Pedestrian and Moto Methodologies by draft
by Risa Dickens.
today Professor Rae Staseson sent me a link to this website, Kidd of Speed, about long rides into the ghost town at Chernobyl. ‘Elena’ lives in Kiev, and rides her motorcycle, and tells histories with photos and her own sweetsad wit. I read her chapters about Chernobyl, and digging at WWII battlegrounds , and the Orange Revolution, and I thought this is what the Internet is for.
I also thought about a paper I had written last year about a Pedestrian methodology- about ways of moving up to and around a subject that build on the methods described by Meaghan Morris in Things to Do With Shopping Centers and Doreen Massey in A Global Sense of Place.
Methods of moving through and of attempting to grasp mediated spaces are explored in both “Things to do With Shopping Centers” by Megan Morris and “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Space” by Doreen Massey. In “Things to do with Shopping Centers,” Morris’s narrator is a pedestrian feminist encountering Australian suburban commercial space. Her method is a kind of leisurely, and sometimes fretful, motion. In Massey’s “Power Geometry,” she adds a next dimension to “easy and excited notions of generalized and undifferentiated time-space compression” (63) by suggesting that this experience exists relative to a power structure. Although Massey is clearly drawing on some conceptual principles from general relativity and complexity theory, in a way, her methodology is also derived from the mental movement of a modern pedestrian. Massey and Morris are feminist geographers- they chart the spaces unaccounted for by modern and postmodern theory, and they map the same spaces again from new perspectives.
In “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place” Doreen Massey examines the postmodern concept of time-space compression. She does this with a methodological mode that can expand and retract its focus. Several times throughout the text Massey asks the reader to slide their imaginative gaze out into space, and then to sweep back in, close enough to consider time moving at a pedestrian’s pace.
Imagine for a moment that you are on a satellite, further out and beyond all actual satellites: you can see planet earth from a distance and, rare for someone with only peaceful intentions, you are equipped with the kind of technology that allows you to see the colors of peoples eyes and the number on their license plates. …) Furthest out are the satellites, then aeroplanes, the long haul between London and Tokyo and the hop from San Salvador to Guatemala City. (…) Look in closer and there are ships and trains, steam trains slogging laboriously up hills somewhere in Asia. Look in closer still and there are lorries and cars and buses and on down further and somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa there’s a woman on foot who still spends hours a day collecting water” (61).
The narrator of “Power-Geometry” has places to go, things- gaps, flaws, omissions- she wants us to see. She identifies a lack of content, especially social content, in the concept of time-space compression. She deconstructs notions of time-space compression that propose the inequalities of capital as the sole determinant of the subject’s experience of time by introducing the obvious other factors – gender and ethnicity. Massey is clear on this point- she is introducing complexity (60) into postmodern theories of space-time, refracting their logic by drawing in the great chaos of transnational social networks.
This movement guides the reader to a conceptual understanding of the local that looks like a Mandelbrot set of linking networks converging at a locus- never frozen in the Heidiggerian moment of Being, but instead always Becoming. What Massey wants to emphasize about the complexity of time-space compression is, as she puts it, “the power-geometry of it all” (61). This principle allows for a shifting of focus, a kind of scaling analysis that slides along lines of force to examine an object, a location, even an individual perhaps, from different perspectives. It is in the specificity of these geometric connections that Massey identifies the origin of uniqueness:
“The uniqueness of a place, or a locality, in other words is constructed out of particular interactions and mutual articulations of social relations, social processes, experiences and understandings, in a situation of co-presence, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are actually constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself (…) Instead, then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings.”
Massey makes good on the promise of her sweeping Hubble vision when she pulls her gaze all the way down to the heart of her own local- walking, just like Morris, through a multiple and much loved commercial space. From this setting she sketches “the links between Kilburn and the world” (65), and even stops to look back at the space from which she, as author, held our gaze a moment earlier:
“Overhead there is always at least one airplane- we seem to be on a flight path to Heathrow and by the time they’re over Kilburn you can see them clearly enough to discern the airline and wonder as you struggle with your shopping where they’re coming from.” (65)
Massey walks and wonders, and we get a sense that it is the fruits of those meandering thoughts we are reading now. Perhaps because both reading and writing are like walking in some ways when the narrative eye swoops into the sky and around the globe it still keeps the rhythm of the woman walking and imagining.
Massey refers to principles from biology and from modern poetry to counteract unprogressive notions of pace (67)- to argue that space, like capital, is not a thing but a process. This idea puts space back into time and into multiple, subjective times and “facilitates the conceptualization of the relation between the center and the periphery” (67). Space, when understood in terms of the social networks that traverse and produce it, can retain its specificity without becoming static. In order for an author to represent this idea she must keep moving and keep looking around and back and forth while she goes. To develop what we need according to Massey, “a global sense of the local, a global sense of place,” we have to piece together histories, like Carrington’s history of Corsica, that reflect the endless movements of people, ideas and powers.
In “Things to do With Shopping Centers” Morris sketches the outlines of a history of this kind while thinking about women and shopping. The narrator of “Things to do With Shopping Centers” moves slowly to allow questions, doubts and alternatives to work their way into her considerations. A few paces into “Things to do with Shopping Centers” the narrator realizes that if this chapter could have a subtitle it would be “pedestrian notes on modernity.” Rather than spiraling off into space to map the power geometry of modernity, Morris walks up to, into, and around her object of inquiry. Connected by the act of walking to other bodies, she looks at the space from unexpected, difficult, even exhausted, angles. She builds an understanding of women’s experiences of these spaces, and of the subjective nature of History as her body, step by step, builds an understanding of other bodies in time.
