A spatial politics of affect

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

This was the first article that we agreed to jointly read and discuss. The article is a bit more ‘contextually dense’ than I’d realised (by which I mean it needs to be read as the work of an urban geographer talking with his peers about the field rather than any kind of general primer on 'affect').

The following brief outline of the introduction and general structure of the paper might be of some help if you haven’t already read it...
In brief, Thrift does the following:

1. Introduction
Why is affect relevant (for Thrift)?
It is a topic neglected in urban literature. However, it is important because:
i) Knowledge concerning affect is already being systematically created and mobilised in the urban landscape.
ii) It may (once) have been possible to restrict thinking about affect in terms of aesthetics but it is increasingly treated as ‘instrumental’; that is, ideas/knowledge/techniques of affect are put to use to do ‘work’ on people and spaces in particular ways with particular goals in mind.
iii) Affect is not only mobilised/actively engineered, but is increasingly part of how cities are understood: as ‘creative’, having ‘buzz’, ‘vitality’, ‘vibrancy’, being expressive etc.

Aim? To think about affect in cities, affective cities, and about the political consequences of thinking about these.

How? Looks at different propositions of what ‘affect’ is (Section 2); looks at some of the ways in which the manipulation of affect for political ends is becoming routine (Section 3); give examples of what might constitute a political agenda that takes into account affect (Section 4), offers a case study (Bill Viola, Section 5) and concludes (Section 6).

Limitations? Thrift says that the limits of his paper are that it is Eurocentric; ignores much of the psychology and cognitive sciences research; comes from a specific theoretical standpoint, which he outlines in detail – including that he is treating affect as a kind of ‘thinking’, or rather that thinking is not just a property of cognition (the brain/perception etc) but is patchy (fragmentary, takes place in space and time), has a material nature, etc.

2. What is affect?
Could be taken to mean lots of things. Often ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ (but not exclusively).
Thrift is NOT interested in idea of individualised emotions (eg as in much psychology).
Instead looks at emotion more broadly; individuals and spaces understood as the ‘effects’ of the events to which their body parts respond and in which they participate (eg I think as Foucault or Judith Butler might talk about bodies).

Concentrates on 4 approaches. These have in common that affect is discussed as ‘a kind of intelligence about the world’. So affect (eg emotion) is not ‘irrational’ and it is not ‘sublime’ either. (I think he means not not-rational or wrongly-rational, and not ‘outside’ of rationality/transcendent either.)
These approaches don’t stand independently, but each is connected to each other in some way (historically, in practice, …)

These approaches are:
i) affect as a set of embodied practices (eg from phenomenological tradition)
ii) affect as a manifestation of underlying ‘drives’ (eg psychoanalytic models)
iii) affect as ‘interaction’ (Spinoza/Deleuze; materiality/thought, mind/body aren’t distinct – instead ‘knowing proceeds in parallel with the body’s physical encounters’; affect is the property of the active outcome of an encounter – not a constrained/defined ‘response’ , but an action …)
iv) affect as the physiological product of evolution (neo-Darwinian; tends towards ideas of ‘universal’ human emotions manifested in common facial/hand expressions, albeit that these can be expressed differently in different social/cultural contexts)

3. The politics of affect
re: the manipulation of affect for political ends. Has a long history (eg military training of aggression), but argues that there is something new in contemporary times – new developments that expand ‘the envelope of what we call the political’ to ‘take note of the way that political attitudes and statements are conditioned by intense autonomic bodily reactions that do not simply reproduce the trace of political intention’.

Gives four examples of such developments:
i) changing forms that make affect a visible element in the political
ii) mediatization of politics
iii) new forms of calculation
iv) design of urban space to produce political response

4. Changing the political
Examples according to the 4 different models of affect.

5. I do not know what it is I am like
Gives a useful and detailed example of the work of video/installation artist Bill Viola

6. Conclusions
...