- Australia
David Bissell
University of Melbourne, Geography, Faculty Member
- I combine qualitative research on embodied practices with social theory to explore the social, political and ethical ... moreI combine qualitative research on embodied practices with social theory to explore the social, political and ethical consequences of mobile lives. My current project is investigating how commuting in Sydney affects people’s sense of self, their relations with others, their job and their sense of place in the city.edit
This paper develops our geographical understanding of the material politics of automation. Through the empirical site of the autonomous vehicle, the paper argues that dominant understandings of the politics of contemporary automation draw... more
This paper develops our geographical understanding of the material politics of automation. Through the empirical site of the autonomous vehicle, the paper argues that dominant understandings of the politics of contemporary automation draw on a restricted understanding of materiality where political agency is concentrated in the hands of powerful individuals or institutions. However, this focus potentially obscures the complex material agencies of the systems of automation themselves. In response, this paper develops the conceptual potentials of the accident to bring these overlooked interruptive material agencies to the fore. This provides us with an opportunity to appreciate how the sites of power in systems of contemporary digital automation are more multiple and dispersed than is often assumed. In making this argument, this paper seeks to contribute to political geographical research that has turned to questions of ontology to pluralise the sites of politics and diversify the agents of political change.
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ABSTRACT Stillness occupies an ambivalent position in a world of flows. Opening up space required for reflective, contemplative thought, stillness is often posited as a vital supplement to movement. Yet, in spite of its reverence as a... more
ABSTRACT Stillness occupies an ambivalent position in a world of flows. Opening up space required for reflective, contemplative thought, stillness is often posited as a vital supplement to movement. Yet, in spite of its reverence as a cornerstone of moral responsibility and a key technic of modernity, reflective thought is now taken to be just one modality of thinking amongst many others that compose the body. This paper explores what happens to the capacities of reflective thought when gathered into a vitalist diagram of the body. It does this by tracing how different forms of stillness participate in the constitution of differently susceptible bodies. It considers how habit works to both hold still and move the body in different ways which helps to disrupt an understanding of a body that has a particular capacity for wilful, reflective sovereign thought. As such, and parallel to suggestions that we currently inhabit an era of thought maximisation, this paper argues that reflective thought itself might be better understood as enrolled into a particular diagram of habit that allows us to consider how reflection and contemplation might function not as a redemptive force of liberation from habit, but as the turbulent reverberations of the shock of the outside that can become debilitating.
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ABSTRACT One of the important tasks of mobile sociology is to attend to the diverse proximities that are generated through the interplay of multiple forms of mobility. In answering to this challenge, mobilities researchers have... more
ABSTRACT One of the important tasks of mobile sociology is to attend to the diverse proximities that are generated through the interplay of multiple forms of mobility. In answering to this challenge, mobilities researchers have illuminated how multiple forms of mobility have given rise to different physical and virtual proximities, involving corporal travel and new communication devices. However, in spite of this apparent diversity, many discussions of physical and virtual proximity appeal to a similar ontology of connection. In the mobilities literature proximity is often understood in the context of an orientated connection towards points of significance and therefore can be described as ‘pointillist’. In response, this article stages an alternative way of apprehending proximity that removes the point. It does this by advancing the mobility-diagram of the loop. The ‘transversal’ proximities that the loop foregrounds seek to apprehend the transformative relations of mobile bodies and their near-dwellers, whilst at the same time untether the study of everyday ‘neighbourhood’ mobilities from their productivist heritage.
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This paper capitalizes on the resurgence of interest in habit within social and political theory as a key concept of our time, following the recent translation and uptake of the work of Félix Ravaisson, to push our understandings of the... more
This paper capitalizes on the resurgence of interest in habit within social and political theory as a key concept of our time, following the recent translation and uptake of the work of Félix Ravaisson, to push our understandings of the irreducible vitality and vulnerability of bodies. It seeks to intervene within debates on the habit-body by challenging the way in which the transitions that habit gives rise to are conceptualized. Many theorizations of the habit-body have tended to stress its ever-evolving, adaptive, affective capacities for subtle alteration and gradual, incremental change. However I argue that this lends itself to an image of the habit-body that prioritizes coherence, calculation and proficiency over other more erratic and unpredictable transitions that habit might give rise to. In response, and drawing on Borges’ short story The Zahir as its empirical lure, rather than understanding volatility as something that habit works to quiesce, this paper seeks to enroll volatility into an image of the habit-body by articulating its agitative and destructive tendencies. It does this by proffering obsession as a specific mode of habit that exhibits these tendencies towards volatility, in order to demonstrate how habit participates in some of the more unstable, precarious and heterogeneous modulations of contemporary life. Capitalizing on the ways through which habit refocuses debates on ‘distributed agency’, drawing attention to the volatilities inherent to habit helps us not only to dismantle ideas of the sovereign self, but in doing so, pluralizes the event and performance of subjectivities. This forces us to conceptualize the relations between thought, will and responsibility in a way that rethinks a radical politics through a revolution of the body over that of the mind.
