The poetics of wandering: The time and memory of the moving body

1. The poetics of wandering:The time and memory of the moving body HUM 201 Fall 2005 Day 13

2. Itinerary for today • Journeys without end-wandering and nomadism • Personal and civil development • Wandering and knowledge (possession) • Spacetime and the wandering subject • Time and technology

3. Wandering and civil development • Wandering a civil as well as a personal state • Moving in an aimless way • For many in the west, wandering is a stage we pass through • In civil development, we passed through hunting and gathering • In personal development, we pass through a period before settling down

4. Wandering as an inherited trait • Early genetic studies • The “wandering impulse” as a recessive trait Lest the argument for a wandering instinct based on a comparison of man with birds may seem far-fetched, four other sets of facts may be adduced: (1) that the wandering instinct is in the anthropoid apes, which show the same basal instinct as man does; (2) that many if not most primitive peoples are migratory; (3) that the tendency to run away is extraordinary[arily?] frequent among young children; and (4) that the adolescent period, when all instincts (and especially those in any way connected with sex) are brought to the surface is perhaps the commonest period of running away. (Davenport, “the wandering impulse”, 9)

5. Pathological wandering • Healthy wandering-eventually settles down • Pathological wandering-wandering without settling • Wandering remains travel • “From the spatial point of view of the settled, nomads are transitory phenomena; from the spatio-temporal perspective of the wanderer, settled people are amputees lacking an important dimension of being.” [41]

6. Political economy of wandering • “The settled posses while the wander experiences” [41] • The settled possess property • Not only goods--territory • “With the settled one sees politically” • Or rather, possession of territory becomes politics • For Flusser, wandering prohibits the development of nation states

7. Wandering and knowledge • “Property is easier to observe than experience” • Wanderers highlight experiences not things • Remember the cabinet of curiosities • A way to turn wandering into knowledge through possession • What is the knowledge for those who wander?

8. Wandering and information • “Communication and not economics form the basis of society” • Hunting and gathering--has it disappeared? • Information • “Information and not possession that empowers” • How do you get information in your wanderings? • Information through difference or novelty • Memory mostly embodied . . . Kept alive through the retelling of stories

9. The sensory-motor apparatus • Some early theories proposed that intelligence and affect came about because of locomotion • William James: “All consciousness is motor.” • As the conditions of life become more complex, it becomes necessary for action to become more carefully selected. . . . It is thus evident that, with an animal as with an army, locomotion demands direction. The sensorium is built up as a director of motion. Natural selection causes the survival of those whose sensorium is adequate for the safe control of movement. • Jordan, 1898, 263.

10. The spacetime of wandering • Aristotle on time- • Every sensible body is by its nature somewhere. (Physics,Book 3, 205a:10) • Time is the numeration of continuous movement. (Physics, Book 4, 223b:1) • Time is dependant on motion (some form of qualitative change • Requires an active agent to move time • Can one sense time in-and-of-itself?

11. Time and memory • Possession and stories • Technologies of memory--time based • Time is felt when space does not change • Time is felt when space is experienced as discontinuous “ . . . it is no longer time which is related to movement, it is the anomalies of movement that are dependant on time” Gilles Deleuze