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Mobilities
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To Make Move and Let Stop: Mobility

and the Assemblage of Circulation
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Mark B. Salt er
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 Mobilities, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2012.747779

To Make Move and Let Stop: Mobility and

the Assemblage of Circulation

MARK B. SALTER
School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
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ABSTRACT The ‘mobilities turn’ in human geography and cognate disciplines has a natu-
ral methodological predisposition towards privileging mobile subjects, or the structures, pol-
icies, or authorities that constrain them. The article sets out two additions to mobility
studies’ theoretical toolbox: the idea of the assemblage and the foregrounding of circulation.
The civil aviation sector demonstrates the utility of this frame.

KEY WORDS: Mobility, Circulation, Assemblage, Aviation, Critical border studies

Introduction
The ‘new mobilities turn’ has garnered serious, sustained, interdisciplinary analytic
attention (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006; Cresswell 2011;
D’Andrea, Luigina, and Breda 2011). The mobilities turn in human geography, soci-
ology, urban planning, and cognate disciplines, however, often focuses on mobile
subjects, or the structures, policies, or authorities that constrain those mobile sub-
jects: the mobilities turn is predominantly agent-centric or state-centric. In making
this turn away from states, economic, or cultural systems, mobilities studies do not
engage sufficiently with the contemporary literature on critical border studies or
critical discussions of security within international relations and sociology. Border
studies and international relations, on the other hand, fetishize state controls and do
not take enough account of immobility, resistance, and irregular movement. Mobile
subjects are created by and create the structure of mobility in which they circulate.
A better understanding of the dynamic co-constitution of mobile subjects and the
deep structure of mobility would not be focused on movement with meaning.
Circulation, as defined by Foucault, problematizes the mobility/immobility
dichotomy. The ‘assemblage’ better describes the dispositif of circulation, using the
civil aviation sector as an example.

Correspondence Address: Mark B. Salter, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa,
Canada. Email: mark.salter@uottawa.ca
Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis
 2 M.B. Salter

Mobility studies must engage directly with questions of territoriality and border
studies (Sack 1988; Rumford 2006; Williams 2006), as well as critical histories of
sovereignty, citizenship, and state formation (Walker 1993; Hindess 2000; Torpey
2001; Isin 2002; Sassen 2006; Steinberg 2009). How might these concepts apply to
the contemporary global mobility regime and mobility studies?

Mobilities Studies and Circulation

Mobilities studies in political science have two primary research directions: a geo-
political mobility that grants ontological primary to the state, and focuses on national
populations and their regulation through borders and immigration, citizenship, and
social identity policies (Guiraudon and Lahav 2006; Betts 2011; Koslowski 2011)
and a networked mobility that grants ontological primary to the ‘social’ and is
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focused on migration and particular circuits of capital and population (Appadurai

1996; King and Christou 2011). Geopolitical mobilities focus on borders, states, ter-
ritories, and geographical space; networked mobilities focus on transnational popu-
lations. Both presume a core organizing principle: the state or the social (Wendt
1987, 1992). Both the notions reinforce a false idea about territoriality and state
control if invented (Rumford 2006). Following Rumford, we want to avoid a meth-
odological predisposition towards the dichotomization of mobility/immobility:
‘Increased mobility in society (and between nation-states) requires new borders to
regulate forms of activity which old-style territorial borders cannot achieve’ (2006,
164). Contemporary circuits or flows are not simply about deterritorialized borders
either, as demonstrated by Mountz (2011) both migrants and states. Those in border
studies focus on policies of restriction and openness; those in mobilities studies
study migration and networks. In making this turn away from states, economic, or
cultural systems, mobilities studies do not engage sufficiently with the contempo-
rary literature on border studies, or critical discussions of security within political
science and international relations (Parker et al. 2009). Border studies and interna-
tional relations, on the other hand, fetishize state controls and do not take enough
account of resistance (Rumford 2009). The bordering function is much more dis-
persed in world society. There is even now, amongst policy-makers and speakers of
security-talk, nostalgia for the era of thin borders. What we see governments and
decision-makers talk about now is pushing the border, widening and deepening the
borders, making the border smarter, extending the border function throughout soci-
ety, far beyond the territorial limits or state agents. Few examine how the agent and
structures of mobility are co-constitutive.
Giddens’ concept of structuration can be helpful here: mobile subjects are created
by and create the structure of mobility in which they circulate (1996). A better
understanding of the dynamic co-constitution of mobile subjects and the deep struc-
ture of mobility is precisely not focused on ‘mobility,’ or rather the assumption of a
core organizing principle behind mobility, granting ontological primary to social
relations or to the state. Mobilities studies need to examine mobility not just in its
presence, but also in its absence (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Adey 2010).
This is what leads us from geopolitical mobility through networked mobility
towards a circulation: we seek not just the presence or absence of individual move-
ments, but motility (Kellerman 2012). Or, what Bigo (2008, 26) calls ‘the paradoxi-
cal liberty to go anywhere except where one wants to go.’ An analytical focus on
circulation focuses on the system that makes certain routes and circuits possible,
 To Make Move and Let Stop 3

