No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The Aesthetics of Urban Movement: Habits, Mobility, and Resistance
Abstract
This paper examines new forms of urban movement from the perspective of embodiment and habit. Utilising Felix Ravaisson's recently revived work, Of Habit, the paper explores the role of grace and embodiment in establishing alternate forms of mobile activity. I argue that it is the mixture of fear and mastery that has the potential to perpetuate certain habits of mobility, leading to an aestheticised relationship to the urban environment, which to some extent overcomes the anaesthesia and blasé attitude that we have come to associate with urban life. My aim is to understand forms like urban cycling, skateboarding, and parkour from the point of view of the micropolitical relations of body, space, and habit. What is at stake here is to rethink the relationship between habit and resistance, in such a way that resistance can be seen in its materiality, rather than in merely reactive or ideological terms.
... In studying the direct encounter, I use an aesthetic rather than moral framework for understanding nonhuman forces at play. I follow Maria Hynes (2016) in drawing on post-Kantian theories of aesthetics that understand this term to reference the sensate experience of the world that does not limit force and activity to the realm of humanism and morality (Dixon et al., 2012a;Hawkins and Straughan, 2015;Grosz, 2008;Ranciere, 2006;Ruez, 2016;Sharpe, 2013). As a framework for understanding an event, aesthetics allows for the perception of forces while resisting an evaluation of their significance in a cultural order. ...
... At the intimate level of the encounter, like the people coming upon Fireside, things and people have a way of self-arranging into what I call visible assemblages, composed of both human and nonhuman elements, which create a hierarchy of attention, through which some components seize us (for good or bad) while others rest in the background (Ranciere, 2006;Sharpe, 2013). Critically for my study, the glance of the viewer is what crystallizes the formation, making the visual resonance an agent in composing an active assemblage. ...
... The emergent visible assemblages of people, things, and circumstances play a primary role in producing affective atmospheres that materially reshape social categories like race and class, manifesting inclusion and exclusion. By reproducing practiced biases in new situations, they shift boundaries and update obsolete assumptions, tethering new and old affects with new and old materials into vibrant aesthetic configurations and habituating their kinship (Sharpe, 2013). As these operations take place, the assemblages shape new categories out of the mixed-up milieu of life. ...
Now that gentrification has taken hold in central Cincinnati and begun to spill outward, nearby neighborhoods in the early stages of gentrification have begun to call for " inclusive redevelopment " to bring vibrancy to depressed neighborhoods without displacing long-term residents. Neighborhood leaders and city officials understand that displacement happens along racial and class lines, yet efforts to directly address this issue have not changed displacement patterns. Research shows social exclusion contributes to displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods, and tends to focus on uneven impact across social categories like race and class, but there is much less attention to how exclusion is enacted and these categories reproduced. I argue that this takes place simultaneously in the intimate space and time of everyday encounters, where proximity and relation unfold affectively through things and people to code them anew, pulling some into the momentum of redevelopment, while pushing others aside. This cognitive reversal of how categories work is important because it relocates their origin in small, interstitial, and nonhuman sites. Pairing assemblage theory and posthumanism with interviews and field notes, I demonstrate the role of nonhuman forces in shaping these encounters; how materials like cheese, pint glasses, trash, beards, and liver & onions play marked roles in producing marginalization. My findings show that things and people compose visible assemblages together, like a group of people sitting at a sidewalk table eating pizza and drinking beer. These assemblages are operative in producing and reinforcing social exclusion: they usher practiced bias through the surface aesthetics of the assorted components, enabling affective atmospheres to prescribe outcomes. These emergent, visible assemblages are thus important sites for intervention into processes of social exclusion leading to displacement.
... In doing so, it contributes to debates in the humanities and social sciences on the limits of Kantian inspired moral philosophy to address contemporary socio-political problems in a world in which the sovereignty of human will has been placed into question. Non-representational theories have been especially attentive to the origin of seemingly subjective attitudes or emotions in affective forces that exceed the human beings that they traverse (Dewsbury 2009(Dewsbury , 2012McCormack, 2007;Sharpe, 2013;Thrift, 2007;Thrift & Dewsbury, 2000). To the extent that 'a Kantian, epistemic structuring of the world by the human subject' has been privileged within moral philosophical reasoning, post-Kantian theorists have sought to open up a world beyond the universe of human sense-making and judgment (Dixon et al., 2012: 252). ...
... Understood as the realm of sensate experience, including, but also going above and beyond, the form that it takes in art, aesthetic experience has a potential to keep open problems and questions that, from the point of view of a moral purview, are always already closed. Recent turns to the aesthetic in the social sciences, then, have sought to articulate ways of encountering the world and its problems beyond the habits of more humanist and moral frames (Dixon et al., 2012;Hynes, 2013;Kingsbury, 2010;Lapworth, 2013;Sharpe, 2013). In seeking to reframe the problem of indifference in other than humanist terms, it is to this emergent body of literature that this paper contributes. ...
... 4. Camus' Meursault is often cited as the exemplar of indifference, equally numbed as he is to the death of his own mother and to that of the man whom he murders (Camus, 1988). On the antianaetheticising capacity of the aesthetic, see Sharpe (2013). 5. ...
Much recent scholarship in the social sciences has recognised the importance of grasping the significance of non-human forces in both social and natural life. Still, we remain faced with the task of reconceptualising some of our more classically humanist problems in other than human terms. This paper undertakes to refigure one such problem, an issue that in moral and political discourse in particular has presented itself as a pressing, and sometimes intractable, problem; namely, what does it mean to be indifferent? The idea of political indifference, for example, evokes an attitude of neutrality or apathy deemed inappropriate to the sphere of political action. The assumption here is that indifference is a subjective quality, a characteristic inhering in those individuals or groups who are insufficiently motivated to exercise their capacity for free and deliberative action. This paper re-examines the common sense understanding of indifference, which, I argue, is bound to a moral purview and rests on an essentially confused view of human freedom. I suggest that rethinking the problem of indifference requires an ‘ontological renaturalisation’, in order to better understand the forces that condition human action. In pursuing this argument, I contribute to a growing body of scholarship that recognises the role of the aesthetic in opening our frameworks of thinking beyond their more humanist limitations. I argue that an aesthetic, as opposed to moral, framework, can re-conceptualise indifference as an ambiguous and potentially productive process, rather than a deficient state or subjective failing.
... Presented as the domain of capital interests, the perception of disruptive action is seen by others, including city offi cials, as a form of legally questionable appropriation of urban space (Carr, 2010;Stratford, 2002). In addition to skateboarders, the drive to redefi ne the relationship between bodies and architectural space is pursued by others, including practitioners of parkour (Aggerholm and Højbjerre Larsen, 2016;Sharpe, 2013;Kidder, 2012;Mould, 2009). These embodied practices open up inquiries into a body's interaction with its immanent environment (Sharpe, 2013). ...
... In addition to skateboarders, the drive to redefi ne the relationship between bodies and architectural space is pursued by others, including practitioners of parkour (Aggerholm and Højbjerre Larsen, 2016;Sharpe, 2013;Kidder, 2012;Mould, 2009). These embodied practices open up inquiries into a body's interaction with its immanent environment (Sharpe, 2013). The everyday terrain of urban space compels the practitioner to engage directly with 2019; Howell, 2005;Jones and Graves, 2000;Owens, 2001). ...
This paper considers skateboarding practices in urban public spaces. Often subversive, the interactions between skateboarders and built features are also regularly captured in visual imagery in print and online. The paper documents encounters between skateboarders and the built environment using visual geographic information and photo representation. Through content analysis of imagery from Instagram posts and Thrasher magazine, the aim is to organize visual/volunteered data to represent the varied types of interactions between skateboarders and particular features of the built environment. The images suggest that skateboarders seek out structures that are typically elements within a corporate plaza or city hardscape such as stairs, rails, planters. This imagery provides large amounts of data that researchers may cull in order to improve understanding of the ways such features are experienced, and of the potential conflicts that arise when a variety of users interact. The broader significance of the research contributes to the growing body of work that positions skateboarding as a legitimate practice in urban public spaces. Scholars, practitioners of architecture, and planners, among others may continue to engage with visualization methods to consider skateboarding as an evolving, responsive, embodied practice.
... More important for our argument here is that everyday traveling, although often having a related need or purpose to it, is a socio-geographical and endemic fact of daily flow that can be a purposive activity in itself (De Vos et al., 2013;Jensen, 2009). Respectively, mobility technologies have an important role in creating stability, reliability and structure for mental and physical activity often associated with human well-being (Sharpe, 2013;Sheller, 2004;Stamps, 2013). ...
... It is often forgotten, that in addition to framing our everyday activities, mobility technologies also significantly contribute to the hidden aesthetic characteristics of the everyday (Ulrich, 1983). If one reflects further the explicit and implicit aesthetic considerations, possibilities for aesthetically significant experiences have an important influence on our mobility habits, including such aspects as choice of means of mobility, choice of destination, choice of route, and even perception of time (Boulange et al., 2017;De Vos, 2019;Gatersleben & Uzzell, 2007;Sharpe, 2013). These aesthetic considerations are vital for the overall well-being of humans, not only because most people would prefer an aesthetically pleasing environment, but also because these preferences for the positive aesthetic values can have far-reaching implications on social, health, and ecological issues (Nasar, 1988). ...
The goal of this article is to deepen the concept of emerging urban mobility technology. Drawing on philosophical everyday and urban aesthetics, as well as the postphenomenological strand in the philosophy of technology, we explicate the relation between everyday aesthetic experience and urban mobility commoning. Thus, we shed light on the central role of aesthetics for providing depth to the important experiential and value-driven meaning of contemporary urban mobility. We use the example of self-driving vehicle (SDV), as potentially mundane, public, dynamic, and social urban robots, for expanding the range of perspectives relevant for our relations to urban mobility technology. We present the range of existing SDV conceptualizations and contrast them with experiential and aesthetic understanding of urban mobility. In conclusion, we reflect on the potential undesired consequences from the depolitization of technological development, and potential new pathways for speculative thinking concerning urban mobility futures in responsible innovation processes.
