Affective Spaces

Frederik Tygstrup

University of Copenhagen

In a series of draft chapters from Robert Musil’s unfinished novel The Man Without

Qualities, the protagonist embarks, in his diaries, on a dissertation on emotions,

pondering questions pertaining to the genesis of emotions, the nature of emotions, and the

(puzzling) location of emotions. At some point, he makes the following note:

The German language says: I feel anger inside, and it says: I am in anger. (…) This difference between the linguistic images of our feelings (…) is mirrored by our present scientific ideas (…). There are psychological doctrines to whom the ‘I’ is an indisputable core piece, detectable in every movement of the spirit and particularly in the emotion, and there are doctrines that completely disregard the ‘I’ and only consider the relations between expressions and describe them as appearances in a field of forces, their origin notwithstanding. (Musil, 1978: 1160)

This distinction, pretty evident and then quite subtle at the same time, suggested by Musil

in the 1930s, provides a good starting point for a preliminary mapping of the extensive

interest in the understanding of emotions that can be witnessed in a wide array of

academic disciplines today. Current research in the history of emotions, phenomenology

of emotions and psychology of emotions seems to comply most with the first alternative

set forth by Musil, i.e. regarding emotions as something that exist within an “I” and thus

appears as a predicate to a subject. This approach also has the merit of conforming to the

grammar of our present everyday understanding of things, positing an “I” who is able to

account for its worldly position in space and time as well as for the reactions this position

provokes as emotions in an inner dimension of the self. On such a basis, we can study the

self in different historical situations and chart different historically contextualized

emotions, we can see how subjectively felt emotions taint the perception of outer stimuli,

we can even start graphing the physiological markers of specific emotions, whose nature

we establish simply by applying the habitual designations of how an individual reports

feeling.

What one risks forgetting, however, when applying this model for the different ventures

of mapping emotions according to historical, pragmatic or physiological distributions, is

the historical nature of the model itself. The grammar of emotions as a designation of

predicates to a subject, of the model “NN feels XX,” is probably a predominantly modern

one. “If I were a nobleman,” Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister at some point longingly

exclaims, and explains: a nobleman appears, according to a specific code, whereas the

bourgeois simply is, by virtue of his individual qualities (Goethe, 1979: 174f). Emotion,

thus, for the aristocrat, is a matter of appearance (Schein), of codified expression, whereas

for the bourgeois it is a matter of being (Sein), of inner authenticity. Goethe’s self-

conscious bourgeois could have been the case in point for Arnold Hauser’s harsh

historical diagnosis:

Emotionalism, like individualism, is a means for the bourgeoisie to express its spiritual autonomy in relation to the aristocracy. The bourgeois, so long held in contempt, now fashions himself in the mirror of his own spiritual life and feels the more important when he contemplates with utmost seriousness his own emotions, moods and inner movements. (Hauser, 1953: 576)

Historicizing the grammar of emotion along these lines would thus entail an awareness of

how not only emotions, but also the ways in which we attribute them and talk about them

as facts of inner human life, are embedded in characteristic social and epistemic

conditions and in fact constructed through a quite specific historical set of agencies and

interests. Eventually, when glossing and interpreting different emotional states as

something ongoing inside psychological persons, we would have to see ourselves as the

heirs of the 18th century, of all the Rousseaus and the Richardsons and their insistent

elaboration of a panoply of inner sentimental movements paving the way for a grammar

of feelings that we have by now interiorized to a degree where they appear to be perfectly

natural objects of scientific mapping and measurement.

It is when embarking on this skeptical line of thought, to which the founding and

synthesizing powers of the “I” might not amount to more than a frail historical

compromise, that Musil’s other option comes to the fore: that emotional life might in

some cases be more accurately described as “relations between expressions” and

“appearances in a field of forces.” And where, consequently, the grammar is turned

upside-down, no longer addressing emotional states as something that we carry within us,

but rather as something in which we find ourselves passing or dwelling. This reversal

seems to inform the increasing interest of late in the notion of affects and in affect

studies1. Although there might not be any clear-cut and consensual distinction between

the notions of emotion and of affect (of which a proper conceptual history still remains to

be written) other than somehow vague and intuitive semantic groupings, a preliminary

differentiation might be established on the basis of the two different grammars evoked by

Musil: emotions are something you have, whereas affects is something you are in. Put

differently: subjects have emotions, but affects produce subjectivity. This will not of

course provide us with a workable distinction pertaining to the object-side, i.e. enabling

us to point and say this is an emotion and that is an affect; we are still dealing with a

somehow nebulous set of “states of mind” and “feelings,” as was also the case initially

for Musil. But what we do have with these two grammars are two distinct ways of

approaching and talking about feelings: one, say, Romantic, describing feelings in terms

of psychology and interiority, and another, post-Romantic, describing them in terms of

contexts (“relations between expressions”) and events (“appearances in a force-field”).