easier, or more difficult. In the face of the multiplication of new models and vocab-
ulary – what does ‘assemblage’ add?

Circulation
The contemporary mobility regime – with its various technologies of identification,
examination, verification, and passage – functions in the same way as the free mar-
ket: a disaggregated system of controls for the movement of peoples does not guar-
antee any one outcome (and indeed guarantees mobility shortages just as the
market guarantees shortages), but rather provides a structure in which certain out-
comes are removed from the political realm and treated as either technical or eco-
nomic questions. Foucault (2007), Polanyi (2001), and Harcourt (2011) each
demonstrate that the invention of free circulation of goods and capital, and the cre-
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ation of domestic circulation for labor between rural and urban and between urban
areas, required a large political apparatus to render certain circuits possible and
other circuits impossible. Empirically and historically, the norms, practices, and
institutions of population mobility are better understood through a rubric of circula-
tion, and not through the mobility/immobility dichotomy Foucault’s (2007, 15).
Security, Territory, Population, provide a new frame for describing and explaining
the mobility turn: circulation. The creation of the state, the economy, and the
national population was focused on ‘an intensity of circulations: circulation of
ideas, of wills, and of orders, and also commercial circulation … fastening them
together and mutually reinforcing them.’ Foucault says that the creation of the
‘free’ market, for example, required a great deal of effort: it was not simply about
more governing, but in creating a system of governing less in which the negative
consequences of the free market, such as food shortages, became nonpolitical prob-
lems that the market itself should solve. Whereas previously the sovereign had a
more direct control over the price of bread – and thus hunger was a directly politi-
cal issue – the move to a free market required that the population, the producers,
and bureaucrats accept the idea that supply/demand would render the political prob-
lem of hunger an economic issue. Circulation was seen as the key to making this
market work: the market would fix food shortages through the mechanism of price
in terms of mobility. Foucault goes further to say ‘it is in terms of this option of
circulation, that we should understand the word freedom, and understand it as one
of the facets, aspects, or dimensions of the deployment of apparatuses (dispositifs)
of security’ (2007, 49). Thus, freedom and security are not opposed, but rather part
of the same system.
Making a similarly structured argument, Urry (2003, 125) argues that mobilities
require immobile, infrastructural moorings. This notion of freedom as a productive
aspect of the security dispositif reorients analytical attention away from movement
per se and towards the constitution of a system in which some movements are made
possible, some movements made political, and immobilities are rendered unprob-
lematic – even in the absence of actual movement. Adey’s relational mobility/
immobility model shares a methodological consequentialism, inherited by Cres-
swell: over determined by the freedom to move as demonstrated only by movement
(Adey 2006). This consequentialism comes from Cresswell’s very definition of
mobility and mobility: ‘movement can be thought of as abstracted mobility’ (2006,
2). It is a methodological danger of the mobilities turn to take movement as evi-
dence of mobility – particularly when ‘meaning’ is always inferred after the fact.
 4 M.B. Salter