... Finally, the frequency of other types of micromobility use (e-scooters, bicycles, and e-bikes) was negatively associated with willingness to adopt AI-assisted e-scooters. This is in line with similar findings by Sharpe [62] who showed that people may continue using familiar transport modes due to habitual reinforcement. This indicates that users who are already accustomed to their current micromobility vehicles may be less inclined to transition to AI-assisted models. ...
E-scooters have become a more dominant mode of transport in recent years. However, the rise in their usage has been accompanied by an increase in injuries, affecting the trust and perceived safety of both users and non-users. Artificial intelligence (AI), as a cutting-edge and widely applied technology, has demonstrated potential to enhance transportation safety, particularly in driver assistance systems. The integration of AI into e-scooters presents a promising approach to addressing these safety concerns. This study aims to explore the factors influencing individuals willingness to use AI-assisted e-scooters. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire, capturing responses from 405 participants. The questionnaire gathered information on demographic characteristics, micromobility usage frequency, road users' perception of safety around e-scooters, perceptions of safety in AI-enabled technology, trust in AI-enabled e-scooters, and involvement in e-scooter crash incidents. To examine the impact of demographic factors on participants' preferences between AI-assisted and regular e-scooters, decision tree analysis is employed, indicating that ethnicity, income, and age significantly influence preferences. To analyze the impact of other factors on the willingness to use AI-enabled e-scooters, a full-scale Structural Equation Model (SEM) is applied, revealing that the perception of safety in AI enabled technology and the level of trust in AI-enabled e-scooters are the strongest predictors.
... In response, we can turn to habit literatures in geography that shed light on embodied automation to help imagine how this feeling of ease comes about materially. Geographers have explained how ease, rather than being thought of in an essentialised manner, can be understood much more contingently in terms of the removal of felt resistances relative to other experiences of mobility and consumption (Sharpe, 2013), where a reduction of effort through using on demand apps translates into a feeling of grace (Ravaisson, 2008). As indicated in the stories I heard, platform apps are central to creating these experiences. ...
Being affected in on-demand platform urbanism is a primary site of politics, not an aftereffect that happens once capitalism has had its way. To make this argument, this article begins by expanding automation from its conventional technical purview to better appreciate its overlooked embodied dimensions. Accordingly, through the examples of on-demand mobility and delivery platforms, I explain how automation can be understood as a specific structure of feeling immanent to on-demand platform urbanism that is transforming city life and creating distinctive subjectivities. This article takes as its empirical focus the unravelling of these embodied dimensions of automation, which has been exacerbated by the gradual rollback of COVID-19 restrictions in Melbourne. My argument is that a felt sense of disaffection by both workers and consumers is effectively deautomating this form of on-demand platform capitalism. The article concludes that disaffection in this context has a potentially recuperative dimension, opening up alternative urban futures that were previously unthinkable.
... Research on parkour that approaches the traceur as 'having' a bodyi.e. as a represented or phenomenological entityis ample. In this direction, it has been acknowledged how the body moves through everyday environments, architectures and modular constraints (Ameel and Tani 2012;Bavinton 2007;Lamb 2008;Saville 2008;Smith and Steinø 2018); how it becomes an agent of urban deconstruction and anarchic reorderings (Atkinson 2009;Bornaz 2008;Daskalaki, Stara, and Imas 2008;Ferrell 2001;Lauschke 2010;Raymen 2019;Sharpe 2013) or how it plays a symbolic role through cinema and new media (Archer 2010;Ladewig 2008;Lauschke 2010). In all these cases, the body appears very clearly as a representation performing in different contexts. ...
... On the other hand, recent studies of mobilities have demonstrated a strong sensitivity to more-than-representational dimensions such as practice, experience, embodiment, and affect (Lorimer, 2005;Sheller and Urry, 2006;Cresswell and Merriman, 2016). The mobile subjects immerse themselves in affective atmospheres (e.g., fear, pleasure, and excitement) and corporal kinesthesis, and in so doing remake meanings and re-negotiate self-identity (Saville, 2008;Spinney, 2010;Sharpe, 2013). These works also delve into a rethinking about the relationships between social structures and individual agency, focusing on how individuals partake in multisensory experiences and lived practices to make sense of the world and organise social relations, mediated by mobilities (Nash, 2000;Diekmann and Hannam, 2012). ...
In post-reform China, Han Chinese urbanities traveling to Tibet have contributed to a new literary genre that documents tourist mobility as a means of self-finding and self-exploration. The sample of data in this study consists of 28 book-length travel writings by Han travellers, and the primary research question addresses the relationships between tourism mobility and self-making, a widely debated issue in cultural and tourism geog-raphies. Engaging with the conceptual tension between an essential self and a socially constructed self, this study argues that while Han writers' travels to Tibet are germane to the hunt for an essential self as a hidden treasure to be redeemed, the self is by no means merely introspective, but intrinsically relational and constituted by social, embodied and materially mediated practices. For the purpose of reconciling and synthesizing the two theoretical positions, this study proposes an alternative concept known as the 'assemblage self', which tries to capture how the more-than-human and more-than-representational dimensions of mobilities can speak back powerfully to the phenomenology of the self. This concept is relational and performative in the sense that it is constituted by networks of discourses, practices, and materialities. We develop this concept by engaging with the recent literature on more-than-representational mobility as a conceptual nexus connecting the concepts of the essential self and the socially constructed self.
... Special attention in examining the mobility patterns should be paid to the power of habits, including imitating family members and friends. In this field, habits were analyzed in the literature regarding mobility [64] as a whole and micromobility (e.g., cycling, skateboarding) [65]. Haustein et al. argued that habits are, together with social and personal norms, the most significant variables creating mobility patterns [66]. ...
Generational change is one of the vital socioeconomic forces affecting the global economic environment. In many studies, the youngest generations are presented as the ones changing the market trends. This can also be observed in areas of travel demand and mobility patterns. However, research on those topics in many countries, for many societies, is scarce. This study aimed to examine the travel behavior of Polish young adults, namely students living in the Tricity area. Factor analysis and ANOVA were used to analyze the data gathered via an online survey assessing the characteristics of mobility patterns of students born between 1981 and 1999. Factor analysis allowed grouping the attitudes towards traveling among those young adults (Y Generation, Y’s, Y Gen). Three factors were identified, and they were associated with luxury and self-expression, freedom and comfort, safety and environmental friendliness. The driver’s characteristics were the least consistent with the classic image of typical Y’s, and those using the active commute—the most. In turn, the largest group were people using public transport, which partially presented convergent opinions with drivers and users of the active commute. It turned out that the car drivers, active commuters and respondents utilizing public transport differed not only in their behavior and presentation of Y Gen characteristics but also in their attitude towards categories such as comfort, desire for luxury, economy or ecology. This study is a complex analysis of the mobility patterns of students in the Tricity area. It presents the set of variables influencing the travel demand of the chosen age group. The study also compares the presented travel choices with those declared by representatives of other nations. Finally, it indicates the next research problems to be addressed in future research.
... Many of these activities also lend themselves to research operating in a more explicitly critical register. Charismatic practices like skateboarding, parkour, and BMX-riding are often takenvia Lefebvre (1991) -as critiques of the built environment and status quo (Borden, 2001;Chiu, 2009;Mould, 2015;Sharpe, 2012); although see Spinney (2010) for a nice counter-example. ...
Developing the concept of kinaesthetics, this article undertakes a critical re-description of amateur sports and fitness to explore the topographies, materials, innovation, and socialities that make up urban environments. Extending work on affect and urban materiality within geography and elsewhere, we argue that amateur sport and fitness animates many cities in ways that are frequently overlooked. The paper aims to 1) broaden understandings of amateur sport and fitness practices; 2) reframe perspectives on the kinds of environments cities are; 3) develop a prospective politics of provision involving the design and maintenance of a social infrastructure of amateur sport and fitness.
... With the ethico-aesthetic paradigm, it is sensation and creation that are primary; the structures that found the scientific paradigm are denounced as particular modes of expression, which are falsely posited as transcendent universals. If the cries of the innovation economy have become the "neuroleptic ditties" (Guattari, 2015a) of our time, the question here, following Scott Sharpe (2013), concerns what it means to activate the anti-anaesthetising capacities of the aesthetic -its ability to produce, amidst the dominant regimes of sensation, new sensations that operate directly upon the nervous system of the always collective subject in its chaosmotic mutations. Guattari's (2000: 131) reference in The Three Ecologies to the "scientistic super-ego", which has condemned the human and social sciences "to overlooking the intrinsically developmental, creative, and self-positioning dimensions of processes of subjectification" is a timely rebuke to the familiarly pseudo-scientific habits of these modes of thinking. ...
... Smoking is widely regarded as an addictive habit that is damaging to health (Farrimond and Joffe, 2006;Thompson et al., 2009;Barnett et al., 2017). De-normalisation policies have conditioned stigmatisation of smokers, which has influenced smokers' behaviours, feelings (Sharpe, 2013) and identities (Poland, 2000). Smoking is linked to a lost willpower, whereas quitting smoking enables healthy, forwardlooking attitudes (Poland, 2000;Poland et al., 2009;Frohlich et al., 2010;Frohlich et al., 2012). ...
This article examines the law-conditioned transformation of smoking atmospheres through habitual smoking behaviour. Smoking experiences in Tallinn, Estonia were studied among high cultural capital smokers who have re-habituated their smoking milieus according to strengthened tobacco legislation. The study shows how in the context of the de-normalisation of smoking, certain groups of smokers will alter their smoking milieus by vigorous rearrangement of themselves and places within the legislated landscape, according to the social demands and personal subjective motivations. The study takes theoretical framework from two implications of habit: ‘forceful materialism’ and ‘performative practice’. These implications are analysed in the framework of materiality-oriented ‘lawscape’ and ‘five-event typology’, as they allow examine the extensive dimensions of re-habituation of place-based tobacco law and transformation of smoking atmospheres.
