Context(s)

Memory as context

More than any other part of the rhetorical canon, memoria or memory seems to be most closely linked with place. In ancient Greece where the Western rhetorical canon came into being, memory was closely associated with oratory—a skill requiring knowledge and creation of space. Moreover oratory in ancient Greece also facilitated navigation through space.

                   In describing the method of memory attributed to the Greek, Frances Yates gives a typical example of how a speech might be memorized using loci mnemonics: A house with many rooms is imagined in the orator’s mind (6-7). Each room is decorated differently and their gaze is guided from one object to the next, from foreground to background. With each new section of the speech, they go to the next room. In the actual place of the speech though, the orator might look from one part of the room to the next with physical objects like pillars or trees used as a loci mnemonic. This giving memory location became known as having a “seat of memory” (Calendrillo 436).

                   Human geographers and urban studies have noted the link between place in memory in a much different and more productive way by engaging the “‘social aesthetic perspective’ and analytically [expanding] it by examining the relationships between sensory experience and the shifting mobilities and temporalities of everyday urban experience” (Degen and Rose 3273). In other words, memory is no longer contained in the head. As we navigate through landscapes and cityscapes, we are navigating through a complex set of loci mnemonics that together provide a unique sensory experience and cultural memory of a public (3273). Space it seems is constructed much like place in the way Arturo Escobar describes it as being “constituted by sedimented social structures and cultural practices” (143). The problem is that those structures and practices are often considered too common to elicit much attention, even on a scholarly level. As Degen and Rose note, “Far less attention has been paid to the way what might be called ‘everyday’, more mundane memories inflect the experiencing of built environments” (3279).

                   Once we begin to look at movement through space as a navigation of a loci mnemonics, the question of how a memory is produced and whose memory is being produced should be addressed. In the Greek tradition, the loci mnemonic of the orator’s mind was his—it was a device not revealed to the audience, but used to reveal the information he wanted. The audience stayed stationary and listened while the speaker stood and navigated the corridors of his mind to transmit memories. Any sensory experience for the audience was given from the orator to them through spoken words alone. The cityscape, while still operating in the loci mnemonic, is a much different case. The first and most striking difference is the agency of the subject. Unlike the Greek audience member, a person who navigates an urban space has the ability to choose from multiple paths with varying degrees of access. The movement through and between these spaces in a cityscape is a navigation of collective memories—in a way navigation between spaces is interaction in public spheres. Michael DeCerteau describes walking through the city as a “long poem” that “manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them'' (101). The interplay of the ambulator and the setting and those who constructed the setting brings mobility and memory into conversation.

                   I plan to have this conversation with my students over a course of seven weeks this fall. For the purposes of this project and for explanation to 171 students it is perhaps wise to distill the theory into viewing place as text. (This is a move I make when teaching the literature-based English 112 as reading place as text.) In viewing place as text we can apply many of the same principles of close reading, analysis, and remediation. Most notably for this project is the use of Eilola-Selber’s idea of assemblage—that is text “constructed from the conceptual, linguistic, and sociopolitical forces active in several different locations” (381). While the assemblages Eilola-Johnson and Selber examine are mainly digital and textual, I would extend the same principles into studies of space and place. Certainly if we look at the city from DeCerteau’s perspective—that once upon a time in a place called the World Trade Center, now a site of memorial—it is a mishmash of cultures, time, infrastructure, history, constructions, behavior—it is a site of memorial that remains in flux. No one person authors the space of the city. No one person calls this his or her composition. We all take part in the construction of space and the creation of place. To put it in terms of the digital sphere, the creation of the city is crowdsourced, though, as we will see, not in an entirely egalitarian manner.

Two types of interaction:

To study the interplay between the digital and the physical spaces I realize two types of interaction are necessary. First, students will need to engage in the physical world as a sort of ethnography. Here, I should note, I am taking liberty with the usual sense of ethnography as defined by social sciences. For the purposes of my 100-level undergraduate course I am looking at mobile ethnography in the way Cresswell describes it as “mov[ing] from a deep engagement with a single site, to analysis of several sites at once (multisite ethnography), to ethnography that moves along with, or besides, the object of research (mobile ethnography)” (647). Hall notes a similar sentiment in Urban Studies when he notes, “For the urban ethnographer, in place in the city, interest might lie in the interplay between the city as place and the assorted mobilities (and imaginaries) it fosters” (574). The interplay is what I want to focus on. The mobility of this sort of research requires two things: physical mobility and mobile tools.