Any understanding of the contemporary circulation must account not only for the
facilitation and incarceration of specific groups, but of all the non-cases of mobility,
those who are stopped before they start (Kellerman 2012). The control of mobility
extends before and beyond the particular journey through the process of identifica-
tion, verification, authorization, consumption, examination and confession, and arri-
val: and these various functions are not defined in terms of mobility/immobility
(Salter 2007). The issuance of nationality, identity documents, and travel authoriza-
tion each radically constrain or enable global mobility, but are underrepresented in
the mobilities literature.
At a recent workshop for academics and policy-makers on the global mobility
regime, empirical observation was made that the practices of visas, preclearance, and
electronic travel authorities/no fly lists, were in effect creating a globalized system
for the surveillance of the mobile public. This represents a fundamental reversal of
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the norm of basic hospitality, formalized in the nineteenth century imperial society
of states in both the decrease in important of domestic frontiers and the bureaucrati-
zation of travel in the colonial scene, institutionalized in the 1922 League of Nations
committee discussions passports and frontier formalities (Salter 2003). From a basic
assumption that there is a legal right of mobility, that involves not simply a right to
leave, but a host ethic that implies at least a prima facie duty of care at the border
itself, Shamir and others identify a contemporary ‘paradigm of suspicion’ (2005).
From a critical point of view, this sounds like a damning critique of contemporary
global politics, but a former government lawyer in the workshop said, ‘that’s right –
we are going to see in the next few years a fundamental judicial review of the right
to move’. Security and freedom were intertwined in the explanation of the need to
manage circulation. Mobility, the argument goes, is a function of risk – and the doc-
trine of risk management, precaution, and preemption means a global expansion of
surveillance – the conversion of data into intelligence in which all points become ref-
erent to some axis of normality/danger – with circuits of different speeds, adjudi-
cated not simply by the gates or faucets, but by the acceleration or centripetal forces
that one can use. The global air network is essentially a slingshot orbit; good
passports are like wheels; money is a near-universal lubricant, as well as social capi-
tal, race, language, etc. (Aaltola 2005; Amoore and de Goede 2008). The apparatus
regulating global mobility was precisely not about creating smooth passages and
selectively permeable membranes: it was about managing circulation, so that even
when the system created immobility, the fundamental structure of the mobile system
was not indicted. The bureaucratic response of the successful 9/11 attacks was to
ground all civilian planes (save for a few notable exceptions), and shut down the
American borders. However, even when the open, networked character of civil avia-
tion, airports, and border security radically failed, circulation started again within
three days (Salter and Mutlu 2012). This is why circulation provides more analytic
purchase than mobility: the forced immobility in response does not represent a fail-
ure of the border regime, but rather its resilience demonstrates something about the
viability of that mode of circulation even in the face of dramatic security failures.
Thinking through Foucault’s ‘circulation’ as a central metaphor of the modern
police, he explains how the notions of security and freedom are constantly invoked
at the same time in the field. Foucault says,

By ‘circulation’ we should understand not only this material network [of

roads, rivers, and canals etc.] that allows the circulation of goods and possibly
 To Make Move and Let Stop 5

of men, but also the circulation itself, that is to say, the set of regulations,
constraints, and limits, or the facilities and encouragements that will allow the
circulation of men and things in the kingdom and possible beyond its borders.
(2007, 325)

Of course, a central mission for the police to take a vital interest in the border and
internationally and Bigo illustrates how those functions intertwined (Bigo 2001).
‘Circulation’ then is another way for Foucault to make one of his main points about
power, and its analysis: it must be considered both in its repressive and its produc-
tive guise. Policing is not simply the control of vagrants, the diseased, and the idle
– but also about the facilitation and regulation of trade, the protection of the free
market from the political violence brought about by food shortages, and the control
of expert craftsman and luxuries leaving the national space, the creation of the nor-
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mal, law-abiding, consuming citizen. Within this system of circulation, all three ver-
sions of his rich analysis of power are evident: ‘We have a triangle: sovereignty,
discipline, and governmental management, which has the population as its main tar-
get and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism’ (Foucault 2007, 108).
Or, as Amoore and de Goede (2008) and Salter (2008) insist, the security dispositif
opens up – rather than simply enclosing or incarcerating – analysis.
Foucault talks about circulation and the creation of a ‘free market’ – the food
shortages made material, perhaps, necessary by the shift of a managed system to
the free market had to be justified. A free mobility system likewise has to be justi-
fied in terms of the stoppages and blockages it creates. Hindess’ argument is more
powerful and persuasive here – citizenship becomes a key mechanism in the gov-
ernmental management of bodies and ideological mechanism in the disciplinary
management of peoples (2000). Free mobility, then, is seen as a reward for group
and individual success, rather than a right. But, in the end, it cannot stop or com-
pletely be stopped. Theories of mobility and circulation must account for more than
strict structural materialist or neoliberal economic explanations: mobility is not a
privilege of the rich only, even if we want to make the argument that smooth, easy
mobility is such a privilege. An investment banker was describing the recent credit
crunch, and he described that the primary governance mechanism of the financial
markets – particularly in the era of computerized, automatic trading – was the ‘cir-
cuit breaker.’ When trading reached a crucial, statistically significant level – all
movement stopped ‘to give people time to breathe’ – to (re)assert rationality and
stop crowd behavior. As we see with aviation, public transport, or the financial mar-
kets – the system simply cannot allow staticity – the entire system is premised on
circulation. Think of the extra ‘security’ measures that are put in place at each
disaster. The dramatic footage of the grounding of all civil aviation on 9/11, and
the lines of airplanes in Canada, were replaced by the lines of passengers waiting
for new and improved invasive security procedures. The replacement of generalized
anxiety with increased surveillance is the best example of rhizomatic growth. Bigo
and others have demonstrated that these security procedures – the dream of perfect
security – far predates 9/11, but the terror attacks then provides the space and the
social capital for a host of different security measures to inhabit space previously
social (2008). But, the expansion of these surveillant and security assemblages are
not coordinated – or even ‘intentional’ in that conspiratorial sense – private firms
are simply responding to market pressures and opportunities, individuals are making
necessary or strategic choice.
 6 M.B. Salter