... Within planning and mobilities research several studies have explored the various modes of urban mobilities through, for example, pedestrian studies (Lorimer 2011;Middleton 2011), urban biking (Jensen 2013), automobility (Bull 2004), skateboarding (Sharpe 2013) and even helicoptering (Cwerner 2006). While most of these modes of movement encapsulate the dominant human movements in cities, there is, still, relatively little research on how pram strolling is shaped -and is shaping -urban mobilities designs -particularly in relation to the role of embodied knowledges and the affective. ...
This paper explores a neglected mode of mobility through an ethnographic study of pram strollers in Copenhagen. I illustrate the analytic advantages of mobilities design thinking to explore how pram strolling is shaped by material designs and experienced through affective atmospheres, embodied practices and social encounters. In so doing, the pram is seen as a significant, yet largely overlooked, designed artifact that affords urban mobility. In the creative vein of mobilities design, the paper experiments with a new style of visual ethnography, surface ethnography, to help unravel the affordances of surfaces. In this process, I relate pram strolling to questions of urban accessibility issues, and more generally, reflect on the future applications and potentials of mobilities design thinking.
... Others view parkour as a simultaneous mobile and perceptual engagement with the urban terrain. Similar studies frame parkour as a subversion of the repetition inherent in modern life, as a way of re-engaging arbitrary and often capricious habits to reclaim more purposeful actions (Sharpe, 2013). Still others have shown parkour as a form of resistance that appropriates the body from constrained experiences of, and ways of moving in, urban space (Lemos, 2010;Atkinson, 2009;Fuggle, 2008a;Thompson, 2008;Mould, 2009;Daskalaki et al, 2008). ...
p>This paper emerged from many months of regular participation in the parkour community in Indianapolis, Indiana. First, this study looks at the art of parkour as a bricolent engagement with architecture. Acts of bricolage, a sort of artistic making-do with objects (including one’s body) in the environment, play with(in) the dominant order to “manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them” (de Certeau, 1984: xiv). Second, this study investigates architecture’s participation in the production and maintenance of what de Certeau calls, “operational logic” (p. xi). That is, how architecture acts as a communicative mode of space; one, which conveys rationalized or acceptable ways of being in space. This critical ethnography, then, takes to task the investigation of how traceurs, the practitioners of parkour, uncover emancipatory potential in city space through bricolent use of both architecture and the body.</p
... Others view parkour as a simultaneous mobile and perceptual engagement with the urban terrain. Similar studies frame parkour as a subversion of the repetition inherent in modern life, as a way of re-engaging arbitrary and often capricious habits to reclaim more purposeful actions (Sharpe, 2013). Still others have shown parkour as a form of resistance that appropriates the body from constrained experiences of, and ways of moving in, urban space (Lemos, 2010;Atkinson, 2009;Fuggle, 2008a;Thompson, 2008;Mould, 2009;Daskalaki et al, 2008). ...
... Bill's statement that, "You have to claw something back for yourself," offers a striking visual metaphor for the feeling of being denied too many valued experiences due to illness. These activities are valuable, not just for granting opportunities to passively experience pleasure, but for being able to voluntarily engage in a challenge and to experience a heightened awareness of oneself in relating with the world (Sharpe, 2013). Cathy's decision to apply to be a baking judge was motivated by her desire to turn the tables on her illness which for too long had been "throwing" her challenges not of her "own choosing", as she put it. ...
Globally, increasing numbers of people face the challenge of enjoying life while living with long-term illness. Little research addresses leisure participation for people with chronic illness despite its links with mental and physical health and self-rated quality of life. I use a space-time geographical approach to explore experiences with leisure in everyday life for 26 individuals with chronic kidney disease (CKD) in Australia. I examine ways in which the spatial and temporal characteristics of illness management and symptoms shape where, when, and how participants can enjoy leisure, focusing on: 1) logistical conflicts between illness and leisure; 2) rhythmic interferences with the force of habit in skilful leisure performance; and 3) absorbing experiences of encounter with self and place through leisure. Data were collected from 2013 to 2014. Participants kept diaries over two sample days and then participated in semi-structured interviews. Findings show that the voluntary nature of leisure offered participants important benefits in coping with and managing illness over the long-term, including opportunities to experience greater sense of control, an alternative experience of one's body to the ‘sick body’, and knowledge creation that supports adaptation to the uncertainties of illness trajectories. The ability to engage in meaningful leisure was constrained by the shaping forces of illness symptoms and management on participants' leisure-scapes. Illness treatment regimens should therefore be adapted to better accommodate leisure participation for chronically ill patients, and leisure should be explicitly incorporated into illness management plans negotiated between patients and health practitioners. Finally, greater understanding of the transformative capacity of habit in activities of experimentation and play may have wider-reaching implications for leisure's potential applications in public health. Leisure should be taken seriously as a vehicle for enhancing wellbeing and adaptation to life with long-term illness.
... The social sciences have become increasingly cognizant in recent decades that these issues are not merely philosophical, but sociological, ethical and political ones. As nonrepresentational theory in geography and Deleuzian inspired sociologies have suggested, the question of how our conventional frames leave difference in itself not only unthought, but unthinkable, is a crucial one for contemporary social scientific enquiry (Anderson & Harrison, 2010;Clough, 2009;Dewsbury, 2000;Fraser, 2009;Gane, 2009;Hynes, 2013;McCormack, 2003McCormack, , 2010Sharpe, 2013;Thrift, 2008;Thrift & Dewsbury, 2000). These shifts in social science register that the dogmatic, moral image of thought shrouds the rich reality of a world in which not being, but difference and becoming, predominate and proliferate. ...
In its consideration of the so-called animal question, sociology faces a new opportunity to productively examine some of its fundamental disciplinary assumptions. This article argues that the problem of the violence of our relationship to animals draws attention to the question of how the animal is encountered at the level of ontology. Through the work of Temple Grandin, a highly influential figure in slaughterhouse design, the authors examine the dominant model of encountering the animal, and offer an opening to an alternative ontological frame. The authors read Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘transcendental empiricism’ through Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s work on neuroatypical modes of perception, in order to argue for an encounter with the animal that remains open to the sensate and emergent dimensions of experience. This, they argue, prevents the premature closure of the problem of ‘the animal’ to which a moral framework sometimes falls prey, keeping it open as a vital problem for thought. In doing so, the authors aim to move beyond the inclusive gesture that would welcome the animal into the social, as though there were something accidental and non-essential about its exclusion from the social in the first place.
... Many are now reflecting on how public spaces might be differently designed and materially experienced (Beal 1995;Borden 2001;Carr 2010;Dinces 2011;Woolley, Hazelwood, and Simkins 2011;Sharpe 2012). At least some of them conclude that skating has transformative potential in the city: It is both playful and transporting. ...
Estimates suggest that tens of millions of people skateboard for transport and pleasure—it is a mobility practice both instrumental and playful. That play is important for creativity, connection, and positive affect is known. Yet skating is often typified as mere vandalism, despite the fact that, intrinsic worth aside, its hybridity is instructive: It invites consideration of the spatial politics of the street and the possibility of accommodating this and, indeed, other forms of “alternative” movement. Arguably, the prospect of such generous geographies is fundamental to ideas about the right to the city, an entitlement embracing responsibilities to one another. Nevertheless, given the ongoing dominance of automobility and widespread anxieties about skating, the tendency has been to try and contain it in parks and regulate its presence on streets, not least by creating design solutions to render it difficult to engage in. A corollary of these strategies, in combination with skaters’ own resolve to claim rights to the city, is that skaters move on to roadways. These armatures have not been designed generously to accommodate forms of mobility apart from motor vehicles—and sometimes pedestrians and cyclists. Consequently, skaters are among the millions who die on the roads annually. In relative terms, the number is minute; nevertheless, each death invokes this question: How can we mobilize a spatial politics of street skating by thinking about the geographies of generosity in ways that might avoid such events? Reflecting on that question is the purpose of this article.
... His ontological inversion of individuals to material processes of individuation thus foregrounds the inadequacies of representational and individualist modes of thought for grasping the active participation of nonhuman agencies, technical environments, and affective forces in productions of human thought and action (Dewsbury, 2012;Parisi, 2009;Sharp, 2011). This more processual ontology of the subject also opens new ways of thinking 'processes of subjectivation' as a key terrain of political intervention and transformation (Guattari, 1995: 25), with recent work addressing the proliferation of spaces and technologies of biopolitical control that modulate the emergences of material dispositions, capacities and habits (Ash, 2012;Roberts, 2012;Sharpe, 2013). Secondly, then, I argue that a philosophy of ontogenesis enjoins us to rethink events of subjective transformation, replacing a 'voluntarist' image of the subject prevalent in much social scientific thinking with an 'involuntarist' primacy of the encounter (Zourabichvili, 2012: 56;Sauvagnargues, 2012). ...
In recent years ‘bioart’ has been lauded in the social sciences for its creative engagements with the ontological stakes of new forms of biotechnical life in-the-making. In this paper I push further to explore the ontogenetic potentials of bioart-encounters to generate new capacities for thinking and perceiving the nonhuman agencies imbricated in the becoming of subjects. To explore this potential I stage an encounter with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, highlighting three implications for theorizations of the constitution and transformation of subjects. First, Simondon forces us to rethink the subject in terms of its transductive emergence from pre-individual processes, and its metastable susceptibility to ongoing transformations. Second, he substitutes voluntarist conceptions of thought with an involuntarist primacy of material encounters as the conditions for novel individuations. Finally, I argue that Simondon enables a thinking of the politics of the (bio)art-encounter in terms of its ontogenetic capacity to materially produce, rather than merely represent, new subjects and worlds.
... The words and phrases that dance through inner speech have a habitual presence seemingly sustained by their own momentum. Where some have highlighted the capacity of habit to refine and perfect bodily movements (Sharpe, 2013), the 'habitual presence' of these words has a much more volatile effect because of their capacity to nibble and gnaw in agitating and unnerving ways. Goodman's description of the sometimes virulent character of sounds against which bodies are defenceless is pertinent here. ...
