Thomas Nail - Being and Motion

Being and Motion

Being and Motion

Thomas Nail

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Oxford University Press 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nail, Thomas, author.

Title: Being and motion / Thomas Nail.

Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2019] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018013561 (print) | LCCN 2018028422 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780190908928 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190908935 (Epub) |

ISBN 9780190908904 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780190908911 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Human beingsMigrationsHistory. | Emigration and

immigrationPolitical aspects. | Migration, InternalPolitical aspects. |

Political sciencePhilosophy.

Classification: LCC GN370 (ebook) | LCC GN370.N35 2019 (print) |

DDC 304.809dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/20180

Contents

I am indebted to a number of people for their support and encouragement of this project.

After completing a first draft of this book in 2016, I organized a roundtable of colleagues to read and comment on the manuscript. I greatly value the contributions of this group of scholars: Chris Gamble, Joshua Hanan, Darrin Hicks, Sarah Pessin, Daniel Smith, Robert Urquhart, and Colin Koopman.

I am grateful to my research assistants, who helped me with various aspects of the project: Ryne Beddard, Nick Esposito, Timothy Snediker, Cody Walizer, and Reese Wold. I would also like to acknowledge the excellent contributions of the graduate and undergraduate students who took my Philosophy of Movement classes during the months when I was writing this book.

I thank my anonymous peer reviewers for providing such careful feedback on such a large book project and to Dan Thomas and Adam Loch for helping me proof the final document. I am absolutely grateful to my editor at Oxford University Press, Angela Chnapko, who believed in this project and supported from the beginning the publication of a book of this length, scope, and ambition. I would also like to thank my copyeditors, Cyndy Brown and Peter Jaskowiak, for their close corrections and suggestions and Jeremy Gates for drawing many of the diagrams in this book.

Thanks also to the University of Denver Rosenberry Fund for its financial support.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, and especially my wife, Katie, for her continued support, feedback, and editorial direction on parts of this project. These are the material conditions without which this work would not have been possible.

Being and Motion

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history, people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world, like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion.

Socially, life is becoming increasingly migratory.

This global movement has also given birth to an explosion of bordering techniques for managing and circulating human movement. Since the mid-1990s, but particularly since 9/11, hundreds of new borders have emerged around the worldmiles of new razor-wire fences, tons of new concrete security walls, numerous offshore detention centers, biometric passport databases, and security checkpoints of all kinds in schools, airports, and along various roadways across the worldall attesting to the increased social anxiety about controlling social motion.

Contemporary politics can no longer be adequately understood through the paradigm of static states, immobile borders, and stationary citizens. This theoretical framework no longer fits the reality of global mobility, fluctuating borders, and constant migration. An increasing number of scholars across a range of disciplines are coming to recognize the primacy of social mobility and movement.

Scientific knowledge in the twenty-first century also reveals that we live in a world of continuous motion. At the macroscopic level, cosmologists just before the turn of the twenty-first century discovered that the universe is not only expanding in every direction but also that the speed at which it is doing so is rapidly increasing. The very fabric of space-time is now defined by the primacy of a continuously expansive movement.

At the mezzoscopic level, the development of nonlinear dynamics toward the end of the twentieth century showed decisively that even the predictable particles of classical physics are subject to irreversible thermodynamic and kinetic flows of energy. Chaos theory, the often touted third scientific revolution of the twentieth century, has shown that the flux, turbulence, and movement of energy are more primary than the relative or metastable fixity of classical bodies.

At the microscopic level, it is also increasingly clear that space-time and gravity are not preexisting, fundamental aspects of reality but actually products of more primary quantum motions. What we used to think of as solid bodies, elementary particles, and background parameters are actually products of nonlocal vibrating quantum fields. Unifying the macroscopic theory of gravitational space-time (general relativity), and the microscopic theory of quantum fields is the primary task of physics today. Toward the end of the twentieth century, two major theoretical systems became the most dominant candidates for unifying them: loop quantum gravity and string theory. Contemporary physicists are now eagerly searching for a quantum theory of gravity that would explain all of fundamental reality through the kinetic vibration of fields.

While there is currently no scientific consensus or unification of the two competing theories,

In short, if we continue to think of motion as something that only happens when given beings move from point A to B, and not something that is fundamentally constitutive of beings themselves and those points, we will fail to understand the most important scientific phenomena of our time, such as nonlocality, entanglement, tunneling, and quantum gravity.

Images have become increasingly mobilized as well. Today, there are more images in wider circulation than ever before. This is in part due to the worldwide increase in mechanical reproduction technologies, global transportation methods, and distribution circuits during the latter part of the twentieth century. There are now more written, spoken, and visual images moving around the world, faster and farther, than anyone could have ever anticipated. However, perhaps the single greatest source of this massive circulation of images has been the advent of the digital image. Just before the turn of the twenty-first century, a host of digital media technologies (computers, the Internet, video games, mobile devices, and many others) unleashed the largest flow of digitally reproduced words, images, and sounds the world has ever witnessed. No other kind of aesthetic medium or method of mechanical reproduction can possibly compete with what digital media has done to the image during this time period. The digital image thus gave a mobility to the image on a scale never before witnessed in human history.