FluidityFixity

P. Adey, Keele University, Keele, UK

& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary
MobilityMoorings Dialectic A phrase coined by John Urry and Henri Lefebvre that describes the mutually reinforcing relationship between xity and uidity. Fluidity and xity are enabled and sustained by each other. Obduracy A term which is suggestive of permanence, rigidity, or xity. It is less about immobility but an inability to change the capacity for something to endure and remain the same. Pointillism Developed by Marcus Doel, the term denotes a style of thinking which presupposes that social action occurs in places of a container-like character. Relational Materialism An approach developed from science and technology studies and actor-network theory that views objects and things as both social and material entities. Matter, from this perspective, is the achievement of a matrix of relationships. Sedentary and Nomadic Metaphysics Two ideas or imaginations of mobility in social and cultural thought. These ways of seeing the world cast xity or uidity as their starting points, or their norms.

[T]heres no holding the world still and looking at it. (A. N. Whitehead, 1979) [T]he human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our action nds its fulcrum and our industry its tools. (H. Bergson, 1911)

academic!). If someone stops us in mid sentence, we might protest, I was just getting into the ow of things. The rst example suggests a certain kind of immobility through the toughness, or persistence of the person we might consider hard. Conversely, the second example draws upon the metaphor of a uid. Being carried away implies that we are being pulled or drawn along down a stream the momentum of the academic in full ow. For most people these metaphors might be used in everyday life as a means to describe or comprehend our world. This article shows how geographers deploy them in exactly the same way as a means to make sense of processes, relations, and geographies. This article sketches out how conceptions and meta phors of uidity and xity are embedded and routinely enacted in geographical theory and research. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the discipline, the article does not limit itself to the words of just geographers, but also pertinent works which have inuenced them. The article covers how conceptions and metaphors of both uidity and xity are embodied within geographical epistemol ogies, ontologies, and research methodologies. This article starts by tracing out the contradictions between approaches which have privileged xity within their analysis, and conversely those which have given primacy to uidity. The prioritization of either of these two perspectives, it is suggested, imbues such approaches in moralistic meanings and signicance. The rest of the article complicates these points of view. Perspectives which presuppose a dialectic of uidity and xity are examined, as is the understanding of these terms within research methodology. The article nishes with a con sideration of the relationality of uidity and xity, and further research directions being developed now or imminently.

Introduction
Fluidity and xity seem fairly banal and material notions. Indeed, for human geographers, they may appear more relevant to the study of rivers, coasts, and lava ows. However, uids and xities are also powerful meta phorical devices that we use on a daily basis. Consider this: when describing someone who we might think of being very able to physically protect themselves, hes (or shes) hard might be a popular phrase used to describe them. Likewise, we might be involved in a conversation where we get carried away with what we are saying (something that occurs rather commonly for an

Sedentarism and Nomadism

Lisa Malkki once argued that the inclination to xity surmounted to a sedentarist metaphysics: the propensity to see the world in xed and bounded ways. It assumes a sedentary way of life, one based on routines and habits in particular places. From the humanistic geographical tradition, a number of authors saw that ones xity within a certain place could furnish senses of social attachment. These sedentary lifestyles could enable the creation of what is known as a sense of place. Through xity the socially barren landscape of space would be turned into a place of meaning. The home was characterized most

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commonly in this way. However, casting place and home in xed and bounded ways serves to construct a binary opposition between xity and mobility. Posed as a polar opposite to xity, uidity tends to be given the reverse meanings; it opposes the xity of a meaningful place by its inherent supposition of change. Furthermore, by moving out of or beyond places meant the loosening of the social bonds one might form with a specic place. In a sense, uidity and mobility were everything xity and immobility were not. These sorts of perspectives have been questioned by approaches coalescing around more uidic principles, underpinned by what we consider to be a nomadic metaphysics. More recent post structural thought, drawing upon the processual thinking of philosophers, such as Whitehead and Bergson, has driven efforts to rethink the xity of the world anew. A more mobile world is understood alongside more mobile concepts. Cultural theorists discuss how mobility offers a way out of the xed power structures of authority. For many authors, the airport, the rhizome, or the nomad provide useful meta phors which critique essentialist and foundational ways of thinking. Here uidity and mobility are romanticized as acts of freedom and democratic choice, whereas xity and immobility are seen as the product of domination and subjugation. For De Certeau, the idea of resistance was described by the process of a uid a wave washing over the solidity of the xed and enduring power of the rock. The work of many geographers has resembled these styles of thought. The powerful frictionless uidity of the nomad even featured in Halford Mackinders 1904 essay on the Geographical Pivot, which discussed the mobilities of power generated by transportation technologies in relation to the xed land they moved over. In essentia lizing uidity with power, and xity with geopolitical vulnerability, for Mackinder the topographical charac teristics of the Asian steppe offered the free owing mobilities that would permit an army to move swiftly across the continent, and seize global power. Geographys quantitative revolution saw its own romantication of uidity. Flows and uids took on economically productive associations with the movement of people, goods, and capital in circuit models of trans portation networks and location analysis. Indeed, motorways were compared to the hierarchical structure of river systems. The object of the uid was even given ontological status as the basis for the human individual, understood as nothing but a ow for behavioralists such as George Zipf. Although as Emily Martin describes in more recent scholarship, the body as ow is not always interpreted in such a positive way, as leaky ows and uids threaten to overcome the integrity of the skin. Given the more recent preeminence given to no madism and uidity within post structural geography, several scholars have warned of the problems given to

