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 ???