Seite - 36 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Band 1/2020

36 Mobile Culture Studies | >mcs_lab> 1 (2020)Johanna Menhard | Entanglements on and with the street Who are the important players in which context? Who or what has the capacity to affect or to be affected? When I am very occupied by my smartphone and feel anger and distrust toward its dis-functions and errors, when I sit for hours in shopping centres to have internet access and am concerned about not being able to check my e-mail while on a walk, I must take care, because it has the capacity to affect me and my movements on the streets. In this sense the lines between things and bodies, non-living and living, culture and nature are blurred. As Patricia T. Clough writes about Massumi s´ approach, “Massumi’s exemplary illustrations of the autonomy of affect not only show what the body can do; they show what bodies can be made to do. They show what the body is becoming, as it meets the limit at a postbiological threshold, which draws to it the dynamism of matter that had been hidden in oppositions held in place by the body-as-organism, between the living and the nonliving, the physical and the biological, the natural and the cultural. It is to this postbiological threshold, I want to argue, that the critical discourses taking up affect, new media, and biomedia are drawn and with which they are ambivalently engaged.”51 To sum up: Even though affect is mostly framed as an emotional or bodily reaction in the methodological contexts of ethno-psychoanalysis, it can – as shown here – be useful in a much broader sense. This can be summed up concisely in the epistemological approach Jens Wietschorke called Beziehungswissenschaft. He stated that at the core of doing research in European Ethnology is the thinking, being and setting in relations.52 Therefore, focusing on the capacity to affect in the context of entanglements on and with the street enables me to elaborate on technology, bodies, and streets in becoming. Spring 2019: From intra-action to post-human bodies in motion As I already pointed out, after I came back from my trip, I went through my field diaries and notes and came across a lot of very ambiguous affective situations: There was a mixture of feeling anger, trust, distrust, fear, tender feelings, overload/overextension, disappointment, and so on. I couldn’t figure out where all these feelings came from. At first, I tried to interpret my field mate- rial but was not satisfied with the concepts I had in mind and they didn’t fit to the story I sensed in the material. It felt too mono-directional to ask how the smartphone influenced my movement on the streets, as if the smartphone made me feel and act this or that way, as if I couldn’t resist or didn’t have agency in this momentum of feeling. I thought of my smartphone as some sort of old friend or partner in a dysfunctional relationship that made me feel the ambiguity between trust, care, distrust, and anger. I wrote a fictional dialogue between me and my smartphone, trying to figure out what makes up this relationship, but still the relationship was not comprehensible. As is often the case, reading and feeling affected by a theoretical framework guided my analysis and 51 Patricia T. Clough: The Affective Turn. Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies. In: Melissa Gregg/Gregory Seigworth (eds.): The Affect Theory Reader. Durham/London: Duke University Press 2010. pp. 206-225, here p. 211. 52 See Jens Wietschorke: Beziehungswissenschaft. Ein Versuch zur volkskundlich-kulturwissenschaftlichen Episte- mologie. In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 66 (2012) 3-4, pp. 325-359.