This paper examines commentary as a mode of speaking that has not received sufficient attention by social and cultural geographers. In contrast to a representational understanding of commentary, where commentary is the expert interpretation of an environment, this paper develops a more passive understanding of commentary where the commentator is a figure through which the affective, material forces that constitute environments become expressed. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Sydney, Australia, the paper examines three modes of everyday commentary related to commuting. The commentaries of reportage, anecdote and autoventriloquy each demonstrate in different ways how the affective, material environments of commuting become spoken. The paper shows, first, how commentary is a constitutive rather than derivative aspect of the experience of commuting. Second, it shows that commentary is an expression of affective, material environments, rather than either the willed self-expression of the speaker, or the manifestation of socially and historically contingent discourses. Third, it shows that commentary can both close down and draw out specific affective, material environments. Fourth, it shows how commentary modulates the powers of existence in the zone of the commute, transforming the affective possibilities immanent to different situations.
... Nathaniel Bavinton (2007) positions parkour's challenge of such restraints imposed by power as a reinterpretation of material–spatial restrictions on public behaviour. Similarly, Scott Sharpe (2013) sees parkour as a form of less-confrontational resistance through the repetition of habit. Paula Geyh (2006) argues that traceurs create a ludic city, one in which people playing in public is a way to push the limits of themselves and their environments. ...
This article explores the emancipatory potential of misuse. Through the practice of parkour, I investigate misuse as a form of empowerment within entanglements of power demarcating acceptable uses of city space. I critically examine my experience practising parkour on Monument Circle in Indianapolis, Indiana. The research questions include, first, how can we define the misuse of space? What can the misuse of Monument Circle teach us about how architecture communicates the interests of power? Can parkour be a practice of empowerment that challenges spatial expectations of use? Foucault’s discussion of disciplinary power theoretically frames the understanding of discourse, power and the use of misuse. Lefebvre’s theorizations on the production of space ground an understanding of the body in and around architecture. Offered here is an analysis of parkour’s misuse of architecture and its challenge of disciplinary power codified and maintained in the built environment.
... Non-representational theorisations of habit attend well to how these molecular slow creep transformations concern the changing incorporeal relations that constitute bodies through the experiences that they have (Dewsbury, 2011;Bissell, 2014;Sharpe, 2013). Such theorisations have drawn inspiration from Félix Rav-aisson's thesis on habit which spotlights how slow creep transformations are the effect of the changing capacities to affect and be affected that are brought about by repetition. ...
Per molte subculture, usi e rappresentazioni dello spazio sono elementi costitutivi, ma negli studi subculturali l'attenzione per lo spazio è stata nel tempo oscillante. Il presente contributo si focalizza sui processi distintivi di uso, produzione e rappresentazione dello spazio nella subcultura skateboard, indagando come chi pratica skateboard scopra, scelga e interpreti i luoghi, e come ai suoi occhi le caratteristiche di tali luoghi definiscano vincoli e possibilità per la pratica.
In this paper, we propose to redefine the classical studies of urban trails and wanderings by giving greater consideration to the affective and intra-active aspects of the performance of gait. Hence, the idea is to deepen our knowledge of landscape as a sphere of movement. The need to conduct research on urban walking emerges from the mechanics of so-called “sensory motor amnesia”, an unaware process of memory loss of how certain groups of muscles feel and how to control them. It seems that, apart from such casual matters as small injuries and bad postural habits, the process can be also deepened due to cultural factors, as a result of adapting bodies to modern urban life patterns. The phenomenon of re-fixing specific, human, physiological affordances is manifested by the development and preference of certain techniques and strategies of embodied acting in space, among which some may result in enhancing the sphere of discomfort and others lead to somatic improvement. This article presents walking, as one of the body technologies constituting the quality of spatial experience. Walking is presented as an exploratory, and adaptive form of the art of living, which can improve the quality of human urban life. The proposed treatment of the topic within the framework of an affective, intra-active, urban landscape theory may facilitate a better understanding of the mechanics of unperceived (hidden) affordances, pertaining to the processes involved in the developing performatics of different kinds of walking in different kinds of urban landscapes.
India’s urban infrastructure is maligned for its breakdowns, inefficiencies, and inequities, and popular resentment at dysfunctional infrastructure is constant in public life. This article focuses on the surprising desire for India’s urban infrastructure among skateboarders. Skateboarders are drawn to India’s urban infrastructure because of its dysfunction, its seemingly unfinished nature. I explore these relationships by analysing four skate videos and making three arguments. First, infrastructure attracts skateboarders for possibilities of creative interpretation and appropriation, on‐camera aesthetics, and the encounters generated between mostly foreign (though not always “western”) skaters and local urban dwellers. Second, far from isolated moments, the appropriation of India’s infrastructure is captured and circulated to an audience of millions in skateboard videos. Third, skate video presents urban India as a frontier in its subcultural geographic and cartographic imagination; although over two decades India’s cities have drifted closer to skateboarding’s core; concrete and steel replacing cows and festivals on screen. The article closes by exploring the implications for skateboarding—a subculture built on disrupting the city, hacking its infrastructure, moving against its flows—when operating in spaces where disruption is the essential condition of everyday life, and how this is transmitted to an adjacent viewing public. Skateboarders are drawn to India’s urban infrastructure because of its dysfunction. Specifically, India’s infrastructure offers possibilities for creative interpretation and appropriation, on‐camera aesthetics, and encounters between mostly foreign (though not always “western”) skaters and local urban dwellers. The appropriation of India’s infrastructure is captured and circulated to an audience of millions in skateboard video, presenting urban India as a frontier in its subcultural geographic and cartographic imagination.
Based on qualitative research among industrial workers in a region that has undergone deindustrialisation and transformation to a service-based economy, this book examines the loss of status among former manual labourers. Focus lies on their emotional experiences, nostalgic memories, hauntings from the past and attachments to their former places of work, to transformed neighbourhoods, as well as to public space. Against this background the book explores the continued importance of class as workers attempt to manage the declining recognition of their skills and a loss of power in an "established-outsider figuration". A study of the transformation of everyday life and social positions wrought by changes in the social structure, in urban landscapes and in the "structures of feeling", this examination of the dynamic of social identity will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and geography with interests in post-industrial societies, social inequality, class and social identity.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
Part 1: Context: Spatial and Social Transformations
2. Field Methods and the Local Context
3. Transformations of Class
Part 2: Senses of Place and Transformed Industrial Landscapes
4. "Quite a Shame": Confrontations Between Workers Nostalgia and Optimistic Official Representations
5. Class-related Senses of Place and Frightening Encounters with Haunted Workplaces
6. Nostalgia and Practices of Resistance in Public Spaces
Part 3: Community Transformations and Social Encounters
7. Community Transformations I: The Nostalgic View of the Former Established
8. Community Transformations II: The Non-nostalgic View of a Former Outsider
9. Conclusion
Contemporary discussions of human–environment relations see habits as enabling forces of change (becoming) in contrast to traditional views of habit as routine and restrictive elements of identity (being). Vital life (becoming) is realised in habit through body repetition (Ravaisson) or through material force (Deleuze). This paper argues for the significance of the pragmatist work of John Dewey that shares this dispositional, enabling view of habit, but denies any dualism between life and mechanism. The paper explores Dewey’s idea of habits as mechanisms of natural forms of organisation that have different life force, depending on the situational qualities of environment–human transactions. This approach also implicates habit in problematisation. The paper goes on to discuss the implications of pragmatist thinking for understanding human–environment relations and the place that habits have in intervening in and reforming those relations through social activism and public policy.
From a commonsense perspective, an outburst of laughter appears to demonstrate little more than a lack of subjective will; it certainly does not register as having political significance. Yet, this is also to render the political in commonsense terms. As the emerging body of literature on the question of the micropolitical suggests, there is, beneath the essentially representational sphere of macropolitics, a micropolitics of affective force. In exploring the political potential of eruptions of laughter, I argue that grasping the novelty of the micropolitical requires that we shift debate away from the scalar questions of large and small, towards the distinction between the ordinary and the singular. Untoward laughter, by protracting the process through which affective force crosses a threshold of perception and becomes remarkable, draws attention to the micropolitics of everyday life. In pursuing this argument, first, I draw on the work of Helmuth Plessner to make a case for the fundamentally ‘undecidable’ nature of laughter: laughter expresses an ‘answer’ to an unanswerable situation. Yet, I argue that Plessner’s phenomenological explanation of laughter is insufficiently sensitive to the micropolitics of bodies, their affective and intensive transformations. Second, then, I draw on Nietzsche’s critique of the sovereignty of subjective will, arguing that the ‘I’ who laughs is merely the dominant drive among a series of conflicting drives. Finally, I draw on Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold, to show that such drives are never ‘mine’. As untoward laughter demonstrates so clearly, the events of the world are always constituted through much more dynamic foldings of material and incorporeal forces.
