Pleasures of distraction
Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt and Connie SvaboSpace, Place, Mobility and Urban Studies (MOSPUS) Research Unit
& Centre for Experience Research (COF)Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change (ENSPAC)
Roskilde University (RUC)
Draft paper for 4th Nordic Geographers’ Meeting, Roskilde University, 24-27.05.2011ANT and tourism practices track
Experiences of pleasure
• Mediation• Multiplicity• Distraction
• Focus on ‘the geographying agency’ of materialities, most notably how the mobile phone camera mediates a city, but also makes the point that a materiality does not ‘geography’ in any singular way; it works in multiplicities; it crafts multiple realities. And in the intersections between them, distraction is found.
Mediation
• To associate; to communicate between two parties
• Inspired by Serres and Latour: simultaneous establishing of a connection and the distortion which takes place in the connection
• Materials, technologies, objects mediate tourist experiences
Multiplicity
• The state of being multiplex or manifold• Inspired by Serres, Latour, Mol & Law: there is
not one singular order, but multiple emergent orders. (It is a goal for research to account for the multiplicity of the world)
• Tourists engage with sites in multiple ways• Materials, technologies, objects mediate places
in multiple ways
Distraction
• Distraction as the intersection between multiple spaces and times
• Emerges from the tensions between multiple orders of reality (absent – present)
• Inspired by Hetherington (Capitalism’s Eye), Benjamin (Passagen-Werk)
• Modernist form of experience – Erlebnis – the pleasure of glancing at the world in distraction; acting through intersections of distance and proximity
Conclusion• Inspired from the combination of ANT and
Walter Benjamin to explore the flickering ’geographies’/worlds of experience (Erlebnis); the pleasure of letting things happen
• mediation – multiplicity – distraction argument• Based in the strong narrative from
ethnographical (also auto/semibiographical) and ’material/technological/virtual’ insight
• Applicable to other examples; your own experiences ???
