Abstract
In this paper, I examine the processes through which movements emerge and are rendered perceptible or imperceptible, building upon the writings of geographers, mobility scholars and philosophers who have sought to overcome or efface the binary of mobility/stasis without flattening differences or overlooking questions of ‘the political’. The paper does this by distinguishing between ‘molar’ and ‘molecular’ movements, drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to trace how perceptions of movement and stasis emerge in a world that is in process and becoming. The molar and molecular are not presented as opposed terms in binary tension, but as overlapping tendencies or ‘segmentations’. I argue that a focus on movements and political forces that are becoming-molar and becoming-molecular requires mobility scholars and political theorists to move beyond narrow definitions founded upon binaries of mobility/stasis, the political/apolitical, and micro/macro. In doing this, the paper seeks to advance debates in geography, mobility studies and contemporary philosophy on processual thinking, vibrant matter, micropolitics and the politics of affect. Drawing upon the example of the Israeli separation wall in the West Bank, I then examine how molecular movements and affects are important for understanding the multiple movements and complex materialities of seemingly static molar entities.
Highlights
Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature imperceptible
With a resurgence of research focussing on movement and process in the humanities and social sciences over the past two decades, there have emerged a diverse set of debates about the politics of processual, nomadic and new materialist thinking, and the implications such work may have for approaches to movement, stasis, materiality, subjectivity, sexual difference, action, affect and related matters
While post-structuralist philosophers, complexity theorists and new materialist thinkers have very actively drawn upon different traditions of ‘processual’ thought to argue for the centrality of movement, flow and flux to the composition or unfolding of the world,1 other thinkers – notably mobility theorists and feminist scholars – have argued, like Cresswell above, that fluid and mobile ontologies and a ‘nomadic metaphysics’ are in danger of reducing or flattening movement to a single, undifferentiated mass flow, wherein action, agency and power are effectively dissolved or rendered unplaceable with the dissolution of bounded objects
Summary
Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature imperceptible. With a resurgence of research focussing on movement and process in the humanities and social sciences over the past two decades, there have emerged a diverse set of debates about the politics of processual, nomadic and new materialist thinking, and the implications such work may have for approaches to movement, stasis, materiality, subjectivity, sexual difference, action, affect and related matters.
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