Transcript The poetics of wandering

The poetics of wandering:
The time and memory of the
moving body
HUM 201
Fall 2005
Day 13
Itinerary for today
• Journeys without end-wandering and
nomadism
– Personal and civil development
– Wandering and knowledge (possession)
– Spacetime and the wandering subject
– Time and technology
Wandering and civil
development
• Wandering a civil as well as a personal
state
– Moving in an aimless way
• For many in the west, wandering is a
stage we pass through
• In civil development, we passed through
hunting and gathering
• In personal development, we pass
through a period before settling down
Wandering as an inherited
trait
• Early genetic studies
– The “wandering impulse” as a recessive trait
Lest the argument for a wandering instinct based on a comparison of
man with birds may seem far-fetched, four other sets of facts may
be adduced: (1) that the wandering instinct is in the anthropoid
apes, which show the same basal instinct as man does; (2) that
many if not most primitive peoples are migratory; (3) that the
tendency to run away is extraordinary[arily?] frequent among
young children; and (4) that the adolescent period, when all
instincts (and especially those in any way connected with sex) are
brought to the surface is perhaps the commonest period of running
away. (Davenport, “the wandering impulse”, 9)
Pathological wandering
• Healthy wandering-eventually settles
down
• Pathological wandering-wandering
without settling
– Wandering remains travel
• “From the spatial point of view of the settled,
nomads are transitory phenomena; from the
spatio-temporal perspective of the wanderer,
settled people are amputees lacking an
important dimension of being.” [41]
Political economy of
wandering
• “The settled posses while the wander
experiences” [41]
• The settled possess property
– Not only goods--territory
• “With the settled one sees politically”
– Or rather, possession of territory becomes politics
– For Flusser, wandering prohibits the development
of nation states
Wandering and knowledge
• “Property is easier to observe than
experience”
– Wanderers highlight experiences not things
• Remember the cabinet of curiosities
• A way to turn wandering into knowledge through
possession
• What is the knowledge for those who
wander?
Wandering and information
• “Communication and not economics form the
basis of society”
• Hunting and gathering--has it disappeared?
– Information
• “Information and not possession that
empowers”
• How do you get information in your
wanderings?
– Information through difference or novelty
• Memory mostly embodied . . . Kept alive
The sensory-motor apparatus
• Some early theories proposed that
intelligence and affect came about because
of locomotion
– William James: “All consciousness is motor.”
– As the conditions of life become more complex, it
becomes necessary for action to become more
carefully selected. . . . It is thus evident that, with
an animal as with an army, locomotion demands
direction. The sensorium is built up as a director
of motion. Natural selection causes the survival of
those whose sensorium is adequate for the safe
control of movement.
The spacetime of wandering
•
Aristotle on time–
–
•
•
•
Every sensible body is by its nature somewhere.
(Physics,Book 3, 205a:10)
Time is the numeration of continuous movement.
(Physics, Book 4, 223b:1)
Time is dependant on motion (some form of
qualitative change
Requires an active agent to move time
Can one sense time in-and-of-itself?
Time and memory
• Possession and stories
• Technologies of memory--time based
– Time is felt when space does not change
– Time is felt when space is experienced as
discontinuous
“ . . . it is no longer time which is related to
movement, it is the anomalies of movement that
are dependant on time” Gilles Deleuze