Resumen En la actualidad, la movilidad en espacios urbanos es un tema relevante que se aborda desde diferentes disciplinas científicas. Destaca el análisis de la interacción del proceso de urbanización y de las transformaciones del desarrollo económico, caracterizado por una escasa planeación en la mayoría de las ciudades de México. Este trabajo es una aproximación al desarrollo de la urbanización de la ciudad de Tepic; para ello, se estudió el transporte urbano y la percepción de los usuarios; el caso muestra las implicaciones derivadas de la promoción del desarrollo económico en un territorio y cuyos cambios originan transformaciones de la ciudad misma. El objetivo de la investigación es construir un marco de referencia conceptual del desarrollo regional y conocer sus implicaciones a través de la percepción que tienen los usuarios sobre la calidad del servicio que brinda el transporte público urbano en la ciudad de Tepic. El estudio-realizado en 2014-generó estadísticos descriptivos y una matriz de correlación a fin de identificar los componentes del transporte, tanto de la demanda como de la oferta, mediante un cuestionario a 300 personas en tres de los principales sitios céntricos de transbordo origen-destino de la ciudad. La evidencia colectada y analizada ha permitido conocer la interacción entre movilidad ciudadana-calidad del transporte-participación de las autoridades-permisionarios, y así ofrecer elementos para la planeación del servicio y su calidad. Finalmente, los resultados mostraron que las correlaciones obtenidas son particulares del espacio de estudio; quizá, en otros espacios con características similares se tendrían comportamientos cercanos. Palabras clave: transporte urbano, calidad del servicio, percepción, Tepic. Abstract Today, mobility in urban spaces is a relevant issue to be addressed by different scientific disciplines. Especially, the analysis of the interaction between urbanization process and the transformation of the economic development, which is characterized by a scarce planning in most of the cities in Mexico. This paper approximates the development of the urbanization of the city of Tepic; for this, urban transport and user perception were studied; the case shows the implications derived from the promotion of economic development in a territory and whose changes originate transformations of the city itself. The objective of the research is to build a framework of conceptual reference of regional development and know its implications through the perception that users have about the quality of service provided by urban public transport in the city of Tepic. By 2014, the study generated descriptive statistics and a correlation matrix to identify the components of transport both demand and supply. This, through a questionnaire to 300 people in three of the main sites of transshipment origin and destination centrally located in the city of Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico. Collected and analyzed evidence has allowed to know the interplay between mobility citizen-quality of the transport-participation of the authorities-permit holders, and to provide elements for the service and quality according to the urban development planning the city of Tepic. Finally, the results showed that the correlations obtained are individuals of the studio space, that perhaps in other areas with similar characteristics have nearby behaviors.
This paper examines the ways in which pioneering skateboarders in Southern California reacted to, and exploited a capital-intensive urban landscape to create a sport that today has tremendous economic, political, and cultural implications. The analysis focuses on archival material drawn from Skateboarder Magazine from 1975 to 1980. Ultimately, the skateboarders and those who documented their emerging sport express deep awareness and understanding of urban space as influenced by topography, urban development and emerging notions of mobility. The asphalt-banked schoolyards of Los Angeles provided an unintended playground for skateboarders and served as a starting point for the modern-era of the sport.
In recent years, geographers and others have begun to tease out the ontological, epistemological, and ethico-political implications of thinking about and with the elemental. In this article, we contribute to this work by considering the relation between the elemental and the aesthetic. More precisely, we argue for the importance to geographical thinking of the development of an elemental aesthetics attuned to the diverse ways in which the elemental is sensed in bodies and devices of different kinds as part of the distribution of ethical and political capacities. Our argument is developed via participatory engagement with the work of contemporary artist and architect Tomás Saraceno, central to which is the ongoing attempt to craft aesthetic works that mobilize the elemental energy of the sun to generate novel modes of sensing, traveling, and living in the air. Drawing on participatory research and engagement with Saraceno's Aerocene project, we show how his work helps us reimagine distributions of the capacity to sense the elemental. In the process, we reflect on some of the ways in which these experiments can inform the shape and orientation of geographical engagements with an elemental aesthetics.
Drawing on cultural geographical work on mobilities and landscape, this article examines parkour in Singapore, a context in which everyday mobile practices are conventionally understood to be heavily constrained and disciplined. As an urban mobile practice that involves bodily adaptation to and dynamic interaction with the prevailing built environment, parkour reveals complex relationships between the self and the landscape. For its practitioners, the doing of parkour holds potential not only for reimagining what Singapore’s urban landscape is or can be but also for reconfiguring understandings of themselves. The term landscaping captures the continuous and concurrent shaping of self and landscape through parkour; landscapes affect individual bodies and are actively (re)constituted through embodied movement. The article engages parkour in more-than-representational terms. By segueing between discursive and phenomenological approaches to mobilities and landscape, a dual emphasis on corporeal experience and representational frameworks highlights how both create and/or regulate such mobile bodies and practices within the landscape.
This essay analyses biographic memories of practices of resistance of workers in the industrial transformation region in the south of Nuremberg. These memories are marked by a nostalgic view of public space in former times, which is put in contrast with public space as it is today. While former practices of resistance are remembered with nostalgia, present-day resistance practices are described as threatening practices performed by others. It turns out that nostalgia for resistance in the public space in the past is also a social positioning in the present.
This chapter details how parkour can be used as a lens to renegotiate the debates about activism and young people. It argues that parkour is childlike, not because it is undertaken by children and young adults but because it demands a more youthful “state of mind” that inculcates a subversive politics of the urban. Such a view foregrounds emancipatory, “childlike” agency of the subculture of parkour, rather than the spectacular “youthful” corporeality that it has become synonymous with. This chapter argues that parkour offers a “way in” to urban activism, not through a direct engagement with political or anti-hegemonic activities or reactive protest against the forces of neoliberal capitalism but through a “softer politics” of rediscovering the urban environment around their own beliefs, expressions, and desires. By engaging in parkour, people are moving away from cultural provisioning of the modern global creative city that is too often prescribed and formulaic and instead participating in a process of urban citizenship that is allowing them to discover the urban and all the experiences it has to offer for themselves. It is this process that characterizes the “childlike” characteristics of parkour.
This chapter details how parkour can be used as a lens to renegotiate the debates about activism in young people. It argues that parkour is childlike, not because it is undertaken by children and young adults but because it demands a more youthful “state of mind” that inculcates a subversive politics of the urban. Such a view foregrounds emancipatory, “childlike” agency of the subculture of parkour, rather than the spectacular “youthful” corporeality that it has become synonymous with. This chapter argues that parkour offers a “way in” to urban activism, not through a direct engagement with political or anti-hegemonic activities or reactive protest against the forces of neoliberal capitalism but through a “softer politics” of rediscovering the urban environment around their own beliefs, expressions, and desires. By engaging in parkour, people are moving away from cultural provisioning of the modern global creative city that is too often prescribed and formulaic and instead participating in a process of urban citizenship that is allowing them to discover the urban and all the experiences it has to offer for themselves. It is this process that this chapter argues which characterizes the “childlike” characteristics of parkour.
Parkour: The emergence, practice and institutionalization of urban discipline
Thesis speaks about parkour and practioners of discipline, traceurs. The emergence of discipline is linked to establishment of social networks and with the culture of spectacle. The example of Slovenian parkour family and traceurs are showing the practices, organization and other activities of community. Common travelling, jamming, workshop organization on which they represent and teach parkour to those who would like to examine themselves in discipline of movement. Through interviews and intensive participant observation is represented the contact between traceurs and the city and others communities. Presented is also the history of discipline, implementation and the process of institutionalization. Majority of west European states have already established supreme organizations, they have parkour academies. Slovenian parkour family is now in the process of facing with the institutionalization.
Politics in geographical research on mobilities evaluates the nature of power and control of mobility and considers how people are differently enabled and constrained by these processes. Politics is usually approached along subject-centered lines where the task is to identify who is enabled and who is constrained and subsequently to account for the hidden mechanisms of power behind this unevenness. This article argues that what these subject-centered analyses can risk underplaying are the very transformations that mobility practices such as commuting themselves actually give rise to. This article draws on qualitative fieldwork during an evening train commute between Sydney and Wollongong in Australia to argue that the politics of mobilities needs to attend to ongoing processes of “micropolitical” transformation that take place through events and encounters, changing relations of enablement and constraint in the process. My argument is that we need to expand our understanding of what constitutes mobility politics to understand the nature and reach of the multiple forces that are at play, affecting and transforming life in this zone. This potentially enables us to more sensitively evaluate questions of responsibility and intervention.
Contributing to cultural geography's emerging interest in the work of Felix Ravaisson, this article explores the relationship between the impersonal force of habit and the personalised production of subjectivity. More precisely, our concern is with the relationship between habit and the stylisation of self that can be witnessed in the production of the intellectual subject. Paying particular attention to the relationship he traces between habit, consciousness and the effort that defines subjectivity, we explore the implications of Ravaisson's understanding of habit for the work of style, understood as an integration of habits and dispositions into a manner of being. By exploring the question of intellectual style in the work of Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche, we consider what the implications might be of performing that task of integration lightly, without the lofty weightiness that often attends intellectual life.
This article examines the relationship between landscapes and the performative materialities of habit in relation to non-representational theory. Materially, landscapes already pre-occupy us insofar as the material world is seen to afford action that is already thought practical intelligence: from how you tacitly know how much clearance to give your step as you walk onto the pavement, to learning to drive a car without needing to concentrate too hard on precisely what it is that you are doing. Where the human is already established in phenomenological thought, habit gives us an ontology whereby this is not the assumed starting point. Material affordances only address half the matter, given that the occupation of being in a landscape is now seen to be much more explicitly constitutive of what it means to be human in the first place. This article, then, addresses the new directions for cultural geography present in recent work on habit within the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Ravaisson. It does this by considering this interface between, on the one hand, the biological rewiring of bodies re-engineered in the lived and habit spaces of immediate occupation of landscaped activity and, on the other hand, that of cultural preoccupations disposing subjective formations in situ within landscapes. In this, it makes use of a workshop event from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded network Living in a Material World and the context of training at the British Army Ministry of Defence (MoD) site at Mynydd Epynt, Wales.
The popular performer speaks in an already recognizable tongue, producing pleasure by an affirmation of what the audience already knows and feels. Yet affirmation is, at its best, much more than this, involving an openness into the coming into being of something that is genuinely new. In this article we explore the way that humour – and specifically the stand-up comedy of Stewart Lee – can cultivate an audience's bodily receptivity to novel modes of thinking and being which are never recognisable in any immediate sense. Affirmation, if it is to be more than a mere confirmation of what is already given, necessarily eschews reactivity. Certainly, Lee's comedy operates through a form of critique that goes beyond the negativity that we would associate with conventional modes of critical thinking and practice. Most obvious in Lee's lampooning of the popularity of the representationally-laden form of observational comedy, ‘critique’ here works affectively at least as much as it does cognitively. Through his attention to the form rather than the content of humour, and through his use of repetition and the creation and maintenance of tension, Lee provides a slow motion capture of those habitual modes of anticipation that foreclose other possibilities for thought and action. In examining the comedic and performative affects of Lee's comedy, we give a sense of the conditions in and through which new modes of attention, new dispositions and forms of bodily attunement might be produced. Drawing on more recent affect theory focused on the minute perceptions of the body, we argue that wit has a special relation to the new, less because it effects an irruptive change in the existing state of affairs, than because it exposes us to the affective conditions of possibility for the production of novelty.
