Peter Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture, Abingdon, 2012, 214 pages, $ 140.00 hardback. ISBN 978-0-415-59356-4.

See Peter Adey's most recent contributions to Society & Space: ‘May I Have Your Attention’: Airport Geographies of Spectatorship, Position, and (im)Mobility, Facing Airport Security: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Preemptive Securitisation of the Mobile Body, Security Atmospheres or the Crystallisation of Worlds, and Affect and Security: Exercising Emergency in ‘UK Civil Contingencies’

In Mobility, Space and Culture, Peter Merriman pursues a fascinating conceptual elaboration of mobility in relation to what he calls the "primitives" of spatial and temporal thinking, especially within Geography, Sociology and their engagements with Western philosophy and social theory. At the same time, the book proceeds from a conceptual agenda towards a detailed history of modern motoring in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Not only does this rich empirical work shed light on a relatively poorly studied period in the history of automobility, but it also suggests that modern apprehensions of time and space have constantly pushed against the kind of onto-epistemologies frequently debated within academic scholarship, particularly within the corpus of work known as the “new mobilities paradigm”. The combination of conceptual development with deep and subtle historical enquiry is a marked achievement.

The book brings together parts of the author’s recently published work and much of his unpublished work to think space and time differently, through phenomenology and process philosophies. The result is an attention not to mobility in or “across or through space and time”, Merriman writes, but rather to “movements with” more detailed apprehensions of movement. The early parts of the book convey this sense of withness particularly strongly. So we learn of “emerging rhythms, forces, spatialities, affects, gellings, temporalities and much more” that happen with mobility. Mobility, Merriman suggests, must be thought with vehicles, with bodies, with machines, with touch, taste, smell and other senses. I did wonder about “with other people”, such as passengers. We do learn something of the collectives bound together in motoring clubs and their social spaces, but how were these experiences felt and shared together?

The early chapters present a genealogy of terms and concepts, tracing ontologies of movement within twentieth-century geographical thought and continental philosophy to unpick conceptions of space, time, place and location. Merriman does this with real ease, in a way reminiscent of Thrift’s important essay (1983) "On the determination of social action in space and time". Equally, the examination of mobility, place, placelessness especially through the writings of Marc Augé is extremely thorough and almost biographical. Critics might suggest that the treatment of Augé is slightly uneven; why not give Seamon (1979), Massey (2005), Cresswell (2006) or other thinkers of place and mobility the same space? On the other hand, the evolution of Augé’s thought creates the fulcrum around which the rest of the chapters turn, yet with more latitude across a wider variety of authors. And it is in this sense that the earlier sections of the book function; they work to build up a rich vocabulary from which to develop historical approaches to early motoring.

The book makes a detailed progression through a series of cuts, first through driving sensations, driving practices and the car’s assembly of differently gendered bodies, particularly through driving apparatuses such as veils and goggles. It then moves through modes of governing driving practices and methods to resist those modes of governance. These chapters are quite surprising in their detail and sensitivity to the historical material. What we clearly see in these chapters, summed up at the end of each section, is how the apprehensions of driving, both as experience and indeed in design and intent, constitute an unresolved tension. This is a tension between abstractions, which tend to prioritise what Merriman describes earlier as geographical primitives, such as place or location (of speed traps, road signs and routes), the calculations of time and motion (speeding fines, the photographic capture of motoring), the demands on the body (understood through  physiological-medico approaches), the apprehensions of the motoring experience, rhythms, affects, sensations, and ultimately more expressive and impressionistic senses of motoring. Space, time and place, are shown to be blunt instruments, distant abstractions, in any attempt to elaborate the lived experiences of early motoring.

The book does suffer a little from a stylistic divide between the later chapters and the earlier conceptual discussion. In many respects the earlier arguments do pay off, and pay off convincingly at that, but the very short conclusion does not allow much space for the ideas to really breathe all that fully. The theoretical energies are not so much developed, set going and reformed or redirected, as opposed to being really well illustrated in the later chapters which exemplify the theoretical discussion. Perhaps they are also put to work in one particular way, by focusing on the apprehensions of drivers, designers, architects, planners. I don’t think this is a false move, but the earlier theoretical work provides ontologies outside of perceptual and experiential encounters. Merriman’s approach shows how these notions don’t say a great deal towards certain experiences of mobility, and he goes some way towards giving us other conceptual vocabularies to do this. But those philosophies are very much directed in the book towards the motorist as the central character, or indeed the planner or policeman talking and seeing past the motorists’ experiences of mobility through state abstractions and techniques of governance. I wondered if these perspectives could be somewhat decentred, perhaps towards a more “inhuman” account of nature, animals and landscape living with motorists (Clark, 2010)?

This also begs the question of just how specific these apprehensions are not only to driving but to a particular moment in time. The book dwells on a litany of motoring literature such as car magazines and monthly publications, and particularly on novels and biographies of drivers, many of them women. While the book nods to the contextual historical literary context in passing—one driver was within the same social circle as Ford Madox Ford—it seems to me that these apprehensions of driving might be quite difficult to separate from a particular mode of representation and expression, which was no doubt highly classed but also timed. To what extent do these representations of motoring sensations and rhythms appear within a distinctive moment of modern literature (see for instance Thacker, 2003)? There is a question I think over the ability to name and capture the thrust, force and lightness of motoring sensation by a particular group of privileged people, privileged enough to drive and be able to write about it. What was the relationship between motoring, the writer and other forms of writing, journalism and fiction, seen within this book? How would these fields—writing and motoring—produce one another, so that for some, early motoring also meant writing about it, while writing was infused with motoring? Of course, a book cannot do everything, but I wonder how these stratifications of motoring compared to others. Did class and gender cut across motoring in the same way as other forms of mobility contemporary to the period, such as train travel?

Mobility, Space and Culture is a mature, well-written and meticulously researched book which walks a tightrope between a substantive theoretical contribution to mobilities scholarship and a fascinating examination of early motorists in Britain. I think it is a real achievement and it deserves to be widely read. 

References

Clark N (2010) Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. London: Sage.

Cresswell T (2006) On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge.

Massey D (2005) For Space London: Sage.

Seamon D (1979) A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter. London: Croom Helm.

Thacker A (2003) Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Thrift N (1983) On the Determination of Social Action in Space and Time. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1: 23–57.