Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect

An Interpretation and Summary of Thrift, N. (2004) ‘Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect’, Geografiska Annaler 86 B (1):57-78

Thrift examines politics of affect as central to vitality of city/urban spaces. The author explains that cities or urban spaces are often experienced as unstable whirlpools of affect (focus; meaning derived from psychology; feeling or emotion) eg anger, fear, happiness and joy. These affects are continually present, surging and descending due to events that occur in large public spaces as well as intimate environments. He gives some international examples - some local, heroic and prosaic events linked to visual arts, would include the Adelaide Fringe Festival Opening (connected to large public space), with noisy but celebratory atmosphere and for the everyday, an artist’s studio or even an exhibition opening, an intimate space layered with emotions of anxiety, passion and hope.

Although, the presence of affect within the city environment and connections between human activities are evident, the topic is neglected in urban studies. (Thrift refers to this as neglect of the affective registers). On the other hand he points out that study of affect has a long history and in philosophy for example, artists are mentioned, utilising public spaces to express emotional content or even express unpopular views resulting in the affect of suspicion, mostly due to the attitude that emotional expression is in opposition to the idea of reason. There is also the systematic scientific investigation of affect (physiology of emotions). Thrift points out that these studies also aim to control or command emotional expressions (identified as passion) within an urban space.

Thrift, then goes on to outline some of the reasons for the neglect of affect, past methodologies of logical analysis regarded affect as having no probative value to mechanistic interpretations of physical movement through urban space. Secondly, the desire to maintain fixed boundaries between different research fields, this point also gives light to creative arts engagement with the study of affect. Thirdly, emotions and perceptions are not easily interpreted into formal and aesthetic elements. Thrift points out that these reasons for rejecting affect, given by urban literature, deny the prevalence of affect in urban design.

Thrift argues that affect has become part of a process of re-looking at the urban landscape, that affect is not only utilised to understand urban life but also used politically. Furthermore, affect is how cities are understood and how urban spaces want to be viewed, as creative, oozing with energy and expressive spaces. The difference between the past and present is that affect although a constant element across time (many centuries) is now being engineered and it’s seen as the hardware of urban spaces.

The limitations of this paper, the omitting of cross-cultural sources from anthropology as well as research from social psychology and cognitive science, show Thrift’s detachment from the idea of individualised emotions and expressions of personal emotional energies within urban spaces.

Initially, I found the ethnocentric position of this paper and lack of awareness of difference as having little relevance to my current research, which is situated within the field of cross-cultural art practice involving issues of migrancy, affect, emotions and senses to explore the sensory and affective dimensions linked to an inner world ruptured by the experience of migration. Furthermore, I also draw upon feminist epistemology and have an interest in the notion of the conceptual space formed by the personal experience of being in-between cultures, particularly the experience of dislocation and being a foreigner in both cultures. Nevertheless, Thrifts introduction drew me in as he began to generously layout a ground with some familiarities. While Thrift thought about affect in cities and about affective cities, I considered affect in galleries, affective exhibition spaces and affective exhibitions.

I began to think about the nature and characteristics of art and consequences of producing such work that puts aside the individual and the personal, to explicitly focus on crocheting political, technique and affect together, in other words, artworks, installations and installation spaces that engineer affect or even specialise in the generation of a particular affective response, conditioning viewers’ bodies, allowing their emotions to be controlled or channelled for some kind of an agenda. Affective responses can be easily designed into spaces, through what Thrift refers to as practical knowledges of affective response, which are; design, lighting, sound, time, performance (bodies and movement), film (lights, faces, hands, bodies, movement and time), signifiers (images, objects, materials and arrangements). However a universal affective response is unachievable and therefore it can never be guaranteed.

Here, I also utilise and briefly mention, Divya P Tolia-Kelly’s commentary titled; Affect – an ethnocentric encounter? Exploring the 'universalist' imperative of emotional/affectual geographies (2006) and relate some of her points to elements of my research; the markedness of individual bodies which could be occupying the gallery space, the idea of an affected/affective/emotional gallery space as a conceptual space, a memory of theoretical critiques of universalism within an interdisciplinary approach to art practice.

Both of these papers and my research focus bring me to a point, where the practical knowledges of affective response are being enriched with the consideration of the individual (an awareness of individuals’ social positioning, issues of power and difference) and furthermore, this is expanded by the incorporation of the personal (relating affected personal memory to broader affective memory and broader affective memory to affected personal memory), as a way to engage with and convey affect through affected and affective space.

As a result the unpredictability of affective capabilities would be central to the installation space and not incidental or a random process. Ensuring fluctuations of affect, the rising and falling of emotional reactions and multiplicities rather than singular or universal affective response would imbue the installation space with varied and unfixable energies, which could refer to the life of urban spaces and hint at the gap between cultures experienced by migrants and refugees.