This paper develops ideas in cultural geography around bodily capacities and their limits to think about the sustainability of skilful performance. Taking golf as its empirical moment and affective theorisations of habit as its conceptual lure, the paper outlines how the bodily proficiencies required for skilful sporting performance are acquired through intensive processes of transformation that emerge through repetition, which make bodily movements easier and more intuitive over time. However, a phenomenon known as the yips intrudes on these trajectories of increasing ease and proficiency where, suddenly and inexplicably, skilful performance breaks down. Where current medicalised debates on the etiology of the yips are quick to attempt to separate the apparently psychological from the physical genesis, this paper draws principally on the writings of Félix Ravaisson to consider how the symptoms of the yips signal changes in the brain–body–environment circuits of habit. The bodily thresholds that these changes give rise to invite us to embrace an appreciation of skilful performance that is much more contingent on its immanent disruption, and an apprehension of habit that acknowledges the volatilities inherent to it.
Contributing to cultural geography's emerging interest in the work of Felix Ravaisson, this article explores the relationship between the impersonal force of habit and the personalised production of subjectivity. More precisely, our concern is with the relationship between habit and the stylisation of self that can be witnessed in the production of the intellectual subject. Paying particular attention to the relationship he traces between habit, consciousness and the effort that defines subjectivity, we explore the implications of Ravaisson's understanding of habit for the work of style, understood as an integration of habits and dispositions into a manner of being. By exploring the question of intellectual style in the work of Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche, we consider what the implications might be of performing that task of integration lightly, without the lofty weightiness that often attends intellectual life.
The 'problem' of skating has been conèated with a 'problem' with young people in public spaces, reèecting a rise in fear of crime from the mid-twentieth century and referencing more general questions about public space and citizenship. My task in this paper is to highlight some of the tensions between skating and urban governance in Franklin Square, Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania in Australia. This task is indebted to ideas about governance and citizenship advanced by Nikolas Rose; about the proper city as conceived by Michel de Certeau; and about fortress strategies and species of spaces promulgated by Stephen Flusty. Franklin Square functions in two ways in this work. First, its examination encourages consideration of local cases. Second, it can be deployed as a heuristic device through which to explore the edges of public space and citizenship. The essay is intended to make two contributions to social and cultural geography, one enlarging on some well-rehearsed debates about situated and contested socio-spatial relations in what I hope are innovative ways, the other unsettling particular strategies that place skaters 'on the edge' and yet draw them into particular domains of citizenship via speciéc practices of urban governance.
This paper takes as its starting point the centrality of nonrepresentational registers of communication and comprehension to understanding how everyday experiences of travelling with others by public transport unfolds. Drawing on extensive primary research, it explores how different affective atmospheres erupt and decay in the space of the train carriage; the modes of affective transmission that might take place; and the character of the collectives that are mobilised and cohere through these atmospheres. Acknowledging that these atmospheres have powerful effects, this paper focuses on the trajectories of particular misanthropic affective relations; and how such negative relations emerge from a complex set of forces which prime passengers to act. Yet this call to action is often met with a reticent passivity that transposes these negative affective relations, often in ways that intensify their force. In expanding the realm of that which is often taken to constitute the 'social', the paper concludes by considering how the demands of collective responsibility fold through contemporary understandings of community.
Oil vulnerability is likely to impact upon one group of citizens – children – in critical ways, since children have borne a special brunt of a car-dependent culture. Children's freedom to explore the city has been curtailed, in large part because of the perceived risks of traffic and ‘stranger danger’. Children are over-represented in road fatalities involving cars and pedestrians and cyclists. Children are also subject to chronic conditions associated with inactivity such as obesity. In order to address this situation, advocates of child-friendly cities have suggested measures to increase children's independent mobility (CIM) and encourage children's active transport. In this paper, we argue that there is a conflation of CIM and children's active transport, which perpetuates the separation of children from adults. To take both children's rights and desires seriously, as well as to take into account the concerns of parents, the active transport needs of both groups must be addressed simultaneously. One cost effective and immediately available strategy is to reduce car speeds in order to minimise the damage to all users of active transport. A holistic understanding of urban transport and children shows that reducing speeds produces the co-benefits of increased health and reduced reliance on oil.
Critics of globalisation maintain a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the net. Any use of the internet for the purposes of criticising global processes and the institutions of global governance necessarily acknowledges its participation in these very processes. But what is the nature of such participation? To the extent that critics of globalisation espy in the internet a means of making a difference, precisely what kind of difference is this? Seen primarily as a representational and a didactic tool, the internet may be put to the service of an idealist politics, enabling truths, otherwise obscured, to see the light of day. Yet such a strategy, it is argued, is bound to a certain repetition that may deny resistance its fully positive power. The paper contrasts two distinct strategic uses of the net in order to open up to a different understanding of the political potential of the internet. For the superunion, the International Union of Food, Agriculture, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF), the internet represents a means of reaching the broadest possible public audience, so as to lessen the hold of the ideology of global capital. The use of the internet by the loose alliance of culture jammers known as the Yes Men calls for an alternative understanding of what it means to make a difference to the contemporary scene. We argue that their use of the net for the purposes of resistance calls into question the representational model and its associated politics.
Find your black holes and white walls, know them … it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Defined by originator David Belle as “an art to help you pass any obstacle”, the practice of “parkour” or “free running” constitutes both a mode of movement and a new way of interacting with the urban environment. Parkour was created by Belle (partly in collaboration with his childhood friend Sébastien Foucan) in France in the late 1980s. As seen in the following short video “Rush Hour”, a trailer for BBC One featuring Belle, parkour practitioners (known as “traceurs”), leap, spring, and vault from objects in the urban milieu that are intended to limit movement (walls, curbs, railings, fences) or that unintentionally hamper passage (lampposts, street signs, benches) through the space. “Rush Hour” was among the first media representations of parkour, and it had a significant role in introducing and popularizing the practice in Britain. Parkour has subsequently been widely disseminated via news reports, Nike and Toyota ads, the documentaries Jump London (2003) and Jump Britain (2005), and feature films, including Luc Besson’s Yamakasi – Les Samouraïs des Temps Modernes (2001) and Banlieu 13 (2004; just released in the U.S. as District B13), starring David Belle as Leto and Cyril Raffaelli as Damien. Sébastien Foucan will appear in the upcoming James Bond film Casino Royale as Mollaka, a terrorist who is chased (parkour-style) and then killed by Bond. (Foucan can also be seen in the film’s trailer, currently available at both SonyPictures.com and AOL.com; the film itself is scheduled for release in November 2006). Madonna’s current “Confessions” tour features an extended parkour sequence (accompanying the song “Jump”), albeit one limited to the confines of a scaffold erected over the stage. Perhaps most important in the rapid development of parkour into a world-wide youth movement, however, has been the proliferation of parkour websites featuring amateur videos, photos, tutorials, and blogs. The word “parkour” is derived from the French “parcours” (as the sport is known in France): a line, course, circuit, road, way or route, and the verb “parcourir”: to travel through, to run over or through, to traverse. As a physical discipline, parkour might be said to have a “poetics” — first, in general, in the Aristotelian sense of constructing through its various techniques (tekhnē) the drama of each parkour event. Secondly, one can consider parkour following Aristotle’s model of four-cause analysis as regards its specific materials (the body and the city), form or “vocabulary” of movements (drawn primarily from gymnastics, the martial arts, and modern dance), genre (as against, say, gymnastics), and purpose, including its effects upon its audience and the traceurs themselves. The existing literature on parkour (at this point, mostly news reports or websites) tends to emphasize the elements of form or movement, such as parkour’s various climbs, leaps, vaults, and drops, and the question of genre, particularly the ongoing, heated disputes among traceurs as to what is or is not true parkour. By contrast, my argument in this essay will focus principally on the materials and purpose of parkour: on the nature of the city and the body as they relate to parkour, and on the ways in which parkour can be seen to “remap” urban space and to demonstrate a resistance to its disciplinary functions, particularly as manifest in the urban street “grid.” The institution of the street “grid” (or variations upon it such as Haussmann’s Parisian star-configuration) facilitates both the intelligibility — in terms of both navigation and surveillance — and control of space in the city. It situates people in urban spaces in determinate ways and channels the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The “grid” thus carries a number of normalizing and disciplinary functions, creating in effect what the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as a “striation” of urban space. This striation constitutes “a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc.” within a field of determinate spatial coordinates (Deleuze and Guattari 386). It establishes “fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects” (Deleuze and Guattari 386). Many of these aspects of striation can be seen in the ways urban space is depicted in the “Rush Hour” video: in the gridlocked traffic, the flashing tail-lights, the “STOP” light and “WAIT” sign, the sign indicating the proper directional flow of traffic, and the grim, bundled-up pedestrians trudging home en masse along the congested streets. Against these images of conformity, regulation, and confinement, the video presents the parkour ethos of originality, “reach,” escape, and freedom. Belle’s (shirtless) aerial traversal of the urban space between his office and his flat — a swift, improvisational flow across the open rooftops (and the voids between them), off walls, and finally down the sloping roof into his apartment window — cuts across the striated space of the streets below and positions him, for that time, beyond the constrictions of the social realm and its “concrete” manifestations. Though parkour necessarily involves obstacles that must be “overcome,” the goal of parkour is to do this as smoothly and efficiently as possible, or, in the language of its practitioners, for the movement to be “fluid like water.” The experience of parkour might, then, be said to transform the urban landscape into “smooth space,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of “a field