prioritizing uidity over xity, or nomadism over sedentarism. Two of the main critiques in this area have revolved around freedom and transformation. We can deduce that the act of equating nomadism with escape works to essentialize uidity to a universal. Of course, this is incredibly problematic given that we do not all have the same access to mobility. Furthermore, by allo cating these kinds of meaning to uidity one forgets how some mobilities are entirely forced and restricted. In deed, the intersecting ows of the airport terminal have been repeatedly used to characterize new kinds of no madic existence, and even thought, regardless of the in equity of the airport experience. However, Tim Cresswell has gone far to show us that while these ideas and concepts might have found the focus of so many academic discussions, they have not remained in this domain. Rather, it has been suggested that both nomadic and sedentary metaphysics can inform opinions surrounding immigration or strategies of protest and state techniques of control. For instance, David Atkinson shows how both sedentarist and nomadic ways of thinking and living were enacted in the Bedouin Sannusi resistance to the Italian fascist regime in Libya. The conict saw sedentarism and nomadism pitted against each other through the different styles of warfare. For the Bedouin, guerrilla style tactics were employed which relied upon freedom of mobility, independence, and little concern with a territory to defend. Conversely, the Italians enacted a technique of xity and contain ment. By constructing concentration camps they conned the nomads into an enclosed and disciplined space characterized by immobility. In the contemporary world, incoming illegal migrants and asylum seekers are inter preted, given meaning, and potentially treated along similar lines. Immigrants are described as a ood, a rising tide that threatens the stability and homeplace of par ticular localities. Comparable terms have been used to describe the in movement of tramps, homeless people, and travelers. Rendered a leaky container, place is transgressed.

Dialectics
Other approaches have worked less to separate uidity and xity but understand how they are intimately related. For David Harvey, the bounded and xed senses of place favored by some humanistic geographers may, in fact, be seen as reactions to the threatening and unsettling world of globalization and the uidity of capital. Harveys ap proach to place runs in parallel to the kind of dialectical relationship between xity and uidity that, he argues, is so fundamental to the perpetuation of capitalism. For Harvey, and several of the authors who have fol lowed his work, the hallmark of the capitalist system is

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the dialectical relationship between uidity and xity. Drawing on Karl Marx, Marshall Berman, and later Al fred North Whitehead, Harvey argues that the circu lation of global capital is dependent upon an apparent tension between xity and uidity. This tension is evi dent in urban spaces which function as spatial xes. The city is a site in which production and consumption are located in just such a way that capital accumulation can continue. For Harvey, these xities are only ever tem porary states of equilibrium. Crisis points meet the city with creative destruction, restructuring it for the next surge of capital accumulation. In other words, the per petual running of capital cannot occur without the xities around which it will accumulate and later depart. In his reading of Whiteheads notions of enduring objects in Justice Nature and the Geography of Difference, Harvey is at pains to show that neither can there be any xity without the generation and movement of capital to construct and maintain it. Such processes always meet crises. At such a point the xities created by the accu mulation of capital melt into thin air torn down repeat edly like the casinos in Las Vegas. New locations and spaces upon which accumulation occurs will be de veloped once more. Neil Brenner has probably done most to extend Harveys and Henri Lefebvres thought on this topic through the notion of spatial scales. According to Bren ner, scales as territorial entities offer another dimension to that of at spatial xities; and capitals need to terri torialize and accumulate within xed and discrete geo graphical spaces is repeated in a scalar dimension as various geographical scales offer hierarchical and boun ded territories for capital accumulation. Furthermore, Brenner shows how throughout the last three centuries, such scales have been reworked and reorganized as the economic status quo reaches crisis point. Consequently, the reconguration of territorial spatial scales allows the processes of territorialization, de territorialization, and re territorialization to successfully occur on new rela tively immobile geographical infrastructures. Running alongside this work, scholars writing from the perspective of travel and mobility have noticed similar relationships occurring in the organization of societies and lives that occur on the move. It is con sidered that mobilities and immobilities are dialectically linked, and actually need each other in order to sustain various systems and processes. Borrowing ideas from complexity theory, John Urry denes this relationship as the mobilitymoorings dialectic in which complicated and large scale mobility systems rely upon rigidly xed infrastructures to support them. For Urry, and later ex plored by Adey, the infrastructural mooring of the airport offers an obvious example of this correlation. The airport is a system of both relatively immobile materials such as bricks, concrete, and mortar; infrastructural pipelines of

