The discursive accomplishment of regimes of automobility

In this chapter, I explore the ongoing discursive construction and contestation of the valuation and meaning of ideologies of automobility (cf. Urry, 1999, 2004, 2007; Conley and Tigar McLaren et al., 2009; Böhm et al., 2006) in the face of climate change. Hence, based on my draft of an alternative conceptualisation of mobility, I address impacts of thought schemes and structures on current social and political discourses of mobility as I discuss and demonstrate how rationalities of advanced liberalism co-constitute a car-dependent way of living.
Drawing on both studies of governmentality and ethnomethodology the chapter adds a widely acknowledged yet underdeveloped perspective to already existing research on automobility: a perspective that enquires into how rationalities of automobility are accomplished in discursive interaction at the vulgar everyday level. In more detail, the chapter reports on a qualitative case study in a decentralised Danish village that demonstrates how citizens accomplish the rationalities that co-constitute their car-dependent mobility in discursive interaction. During the time of the case study (2010-11), the village was engaged in an energy village project, and the study illuminates how certain rationalities of advanced liberalism are re-negotiated as citizens are called upon to make their everyday transportation conduct meaningful and in accordance with the local energy project. Particularly, the study shows how skilfully the citizens accomplish a rationality of ‘freedom as autonomy’ (cf. Rose, 1999) as the most important rationality regarding their everyday mobility.

Hereby, the chapter contributes to the study of ideologies of automobility in two interrelated ways. Firstly, rather than following the dominant conceptualisation of automobility in terms of complexity theory, the chapter approaches automobility not merely as the result of the blind and unaccountable happenstance of systems, but of molecular (and traceable) governing at all levels which is prominently unfolded in discursive interaction. In this, the chapter is inspired by scholars such as Böhm et al. (2006) who outline a theoretical move from complex systems to Foucauldian regimes of automobility. That is, I follow Böhm et al. as they suggest that the notion of regimes makes it possible to maintain an orientation to automobility as somehow systematic, but also as bound up with multifarious and subtle relations of power that co-construct the very sense of a patterned and necessary system. 

As indicated, the chapter furthermore, perhaps more specifically, contributes to automobility in that it takes a novel and thoroughly discourse oriented approach to the study of ideologies automobility. In my understanding of rationalities or ideologies of mobility as discursively constructed, I am inspired by ethnomethodological discourse studies (such as membership categorisation analysis). Whereas more deductively oriented discourse analytical approaches have an inherent tendency to presuppose (and therein homogenise) its findings, ethnomethodologically informed discourse analysis acknowledges the importance of studies of how rationalities are continuously made observably relevant for all practical purposes. However, it is not the entire domain of ethnomethodological research that invites to be connected up with Foucauldian studies of governmentality. Consequently, I do not draw on any version of ethnomethodological research, but on a line which can be connected with studies of governmentality, and the chapter outlines an argument for the theoretical feasibility and the methodological fruitfulness of this unconventional merger, suggesting it as a basis for an alternative conceptualisation of mobility. In this, the chapter draws on my PhD thesis (Lindegaard, 2012) in which I fully connect up ethnomethodological discourse studies and Foucauldian research, something which has otherwise only been indicated by a very few scholars, such as McHoul (1986, 1996) and Laurier and Philo (2004).