mobile-mentary @ Cultural Studies Now

In the Deleuze panel at the Cultural Studies NOW conference, Max outlined a continuum between the mobile-mentary project, Tokyo’s cityscape and the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome. Max drew upon Berhard Kellermann’s 1912 publication Ein Spaziergang in Japan (a walk in Japan) and linked the contemporary Japanese mobile phone user to the modern flâneuse (woman walker) and flâneur. Both explore the city as a time-space network. The mobile phone user guides her/himself through the global city and via i-mode s/he guide him/herself through the everday life and the online world. (In Japan the mobile phone has established itself in the domain of the everyday; more emails are send via mobile phones than computers). Moreover Max pointed at the Lettresists’ and the Situationists’ notions of dérive and détournement, which formed a basis for the concept of psychogeography. In addition Max described the parallelism between the mobile-mentary prodction-process and psychogeography, which is also reflected in Tokio’s city structures. The mobile-mentary project and the city itself represent a time and space construct, in which “any multiplicity is connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.24) The rhizomatic characteristics of discontinuity, rupture, multiplicity, contiguity and immediacy (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.17) define the montage between the filmic-space and the cityscape. The new mobile montage, the viewing of micro-movies in the streets “connects any point to any other point.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p.23). And consequently creates a fusion between the filmic and the diegetic spheres.