It will of course ultimately depend on the object you want to study, i.e. the event of some

feeling appearing in a precise set of conditions, which of the two approaches proves the

better. Take an example: the opening sequence of the 2008 HBO-series Generation Kill,

directed by David Simon, portrays a handful of young soldiers in an SUV traversing the

Iraqi desert; the inside of the vehicle is noisy, the speed of their convoy high and the

outlook fragmented, the men are fully harnessed for battle but do not seem to know

exactly what to expect and are thus all the more ready in some general sense, yelling

among themselves and on the radio, fiddling with their equipment, eating chocolate bars,

trying to be on watch while also tending to internal hierarchies and jargons.

                                                                                                               1Some prominent contemporary examples include Thrift (2008), Butler (2009), Frédéric Lordon (2010), Brian Massumi (2002), and Yann Moulier Boutang (2007).

The intensity of feeling permeating the sequence is beyond question – panic, fear,

aggression, boredom would all be eligible candidates for naming it – but then again, and

that would be the central point here, not really as someone’s feeling. It seems more

accurate to say that an affect prevails in the SUV traversing the blank and inscrutable

desert space loaded with frail young men in full military gear. The first-person

perspective and the related languages of contemplation and introspection would appear

somehow inadequate because the affect is so obviously derived from the situation.

Thus, analyzing affects entails a shift of focus from the psyche to the situation. And, in

turn, the situation appears as a complex composition of material elements, social scripts

and protocols for agency, human bodies and their different tools and prostheses, and an

ensemble of individuals expressing their different volitions, imaginaries and propensities.

It is by way of such a relational arrangement that the locus of a given feeling moves from

the inner state of the individual to a less clearly delineated field of shared “atmosphere.”

This does not prevent, of course, that a feeling is actually felt by someone and can be

articulated as a specific state of mind. Only the way in which that particular feeling

emerges, amplifies and propagates transcends the strictly individual and autonomous

sphere. We are propelled, in other words, to consider the situation in what would be

Sartrean terms, that is, as a negation of any individual aspiration and self-projection onto

the world, and at the same time as the very possibility of such a thing as an individual

aspiration. The individual is always already heteronomous and given over to the situation

in which one finds oneself, but indeed also invited precisely to find oneself by way of

affirming the constraints of the situation. The situation, in this rather strong sense of the

notion, thus already entails an attenuation of the strict demarcation usually drawn

between what would pertain to an individual and what would pertain to its surroundings,

taking us from considering these somehow overly abstract entities to analyzing more

concretely what Sartre calls the “internal metabolism” of the situation (Sartre, 1943: 611).

Given the situation as a relational ensemble, we can study the logic of affects in one of its

basic forms, as the dynamic interplay of affecting and being affected. If you put a young

man into a SUV in a convoy on a military mission in some sunny desert, you affect him

by framing him in a specific situation characterized by the ways in which spatiality,

temporality and alterity are formatted (to stick here to Sartre’s elements for analysing

situations): the convoy, the mission, the crew. This framing, however, is not only an

interchangeable frame for an otherwise self-identical individual; the composition of the

situation also defines the individual as it prescribes the range of reactions he can

mobilize. His training and socialization as a soldier, the equipment around him and

attached to his body, the entire set of relations in the box in which he is enclosed invites

him to act in particular ways, clumsily or cleverly, depending on his ability to be affected.

Relational analysis of a situation invites consideration of the kind of micro-mechanics

involved in the production of affect. How is a peculiar component of a situation (the

soldier, or the unit, or the convoy…) affected by what happens, which affects does this

component in turn produce? This almost engineer-like approach to the affective

component of a situation is spelled out by Gilles Deleuze in his influential commentary

on Spinoza. Affectivity here stands out as something fundamentally processual, as the

signature of an event that unfolds, combining on the one hand the modification of a body

(affectus) and on the other hand the way in which this modification is taken up or

responded to by the receiving body (affectio). Deleuze: “Affectio refers to the state of an

affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, whereas affectus refers to a

passage from one state to another, in relation to the correlative variation of the affecting

bodies” (Deleuze, 1981: 69).

