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Mobile Culture Studies | >mcs_lab> 1 (2020) Johanna Menhard | Entanglements on and with the street 33 In failure lies the possibility to feel, see and understand things differently. It’s a chance to grasp what otherwise would be too invisible in everyday life. Winter 2018: Affect as a framework within research Several affective states were caused by my entanglements on and with the street through my smartphone use and its errors. I will shed light on these and discuss them here to highlight affect methodologically and analytically. Before I do that, I will briefly contextualize the term affect. In order to grasp the entanglements on and with the city’s streets and the mobile phone usage I consider the research field as an assemblage. It is not meant to capture streets and human- non-human beings holistically and to sum up multiple elements – that is by no means the claim – but rather to perceive urban spaces, according to Ignacio Farías, as emergent events and becom- ings. Focusing on what evolves in specific contexts makes it possible to understand streets as a space that is in the process of becoming and can be experienced subjectively, as well as to under- stand the relationships between specific heterogeneous elements and their affective capacities. As Diamantaki and others write, dealing with technologies is not merely interaction with mate- rialities but the production of meaning and action. Furthermore, technological systems are not simply collections of multiple elements, but are incorporated through certain actions, by which they acquire symbolic, individual, and emotional meaning.34 The aim of conceptualizing the field as assemblage is not only to describe what the individual elements are or to assign meaning to them but also to create an understanding of what they do or make possible (in the sense of capacity to affect) in relation to other elements with which they are entangled.35 In both urban research and feminist science and technology studies thoughts by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have shaped epistemological approaches to cities, technologies, and bodies in motion.36 Scholars from different disciplines took up the term agencement or better known as assemblage from the German and English translation. Agencement can be described as an organization or arrangement of elements and relationships, although according to Jasbir Puar, the focus is not on the content (what is represented), but on the relationships and patterns.37 According to a monist tradition, thought and materiality, things and tools, living and non-living, human and non-human are not seen as oppositional entities, as others, but as elements and actors in a cer- tain arrangement.38 Billy Ehn, Orvar Löfgren and Richard Wilk suggest in Exploring everyday life that, while doing research on media, we have to acknowledge them to be co-actors: “Media studies often tend to underplay this mundane materiality; it gets lost in the flow of texts, sounds, and images. Media use always occurs in a place. […] Domestic media have 34 Diamantaki et al.: Conceptualizing, p. 70. 35 See Jasbir Puar: ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’. Interesectionality, assemblage, and affective politics. In: Meritum – Belo Horizonte 8 (2013) 2, pp. 371-390, here p. 381. In reference to Manuel de Landa: A new philosophy of society. Assemblage theory and social complexity. Lon- don/New York: Continuum 2006. 36 Especially Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari: A thousand plateaus. Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis /, London: University of Minnesota Press 1987. 37 See Jasbir Puar: ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’, p. 380. 38 See Iris van der Tuin/Rick Dolphijn: The Transversality of New Materialism. Women: A cultural review 21 (2010) 2, pp. 153-171, here p. 154.