            The physical mobility I describe here as a method is walking, while I emphasize the mobile phone as exemplified by the smartphone as the tool for recording this physical movement. At first it seems as if the phone is acting merely as a tool to record walking (and it is, partially); however, the phone itself is a source of movement. The tool of the smartphone actually brings out the second type of interaction necessary to discuss the interplay of the digital sphere with the ambulator, the oscillation between the mental space of internet and the physical world. To help organize the structure of this prefacing essay a bit more I have broken the two sorts of interaction into two sections:

1. Walking

There are problems with walking. It is abilist and assumes a certain form of transportation--a move that presupposes the mobility of the person in more ways than simply the means of propulsion. Anthropologist Tim Ingold takes a historic look at walking in Western culture noting its earliest social roots as being “for the poor, the criminal, the young, and above all, the ignorant” (322). Public opinion apparently had not changed much from the 1800s through the mid 1990s:

            My goal here is not to further dichotomize the mental and social space or to priveledge the head over the heels. I also want to shun the idea stereotypical images of the world-wandering sage and the isolated genius. As Hall notes, we should not, “insist on or establish a binary opposition–fixity and location as against space and motion. Instead, what is of interest about the new urbanism is its concern with another order of fluidity, decidedly local: the small and (seemingly) trivial practices and movements that constitute the urban everyday” (574). It seems that walking, in its neglect as a form of rhetoric, as a form of being social, in all its manifestations outside of sheer physical mobility, does a fine job making the everyday assemblage/practice of movement invisible to us. For Cresswell, “Physical movement is... the raw material for the production of mobility” (19). Again, it is Ingold who says, “For surely we walk, just as we talk, write and use tools, with the whole body” (332). I extend his argument to say that walking—just like talking—is a form of public interaction, even if we are out walking by ourselves after midnight where the streets have no name.

            So, talking about walking as rhetoric is an exclusive act. In this project I will use walking as my go-to form of mobility; however, I do so consciously acknowledging the marginalization using this terminology might develop. Cresswell notes that walking is often imbued with masculinity (walking the line; walking tall; Tarantino badass Jule’s line about walking the Earth like the hypermasculine Caine from Kung Fu) (21). He also notes the societal imperative to “fix” people who are unable to walk as if walking is what makes them human (21). I aim to do more than acknowledge and dismiss the inherent attitudes our society equates with walking though. I plan to put the traditional notion of walking into conversation with the New Mobilities Paradigm (Sheller and Urry) in a way that reveals these attitudes to students.

            In discussing my course unit, I reference walking specifically because of the nature of geocaching. The practice of walking is a way of “recognizing that place, body, and environment integrate with each other; that places gather things, thoughts, and memories in particular configurations” (Escobar 143). Thinking about walking through these places creates a sort of cognition Ingold comes to call “circumambulatory knowing” (331). My students in their two projects will first develop an understanding of place by locating and interacting with geocaches in the geocaching community. Media reflection pieces will help ensure they are critically engaged. Secondly, students will develop their own geocache and deposit it within a system in a way that subverts the intended purpose. (The full mobilities project can be found under the “Assignments” tab.)

2. Interfacing

                                                                       

            “Mobility was not invented by the mobile phone” (Cresswell 646).

While the mobile phone did not create mobile studies, it has become the flagship technology for mobility. Given the assemblage of place--the bridging between the physical and the digital “researching place involves a multi-faceted understanding of the coming together of the physical world (both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’), the processes of meaning production and the practices of power that mark relations between social groups” (Cresswell 122). In other words we need to be able to toggle between these spaces in order to understand place, in order to understand mobility--in order to understand how we move from place to place.

            I adopt a Walter Ong perspective when he describes technologies as not “mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness” (82). Once again, to apply memory to this model means that the transformations of consciousness become manifested in loci mnemonic of space and place. The ability to switch between spheres is dependent on the technology. And, in this case, the technology is inextricably tied to place.

            So the smartphone with its capabilities afforded through apps, is more than a recording device or a tool used to aid in mobilization. The smartphone as an interface allows mobility through space by being present in a place. This opens up the complication of a theoretical frame for this class.   

Theoretical backing

Just as it is necessary for students to be switching interfaces and studying the complex relationships between the objects, people, locations, and sociopolitical forces, it is necessary for me to employ more than one theoretical lens in creating this project.  My concern with place as an assemblage with a discursive set of authors befits Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. The interactionalist lens this theory provides allows for us to view place as coauthored, as containing many histories, as shaped by the invisible forces of laws, customs, traditions and other facets of culture. But the idea of networks does conjure up the idea of fixity Hall warns against in his study of walking, namely locations and their infrastructures (574).

        The problem is this: Networks in are often looked at in terms of mapping, as set of points on a plain connected by lines of transit. The nodes are the actors in the network and the lines between them are simply the routes connecting the actors. Where Actor-Network Theory gives us the ability to view publics and place as assemblages, it also conveys a sense of fixity of nodes (the actors) that undercuts the importance of mobility (the infrastructures). Latour does push back against this type of reductive mapping that would resemble “a telephone, a freeway, or a sewage ‘network’” (129). The very word “network,” he contends, is problematic in that it conveys a “trace” account of what has already occurred (130-131).