lead, copper, as well as spatially sunk and located insti tutional arrangements and contractual obligations. Such a xed entity provides mooring to the vast matrix of the global airline system. Without this immobility, the airline system would simply not work. One might make similar comparisons to the immobility of the telecommunication and satellite communication infrastructures that permit the technologies of mobile and satellite phones and tel evision, or even wireless broadband.

No Holding Still
Another strand of work which orbits the uidityxity debate concerns discussion about the world which we study. How geographers simply comprehend and make sense of the world and the very research processes they engage in, can be seen to operate according to pretty well xed understandings. We might think of this as a particular kind of ontology a theory of a world that resembles a snapshot image a world captured, xed a world that is. Such perspectives have undergone several critiques in recent years. In terms of research methodology, various efforts have been critical. Sarah Whatmore borrows from science and technology theorist Isabel Stengers to rethink the eld as a passive world out there that lies down and plays dead for researchers to capture and probe. Such a prospect is reminiscent of Whiteheads famous maxim that, theres no holding the world still and looking at it, echoed in Dicken and Lloyds rather overlooked complaint, we cant just go out and stop the world (Whitehead, 1979). As an alternative approach, drawing on the writings of Simonden, Deleuze, Guattari, and others, geographers have begun considering not the world as it is, out there for us to study, but rather a world that is in becoming. This is a world that cannot just be, but that is brought forever into being. Conceiving the eld as a uidic, active, complicated, and messy terrain to encounter problematizes the issue, as does an understanding of the mobilizing process of research itself. Drawing on Bruno Latour, Whatmore outlines the energetic exchanges set in motion by research practice. Practices which literally put the world into play, as researchers take evidence back to the lab, compress earth and soil underfoot, or cause pedestrians to bypass their questionnaire. While this relationship between uidity and xity may provoke geographers and academics to rethink their re search methods, it has also disturbed conceptions of the spatial relationships geographers are concerned with. In particular, it de solidies the more or less container like ideas of space and place that provide stages to social action. Every space is in motion says Nigel Thrift. Taking an ontogenetic approach is not to suggest that things and events are understood to happen in place, a conception

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Marcus Doel describes as pointillism which we can re late back to sedentary thought. Rather this kind of ap proach is to understand how social action does, in fact, take place. For Doel it is to understand the myriad currents that traverse and indeed make space. It is not a question of ontology, but an ontogenetic animation of space, action, or subjectivity. It is an engagement with a world or a subject always turning into something else. Body centered, phenomenological ontologies that orbit around body practice, are encompassed in some of the ideas deployed by geographers who have rethought the relationship between subjectivity and landscape. J. B. Jackson had started this some time ago as he pondered the exible life of the mobile home dweller in the American landscape. But more recently John Wylies rendering of his ascendance of Glastonbury Tor postures a less than static individual, but rather an interinvolve ment between landscape and the body. Ones subjectivity is not pre given a priori, just as space, is never simply there. It is not out there, xed, for us to nd. Rather through the act of walking up the Tor one is assembled and performed in the very practice of strolling along or hiking upwards. For Mike Crang, this kind of spacetime acts less like a container of action, but is deformed and made by it; as ones self is assembled, so to is the world. Geographers inuenced by Ingolds phenomenological attitude to landscape suggest that practices of walking and dwelling do not occur on top of the landscape, acting upon it, but they occur with it. Fixity in this sense be comes an illusion taken from the academic attempting to separate themselves from it. However, it is important to consider that this kind of genesis may be helped and nudged along. Dodge and Kitchin, borrowing from Adrian Mckenzie, argue that the in becoming status of the world is brought about by its augmentation its manipulation by various software, electronic, and information communications systems. This technicity serves to marry up space with software code. In this way, almost every action and movement we make becomes recorded, tracked, traced, and modied by software in one form of another. It also means that space is increasingly more reexive. Spaces react to presence and shape and change accordingly. These sorts of outlooks appear grounded in a world always in motion. The illusionary nature of xity is ex plained and surpassed by notions of connection, rela tionality, and transformation. Even notions such as identity are seen as uid and ephemeral, coalescing into semipermanent forms before moving on again. Having said that, some authors have become increasingly dis satised with such an emphasis. In comparing the thinking of Judith Butler and Luce Irigary, Jenny Robinson questions Butlers favoritism of instability, of identities constructed anew through performativity. While suggestive of potential social transformations,