without conduits or channels” (371), and thus into a space of uninhibited movement, at least in certain ideal moments. Parkour seems to trace a path of desire (even if the desire is simply to avoid the crowds and get home in time to watch BBC One) that moves along a Deleuzean “line of flight,” a potential avenue of escape from the forces of striation and repression. Here the body is propelled over or through (most parkour movement actually takes place at ground level) the strata of urban space, perhaps with the hope that, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “one will bolster oneself directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections” (15). In the process, parkour becomes “an art of displacement,” appropriating urban space in ways that temporarily disrupt their controlling logics and even imply the possibility of a smooth space of desire. One might see parkour as an overcoming of social space (and its various constrictions and inhibitions of desire, its “stop” and “wait” signs) through the interplay of body and material barriers. The body becomes an instrument of freedom. This, again, is graphically conveyed in “Rush Hour” through the opening scene in which Belle strips off his business suit and through the subsequent repeated contrasts of his limber, revealed body to the rigid, swathed figures of the pedestrians below. In part an effect of the various camera angles from which it is shot, there is also an element of the “heroic” in this depiction of the body. This aspect of the representation appears to be knowingly acknowledged in the video’s opening sequence. The first frame is a close-up, tightly focused on a model of a ninja-like figure with a Japanese sword who first appears to be contemplating a building (with an out-of-focus Belle in the background contemplating it from the opposite direction), but then, in the next, full shot, is revealed to be scaling it — in the manner of superheroes and King Kong. The model remains in the frame as Belle undresses (inevitably evoking images of Clark Kent stripping down to his Superman costume) and, in the final shot of that sequence, the figure mirrors Belle’s as he climbs through the window and ascends the building wall outside. In the next sequence, Belle executes a breath-taking handstand on a guard railing on the edge of the roof with the panorama of the city behind him, his upper body spanning the space from the street to the edge of the city skyline, his lower body set against the darkening sky. Through the practice of parkour, the relation between body and space is made dynamic, two reality principles in concert, interacting amid a suspension of the social strata. One might even say that the urban space is re-embodied — its rigid strata effectively “liquified.” In Jump London, the traceur Jerome Ben Aoues speaks of a Zen-like “harmony between you and the obstacle,” an idealization of what is sometimes described as a state of “flow,” a seemingly effortless immersion in an activity with a concomitant loss of self-consciousness. It suggests a different way of knowing the city, a knowledge of experience as opposed to abstract knowledge: parkour is, Jaclyn Law argues, “about curiosity and seeing possibilities — looking at a lamppost or bus shelter as an extension of the sidewalk” (np.). “You just have to look,” Sébastien Foucan insists in Jump London, “you just have to think like children….” Parkour effectively remaps urban space, creating a parallel, “ludic” city, a city of movement and free play within and against the city of obstacles and inhibitions. It reminds us that, in the words of the philosopher of urban space Henri Lefebvre, “the space of play has coexisted and still coexists with spaces of exchange and circulation, political space and cultural space” (172). Parkour tells us that in order to enter this space of play, we only need to make the leap. References Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Jump London (2003). Mike Christie, director. Mike Smith, producer. Featuring Jerome Ben Aoues, Sébastien Foucan, and Johann Vigroux. Law, Jaclyn. “PK and Fly.” This Magazine May/June 2005 http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2005/05/>. Lefebvre, Henri. “Perspective or Prospective?” Writings on Cities. Trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Rush Hour (2002). BBC One promotion trailer. Tom Carty, dir. Edel Erickson, pro. Produced by BBC Broadcast. See also: Wikipedia on parkour: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour> Parkour Worldwide Association: http://www.pawa.fr/> Parkour Net (multilingual): http://parkour.net/> NYParkour: http://www.nyparkour.com/> PKLondon.com: http://www.pklondon.com/> Nike’s “The Angry Chicken” (featuring Sébastien Foucan): http://video.google.com/videoplay? docid=-6571575392378784144&q=nike+chicken> There is an extensive collection of parkour videos available at YouTube A rehearsal clip featuring Sébastien Foucan coaching the dancers for Madonna’s Confessions tour can be seen at YouTube Citation reference for this article MLA Style Geyh, Paula. "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>. APA Style Geyh, P. (Jul. 2006) "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>.
Skateboarders are an increasingly common feature of the urban environment - recent estimates total 40 million world-wide. We are all aware of their often extraordinary talent and manoeuvres on the city streets. This book is the first detailed study of the urban phenomenon of skateboarding. It looks at skateboarding history from the surf-beaches of California in the 1950s, through the purpose-built skateparks of the 1970s, to the street-skating of the present day and shows how skateboarders experience and understand the city through their sport. Dismissive of authority and convention, skateboarders suggest that the city is not just a place for working and shopping but a true pleasure-ground, a place where the human body, emotions and energy can be expressed to the full. The huge skateboarding subculture that revolves around graphically-designed clothes and boards, music, slang and moves provides a rich resource for exploring issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and the family. As the author demonstrates, street-style skateboarding, especially characteristic of recent decades, conducts a performative critique of architecture, the city and capitalism. Anyone interested in the history and sociology of sport, urban geography or architecture will find this book riveting.
This chapter shows that the pathways or routes through Deleuze's texts form an open tracery: ‘There is no heart, but only a problem – that is, a distribution of notable points; there is no centre but always decentring, series, from one to another, with the limp of a presence and a absence – of an excess, of a deficiency’. And that, within this open system, this problem of immanent space and representation is distributed across three main terrain: first, across the realm of art and the role of genesis in this practice; second, in the face of a politics of encountering the foreign; and, third, in the field of a science grappling with the nature within us and the role it played in Klee's programme of artistic expression.
In this unruly geography there is always time: time to take a detour and leave the shortcut behind.
This paper develops ideas in cultural geography around bodily capacities and their limits to think about the sustainability of skilful performance. Taking golf as its empirical moment and affective theorisations of habit as its conceptual lure, the paper outlines how the bodily proficiencies required for skilful sporting performance are acquired through intensive processes of transformation that emerge through repetition, which make bodily movements easier and more intuitive over time. However, a phenomenon known as the yips intrudes on these trajectories of increasing ease and proficiency where, suddenly and inexplicably, skilful performance breaks down. Where current medicalised debates on the etiology of the yips are quick to attempt to separate the apparently psychological from the physical genesis, this paper draws principally on the writings of Félix Ravaisson to consider how the symptoms of the yips signal changes in the brain–body–environment circuits of habit. The bodily thresholds that these changes give rise to invite us to embrace an appreciation of skilful performance that is much more contingent on its immanent disruption, and an apprehension of habit that acknowledges the volatilities inherent to it.
Stillness occupies an ambivalent position in a world of flows. Opening up space required for reflective, contemplative thought, stillness is often posited as a vital supplement to movement. Yet, in spite of its reverence as a cornerstone of moral responsibility and a key technic of modernity, reflective thought is now taken to be just one modality of thinking amongst many others that compose the body. This paper explores what happens to the capacities of reflective thought when gathered into a vitalist diagram of the body. It does this by tracing how different forms of stillness participate in the constitution of differently susceptible bodies. It considers how habit works to both hold still and move the body in different ways which helps to disrupt an understanding of a body that has a particular capacity for wilful, reflective sovereign thought. As such, and parallel to suggestions that we currently inhabit an era of thought maximisation, this paper argues that reflective thought itself might be better understood as enrolled into a particular diagram of habit that allows us to consider how reflection and contemplation might function not as a redemptive force of liberation from habit, but as the turbulent reverberations of the shock of the outside that can become debilitating.
As innovated by French “free runners” David Belle and Sébastien Foucan in the1990s, Parkour is a physical cultural lifestyle of athletic performance focusing on uninterrupted and spectacular gymnastics over, under, around, and through obstacles in urban settings. Through the public practice of Parkour across late modern cities, advocates collectively urge urban pedestrians to reconsider the role of athleticism in fostering self—other environment connections. This article taps ethnographic data collected on Parkour enthusiasts in Toronto (Canada). For 2 years, the author spent time in the field with “traceurs” (i.e., those who practice Parkour) and conducted open-ended interviews with them regarding their experiences with the movement. In this article, the author explores Parkour as an emerging urban “anarcho-environmental” movement, drawing largely on Heidegger's critique of technology along with Schopenhauer's understanding of the will to interpret the practice of Parkour as a form of urban deconstruction.
Parkour, or l'art du déplacement, has become widely practised in recent years, with most of its participants (or traceurs) conducting it in urban environments. Studying parkour and those who practise it provides urban geographers with a new and fascinating way in which movement is perceived in the city. Using the theoretical idioms of 'smooth and striated space' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus Continuum, London) and 'the event' (Badiou, 2005, Being and Event Continum, London), this paper will position parkour as an alternate way of theorising the city as an arena for capitalist versus subversive practices. Moving away from the idea of smooth space incorporating a 'war machine', the Badiouian event is a more appropriate lens through which to theorise parkour and its participants' relationship with the city, in that it embraces a serene ethos of urban rediscovery.
Studies of resistance challenge overly structural conceptions of social systems by emphasizing the various forms of creative practice operating within hegemonic space. Yet, by illustrating the different ways that agents respond to a dominant system, resistance theory inadvertently establishes that system as a preestablished entity. Thus, although resistance theory endeavours to recognize the ongoing deconstruction of systems, it simultaneously reifies the system as primary. In response, I argue that this problem is not indicative of a flaw in resistance theory per se, but rather of a flaw in the conception of systems it operates with. Drawing upon Butler's work on performativity, I develop an alternative theory of systems that accounts for social coherence and stratified relations of power through creative forms of social practice alone. Rather than depending on sociostructural concepts such as ideology, hegemony, and normative space, a performative theory of systems situates creative social practice as the engine of social coherence. In this framework theories of resistance are redundant because creative practices are the rule of systems rather than a challenge to their stability.