Affect, then, and ultimately the production of feeling, is inscribed in a relational network

where processes of affecting on the one hand and articulation of specific affects on the

other develop through an ongoing relational interaction. Such an empiricist mapping of

the relational structures that underpin affectivity in turn gives us an opportunity to

characterize more precisely the nature of the ‘situation.’ In fact, the situation can be

described according to two different perspectives: we can consider it as a diagram, i.e. as

a kind of blueprint of relations charting the reciprocal relations between elements that are

put together in a particular way, and we can consider it as an event, where the relations

are so to speak set in motion, where the intensities produced through the relational

juxtaposition of elements spark something happening. The situation is a set-up, and

designed to unfold the potential invested in the set-up.

Describing affects as something that pertains more to situations than to psychological

persons – as events in a force-field, to once again retain Musil’s instructive definition –

underscores the role of contingency in human matters (also a core facet to Sartre’s

theorizing of the situation), contingency understood both in a pragmatic sense referring to

what is nearby, and in a more logical sense referring to the relative chance of what

happens to be nearby. Affects mark out the contingency of any being and invite us to

understand how the production of subjectivity essentially relies on this contingency.

Judith Butler succinctly spelled it out as follows:

That the body invariably comes up against the outside world is a sign of the general predicament of unwilled proximity to others and to circumstances beyond one’s control. This ‘coming up against’ is one of the modalities that define the body. And yet, this obtrusive alterity against which the body finds itself can be, and often is, what animates responsiveness to that world. That responsiveness may include a wide range of affects: pleasure, rage, suffering, hope, to name a few. (…) Hence, precariousness as a generalized condition relies on a conception of the body as fundamentally dependent on, and conditioned by, a sustained and sustainable world; responsiveness—and thus, ultimately, responsibility—is located in the affective responses to a sustaining and impinging world. (Butler, 2009: 34)

Whereas Butler’s stress on contingency and involvement is clearly in line with the

situational approach outlined above, it also adds an important dimension to the

understanding of affectivity, namely the ways in which affect has to be understood as a

fundamentally bodily phenomenon. Bodies are affecting and affected through the

situational relations in which they are engaged. It is equally important, however, not to

think about bodylines as a just a slightly more materialistic version of personhood,

substituting the egological “I” with an enhanced, corporeal version of the autonomous

subject. Butler, to be sure, stresses this reservation by remarking that the body is

“fundamentally dependent on, and conditioned by, a sustained and sustainable world,”

thus taking as the point of departure the presence of a body, while not positing the body

as an epistemologically fundamental category. Bodylines, then, is not a metaphor of the

subject, but rather a stage for the processes of subjectivization taking place.

This understanding of the body is thus neither Cartesian, as opposed to the mind, nor the

traditional phenomenological one, as a situated center of perception, but more akin to the

idea of bodylines formulated by the late Merleau-Ponty as a dynamic point of intersection

between outer and inner impulses. According to Merleau-Ponty, bodylines remains a

reflective moment, the body being at the same time just another thing in the world, and

the agent of a self experiencing the world: object and subject in one, and thus

consequently neither properly one nor the other. Alternatively, in the clever formula

coined by Terry Eagleton: “It is not quite true that I have a body, and not quite true that I

am one either” (Eagleton, 1993). Being in the world, for Merleau-Ponty, is essentially a

negotiation of this chiasmic structure, an undulating movement to-and-fro between

subjectivizing the predicaments of what is given as objective, and giving over the

subjective to the objective conditions that determine and carry it. The idea of the body

never comes to rest on either side, as something predominantly subjective or something

predominantly objective, but remains suspended in the reciprocal reflection between

these aspects, “like two mirrors facing each other, giving birth to two indefinite series of

infolded images that no longer belong to either of two surfaces, as each image is just a

reflection of the other, thus making the couple of mirrors more real than any of the two”

(Merleau-Ponty, 1965: 183). The sustained paradoxical nature of these different

formulae, however tiresome, has the merit of emphasizing the processual nature of any

(embodied) situation, the ongoing ‘metabolism,’ as Sartre had it, between inner and outer

reality. Thus, while we cannot pin down a straightforward definition of the body, we can

see bodylines as an interface involved in any human situation and an interface that

constantly coordinates and processes the interaction between ‘psychic’ and ‘material’

components as they swiftly oscillate and transcend into the realms of the other. That

affects are bodily, therefore, implies that we localize affect precisely at this elusive

interface where internal and external reality are projected onto each other, or where

affectus and affectio come together in a specific affective quality, excessively involved in

the situational context to be deemed strictly subjective and overly tainted by individual

receptivity to be strictly objective.

