Imagined mobilities

As a matter of fact, and not just conjecture, we live in multiple realities: The reality of the workplace, the reality of the classroom, the reality of intimate conversations among friends, the reality of family celebrations. Each of these is its own reality, meaning that it consists of a finite province of meaning and has its own tension of consciousness: whether the heightened alertness among intimates, the dulled sensibilities of repetitive work routines, or the expectations of prevarication in political arenas.

L'imaginaire is its own finite province of meaning - bounded by certain master symbols, reveled in for the possibilities it suggests, yet never confused (except by the most naïve) with empirical reality. Yet even more so, the imaginary prefigures other realities -- if something is "not imaginable," people can actually shut it out of their consciousness. Sigmund Freud called this defense mechanism "denial."

There are two answers to this, the historical and the contemporary. Historically, new forms of mobility have been the stuff of dreams, until they were actually built: Leonardo da Vinci imagined human flight four hundred years before Blériot and the Wright brothers accomplished it; Michel Nadar landed on the moon, in the pages of Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune, one hundred years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually set foot there.

Even in our daily lives we always imagine mobility before we accomplish it: whether commuting to work, we think about the traffic ahead; visiting family, we try to imagine the joyous reception; and in a pilgrimage to a holy shrine, the pilgrim will utter a prayer before beginning the voyage. Some mobilities such as tourism, stretch our imagination, which is a major part of their enjoyment; others provide a "reality check," to see if our thoughts about a distant event were real, or just dreaming.

Imaginaries have a symbolic constitution. Symbol systems have an analogical or metaphorical coherence, which no one confuses with literal fact, even if they cannot really articulate the difference. Symbol systems are organized around a few "key symbols," "root metaphors," or "master narratives," which order and give coherence to the entire system.

For imaginaries of mobility, the nation is one of the master narratives. Nations are what the historian Benedict Anderson called "imagined communities," creating a sense of kin-ship and fellow-ship among millions of people separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. Associated with the rise of mass-distributed print publications and the eclipse of religious imaginaries since the 16th century, the nation became a dominant trope for many different forms of mobility: whether the Trans-continental Railway, uniting the American continent, the automobile as an instantiation of the "American Dream" and American identity, or human flight as national transcendence.

Mobilities in the sense of transportation and communication infrastructures are pursued around the world as means of uniting the nation, of turning the imagination into fact.

Narratives of mobility often are uniquely national:  for Americans, mobility is a symbol of freedom, whereas for the French, mobility can be a symbol of sophistication. As with any other translation of poetry, one has to be attentive to the nuances: the music of the imaginary is probably more important than the facts it pretends to convey.