The contemporary challenge of postmodernity draws our attention to the nature of reality and the ways in which experience is constructed. Sensuous Geographies explores our immediate sensuous experience of the world. Touch, smell, hearing and sight - the four senses chiefly relevant to geographical experience - both receive and structure information. The process is mediated by historical, cultural and technological factors. Issues of definition are illustrated through a variety of sensuous geographies. Focusing on postmodern concerns with representation, the book brings insights from individual perceptions and cultural observations to an analysis of the senses, challenging us to reconsider the role of the sensuous as not merely the physical basis of understanding but as an integral part of the cultural definition of geographical knowledge.
This article examines the politics of ‘le parkour’ a new global art developed in the Paris suburbs. The practitioners’ creative and dangerous movements, as a form of spatial appropriation and as a collectively developed art-form, claim new commons. Their collaborative creation of these commons forges a group identity that allows each member to retain their individuality, forging an integrated but heterogeneous collectivity. This group dynamic, combining singularity and collectivity, suggests a connection to Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude, a potential, emerging democratic political force in the global information economy. In parkour, the centrality of embracing fear as an aesthetic experience is significant because it is precisely fear that prevents the multitude from forming and reaching its full political power by maintaining the separation of different segments of workers. An art of the multitude, parkour is its microcosm, artistic manifestation, or even harbinger.
Parkour, the art of moving quickly in urban areas using only the body and staying true to the principle of “displacement,” a call to ceaseless forward movement combined with a kind of Zen-like self-presence, is dangerous to the practitioner (traceur) but also, in a sense, to the logic of the city. As documented on YouTube, Jump London, and Casino Royale or seen in the flesh, parkour is the most spectacular of a set of unruly practices in the specular city, from skateboarding to flash mobbing. The traceur can be situated in the history of urban wanderers in the midst of capital, from the nineteenth-century Parisian flaneur to the strange urban hieroglyphics of the Situationist drifters and the new psychogeographers. The city is an accretion of forms characterized by a nostalgia for self-presence (roughly, democracy) and by economy (transnational capital flow), the first a desire to be here, the second a reckoning with the impossibility of being simply here. In the most literal, architectural sense, these might be civic buildings on the one hand and commercial on the other, and as it turns out, these are the best buildings to jump off, over, and around. Late capital's urban matrix hardly has time to be itself in the haste with which it hums a threnody of global evocations, and the traceur moving soundlessly in such a sensorium, or glimpsed briefly against a cityscape of allusive forms, will tell us everything we need to know about presence if he or she will but tarry for a moment.
This article engages debates on emotional geography and non-representational theory by considering fear as a distinctly mobile engagement with our environment. Parkour, or freerunning, has exploded into public consciousness through commercial media representations and films. It is depicted as a spectacular urban sport that either can or cannot be done. Through ethnographic research with groups of parkour practitioners I consider what has been excluded from these representations: the emotions involved in trying, experimenting, and gradually learning to be in places differently. In parkour places are ‘done’ or mobilised in tentative, unsure, ungainly and unfinished ways which can be characterised by a kind of play with architecture. I argue that this play is contingent upon an array of fears, which, rather than being entirely negative, are an important way in which practitioners engage with place. Here fears can manifest differently, not only restricting mobility, but in some cases encouraging imaginative and playful forms of movement.
In Monstropolis, the virtual world of monsters in the 2001 Pixar-animated Disney movie Monsters, Inc., the screams of human children are the source of energy. In this paper, the energy shortage (or ‘scream shortage’) depicted in Monsters, Inc. serves as a subtle and engaging allegory, drawing attention to the non-virtual world's concerns with energy supplies, particularly oil. Peak oil, the time at which the global production of oil reaches its maximum, is arguably one of the most important issues that will affect the conceptualisation of children and our ability to create and maintain child-friendly cities. This paper derives new ways of conceptualising the relationship between peak oil and children in modern western societies, through a critical analysis of a number of themes from Monsters, Inc. The value of such an analysis is that in Monsters, Inc. the issues of children, lifestyle and energy acquisition and use are all brought together in a common problematic. Thus, the underlying descriptions in Monsters, Inc. provide a catalyst for a wider debate about children and peak oil.
This paper capitalizes on the resurgence of interest in habit within social and political theory as a key concept of our time, following the recent translation and uptake of the work of Félix Ravaisson, to push our understandings of the irreducible vitality and vulnerability of bodies. It seeks to intervene within debates on the habit-body by challenging the way in which the transitions that habit gives rise to are conceptualized. Many theorizations of the habit-body have tended to stress its ever-evolving, adaptive, affective capacities for subtle alteration and gradual, incremental change. However I argue that this lends itself to an image of the habit-body that prioritizes coherence, calculation and proficiency over other more erratic and unpredictable transitions that habit might give rise to. In response, and drawing on Borges’ short story The Zahir as its empirical lure, rather than understanding volatility as something that habit works to quiesce, this paper seeks to enroll volatility into an image of the habit-body by articulating its agitative and destructive tendencies. It does this by proffering obsession as a specific mode of habit that exhibits these tendencies towards volatility, in order to demonstrate how habit participates in some of the more unstable, precarious and heterogeneous modulations of contemporary life. Capitalizing on the ways through which habit refocuses debates on ‘distributed agency’, drawing attention to the volatilities inherent to habit helps us not only to dismantle ideas of the sovereign self, but in doing so, pluralizes the event and performance of subjectivities. This forces us to conceptualize the relations between thought, will and responsibility in a way that rethinks a radical politics through a revolution of the body over that of the mind.
Preface to this edition, by Steven Lukes Introduction to the 1984 edition, by Lewis Coser Introduction to this edition, by Steven Lukes Durkheim's Life and Work: Timeline 1858-1917 Suggestions for Further Reading Original Translator's Note The Division of Labour in Society by Emile Durkheim Preface to the First Edition (1893) Preface to the Second Edition (1902) Introduction PART I: THE FUNCTION OF THE DIVISION OF LABOUR 1. The Method of Determining This Function 2. Mechanical Solidarity, or Solidarity by Similarities 3. Solidarity Arising from the Division of Labour, or Organic Solidarity 4. Another Proof of the Preceding Theory 5. The Increasing Preponderance of Organic: Solidarity and its Consequences 6. The Increasing Preponderance of Organic: Solidarity and its Consequences (cont.) 7. Organic Solidarity and Contractual Solidarity PART II: THE CAUSES AND CONDITIONS 8. The Progress of the Division of Labour and of Happiness 9. The Causes 10. Secondary Factors 11. Secondary Factors (cont.) 12. Consequences of the Foregoing PART III: THE ABNORMAL FORMS 13. The Anomic Division of Labour 14. The Forced Division of Labour 15. Another Abnormal Form Conclusion Original Annotated Table of Contents
Despite a burgeoning literature on mobilities in general and cycling in particular as a transport, leisure, and political practice, there remains a lack of research on cycling in pedestrian public spaces. There is, however, a substantial body of literature in relation to skateboarding in public spaces which with few exceptions theorises it as resistant to preexisting dominant design codes and social norms. Using the example of London’s South Bank this paper focuses on the urban cycling practices of bike trials and BMX in order to illustrate that these practices are perhaps not as ‘resistant’ as previous accounts have argued. Whilst accounts of skateboarding have tended to draw upon a body – architecture dialectics and subcultural theory, using ethnographic methods this paper discusses the practice and reception of display, sociality, and authority inherent in these public performances. In doing so the paper demonstrates that these styles of riding largely perform the social and cultural norms enshrined in the redevelopment of the South Bank. The result is a performed reading of these practices and spaces which sees power as always becoming. In line with this, the paper also questions the logic of current strategies which seek to displace riders and skaters to peripheral ‘private’ skate parks based on an erroneous reading of such practices as always resistant.
Resistances, subjectivity, common
- J. Revel
- J. Revel
Rodney Mullen: From the ground up
- K. Dianda
- K. Dianda
The Fold 2011: Ravaisson's Of Habit in 2011: Repetition and Difference. Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting Deleuze and Space
- G Deleuze
- Minneapolis
- J D Dewsbury
- D Bissell
Deleuze, G., 1993: The Fold. Translated by T. Conley, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Dewsbury, J.D. and Bissell, D., 2011: Ravaisson's Of Habit in 2011: Repetition and Difference. Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Seattle. Dewsbury, J.D. and Thrift, N., 2005: Genesis eternal: after Paul Klee. In Buchanan, I. and Lambert, G. (eds) Deleuze and Space. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 89–108.
Editors' introduction. In Ravaisson, F. Of Habit
- C Carlisle
- M Sinclair
Carlisle, C. and Sinclair, M., 2008: Editors' introduction. In Ravaisson, F. Of Habit. Translated and edited by C. Carlisle and M. Sinclair. Continuum, London, 1–21.
Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body Aesthetics and anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's artwork essay reconsidered
- Routledge
- New London
- York
- I Borden
Routledge, London and New York. Borden, I., 2001: Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body. Berg, Oxford. Buck-Morss, S., 1992: Aesthetics and anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's artwork essay reconsidered. October 62, 3–41.
2011: Ravaisson's Of Habit in 2011: Repetition and Difference
- J D Dewsbury
- D Bissell
Parkour, the city, the event. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
- O Mould
Resistances subjectivity common.Generation Online.org Retrieved
- J Revel
2010: Mobilities, meetings and futures: an interview with John Urry. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
- P Adey
- D Bissell
Teen dies in ?rooftop run
- Anon
Review of bystander approaches in support of preventing race based discrimination
- J Nelson
- K Dunn
- Y Paradies
- A Pedersen
- S Sharpe
- M Hynes
- B Guerin
Stillness in a Mobile World
- D Bissell
- G Fuller
The Fold. Translated by T
- G Deleuze
Rodney Mullen: From the ground up. ON Video Skateboarding, Winter Issue. Retrieved: 28 August 2012 from <
- K Dianda
Urban free flow: a poetics of parkour Retrieved: 31 August 2012 from <
- P Geyh
Addiction and Grace: Preface to F?lix Ravaisson's Of Habit
- C Malabou
Thinking-spaces for research-creation Inflexions 1, 1?16 Retrieved: 12 April 2012 from <
- D Mccormack
The metropolis and mental life Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory
- G Simmel