        But the word “trace” still smacks of connecting points through a linear network of non-places. This becomes especially evident in Latour’s second uncertainty, “The Action is Overtaken” (43-62). In describing action in relation to actor, Latour says, “An ‘actor’ in the hyphenated expression actor-network is not the source of action but the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it” (46). But if we look at the exemplar space of urban studies, the city, as an assemblage, as being composed of other actors—and if we view memory as an actor in that space—the city is certainly a source of ongoing action.

        With the rise of mobile technologies a theory that foregrounds the movement not just between the nodes, but the movement and transformation of nodes themselves in real time is needed in addition to ANT. Again, the wisdom of Walter Ong seems to point to one of the pratfalls of relying too much on a single theory: “Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available” (80). If we extend the notion of text and word to place as I have been doing, we see that place--itself a creation of technologies facilitated by physical/social and digital spheres--is a creation of technologies. Studying these spaces without the technology is to sell the critique short according to Ong. We must be able to critique as the technology allows us: with movement and in real time. As Lefebvre writes, “ When codes worked up from literary texts are applied to spaces — to urban spaces, say — we remain, as may easily be shown, on the purely descriptive level” (7). He goes on to emphasize the importance of physical space and the energy flows found within that space (8).

In describing their approach to proposing the New Mobilities Paradigm, Sheller and Urry state, “Places are thus not so much fixed as implicated within complex networks by which hosts, guests, buildings, objects, and machines are contingently brought together to produce certain performances in certain places at certain times” (214). With Sheller and Urry’s model we see the lines of transit disappear and the nodes begin to mesh together--one sphere acting as a system of transit rather than a linear path between nodes. It seems that ANT’s treatment of transit can be construed in much the same way Cresswell critiques how transport studies has “often thought of time in transit as `dead time' in which nothing happens—a problem that can be solved technically. Mobility studies have begun to take the actual fact of movement seriously” (18). The introspection of Latour’s ANT is compromised by NMP in favor of studying the fluidity of space.

        Perhaps another defining characteristic of NMP is speed. Latour acknowledges that “Traveling with ANT... can be agonizingly slow” (25). The five uncertainties according to Latour are to blame for the disruptions in the system. But this slow movement might also explain why the frames of reference in Latour are referred to as “shifting” or “unstable” (24, 30) rather than the more mobile “in flux” or “fluid.” When we scale time down, some movement becomes viewed as stationary. My own example is plate tectonics. On a long enough timeline, the plates are in movement. For the people inhabiting the Earth’s crust, those places for the most part, are still. They might shift from time to time with the occasional earthquake, but that is viewed as a shift or an instability. When the perceived movement stops, the place is once again considered static though geologist would disagree.

        Mobility, Cresswell argues, deals in velocity as a form of human speed. He gives anecdotal examples of the now-defunct Concorde airline as expedited time spent in a non-place and slow food as opposed to fast food as a marker of the bourgeois (23). While ANT allows for the introspection and interrogation of spaces, it does so at the cost of studying the continuous flows and energy of space. This is not to say that Actor-Network Theory holds no value for my course or in mobility studies in general. Where the New Mobilities Paradigm highlights concepts of movement, velocity, and the significance of non-places, it falls short of describing how objects have agency.

In creating this course I determined I needed both perspectives. Rather than taking the usual academic tact of blending one with the other or integrating the theories into one, more cohesive body, I am choosing to view them as separate but equally informative in different directions. To study place as text we need ANT and to study the movement of and within place we need the NMP.

In outlining his use of geocaching to teach gaming, Jason Farman, notes the “proprioceptive-semiotic convening of bodies, technology, and material space” involved (1). The mobility project for my class asks students to use mobile technology as it interacts with space to navigate through place. Like a sound game structure, geocaching provides “plenty of positive social interaction and a meaningful context for collective effort” (McGonigal 230) . In this case geocaching has become “a game that utilizes the correlation between the material landscape and digital space and depends on the collaboration between these spaces for a sense of embodiment” (2). My goal is to have students engaging their multiple identities as students, game players, geocachers in multiple spaces through multiple interfaces. I do not want them privileging head over heels as Ingold decries, nor do I want them associating data gathered from wandering the earth as the work of a bum.

The bridging (certainly not the merging or conflating) of ANT and NMP facilitates a deeper type of learning for the student, one I try to employ through my class structure where the “player’s embodiment is developed simultaneously between the zones of perception and invisibility, between resistance and hegemony, between technology and the body” (2). The results, I hope, reveals a network of mobility to the student.