Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
holidaying,tiedtotimes,seasons,andplaceandperformedthroughaseriesofritualistic
maneuvers and embodied practices of relocation away from home and work.
From this kind of theoretical grounding of affect in bodies and performance, cultural
geographers such as Thrift, McCormack, and Anderson locate affects in transversals
between bodies located in the materialities of space-time and in sites of inbetweenness
that connect people and people as well as people and places (cf. Pile 2010).
The emergence of affect from the relations between bodies, and forms of en-
counters that those relations are entangled within, make the materialities of
space-time always-already affective. There is not, first, an “event” and then,
second, an affective “effect” of such an “event.” Instead, affect takes place be-
foreandafterthedistinctionsofsubject-worldorinside-outsideasa“ceaselessly
oscillating foreground/background or, better, an immanent 'plane' (Seigworth
2000, p. 232).” (Anderson 2006, 736)
In a register of dialectics, we might say that affect is both the condition and outcome
ofaction.However,Andersonrefusestousethelanguageofcauseandeffect,insideand
outside, sohesaysinstead thataffectis“enfolded inaction” asanimmanent planeofits
possibility.
This geography of affect shifts the analytic focus from mind and the rhetoric of place
identity to embodied practices and thus connects work in the field to broader devel-
opments in the so-called affective turn in the social sciences (e.g., Clough and Halley
2007). In so doing, it neither approaches subjectivity through phenomenological intro-
spection nor treats it simply as a discursive or textual accomplishment. Instead, by the
“spacingofemotionandaffect”(AndersonandHarrison2006,334),subjectivityisseen
as the product of specific forms of participation in the settings and routines of every-
day life. The immediate advantage of this theory is that it widens the scope of political
analysis to include a focus on affect. Hope, fear, joy, shame, boredom, and many other
affects may constitute geographies of privilege in addition to or alongside boundaries
and regions of inclusion-exclusion that have been of interest in the social psychology
literature of place identity.
This offers new possibilities for political engagement which aims to understand and
dismantle forms of relations and materialities of oppressive affects. The job is urgent
for, as Thrift suggests, affect has become the site of social engineering:
now affect is more and more likely to be engineered with the result that it is
becoming something more akin to the network of pipes and cables that are of
suchimportanceinprovidingthebasicmechanicsandroottexturesofurbanlife.
(Thrift 2004, 58)
