Hello. It's a pleasure to meet you again. I'm Anthony [inaudible] and now we're going to explore the idea of localism and the immotility. What is that? As we saw before when talking about the dominant mobility imaginaries, we have today, the idea is that we should experience high levels of mobility. Because that means freedom, that means competitiveness, that means all positive things according to the linear life without afterlife perspective. Which is also associated with the idea that we should have that mobility, and mobility should be seen as a desirable thing. It's not a sacrifice. To this, we can call globalism. We see that in this representation, on the right-hand side and on the top. It's an utopia. That's the problem and that's the criticism we probably should make to the policy documents despite the European Union, that its base thing, it's policy in an utopia, and all utopias have important flaws. But let's leave that for a moment. Let's imagine what would happen if we have a situation in which we would have very low levels of mobility but that will be seen as something that we want to experience. To that we can call localism, is also an utopia, is very difficult to imagine that something like that could fully come into fruition. That happens. The reason why globalism and localism act so fragile, it's not because the idea in itself, it's inconceivable but because it's so practically difficult to implement and maintain. Indeed, very easily, globalism can deteriorate into what Zygmunt Bauman calls liquidity. That is, a situation in which people experience high levels of mobility but they don't want it. It's a burden. It's a pain, having to constantly travel when would you like to simply be able to stay still, connect, develop roots in depth relationships in a given place. The extremity dystopian situation when you would like to have stayed and you had to move on. A lot of stories that explore heartbreaking moments of life are very much about that. You would like to have stayed in that place and with that people or with that specific person, and you were forced to leave or that person was forced to leave or wanted to leave. Then you stay there trapped in the opposite situation. Because if the person that you loved, for example, left and you had to stay, life lost meaning there and still you couldn't move. That takes us to stagnancy. As you can see, these different utopias and dystopias are very intertwined. Stagnancy is the situation in which you would like to have moved on, you would like to have traveled, but you couldn't. You were stuck in a given place. The problem of localism is that it can easily escape into stagnancy. You think that you are so happy in that place, leaving a very geographically bounded life. But there is a moment in which you say, actually, I don't feel happy here anymore. But then the fluke , you'll have to stay. You become stagnant. There are then these four possibilities. I'd like to ask you to be non-critical about localism and globalism. Let's consider them absolutely perfect experiences and ways of organizing society and their own lives, if they could be implemented. Then the problem of them is not that they are not beautiful utopias because they are, but the fact that because they're very difficult to implement and to maintain, they can easily deteriorate either into liquid life or into the stagnant life. If we tried to then systematize a little bit better, what distinguishes, for example, localism from stagnancy? Something is missing. In order to understand this better, I would like to alert you for the fine work of scholar, Vincent Kaufmann who presents the idea of motility. This is mobility as a desired form of social in the sense of collective and/or personal, in the sense of individual "capital". The limitation of the concept is that mobility can be an undesired experience, and that it can therefore be a form of poverty. Think about a city like London. The wealthy can leave there and work nearby and therefore, they have these very comfortable experience in this amazing city. That has all opportunities, things to do, beautiful places to visit. If you can live and work nearby is actually really nice. The issue is that the great number of people cannot afford to live there, and so they are forced to commute long distances to enter London and to work there. Their commuting is a form of poverty, while the comfortable walk that the wealthy do in the morning, from home to work is a form of capital, is a value of their lives. As we start to see this, we can move to the idea of the motility, proposed by myself and look [inaudible]. Immotility is proximity and low mobility, as desired forms of social or/and personal capital. This is what allows us to really identifying what is localism, and how it relates to stagnancy. Localism is what you have when you have immotility. But if you subtract immotility from localism, you become stagnant. Likewise, when you have globalism and you subtract from it immotility, what you have is liquidity. As a side remark, I would like to let yourself for the difference between, full versus partial forms of localism at which, seeing it in reverse will allow us to understand full versus partial forms of globalism. Full localism will mean that people travel locally, manage the resources that they consume and dispose of also locally, and capital movements flows as so happen locally. It's the local economy idea. If these three things at the same time are working properly, you will have full localism. Again, it's difficult that this could work. That's the limitation of the idea. That if it could work and if people would desire it, that could be considered then an Utopia. Let's try to analyze more in greater detail the difference, between motility and the immotility. Which if this confuses you, you can think about, let's analyze globalism and localism, using a number of analytical elements. Note that we could equally do a very similar exercise globally, for stagnancy and for liquidity. But let's just focus on these two for simplification. The analytical elements I'd like to bring to your consideration are access, skills, materials, time, and meanings. In terms of access, motility is characterized or is facilitated by high technology: Powerful cars that can travel fast and long distance, long speed, fast trains, the airplane. These are the means through which people can, achieve, the reaching, coming back to the part 1, the rich, the access is given by these things in the mortal society. In the immortal society, what happens with three motility? Access is granted by, low profile forms of mobility. I represent here a family walking their kid. They're probably doing this for leisure. But imagine that these will be their normal traveling; relaxed, slow tempo, enjoying the experience. These will be the utopia of the immotile situation or a representation of it. We could imagine other situations, instead of couple in a park with a kid, you can imagine a single person enjoying a walk through the city or cycling