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ABSTRACT This paper is about the unintentional placement of objects. Focussing on items of clothing that have been often-accidentally displaced, this paper explores the ephemeral, delicate and often superficial materiality of these... more
ABSTRACT This paper is about the unintentional placement of objects. Focussing on items of clothing that have been often-accidentally displaced, this paper explores the ephemeral, delicate and often superficial materiality of these objects of rupture relative to a flow-optimised urban landscape. As such this paper fits into wider debates on ownerless objects, unintentional memorialism and events of corporeal severance. Focus is on both the physical movements of these objects as they fold through the surrounding environment and the affectual movements that emerge from their capacity to rupture bodily experience by circulating particular forms of feeling. This paper considers how certain acts of intervention can transform these objects through movements of expectancy to create moments of delight through reunion. In sum, this paper makes a useful contribution in considering how particular objects at the nexus of the human and non-human rise to prominence, and through this how, contrary to the sublime or magnificent, small and intensely personal dislocated objects have the capacity to move.
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What makes the figure of the passenger distinctive as both a subject and an object of mobility and transportation systems? What distinguishes the passenger from other mobile subjectivities, from nomad, flaneur to consumer? How is the... more
What makes the figure of the passenger distinctive as both a subject and an object of mobility and transportation systems? What distinguishes the passenger from other mobile subjectivities, from nomad, flaneur to consumer? How is the passenger represented, ...
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ABSTRACT One of the important tasks of mobile sociology is to attend to the diverse proximities that are generated through the interplay of multiple forms of mobility. In answering to this challenge, mobilities researchers have... more
ABSTRACT One of the important tasks of mobile sociology is to attend to the diverse proximities that are generated through the interplay of multiple forms of mobility. In answering to this challenge, mobilities researchers have illuminated how multiple forms of mobility have given rise to different physical and virtual proximities, involving corporal travel and new communication devices. However, in spite of this apparent diversity, many discussions of physical and virtual proximity appeal to a similar ontology of connection. In the mobilities literature proximity is often understood in the context of an orientated connection towards points of significance and therefore can be described as ‘pointillist’. In response, this article stages an alternative way of apprehending proximity that removes the point. It does this by advancing the mobility-diagram of the loop. The ‘transversal’ proximities that the loop foregrounds seek to apprehend the transformative relations of mobile bodies and their near-dwellers, whilst at the same time untether the study of everyday ‘neighbourhood’ mobilities from their productivist heritage.
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In contrast to other discourse-centric explorations, I rethink the embodied experience of chronic pain through an affective ontology. Drawing on intensity, as a way of coming to know the qualitative experiential dimension of affect as... more
In contrast to other discourse-centric explorations, I rethink the embodied experience of chronic pain through an affective ontology. Drawing on intensity, as a way of coming to know the qualitative experiential dimension of affect as diminished or heightened, I explore some of the complex relationships between intensity, desirability, and intentionality that cohere around pained bodies. In contrast to transient pain,
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ABSTRACT Stillness occupies an ambivalent position in a world of flows. Opening up space required for reflective, contemplative thought, stillness is often posited as a vital supplement to movement. Yet, in spite of its reverence as a... more
ABSTRACT Stillness occupies an ambivalent position in a world of flows. Opening up space required for reflective, contemplative thought, stillness is often posited as a vital supplement to movement. Yet, in spite of its reverence as a cornerstone of moral responsibility and a key technic of modernity, reflective thought is now taken to be just one modality of thinking amongst many others that compose the body. This paper explores what happens to the capacities of reflective thought when gathered into a vitalist diagram of the body. It does this by tracing how different forms of stillness participate in the constitution of differently susceptible bodies. It considers how habit works to both hold still and move the body in different ways which helps to disrupt an understanding of a body that has a particular capacity for wilful, reflective sovereign thought. As such, and parallel to suggestions that we currently inhabit an era of thought maximisation, this paper argues that reflective thought itself might be better understood as enrolled into a particular diagram of habit that allows us to consider how reflection and contemplation might function not as a redemptive force of liberation from habit, but as the turbulent reverberations of the shock of the outside that can become debilitating.
