Embodiment, Mobility, Temporality
Definitions:
Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our bodily presence, and by virtue of our relationship with other bodies (including objects).
Place: those specific spaces to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented toward by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects).
Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools and technologies.
Questions:
1. While reading Jason Farman’s chapter “Embodiment and the Mobile Interface” and Nigel Thrift’s chapters “Still Life in Nearly Present Time” and “Driving in the City,” I found myself returning to Donna Haraway’s concept of naturecultures, a way to think about the mutual imbrication or co-constitution of “nature” and “culture” and thereby avoid the binary between the two, which serves to reinforce the fallacy of human exceptionalism (and, possibly, technological determinism). Farman’s attempt to bridge phenomenology and poststructuralism (19), like Thrift’s impulse to move away from de Certeau’s focus on inscription and purely linguistic ways of thinking (77), seem aligned not only with Haraway’s thinking but also with the constellation of theoretical frameworks that have come to be described as “new materialism.” What could be gained by situating these authors’ theoretical moves more explicitly within the camp of new materialism, as indistinct or as shifting as its borders and boundaries may be? Conversely, is there a reason for not doing so?
2. Throughout the Thrift chapters, I had to resist the urge to start thinking about disability as a way to conceptualize (non)normative ways of being in time and space. In trying to think about speeded-up or slowed-down modes embodiment, I was surprised that Thrift does not consider drugs and other substances that affect our perception of present-ness and presence, especially given his emphasis on mysticism and the implication of drugs in both licit and “underground” capitalist economies. It seems that substance use and abuse would factor heavily into any consideration of biopolitics.
3. My final question is prompted by a somewhat casual statement by Thrift regarding the spatial equivalent of anachronism (77). Despite footnoting this concept, he does not attempt to define or elaborate on it, yet for me it sparked a series of questions about obsolescence and its relationship to embodiment and spacetime. Do obsolete spaces exist in anything other than a theoretical way? In brainstorming this concept with a friend, we immediately thought of ARPAnet, the military precursor to the internet. How are obsolete spaces practiced or produced? What would it feel like to inhabit one or sense one? Can spaces be obsolete it they still function in some way or serve a purpose? (My first thought was of an outhouse—they still exist and they still get the job done, but in the popular imaginary they are at worst obsolete and at best rustic.) “Driving in the City” also prompted me to think about certain cars as obsolete technological spaces. My 1989 Jeep Cherokee, for example, still runs but is on its way to the scrap heap, its working parts to be redistributed among other soon-to-be obsolete cars. And the growing prevalence of software-regulated engines that Thrift points to means that certain humans and their skill sets, like my stepfather’s ability to keep my old car running, will soon become obsolete as well. I am fascinated by obsolescence, age, and its ripple effects throughout economies and ecologies unfolding in real (or nearly present) time.
Image: Dennou Coil, an anime in which pervasive mobile technology leads to networked cities in which Saatchi, the pink machine pictured, is responsible for updating (thereby destroying) “obsolete” spaces.