in a contemplative manner through an urban area. But what's important is this idea of connection, of enjoyment, of a slow tempo. In terms of skills, the motility is characterized by transferable skills, mobile skills. Skills that are useful everywhere. That are in fact dependent on everyone being connected. Are skills that if you leave place A and you go for place B, you can do the same thing there. It doesn't really matter. Context is not important so that you can work, so that you can contribute to society. In the case of immotility, it's the opposite. Skills will be deeply related to the kind of resources and needs and geographical features and social features that exist in your local setting. You will be using natural resources that are from the area. You'll be providing things that people from the area need in a way that is specific to that area. This can be seen as a very romantic thing for sure, but it's also a form of vulnerability. If you have to move, you cease to be useful. You need, or at least you need to completely change your skill set. That's why we're talking about utopias here. In terms of materials. Around the mortality society is the society of the banana. Standardized products produced very far away brought to your shelves all equal, all the same size. You can buy bananas in Amsterdam, London, New York, and they look the same. That happens because they are motile bananas produced very far away in a standardized farm to be consumed everywhere in the same way. In immotility that cannot happen. If you live in Europe, you will not have bananas, you might have carrots though. Those carrots will be produced around the corner in the plots that you can see from your window possibly. Or that with a walk or with a bike ride, you could go and visit the person that is producing the carrots you are consuming. This also means that, and we'll come back to that, the materials would have strong dependence from the weather conditions, the seasons, the ups and downs of the local economy. In terms of time, motility is characterized by the timetable, by the scheduled event. As in a railway station or in an airport, the train is scheduled to depart at 3.2 and at that exact moment, in principle, the train starts moving. Therefore, you need to be inside the train before that, so that if you want to travel on it. Everything is precise, everything is measured. Also time or specially time. Time is a resource, is a scarce resource. You are living a life characterized by running behind time. That doesn't have any concern for your own life, instead, you need to regulate yourself by the clock. Any motility, it's not the clock or rules anymore, but is the natural working of your local area. Consider for example, grapes. You want to eat grapes, you need to wait for time of the year in which grapes are available, after that there's no more grapes. The things that you consume, the activities you perform are fundamentally dependent on the natural working time of nature of the day. With this, I should say that I'm obviously presenting an extreme version and also somewhat romantic version of the immotility, and also an extreme version of motility. But that's what we want to do. We want to make these extreme so that we can actually see how can we think about alternatives to the dominant vision which is characterized by motility. Finally, it's important that we discuss meanings. What gives to something value in the sense of symbolism, is the question here. In a motile society, there is a fundamental predicament which is as everything and everyone is on the move frequently, It's very difficult for you to stay paired with someone or with a group for a long time. Sooner or later, you will have to move on or someone else will. You'll be left alone, or you will have to abandon someone. This means that you need to become more individualistic. If everything depends on you, because people will not stick around. That means that you need to cultivate your own value. Self-affirmation, ego, development, identity, crafting is necessary so that you can move on to a different place and a firm yourself there. An experience domination, you need to dominate in the different places you go. Remember that the imperatives of this form of life, characterized by linearity and no afterlife. You need to enjoy it as much as you can, you need to maximize yourself. Therefore, meanings are always related to yourself. If I look at something, I will see that thing instrumentally in the sense that what good, that thing or person can do to me, because it's all about me. If we're talking about the immotility, you'll be staying alone time in the same place. Unless you living as a pyramid. But if you're living in a collective, in a society, in a community, that means that you will have to develop connections with these people and so that they are not painful. That you are not in a difficult situation because you're with these people, which would immediately take you out of immotility and therefore couldn't work, will be a contradiction of these logic. This means that you won't be developing strong, meaningful, powerful connections with those around you. Strong friendships, strong connections, strong relationships, lifelong relationships, deep forms of bonding with the others that would allow you to resonate with them. You might be confined to a small geographical area, but the depth of the human experience you can achieve there will be greater, very large, very deep, awesome experiences of interaction with the other human beings and with the environment around you. That is what makes it possible in the first place that you are happy to stay there. Note that you will not need to become individualistic. It's more about being in dialogue, in relationship, in connection, in resonance. This is a term again that Hartmut Rosa talks about an invited tool to explore his work, when we'll come back to it. With this, I've created here a powerful duality. I'm proposing that an alternative mobility imaginary could come precisely from the absence of the value of mobility. Instead will have a situation in which people would deeply enjoy staying, will deeply enjoy stillness, connection, roots and wings. At the moment, imaginary is fundamentally based on the idea of wings, on the idea of wheels, on the idea of movement. What about if we have a mobility imaginary, in which we subtract from that imaginary mobility itself, what would we have? Is very difficult to think about because it requires resonance. You can only be happy for a long time in the same place if somehow you are in deep relationship with that place and with its people. The problem is, can you force that? Probably not. No matter how much social engineering you can put into it. It will probably fail to, as a planner, as a policymaker, to actually make people happy to stay. Unless some magic happens and people are actually happy to stay. This takes us to the issue of instrumentalism and that is going to be covered in the next part. Thank you for listening and see you soon.