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... Comfort in this regard is folded through performed identity and bound up with signification and the ... here I want to focus on the everyday quotidian moments of transient pain which ... Pushed further, such a thesis problematises... more
... Comfort in this regard is folded through performed identity and bound up with signification and the ... here I want to focus on the everyday quotidian moments of transient pain which ... Pushed further, such a thesis problematises this relationship between the sedentary body and the ...
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This paper investigates the relationship between mobility and embodied experiences of quiescence. Rather than conceptualizing quiescence as an experience that is opposite to activity, this paper explores how various experiences of... more
This paper investigates the relationship between mobility and embodied experiences of quiescence. Rather than conceptualizing quiescence as an experience that is opposite to activity, this paper explores how various experiences of quiescence emerge through the course of a railway journey. The first section of the paper illustrates how particular dispositions of vulnerability have the potential to generate a series of
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... Stilling, immobility and stasis are often taken to be symptomatic of, and aligned with, a series of less than desirable experiences including ... residual product of mobility, but rather an integral aspect of existence within the... more
... Stilling, immobility and stasis are often taken to be symptomatic of, and aligned with, a series of less than desirable experiences including ... residual product of mobility, but rather an integral aspect of existence within the space of flows (see Harrison, 2009; Harley, 2009; Murphie ...
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Politics in geographical research on mobilities evaluates the nature of power and control of mobility and considers how people are differently enabled and constrained by these processes. Politics is usually approached along... more
Politics in geographical research on mobilities evaluates the nature of power and control of mobility and considers how people are differently enabled and constrained by these processes. Politics is usually approached along subject-centered lines where the task is to identify who is enabled and who is constrained and subsequently to account for the hidden mechanisms of power behind this unevenness. This article argues that what these subject-centered analyses can risk underplaying are the very transformations that mobility practices such as commuting themselves actually give rise to. This article draws on qualitative fieldwork during an evening
train commute between Sydney and Wollongong in Australia to argue that the politics of mobilities needs to attend to ongoing processes of “micropolitical” transformation that take place through events and encounters, changing relations of enablement and constraint in the process. My argument is that we need to expand our understanding of what constitutes mobility politics to understand the nature and reach of the multiple forces that are at play, affecting and transforming life in this zone. This potentially enables us to more sensitively evaluate questions of responsibility and intervention.
train commute between Sydney and Wollongong in Australia to argue that the politics of mobilities needs to attend to ongoing processes of “micropolitical” transformation that take place through events and encounters, changing relations of enablement and constraint in the process. My argument is that we need to expand our understanding of what constitutes mobility politics to understand the nature and reach of the multiple forces that are at play, affecting and transforming life in this zone. This potentially enables us to more sensitively evaluate questions of responsibility and intervention.
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This paper examines how nonrepresentational theories of practice can expand our understanding of the ways in which mobility transformations take place. It argues that we need to attend more sensitively to the different ways in which... more
This paper examines how nonrepresentational theories of practice can expand our understanding of the ways in which mobility transformations take place. It argues that we need to attend more sensitively to the different ways in which mobility practices self-transform through their ongoing, repeated enactment. Its central claim is that commuting practices are always evolving, adapting, and elaborating. This is because of the different ways that the past coexists with and complicates action in the present. The first part of the paper shows how mobility transformations are most frequently evaluated according to linear, chronological understandings of temporality. In response, it shows how an attunement to duration, using conceptualisations of the virtual, provides a way of understanding the complex temporal folds through which the past inheres in the present, transforming its course. Pivoting around three interview encounters with commuters in Sydney, Australia, the second part of the paper shows how the virtuality of the past inheres in and becomes actualised in the present through movements, events, and milieus—flagging the significance of habit memory, recollection memory, and tertiary memory, respectively. These virtual potentials underscore not only the complexity and excessiveness of the present, but also the openness and the indeterminacy of the future. The paper questions what constitutes a mobility transformation; it expands our comprehension of the agencies of transformation affecting life in this sphere; and it challenges us to rethink the ontological unit upon which macropolitical interventions are usually focused.