The pedestrian mode allows Morris, like Massey, to see the complexity and contradictions of the shopping centers and of the institution’s conception of their ideal user. Of the anxious or pleasurable experiences of actual users, and of the theories that have tried to contain it and them:
Just like studying women modernists, thinking about shopping centers should be a way to (…) ask not “why does this fall short of modernism” but, “how do classical theories of modernism fall short of women’s modernity?”
This is, I think, the most outstanding question in this chapter, at least for me and my research on open source, and on the Countess Castiglione. Morris begins the endless journey of exploring the gaps in classical modernism by walking beyond the limits of the spaces included in modernist theories. By taking the ambivalence of certain activities- the anxieties of certain pleasures- into consideration: “if walking around for a long time creates absorption in the spectacle, then one sure way to begin from a sharply defined sense of critical estrangement is to arrive at a drive-in center on foot and have to find a way to walk in.” The commodity spectacle of the suburban drive-in center behaves differently and, by doing so, suggests that typical narratives about structures, access, and identities might be limited in their scope.
Morris pauses her progress to question the images produced by any attempt to know Ordinary Woman, or Shopping Woman, or Academic Woman (and we might add Historical Woman, Beautiful Woman, Open Source Woman.) She offers an artifact for our consideration: a photograph, a piece of surveillance, that has been decontextualized and reframed by a marketing discourse about women, consumption and pleasure. This object yokes together the problematic notions that characterize discourses about the relationship between the means of production, the commodity spectacle and women’s identity. At this point the narrator nearly gets stuck in the theory loop. She frets about her role in the production of object-images of women and about her ability to access any woman’s experience by way of feminist theory. She sees herself writing over other bodies, mapping theories onto places where they don’t quite fit. The escape from this eddy of self-doubt- this theory about theory loop- is made possible by a different kind of motion. Morris realizes that “a feminist study ought to be able to occupy this user-designer, consumption-production gap, not to “close” or “bridge” it but to move outside the repetitive terms of the disciplinary polemics it imposes.”
So maybe we should think some more about a pedestrian methodology and about how it might relate to motorcycle methodology or a search and surf and clicking kind of Internet methodology. About the way your mind travels while walking, triangulating your position in space and time. This mental method, when interpreted from inside a body that understands fretting as well as leisure; anxiety, irritation and confusion as well as pleasure; exhaustion as well as curiosity can, I think, find a path beyond repetitive terms. This method is fundamentally related to Massey’s emphasis on the gaze that places a space within a network of social relations.
Morris moves with her subject away from the city, out towards the country town, up to the image of the shopping mall and of Shopping Woman. There follows a shopping mall triad, in which three spaces are yoked together by the author’s subjective experience as well as by systems of production and consumption. Then the analysis focuses on the history of one space: Green Hills Shopping Center. Using the history of the space provided by a local newspaper Morris reconstructs a story about the corporate creation of a collective identity and the destabilization and re-narrativization of a unique community.
By the end of her long walk in and around these shopping centers Morris can suggest that there are stories here that do not obey the transitory, fragmented, insubstantial logic of the swirling commodity spectacle: of the flaneur’s experience of modernity:
I would argue that the proclaimed dissolution of public and private on the botanized asphalt of shoppingtown makes possible, not a flaneuse, since that term is anachronistic, but an experience of “modernity” for women in which it is vital not to begin by identifying heroines and victims (even of conflicts with male paranoia) but rather a profound ambivalence about shifting roles. (88)
Morris sees a female experience of desire in suburban shopping centers that is ambivalent- articulated in terms of sufficiency and confinement, role play and repetition. And so she suggests that a pedestrian narrative about women and consumerism might figure the shopping experience as moving in ways that are more like S&M and less like phantasmagorias and strip-shows.
Meagan Morris and Doreen Massey want to intercede in the loops of theory active in certain realms of cultural studies. Both authors disrupt essentializing ideas about place and, by extension, about people, by employing methods in motion. Whether it is the telescopic and then geometric gaze of “Power-geometry” or the ambivalent gaze of the wide-eyed but critically distant pedestrian, both narrators manage to incorporate the multiplicity of identity and of perspective into their spaces and texts. By moving around their subjects with their bodies and minds they reveal gaps and patterns and blockages and alternate routes and rhythms.
For my final project I would like to think more about pedestrian methodology, about the kinds of information that become apparent when you take your theory on the road, when you walk with it and allow the ideas and images you encounter to intersect with your desire to know and to possess your subject. I would like to walk through the private rooms and public spaces that structured the Countess de Castiglione’s life- to imagine her in her cities and spaces and in her time. To map the networks of narratives of power and desire that combined to make her photography and her life exceptional. I would like to think about the ways cameras and shopping centers are discursively linked in modernity to women and femininity. There is a power geometry that determines Castiglione’s relationship to photography and history’s relationship to her, and I myself am twisted up within it, wanting something from her, and in a position of authority in relation to her- fretting about my own objectifying theories.
In another essay I might like to think more about the relationship between S&M and women’s experience of modernity, but for now I will just suggest, based on my own experience recently rassling with the objectifying desire that dominates the discourse around the Countess’s body and her body of work, that Morris’s idea about S&M might reflect her own experience as a historian.
My questions, then, for the end of this, are: Where do methodologies come from? What kinds of experiences structure them, how do they become reified, and how can we analyze our own methods without ending up “confined by the very terms we are contesting?” (Morris) How is our method related to our desire and what kinds of desire are prominent or possible here, in this time and place?
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