Copyright Lauren Wagner

DRAFT 3 Aug 2015

Viscosities and Meshwork: Assembling pathways as ordinary mobilities

Introduction: Following networks
{network} Lubna who recognised me from the road how circuitous and closed these networks are, even I
can insert...{/network}

The fieldnote above, encoded as an example of network in my analysis process, refers to an

ethnographic encounter which surprised me significantly during my PhD fieldwork in 2008. Over
the course of that fieldwork, as I learned to reconfigure my understanding of participants
practices through an assumption of networked mobilities rather than of stasis, it became an
experience that elucidates and defines core dynamics of how networked mobilities create spaces
- what I will discuss as viscosity and meshwork - rather than an anomaly. This shift in
assumption was my key entry point into the mobilities paradigm; specifically, with reference to
my interests in practices of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism, it enabled me to step
aside from a spurious assumption that human beings normally stay in one place, and instead to
observe what processes pull us together into settling or collecting from a normal state of
movement. In this chapter, I want to reflect on how working from an assumption of humans-asmobile, along with taking this surprise to be an inevitability rather than an anomaly, configures
viscosity and meshwork as useful metaphorical dynamics for approaching networked urban
mobilities.
In the course of following the people to learn about how summer vacations in a diasporic
homeland are part of practices of being diasporic, I crossed the Netherlands, Belgium, France,
Spain, and in to Morocco along with families making their annual trajectory from one home to
another (Wagner 2011). I encountered many people following the same path along the same
road, and making the same stops in the gas stations, rest areas, and tourist sites which the family
I accompanied used themselves as landmarks to break their journey and reunite disparate cars in
their caravan. As a researcher, I cold-approached many of the passengers of other cars who were
also stopped in these places, in the constant pursuit of new and extended contacts that would
contribute to the ethnographic data on this holiday experience. At one of those stops, I must
have introduced myself to Lubna, because a month later she recognized me in the bathroom at a
hotel pool in Meknes. Standing at the sink, washing my hands, she exclaimed a hello and
reminded me that we had met in a gas station in Spain somewhere.
The fieldnote reflects my surprise (and perhaps some anthropologist pride?) that I had inserted
myself into these social networks appropriately enough to be familiar that in this instance, I
was the person observed as part of a known community rather than being the recognizably
external observer. As the analysis progressed, I paid closer attention to the locative coincidence
of our meetings: first at a gas station in Spain, then in a bathroom in Meknes. Places that are not
in physical proximity to each other; nor are they in what would normally be defined as a localized
community. Yet, evidenced by the fact that this re-encounter happened (and that other,
similarly surprising, re-encounters continued to happen during that summer of fieldwork), I