Robinson asserts that Butler elides the sticky and hard to change xities of identity which do not alter and transform, or are simply replayed rather than replaced. Similarly, Hester Parr makes the point that many people with mental health problems seek not uidity but sta bility safe psychological and social boundaries. More over, Rose and Wylie complain that efforts to embrace the relational, mobile, and uidic in elds like land scape, can go too far, attening out arrested topographies of disconnection, isolation, and immobility. Fixity, it seems, is making a comeback.

Special Effects
The nal work we can dwell on concerns relationships and effects. In fact, for a group of authors the charac teristics of xity and uidity emerge as the effect or an accomplishment of a series of relationships. Perhaps the most exemplary instances of this work can be found in the recent focus upon architecture within human geog raphy. Drawing on theorizations of relational material ism from science and technology studies and theorists, such as John Law, work in this area suggests that we think of buildings as building events. In this view, the apparent stasis or movement of a building is brought about by an effect, by the sum of a particular relationship. Geog rapher Lloyd Jenkins follows Law and Anne Marie Mols example of a World War I bunker through which the materiality of the bunker is not only given by the com position of the concrete it is made of, but rather by the relations it is involved in, such as the weather, reinforcing rods, and more. The interactions of a host of people, things, and climate act in such a way that the very old building is maintained and made durable. Consider a wall. Clay, sand, cement, water, carbon, the energy from the re that dries the bricks, rain, the various acids in the rain, particulates of dust and more intersect with a shoe, a hand, a football, the seat of ones pants, skin, blood, light, to create what we know as a wall. In deed, the wall may be protected through legislation, ownership rights, and a host of social forces that stop the wall being vandalized or knocked down. While these relationships hold the wall together and create its sense of xity, other kinds of relationship can make it much more uid. Jane Jacobs expands on the example of the Ronan Point high rise disaster in the 1970s to consider the complex webs of associations and materialities that added up to the big event of the high rise apartment, and the event of its collapse. Gas, pipes, matches, load bearing anks, Mrs Ivy Hodge, the designers, building regu lations and codes of practice, all interacted together to produce the buildings uidity. Failure or breakdown is not the only time when u idity is apparent within the networked sociality of

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buildings or individual objects. In Laws example of a Portuguese merchant ship, he describes how the various people, objects, and things that make up the ship hold together in relatively solid relationships. The network immutability realizes the task of holding together a working sea going vessel, thereby, giving the ship its mobility. However, these kinds of immutable mobiles have come under question because of the absolute xity given to the internal space of the network, or its topology. Mol and Law discuss how some objects work precisely because of the internal uidity of their network. Thus, something like a Zimbabwean bush pump continuously changes. Its internal structure can be modied and altered. Parts break off it and can be replaced; its shape and form alters slightly as it is used differently in dif ferent places. Its network is uid, a mutable mobile.

persistence? Some of the most innovative work at the interface of uidity and xity debates concerns this very question. Anique Hommels study on obduracy and the unbuilding of cities may be one such area geographers and social scientists will follow. Building upon ideas surrounding relational materialism from the social con struction of technology (SCOT) and actor network the ory (ANT), Hommels provides a comprehensive analysis of what holds the form of cities together. Focusing on several urban areas in the Netherlands, Hommels argues that a lack of participation and the momentum of tradi tion can make a city hard to budge. Citizens, closed out of the planning process may nd their urban spaces particularly rigid and unmalleable. Conventions and traditions in city design and use can work to solidify structures further. Affect, Materiality, and Sensation Another indication of the future of research in uidity and xity may be found in the writings of geographers such as Ben Anderson who discuss and theorize the no tion of affect. Arguing that we take account of the phe nomenological and affective dimensions of subjectivity, David Bissell suggests that we consider the corporeal experiences of xity and immobility. Such an approach elides dualisms of uidity and xity, by exploring how the most immobile acts of waiting for a train, listening to music, or being bored, can evoke innumerable affective resonances and transitions in the bodys activity or pas sivity; anger, agitation, excitement, tiredness, fatigue, and hunger are some among many examples. In this sense, the corporeal affective modes of activity go beyond uid displacement or a xed position, and overcome roman ticized and productivist associations.
See also: Actor-Network Theory/Network Geographies; Humanism/Humanistic Geography; Poststructuralism/ Poststructuralist Geographies; Social Studies of Scientic Knowledge.

