Unravelling Space and Landscape in Leisure’s Identities

Abstract

In his marvellous novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera asks what flirtation is: One might say that it is behaviour leading to another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee. (Kundera, 1984:174) Such pregnancy of possibility, and possibility of becoming; the implicit if possibly agonising playfulness; the very combination of contingent enjoyment, uncertainty, frustration, anxiety and hope would seem to thread across living. Along with these, living holds a felt possibility of connection, meaning, change. To fix may be assurance, certainty or entrapment, closure or a mix of these. Flirting provides the ground to consider the work of leisure and space in making identity. The more explorative, uncertain and tentative ways In which our being part of a world of things, movements, materials and life; openings and closures, part openings mixed with part closures; engaged in living suggests a character of flirting; spaces of possibility; exemplified in the way in which we can come across very familiar sites finding new juxtapositions of the emphasis of materials in our feeling of here, now, as it were, 'unawares'. Our emotions become alive in the tactility of our thought; we discover our life and its spaces anew. However modest these feelings of vitality may be this quiet dynamic can unsettle familiar and expected cultural resonances and the work of politics; questions and enriches how we understand those planks of contemporary excitement, around mobilities, technology, the making and contextualizing of 'culture' and so on. What was felt ordinary, mundane and everyday becomes otherwise; changes in texture and in a feeling of what matters. Encounters like this can happen in diverse, nuanced, complex ways amongst moments of doing things, across different spaces and journeys of our lives and different intensities of encounter. Familiar and habitual rhythmic engagement, meaning and relationships with things can change in register. In these ways flirting is a creative act in a practical, embodied ontology of living and the feeling of its doing and becoming (Harre, 1993; Shotter, 1993). Such is our relationship with space; our participation in its emergence and change; the relationality of affects involved, mutually, commingling, how we lend that moment of spacing meaning and significance. Flirting is not something in passing, superficial.