Page - 40 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 1/2020

40 Mobile Culture Studies | >mcs_lab> 1 (2020)Johanna Menhard | Entanglements on and with the street reference to Tim Ingold’s writings on entanglements:69 The focus of ethnographic research lies in the “’entangled relations’ among humans, nonhumans, and the natural, social, and vir- tual environments”, therefore “the ethnographic knowledge [that Dara Culhane approaches] emerges not through detached observations, but through conversations and exchanges of many kinds […]”.70 Epistemologically is this an approach that Wietschorke subsumed as Bezie- hungswissenschaft, meaning that the European Ethnologist is not just doing research on, but also with and within something. Consequently, ethnography is thinking, being and putting in relations the street and the urban space in general. One possibility for elaboration on the street and its connections is to think of it using the concept of assemblage instead of focussing on the entities which might be observable individually, to examine their entangled connections and capacity to affect. Doing ethnography also means that the researcher can’t be detached from the field, but is entangled with the street and urban space as well. Therefore, affect can be a pretty useful concept and tool for making intra-actions tangible. Last, but not least, the performative aspect of the writing process and understanding oneself as a storyteller is also part of an epis- temological approach towards taking Beziehungswissenschaften seriously and acknowledging the co-creative aspect of ethnography.71 Third, it raises questions about the framing of bodies in motion on the street. Movement is part of expressing the structural boundaries of oneself in the world. That is why walking and connecting in both spatial-territorial and inter-personal dimensions are not only affected by the freedom that a being has, or does not have, to move in and affect certain spaces, but also by that being’s limitations.72 The process of becoming on urban streets, as affected by the smartphone, is made tangible by the smartphone’s failures and their effects on me as a body in motion. When it fails, my body fails to extend itself through the object and cannot perform intended actions due to the failed extension of bodily capacities. So, failure is about the loss of the capacity to perform an action for which the smartphone was intended, but not a property of the smartphone itself. Ahmed writes, “The experience of this ‘nonextension’ might then lead to ‘the object’ being attributed with properties, qualities and values. In other words, what is at stake in moments of failure is not so much access to properties but attributions of properties, which become a matter of how we approach the object.”73 At that point, I realized that the smartphone was more a part of my body than I was aware. I felt its failure as my own failure, as I was not able to extend and perform intended actions. The fragility of technology was my fragility. Ahmed continues, 69 See Tim Ingold: Bindings against boundaries. Entanglements of life in an open world. In: Environment and Planning A 40 (2008) 8, pp. 1796-1810. 70 Dara Culhane: Imagining. An Introduction. In: Denielle Elliott/Dara Culhane (eds.): A Different Kind of Ethnography. Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2016, pp. 1-21, here p. 3. 71 Ibid., p. 7. 72 See Karl Braun: Grenzziehungen im Imaginären – Konstitution von Kultur. In: Thomas Hengartner/Johannes Moser (eds.), Grenzen & Differenzen. Zur Macht sozialer und kultureller Grenzziehungen. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2006, pp. 19-40, here p. 23. 73 Ahmed: Orientations, p. 549.