Seite - 41 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Band 1/2020

Mobile Culture Studies | >mcs_lab> 1 (2020) Johanna Menhard | Entanglements on and with the street 41 “In this way, bodies and their objects tend toward each other; they are orientated toward each other and are shaped by this orientation. When orientation ‘works’, we are occupied. The failure of something to work is a matter of a failed orientation: a tool is used by a body for which it was not intended, or a body uses a tool that does not extend its capacity for action.”74 When the smartphone does not working, my bodily functions, such as orientation skills, access to memories, remembering phone numbers, addresses, book titles and so on, do not work either. This disruption of my journey by my dis-functional smartphone made me think of my entanglements with the street and that my body in motion is interwoven with the non-living and digital. The posthuman body is an extended body75 which is never fully consciously acces- sible, never in control of its full capacity, because the possibilities to extend and perform are limited by infrastructure, knowledge, data, providers, companies, updates, and so many other partially tangible and accessible aspects that can nonetheless affect, limit or push the bounda- ries of a body in motion. There is no end to this story, but there are plenty of questions. I will ask a few of them here, at the end of my storyline: What are the consequences of this extended body? Of being entangled with technology? Of being entangled with the property of companies which collect and sell my movement and other kinds of data I produce? Of the accessibility of the body in motion? Of not knowing what happens with the data? Of data-usage based on capitalist logics and exploitation? How can we face these entanglements in urban anthropology? How can we do research in the context of so many invisibilities and where so much and so many daily rou- tines, movements, imaginings, and actions are connected to a small device? 74 Ahmed, Orientations, p. 550. 75 See N. Katherine Hayles: How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informat- ics. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press 1999, p. 291.