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This article examines how stressful commutes are changing the bodies that are caught up in this everyday mobility. Contrasting with psychological research on commuter stress that makes generalised claims about the commuting experience,... more
This article examines how stressful commutes are changing the bodies that are caught up in this everyday mobility. Contrasting with psychological research on commuter stress that makes generalised claims about the commuting experience, this article develops a non-representational understanding of bodies. From this point of view, stress is seen as having a much more ambivalent and complex constitution through the way in which everyday practices of commuting are implicated in processes of bodily transformation. Conceptually, whilst drawing attention to the radically contingent and irreducibly specific nature of commuter stress, the paper emphasises the significance of attending to subtle, slow creep transformations within daily habits that necessarily build to tipping points over time, thus offering a new way of understanding disruption in the context of commuting. Methodologically, it stages an expressionistic capture of these affective signs of slow creep transformation and tipping points through an interview encounter in Sydney. This encounter, while involving reflections on my own participation, aims to solicit from the interviewee a heightened exposure to those subtle transformations that, when noticed, can create a cascade of backward-tracing realisations. Disciplinarily, it impresses the importance for mobilities research to more sharply attend to these affective folds that both undergird and destabilise life on the move.
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This paper examines commentary as a mode of speaking that has not received sufficient attention by social and cultural geographers. In contrast to a representational understanding of commentary, where commentary is the expert... more
This paper examines commentary as a mode of speaking that has not received sufficient attention by social and cultural geographers. In contrast to a representational understanding of commentary, where commentary is the expert interpretation of an environment, this paper develops a more passive understanding of commentary where the commentator is a figure through which the affective, material forces that constitute environments become expressed. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Sydney, Australia, the paper examines three modes of everyday commentary related to commuting. The commentaries of reportage, anecdote and autoventriloquy each demonstrate in different ways how the affective, material environments of commuting become spoken. The paper shows, first, how commentary is a constitutive rather than derivative aspect of the experience of commuting. Second, it shows that commentary is an expression of affective, material environments, rather than either the willed self-expression of the speaker, or the manifestation of socially and historically contingent discourses. Third, it shows that commentary can both close down and draw out specific affective, material environments. Fourth, it shows how commentary modulates the powers of existence in the zone of the commute, transforming the affective possibilities immanent to different situations.
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This paper takes as its starting point the centrality of nonrepresentational registers of communication and comprehension to understanding how everyday experiences of travelling with others by public transport unfolds. Drawing on... more
This paper takes as its starting point the centrality of nonrepresentational registers of communication and comprehension to understanding how everyday experiences of travelling with others by public transport unfolds. Drawing on extensive primary research, it explores how different affective atmospheres erupt and decay in the space of the train carriage; the modes of affective transmission that might take place; and the character of the collectives that are mobilised and cohere through these atmospheres. Acknowledging that these atmospheres have powerful effects, this paper focuses on the trajectories of particular misanthropic affective relations; and how such negative relations emerge from a complex set of forces which prime passengers to act. Yet this call to action is often met with a reticent passivity that transposes these negative affective relations, often in ways that intensify their force. In expanding the realm of that which is often taken to constitute the ‘social’, the paper concludes by considering how the demands of collective responsibility fold through contemporary understandings of community.
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... These debates are broadly framed around discourses of pace (Hubbard and Lilley 200443.Hubbard, P. and Lilley, K. 2004. ... The Poetics of Space , Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ... When thinking about airports, luggage might equally... more
... These debates are broadly framed around discourses of pace (Hubbard and Lilley 200443.Hubbard, P. and Lilley, K. 2004. ... The Poetics of Space , Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ... When thinking about airports, luggage might equally encumber in its absence. ...
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... So there is a lot in those studies about the significance of different times and temporalities. ... PA Some of the things that David was talking about in terms of the idea of a subject that is ... PA In both the celebration of life on... more
... So there is a lot in those studies about the significance of different times and temporalities. ... PA Some of the things that David was talking about in terms of the idea of a subject that is ... PA In both the celebration of life on the move as this joyful, ecstatic experience, but also in the ...