Copyright Lauren Wagner

DRAFT 3 Aug 2015

needed some way to understand how they must be in proximity to each other, despite the fact
of their seemingly self-evident physical and temporal distance.
Viscosity and meshwork
While I was writing up my research, my supervisor handed me the book Psychedelic White, by
Arun Saldanha (2007), which became instrumental in conceiving of how these encounters should
not be surprising at all. In exploring Goa as an international rave scene producing machinic
geographies of race, Saldanhas contexts appear to be patently quite distant from my topic. Yet,
he describes what he calls viscous practices of participants and aspirants to the scene, tending
to cluster together into certain locations, atmospheres, and groupings so that some are able to
integrate while others are unforcefully, yet palpably kept out. These groupings are
characterized by viscosity as they nightly pursue the scene, in the way that actors might
disassemble their groups and travel, to reassemble almost magically in a new location.
By imagining Lubnas and my movements as what he elsewhere calls a political geography of
many bodies (Saldanha 2008), I can step back to observe viscosity as a dynamic of practice,
describing the movements of material mass of actors along with the material and agentive
affordances of their consumption environments, predictably magnetizing towards one another
and repelling others between certain locations. This analytical shift focused my attention on how
these networked collectivities of like-minded individuals are profoundly if not primarily
mobile, and how, inherently, they would reappear as I became embedded in their leisure
consumption and its predictable spaces.
More recently, developments in networked urban mobilities have prompted me to pair this idea
of the viscosity of bodies with a notion of meshwork of infrastructures that support them.
Saldanha takes note of certain materialities that tend to congeal viscous groupings like the
motorbike as a mode of transport for him, or the family car as a mode of transport for me; I want
to draw attention to meshworks as the trodden pathways (Ingold 2007; 2008), or the interwoven
fabric of structures that become a layer of support (De Landa 1997) that assemble along with
these viscosities of moving bodies. Meshworks may be latent in existing networks and structures,
like transport, communicative transmission, trust networks, and built infrastructures for human
life, that become activated in the viscous seeking of collectivities at certain nodes or along
certain pathways. These happen in how neither the gas station in Spain nor the hotel pool
bathroom in Meknes were created for me and Lubna to meet, yet they both have become
enmeshed into viscous geographies of diasporic Moroccans traveling to Morocco over summer
holidays. In order for us to meet, their material affordances and latencies their provision to
take a break from the road and fill ones tank, or to wash away ones waste, sweat and dirt
have become indispensable as infrastructural nodes along this well-trodden pathway, supporting
the alongness of assembling, dispersing along a trajectory, and predictably reassembling
elsewhere.
Conclusion: Experiencing mobilities
Combining these terms allows me to approach human-life-as-mobile, and then interrogate how
material and affective conditions that may seem very solid and static encourage us to slow down
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DRAFT 3 Aug 2015

in certain nodes long enough to encounter each other. This change of perspective in particular
helps me re-conceive some of the assumptions that dominate migration, diaspora, and
transnationalism as research areas and policy topics such as, the focus on examining
individuals in terms of belonging or not belonging that happens in fixed, immutable, and
spatially-configured homes, defined through community, ethnicity, nationality, or citizenship,
and their borders. For the participants in my research, rather, I observed a sense of belonging
that happened in mobility, specifically in interaction with like-minded (yet diverse) others who
were viscously engaged in parallel assemblings of leisure consumption practices. The borders
that became activated through their viscosities were not necessarily ones defined by an ethnic or
national label, but more potently ones of economic power - borders that echoed in Saldahnas
research as geographies of consumption distinction, which happen to coincide with and
perpetuate divisions of (racialized, ethnicized) citizenship.
My analytical experience of mobilities, then, was as ongoing dynamics: meshworks of structures
allowing and disallowing passage along certain pathways, and collectivities becoming palpable as
viscous movement that attract some and push others out. These dynamics emerged in the
meetings I had with Lubna - now configured as predictably likely rather than surprises - and in
the ways, as I argued in the Networked Urban Mobilities conference (Wagner 2014), this
experience of going on holiday is not so much a departure from normal life as it is a site in
which normal diasporicness is perpetuated, reinforced, and iterated for future generations. In
short, in order to take mobility as a starting point, and to take seriously the alongness of
mobilities, I put forward viscosity and meshwork as two interdependent dynamics describing
assemblage that make belonging something that happens along the road, as much as something
that happens at its destination.
REFERENCES
De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997.
Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History. London; New York: Routledge, 2007.
. Bindings against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World. Environment and
Planning A 40, no. 8 (2008): 17961810. doi:10.1068/a40156.
Saldanha, Arun. Psychedelic White. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
. The Political Geography of Many Bodies. In The SAGE Handbook of Political Geography,
edited by Kevin R. Cox, Murray Low, and Jennifer Robinson, 32333. London: Sage, 2008.
Wagner, Lauren. Hypermobility on holiday: Networked affective densities in leisure trajectories
through Morocco. Presented at the Cosmobilities 10th Anniversary Conference: Networked
Urban Mobilities. November 5-7, 2014
. Negotiating Diasporic Mobilities and Becomings: Interactions and Practices of Europeans of
Moroccan Descent on Holiday in Morocco. Doctoral thesis, Geography, University College
London, 2011. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317815/.