Maren Ade's iconoclastic, incisive, and moving 2016 film Toni Erdmann tells the story of Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller), a German business consultant on assignment in Bucharest. Ines has come to Romania to deliver to her client a plan for the downsizing and outsourcing of the labor force of an oil company. A hard-charging young executive and an emissary of the sophisticated, rapacious capitalism of the Western European model to the postsocialist East, Ines holds fast to the conviction that her willingness to be unfailingly mobile is the means to achieving the reigning vision of “the good life,” replete with wealth, respect, and happiness.
Except, however privileged Ines is, these things elude her. As she performs her job, hurtling herself (and the livelihoods of other people) from place to place, she remains how capital wants her: untethered, alienated, and empty. This condition is recognized by her semi-estranged, decidedly strange father, Winfried (Peter Simonischek), who follows Ines to Bucharest both to assuage his own loneliness (a retired music teacher, he has lost his wife and, more recently, his dog) and to help her revitalize the humanity that seems to have dwindled in her. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether the mission is accomplished, as the film ends (this is not a spoiler) with Ines bound for another consulting gig in Singapore.
Ines embodies the “aspirational mobility” that is one of the cardinal practices of modernity and the subject of the special section edited by Eva Gerharz and Supurna Banerjee. The special section draws together a diverse and provocative set of articles that investigate aspirational mobility from a number of angles, subject positions, and sites: German corporate managers in China, Bangladeshi youth in Rome, students of migrant background in German universities, and working women negotiating precarity in South Sudan. As the articles show, aspirational mobility has intensified with the growth and acceleration of transportation and communications technologies, decolonization, the end of the Cold War, and the sectarian, ethnic, and national conflicts, large and small, of the last half-century.
Another powerful spur to aspirational mobility is neoliberalism, which is both a regime of accumulation and the “governing rationality,” in the words of Wendy Brown, of everyday life. Neoliberalism conditions us to regard ourselves as “firms”—that is, as repositories of socially recognized “human capital” that must always be increasing in value.1 By neoliberal logic, associations and practices that do not enable the individual to garner more capital serve no purpose. Hence neoliberalism discourages our strong affiliation with the nonmarket “regimes of belonging” that Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka describes in her contribution to the special section, such as the family, the local community, religions, and other entities that anchor us, nurture us, and tie us down. As the film studies scholar Hester Baer observes, films like Toni Erdmann and Yella (2007, Christian Petzold) illustrate how “neoliberalism's financialization of all spheres of life has led to the erosion of traditional social formations . . . result[ing] in both enhanced mobility and deepening insecurity, a paradox that exemplifies the neoliberal repertoire.”2
Through their analyses of various texts and ethnographic evidence, Gerharz and Banerjee and the other contributors to the special section show how deeply mobility and insecurity are linked in the lives of those on whom they focus. They also show those people exercising agency in their negotiations with and refusals of the dictates of neoliberalism, and reclaiming membership in social formations conducive to more moral and humanistic visions of the good life.
This issue of Transfers also features a strikingly original Ideas in Motion piece that brings together David de Jong, an airline pilot, and Tina Harris, an anthropologist, in an ethnographic collaboration. Using the 2018 crash in Indonesia of a Boeing 737 Max as their point of departure, the pair pursue an understanding of how different forces have crafted the narrative around that troubled aircraft, and speculate as to how actors (nonhuman and human alike) can be brought into “compatibility” with one another as a means to greater air safety.
Lastly, Andrew Stokols explores in his Trajectories piece how “platform” corporations such as Uber and Google have emerged as both elements of contemporary urban infrastructure and come to represent privatized, disruptive alternatives to public things more generally. Surveying recent books on Uber in Washington, DC, and the tech industry's aspirations for transportation infrastructure, Stokols ponders the future of everyday mobility in a political environment in thrall to narratives of autonomy and mastery.