Assemblage
One of the thinking tools that has come to be widely adopted in sociology, surveil-
lance studies, and globalization studies is the assemblage, which also has utility for
analyses of circulation. In Deleuze and Guattari, the elements of an assemblage may
have a concerted or emergent effect without there being an underlying organizing
principle. Haggerty and Ericson make the argument regarding surveillance (2000);
Ong and Collier from an anthropological perspective make a wider argument that we
must see different kinds of assemblage – that assemblage is a noun always plural.
They define assemblages are ‘systems that mix technology, politics, and actors in
diverse configurations that do not follow given scales or topographies’ (2004, 4). Fol-
lowing Walters, there is a largely unnoticed connection between Foucauldian analytics
of power and Deleuze and Guattari conceptions of matrices of control (2006). Neither
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Foucault nor Deleuze and Guattari’s seek a single overarching framework that
explains all systems of control. The Foucauldian dispositif, translated as structure or
apparatus, seeks to organize the various and heterogenous ideas, agents, and institu-
tions that create a particular field of social life (Agamben 2007; Foucault 2007). The
assemblage seeks a similar field effect, but liberates Foucault from a desire for an
underlying organizing principle. Plainly, this idea of a circulation assemblage is part
of a wider movement in social theory to come to grips with social complexity brought
about by the dispersal of what we used to call ‘sovereign’ power. Deleuze and Guattari
explain assemblages through rhizomatic expansion, heterogenous actors, and uncoor-
dinated action that have effects that are both constrictive of individual areas of play
and enables. The concept of assemblage, however, avoids the trap of state-centrism.
Sassen’s work suggests that the state itself is being disaggregated – with financial min-
istries and intelligence agencies, for example, gaining far superior global reach than
say public health or education ministries (2006). Private authorities are also deeply
implicated in the creation, policing, and control of the global mobility regime – not
simply air carriers, but the private firms that create the biometric capture technology,
risk analysis software, and create a layer of privatized security throughout the system.
The circulation assemblage is defined by its function: the management of mobility.
The methodological value-added of an assemblage is that we need not rely on the
metaphors of panoptic self-disciplining or sovereign exclusion only, but rather in addi-
tion to these forces, we see also a governmental mobile biopolitics that comes to man-
age circulation through the security techniques of inclusion, facilitation, and
acceleration as well as exclusion, detention, and imprisonment. In this way, the critiques
of mobility made by Turner and Shamir, who both argue for sociologies of immobility,
but make the case that mobility and immobility are both essential parts of the interna-
tional biopolitical regime – and that security and facilitation are not opposite parts of
the system, but two techniques of the same assemblage (Shamir 2005; Turner 2007).
This is what Agamben (1998) had missed in his explanations of biopolitics and
the particular explanations of camps – these systems are not only made necessary
by the current mobility assemblage, but they are not exceptions. The border, be it
state or biopolitical, is precisely constituted through repeated decisions of inclusion
and exclusion, entry and exit, and what is vital for the authority of the state is not a
particular decision either in its correctness or in its political import, but in the
repetition of the authority to decide. A lawyer gains in authority each case he takes
– regardless of her win/loss record, a doctor or psychiatrist with each patient,
regardless of their health or illness, a professor with each student, regardless of their
 To Make Move and Let Stop 7

