Life-Worlds of Deceleration: Reflections on the ‘New Mobilities Paradigm’ through Ethnographic Research in Post-Socialist Germany

Abstract

This paper is about mobility and its pace. There is a basic assumption that modern societies are societies of increased mobility and acceleration (Rosa 2010; Sheller and Urry 2006; Bauman 2000). This assumption is embedded in the cardinal modern paradigm of eternal growth which apparently unabashedly determines economic processes, political action, cultural values and moral geographies. However, within the European framework of many unclear, contradictory and continuously changing regulations and processes and within ‘fragmented law zones’ (such as EU, the Eurozone or Schengen area) without one single centre of political decision making (Faludi 2008) we have to ask how people generate their own, more complex European geographies (Hess 2006: 115), mobilities and time regimes. Referring to Anna Loewenhaupt Tsing, the argument I will make in this chapter is led by the basic assumption that mobilities come to life in ‘frictions’ (Tsing 2004). Tsing argues that,

[s]peaking of friction is a reminder of the importance of interaction in defining movement, cultural form, and agency. … Roads are a good image for conceptualizing how friction works: Roads create pathways that make motion easier and more efficient, but in doing so they limit where we go. The ease of travel they facilitate is also a structure of confinement. Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling, excluding, and particularizing. (ibid.: 6)