Abstract
Mobility has become a central topic of contemporary social research with the mobility turn initiated in the 2000s. In order to grasp the complexity of the global order, its authors have attempted to decenter the importance of human subjectivity and to envisage a “sociology beyond societies”. The present paper considers this interpretive context to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Alfred Schutz’s theory of action, and to propose a notion of mobility intrinsically linked to the performance of subjectivity. By revisiting the distinction between action as a thing produced and as an ongoing process, the notion of mobility is detailed in relation to movement in space and to the subjective flow of time. The specific type of action Schutz calls “locomotion” in his later work enables us to understand how action involves bodily operations in configuring a common space of sociality and communication. I conclude by going beyond the explanation of action in terms of its starting point and end point, and by assessing how action unfolds through the experiential life of the subject, with its new meanings and unexpected changes.
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Notes
Urry’s (2000: 15) criticism can be extrapolated to Schutz insofar as it is concerned mainly with the role attributed to the sphere of human action in the “classic philosophical-sociological debates” between holism and individualism. This should not prevent examining the differences between Schutz’s and Berger and Luckmann’s works. See Muzzetto (2016). As the author states, Berger and Luckmann separate the sociology of knowledge from phenomenology stricto sensu, and, although Schutz is a key reference, their theoretical framework draws on the philosophical, sociological and anthropological perspectives found in the work of Hegel and Marx, Durkheim and Weber, Plessner and Gehlen, to name but a few. In particular, Muzzetto stresses how Berger and Luckmann’s conception of the “natural attitude” differs for Schutz’s, and leads to the view that the reality of the everyday life-world is endemically fragile, tinged by anxieties of disintegration and chaos.
For a systematic account of the notion of “communicative action,” see Knoblauch (2020).
According to Simmel (1971b: 10), “fragmentation” does not refer to a state of incompleteness, but to being only a part of the world and of the individuality and unique possibilities of ourselves.
See Goodstein’s (2005) work on Simmel, whose work can be read as a precedent of Schutz’s phenomenology.
To characterise the attitudes embodied in action, Schutz (1967: 73) also refers to “moods” as that which makes us more or less attuned to pragmatic mastery (the things “being on hand”) or to discovering new possibilities of action.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was presented at the 2019 Annual Conference of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (SPHS), held at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh (PA), October 31-November 2, 2019. I would like to thank the conference participants, especially Jochen Dreher, Andreas Göttlich, Carlos Belvedere and Alexis Gros, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, for their comments. I am also grateful to Hubert Knoblauch and René Tuma for their comments on a preliminary draft version discussed at Technical University of Berlin in October 2019.
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Lafontaine, S. The Significance of Mobility in Alfred Schutz’s Theory of Action. Hum Stud 43, 567–584 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-020-09563-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-020-09563-2