success or failure. Indeed, it is the number of cases that circulate through the sys-
tem that determines the success of that institution. Can the assemblage define,
accept, process, and expel/graduate the individual case, in doing so making popula-
tions that it has served, and rendering them visible, countable, and controllable?
Why is circulation absent in Agamben’s discussion of the camp, the threshold, and
the ban? Surely, the camp is not, for Agamben or for us, a site of pure staticity?
The camp is a machina mori – a death-machine: the processing of individuals with
citizenship into cases of racial impurity and consequently into mortality tables in
the names of economic efficiency and eugenic security. Agamben’s discussion of
refugee’s is equally absent any sense of circulation – while he posits a potential
postsovereign moral space that refugees inhabit by choice that we may inhabit by
political will – there is no sense of the abandonment inherent in those zones
d’attentes (2000). But, those zones d’attentes also make the case about circulation.
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Ticktin (2005) demonstrates through careful political anthropology the circuits

through which illegals move, being simultaneously inside the territory of France
and abandoned by its law – and yet even within these vicious bureaucratic circles,
there is still movement. Similarly the critical discussions of Guantanamo Bay –
though brilliant in bringing the governmental and the sovereign analytics together –
do not take into account the actual circulation of prisoners, information, service
men, ideas, and practices through Guantanmo Bay (Johns 2005; Ek 2006; Aradau
2007). GITMO is never full (neither is an airport, nor is the American military
archipelago) – the camp only ever expands. Furthermore, the grounds for incarcera-
tion and facilitation grow. The widening of the mechanisms for trusted travelers and
subjects of the extraordinary rendition process are exactly the same: because of
what the state already knows about those individuals, regular security procedures
can be withheld and special facilitation made – and crucially, it is the dual potential
of both of these fast tracks that justify the expansion of transactional and corporeal
surveillance of the everyday (even the immobile). The potential for the control of
mobility – not the actual movement itself – is the defining aspect of the manage-
ment of circulation. What could an analysis of the circulation assemblage look like?

Aviation Sector
The mobility assemblage is not centrally, or hierarchically, organized. If the circula-
tion assemblage is defined by its function, that is the management of mobility rather
than the facilitation of a particular circuit of movement or some interdiction in the
name of security, then how can it be studied? What are the traces of the circulation
assemblage? How do we balance the study of mobilities, immobilities, and unmo-
bilities? Plainly, some circuits are more important than others and some easier to
navigate than others. Examples from civil aviation demonstrate that the circulation
assemblage is rhizomatic, disaggregated, and heterogeneous.

Rhizomatic
Deleuze and Guattari contrast arboreal structures (vertical, with firm foundations
and extension from a central line) and rhizomatic structures (horizontal, which
expand in any available direction). Like the strawberry plant, the rhizome is a dec-
entered: ‘principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be
connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or
 8 M.B. Salter

