Neoliberal Mobility and Its Discontents

Although movement is a necessary part of our daily lives, for those enamoured with the project of modernity, mobility often becomes a fetish. Thus in the neoliberal age a new version of Baudelaire’s flâneur has appeared, one who engages in excessive movement. The biomechanical term hypermobility is used by John Adams to describe this pattern of extreme travel; he argues that while mobility is normally a creative and liberating activity, recent shifts in cultural practices have resulted in people over-exercising that freedom with negative consequences which increase the risks of contemporary global capitalism. ² Subsequently, Sivaramakrishnan and Vaccaro have extended the metaphor to propose that “the scale and frequency of this interconnectivity” and the resulting hypermobility have become the distinguishing feature of post-industrial society. ³ And in their exploration of the “system of automobility” Sheller and Urry see the car initiating large numbers of new trips that arise not from economic or social necessity, but to construct a personal identity. ⁴