Somaesthetics of urban automobility: ‘Journey’ as a kinetic metaphor in embodied urban epistemes

Somaesthetics of urban automobility opens up underexplored dimensions of the ‘mobility turn’, acting as a key tool of reconfiguring implicit narratives of control and exclusions within the structuration of everyday urban epistemes. The mobile epistemes of everyday journeys remap known social inequities in very different, quick, need-based approximations for maintaining somatic integrity and the status quo. Somaesthetics, as a cognate field to kinaesthetics, offers a roadmap of embodied political action by “uncontrolling” mobile epistemes to disrupt and loosen this grip, preventing mobile practices from being straitjacketed into blindly repetitive, techno-governed narratives. It forces us to confront the discomfort of alternatives, the paradox of journeys that fail or falter, and the curative relevance of such discomfort for epistemic advance. The contextual peculiarity of the cases we examine tests the elasticity of the somaesthetic method, the Indian scenario constantly juxtaposing chaos and choreography in urban navigation. In this ‘transactional mode of inquiry’, the somatic subjects are illustrative of their purposive mobility that impacts and challenges epistemic limits, stressing the meliorative necessity to cope with the uncertainty that mobility brings. Marginalized epistemes come to the fore within four salient dimensions of everyday journeys: unnavigability, relative immobility within movement-space, digitized navigation, and chance encounters.