root, which plots a point, fixes an order’ (1987, 7). Thus, the management functions
of the circulation assemblage will crop up wherever there is social, political, or
technical space for them to manifest. Frequent flyer programs, for instance, ask for
nationality and passport data to better improve travel planning and early check-in.
This does not portend some malicious attempt to gain more information, per se – it
is an uncoordinated move by a private enterprise to integrate facilitation and security,
which has the effect of managing potential circulation (both in terms of facilitation
and prohibition).
In international civil aviation, for example, there is a clear example in the interna-
tional exchange of data between state and private enterprises. Advance passenger
information (API) is designed for states to get information about passengers before
they arrive at the border: some states use this as a device of remote control – through
electronic travel authorization systems (Australia and soon the USA), others as a
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way of kind of biopolitical triage for border examinations (Hobbing 2010; Salter
2010). Of course, API data is collected by commercial agents (airline companies, tra-
vel agents, and expediters), the data is dispersed and the data-double travels circui-
tous and uncertain routes (through Global Distribution Systems like Galileo and
Sabre) to arrive in international databases (INTERPOL, American and other coun-
tries). But, while the API is a global standard intended for border control, passenger
name record (PNR) data has also become the subject of international data-sharing
agreements. Here, the control of circulation is expanding to fit the space made avail-
able. There is not as much standardization for PNR data, and it is precisely the
messy nature of PNR data that makes it appealing to intelligence agencies. First, the
data is there, which has become reason enough to conduct surveillance after 9/11. A
DHS official once said at a meeting on border security technologies, ‘the lack of
information sharing was a prime cause of 9/11’. Second, PNR data, which was
developed by private airlines and their reservation systems and later colonized by
other travel partners, is a random selection of information, not about citizenship or
personal identification data, but seat preference, meal preference from which may be
inferred religion, physical or medical conditions, on-ward travel, form, and time of
payment, contact addresses, organizer. Amoore and de Goede talk about this in terms
of transactions (2008). The aim of security officials is to capture an accurate and
complete image of the potentially mobile population. All of the connections seen in
hindsight from the 9/11 forensic report are now sought in the future. In the name of
preemption and precaution, surveillance creeps where information is available or can
be connected, it is precisely uncoordinated. For international air travel, a purpose-dri-
ven system for data exchange for governments was created API, but in the post-9/11
world, PNR data is increasingly mined for potential intelligence simply because the
data is there. The surveillance and control of circulation, then, expands to fit the
space available. Rather than being driven by some internal logic, the dream of per-
fect security justifies whatever expansion technology, policy, and inattention will
allow. It is important that, despite some ‘gravity wells’ around particular agencies,
nodes, or sites, this assemblage is not stable: the assemblage is defined in its
function, not even in its connection to other nodes.

Disaggregated
The assemblage is disaggregated: systems and apparatuses of control are not con-
nected or coordinated. National identity verification systems, travel authentication
 To Make Move and Let Stop 9

systems, travel facilitation systems, border examination systems each operate inde-
pendently, and often in tension with one another. API data is often ‘pushed’ from
the airline company to the destination state, even when the passengers are transiting
(using informational infrastructure provided by SITA). That data is then processed
through national filters that are themselves a messy compilation of other systems
(counter-terrorism, intelligence, police, and refugee and migration databases) pro-
cessed through algorithms based on Amazon.com recommendation system.
One of the key architects of these algorithms developed the system to help Las
Vegas casino’s stop gambling fraud, and later adapted the program to help large
American retailers avoid hiring shoplifters and criminals. The notions of threat,
guilt, and risk that underpin the border examination are not simply jurisprudential
but commercially derived concepts of risk and due diligence. Not only are interna-
tional visa policies not harmonized, but the very form and substance of the passport
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vary widely: the standards are set by the International Civil Aviation Organization,
but the practices by states are determined wildly different. There is no global iden-
tity verification architecture either: passports, nationality, and identity documents are
issued by states in a multitude of ways, with differing degrees of certainty, authen-
ticity, and fraud. Despite the American efforts to support the digitalization of iden-
tity records in developing countries (couched as development aid, but for the
purposes of counter-terrorism), the transliteration of nonwestern languages is dis-
puted. Agencies do not talk to one another to the extent that critics fear – there are
bureaucratic cultures precisely against information sharing. Intelligence gathered by
agencies, national governments, or private contractors goes through the Pentagon,
which forwards some files to the National Terrorism Screening Centre, which then
identifies some names to terror and no-fly watch-lists (Bennett 2008). In short, there
are a number of obscure and competing bureaucratic and organizational filters. Not
all of those who are on the list are actually incarcerated. As a senior aviation secu-
rity official once told a national conference, ‘we know that terrorists fly all the
time.’ Terrorists and criminals are allowed to circulate. Each of these different sys-
tems – identity, documentation, authorization, and examination – operate to manage
circulation, but are entirely uncoordinated.

Heterogeneous
Building on the points made by Balibar and Walters, it is clear that the circulation
assemblage is heterogeneous: the management of circulation is not consistent across
time, space, or networks (Balibar 2002; Walters 2006). The methodological advan-
tage of the idea of the assemblage is that mobility can be detected and analyzed
even in the absence of movement. Airport security procedures at FRAPORT, Schi-
phol, or Ben Gurion may differ greatly from Luxor, Inuvik, or a Boeing Field: but
the capacity of each of those portals to enable particular circuits of mobility is func-
tionally equivalent, regardless of where they are located. However, the technologies
through which that circulatory function is managed, the logics by which particular
circuits are opened, the populations constituted by these different nodes may be
entirely different. Trusted traveler systems proposed by states, such as the American
NEXUS or CANPASS program, are completely divorced from commercial pro-
grams, such as FasTrack – though both use biometric technologies, background
checks with risk and pattern analysis, and self-policing. Lyon has identified these
two logics: consumption and security (2003). These two logics are not seen as in
 10 M.B. Salter