Fixed and Fluid Futures

As Lackoff and Johnson put it, xity and uidity seem to be metaphors we live by. Their characteristics have been applied to subjects as diverse as the workings of capitalism to the meanings given to asylum seekers; from under standings of landscape to the form of buildings. They seem to be terms geographers have put to work in order to better comprehend systems of knowledge, to get at how the world functions, or to theorize the research method ologies we might employ. They are not, furthermore, just academic for they are metaphors rooted in thought, daily language, and practice. Let us now conclude with some of the directions research in this area looks to be going. Degree, Phase, and State Most simply, there appears to be an increasing effort, and need, to begin to differentiate these terms. Like concepts such as mobility, uidity and xity can become rather opaque and all encompassing, hiding the innumerable differences between one xity and another, one uid and another. Work in this area might begin to see xity and uidity as two ends on a continuum, with varying degrees in between. Alternatively, notions, such as phase and state, as recently delineated by Martin Jones, Law, and Mol, and explored in elds, such as pedestrian dynamics, can take into account the ability for uids or xities to shift and change state from one moment to the next, phasing in and out. Moving beyond the binaries of uids and xities, Mol and Law also suggest that the properties of re may helpfully describe the ickering presences of certain relationships. Obduracy, Endurance, and Persistence We also need to ask, why is it that some things do not move? Why do some things endure or attain a sense of

Further Reading
Adey, P. (2006). If mobility is everything then it is nothing: Towards a relational politics of (im)mobilities. Mobilities 1, 75 94. Anderson, B. (2004). Time stilled space slowed: How boredom matters. Geoforum 35, 739 754. Atkinson, D. (2000). Nomadic strategies and colonial governance: Domination and resistance in Cyrenaica, 1923 1932. In Sharp, J., Routledge, P., Philo, C. & Paddison, R. (eds.) Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination and Resistance, pp 93 121. London: Routledge. Bergson, H. (1911). Creative Evolution. New York: H. Holt. Bissell, D. (2007). Animating suspension: Waiting for mobilities. Mobilities 2, 277 298. Brenner, N. (1998). Between xity and motion: Accumulation, territorial organization and the historical geography of spatial scales. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16, 459 481.

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Certeau, M. D. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crang, M. (2001). Rhythms of the city: Temporalised space and motion. In May, J. & Thrift, N. J. (eds.) Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, pp 187 207. London: Routledge. Cresswell, T. (2006). On the Move: The Politics of Mobility in the Modern West. London: Routledge. Dicken, P. and Lloyd, P. E. (1990). Location in Space: Theoretical Perspectives in Economic Geography (3rd edn.). London: HarperCollins. Doel, M. A. (1999). Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Hommels, A. (2005). Unbuilding Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, London. Jacobs, J. M. (2006). A geography of big things. Cultural Geographies 13, 1 27. Jenkins, L. (2002). Geography and architecture: 11, Rue du Conservatoire and the permeability of buildings. Space and Culture 5, 222 236. Jones, M. (2005). Towards phase spatiality: Regions, regional studies and the limits of thinking space relationally. Paper presented at the Regional Studies Association Conference, Aalborg, Denmark. Law, J. and Mol, A. (2001). Situating technoscience: An inquiry into spatialities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, 609 621.

Mackinder, H. J. (1904). The geographical pivot of history. Geographical Journal 170, 298 321. Malkki, L. (1992). National Geographic the rooting of peoples and the territorialization of national identity among scholars and refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7, 24 44. Martin, E. (1998). Fluid bodies, managed nature. In Braun, B. & Castree, N. (eds.) Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium, pp 64 83. London: Routledge. Massey, D. B. (2005). For Space. London: Sage. Parr, H. (2006). Mental health, the arts and belongings. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31, 150 166. Thrift, N. (2006). Space. Theory, Culture and Society 23, 139 146. Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty First Century. London: Routledge. Urry, J. (2003). Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity. Whatmore, S. (2003). Generating materials. In Pryke, M., Rose, G. & Whatmore, S. (eds.) Using Social Theory, pp 89 104. London: Sage. Whitehead, A. N. (1979). Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. London: Free Press. Wylie, J. (2002). An essay on ascending Glastonbury Tor. Geoforum 33, 441 454. Zipf, G. K. (1949). Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. Cambridge, MA: Addison Wesley Press.