therefore perhaps through the questions - and practices - of love and work that we should locate mobile media, and the broader problematic of mobility. This will always be a question of ongoing experiment, whether in the reactive attempt to capture this change or in the attempt to find new ways of loving and working.