conflict – either by managers, security personnel, or passengers, and though the

motivation for control may be different, the functional affect of these multiple pro-
grams are similar. In areas of intense development and interdependence, with a high
degree of technological sophistication, the assemblage seems to work smoothly and
efficiently to manage international circulation. Some might question if the same
structure affects the Global South? It is only when we assume a global regime that
we criticize the civil aviation network as being only as secure as its most insecure
port-of-entry. The simple power of the border guard to reject a traveler at the border
has equal effect on the circulation of individuals, regardless of the technological or
bureaucratic infrastructure that supports the decision. Aaltola’s spectacular article on
the hub-and-spoke architecture of American Empire suggests that ‘airports teach
people the central rituals of acknowledgment that are needed to navigate the Byzan-
tine structures of the modern hierarchical world order’ (2005, 261). However, the
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implications of engaging in mobility may be different. Functionally, all airports may

share a similar effect of managing mobility, even as the particular technologies and
logics for that management differ wildly.

Lines of Flight
This article demonstrates the analytical advantage of studying a circulation assem-
blage that is a rhizomatic, disaggregated, and heterogenous. The possibility for cir-
culation must comprehend equally the ideational and the material, the social, and
the bureaucratic, the disciplinary, and the sovereign. In this, the Foucauldian notion
of circulation is far better at comprehending the managing mobility, and liberates
the mobilities turn from its methodological dependence on movement and its liberal
bias towards interpreting freedom as movement. Orienting mobilities research
around circulation accounts for processes of control hidden or minimized by the
relational mobility/immobility paradigm: circuits that isolate particular individuals
or populations without rendering them immobile. Prisoners and the subjects of the
extraordinary rendition process are both objects in a very restricted mobility circuit,
as are illegal migrants, refugees, or sans-papiers. For example, the potential for
international mobility is not simply in crossing geopolitical borders or engaging
transnational networks: international mobility requires an imagining and self-con-
cept of mobility, assertion of identity and the ability to translate that into verifiable
identity documents, the authentication of status and the authorization to travel, the
amassing of social and economic capital to enter the network, and the capability to
engage with agents of control throughout the system. Analysts must then be attuned
to the multiplicity of sites of control, the choke-points or nodes in the assemblage
through which competing logics of management are applied. Liberating the mobili-
ties turn also from the search for a core principle (be it class, race, gender, national-
ity, risk, or security) accounts for overlapping, competing, and uncoordinated efforts
to manage circulation, such as those by social, commercial, and state actors. In par-
ticular, we can identify a fusing of facilitation and security in the discourse of both
commercial and state managers in the aviation sector – although each group has
arrived at that particular method of circulation control entirely differently, or rather
through interpreting efficiency and efficacy radically differently. Paglen and Thom-
son’s Torture Taxi (2006) and Grey’s Ghost Plane (2007), for example, both chart
the particular circuits of the extraordinary rendition process that illustrate precisely
how subjects were transported through a seamless system of interrogation rooms,
 To Make Move and Let Stop 11

airports, and prisons. These subterranean circuits must be examined just as assidu-
ously and carefully as the refugee or migration literature.
A research program into the circulation assemblage is wider than that of the
mobilities turn, and happily and exuberantly exceeds the disciplinary bounds of
geography, sociology, political science, or law. But, following from the work of
Adey, Mountz, Rumford, Walters, and others, it remains faithful to an ideal of polit-
ical sociology that is problem driven: how is circulation managed?

Acknowledgements
My thanks to Tim Richardson at NORFACE for the opportunity to present this
fledgling paper at the University of Aalborg and to Peter Adey and Luis Lobo-
Guerrero for their organization of the ‘Securitising Mobilities and Circulations’,
workshop, held at the University of Keele supported by the Economic and Social
Downloaded by [University of Ottawa] at 10:08 10 January 2013

Research Council as part of the Biopolitics of Security Network. This project has
been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the
University of Cambridge. Thanks also to the reviewers.

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