Transported Immobility

In this chapter I take Barthes’ concept of transported immobility and allow it to travel from the dining car of a French train to the forests of Sweden and to my own experience of living in a digital media blackout zone. In ‘Dining Car’, Barthes’ reflects on the contrary experience of eating an elaborate meal in an upscale restaurant carriage. This entire mise-en-scene Barthes’ describes as a ‘mirage of solidity’ (1979: 143); the thirteen waves in the dining car experience ‘conceal by a protocol of attention its very contingency’ (1979: 141). For Barthes, the protocol of attention surrounding the elaborate dining car experience is a mythic substitute, a ‘spectacle of stability’ (1979: 144).

We can extend this idea of transported immobility from its original story of the dining car to other kinds of contrary experiences. Here, the mix of mobility and immobility is suggestive of how movement and transportation are accompanied by constraints on mobility. It is also suggestive of how objects and embodied experiences are also connected to subjectivities, stories and myths. What Barthes describes in the idea of transported immobility is how some experiences have a contrary mixture of freedom and constraint, of spectacle and mundane reality. In this work I describe the nine waves of the nature hotspot experience, where I am tethered to a particular indoor and outdoor place and dependent on intermittent digital media connection. Such tethering fixes me to a particular place in the rural forest that enables WiFi, provides access and a flow of communication in that moment of connection, and is a source of frustration as rural infrastructures and inclement weather routinely affect the experience, a non-normative experience of media breakdown and repair that challenges our assumptions of living in a digital society.