The triple approach to affects as relational, as situational and as corporeal thus all point in

the same direction: that affects cannot be pinned down to one specific realm or layer of

reality, but seems to persist as a material/immaterial halo or sphere hovering indistinctly

but none less insistently above and within any field of human agency and interaction.

Affects alight and persist in the unfinished and processual, as scintillating qualities of the

present with their own characteristic signature. They appear as a kind of quasi-objects,

atmospheric facts, as it were, to which we must accord a being of their own as they

emerge from the stratum of human reality. It is this ‘almost objective’ nature of affects

that makes Brian Massumi argue for what he calls ‘the autonomy of affect,’ and it seems

to be very much the same endeavor that made Raymond Williams coin the succinct (and

slightly oxymoronic) notion of ‘structure of feeling,’ combining the connotative

vagueness of feeling with the regularity of the structural:

We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships; not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought; practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting and dominating characteristics […]. (Williams, 1977: 132)

Both Massumi and Williams thus highlight the need to take the reality of the affective as

an object of cultural studies, precisely because affects not only derive from, but also

inform and guide cultural agency and the formation of ideas and beliefs that will

eventually be socially institutionalized. The crucial question then remains, of course, how

cultural analysis of the social reality of affects would proceed. Given the theoretical

emphasis on the exteriority of affects developed from Musil’s second option for studying

‘appearances in a field of forces,’ a lot of traditional approaches to individual feelings and

their expression become somehow unattractive due to the limitations on the scope of

analysis they imply. The somatic approach, localizing the affect in the bodily presence

and the swift interactions and reversions it mediates between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’

between the psychological and participatory on the one hand and the social and the

positional on the other, furthermore directing interest towards the dimension of the

ambient, the expanse of relations that mark out specific situations and the capacities and

capabilities inherent herein. In other words, towards the dimension of space. Theorizing

affects in terms of exteriority, atmosphere, or ambience: as something you are ‘in’ rather

than something you ‘have,’ already invests the affective with spatial qualities. It is

probably also no coincidence, by the way, that contemporary academic focalization on

affects as an important research topic has very much been advocated by sociologists and

geographers (not least following Nigel Thrift’s groundbreaking writings on the subject)

working on techniques of mappings social spaces, rather than by scholars in the historical

and aesthetic disciplines. The methodological challenge, thus, clearly seems to be to

develop analytical tools and concepts with which we can describe affects as spatial

phenomena, or perhaps better: with which we can pinpoint the spatial existence of affects.

The idea of adding affects to the list of what can be mapped converges well with the

prolific use of mapping techniques in the wake of what has been called the spatial turn in

cultural studies. The power of maps to chart not only metric relations but, as Rem

Koolhaas once put it, “the diagram of everything” (Koolhaas, 2004: 20) has been

intensively developed to enhance our understanding of the spatial distribution of all sorts

of flows, of social relations, of power and authority, of social agency, of modes of

imagination and contemplation, and much more. The expanded field of mapping practices

is very much dependent on the thriving theories of space throughout recent generations,

updating as it were our ideas of space to match the spatial complexity and malleability of

contemporary social life.

A good starting point for developing this flexible notion of space could be the distinction

proposed by David Harvey (2009: 133ff) between absolute space, relative space and

relational space. The two first, absolute and relative space, are quite well known, and also

really the only two notions of space that are generally acknowledged and widely

understood. Absolute space was invented by the Renaissance. This was the realm of

Galileo’s and Kepler’s space in which planets could be conceived as bodies in motion

and in positional relations to each other – space, in other words, where all things have

their proper coordinates. The practical usefulness of this notion of space has remained

uncontested; it became the space that rendered Newton’s mechanics and modern physics

feasible as well as the foundations on which Kant’s critique of pure reason rests and is

indeed the space within which we map the distances we experience, a homogenous,

theoretically unlimited space on which we may plot every bit of matter with utmost

exactitude through three coordinates (x, y, z). From Galileo to GPS, absolute space (or

objective space) has set the standard of spatial positionality of everything that is and

everything that takes place. The second notion, relative space, may be considered as a

reversal of this idea. Here, we are no longer dealing with the space in which events take

place, but rather the space – the organization of space, and the intuition of space – which

is produced through the individual event. Relative space is, precisely, relative to a

perspective, to the event of seeing and using space in a particular way. This idea of space

goes back to more ancient understandings of space, most notably to the notion of place.

Place, here, is not just something positional but is also endowed with a more qualitative

side, the resonance of all the traditions, narratives and practices it has become imbued

with. Furthermore, relative space also became a prominent notion in modern

phenomenology, which contributed to shift the focus from our understanding of space to

our perception of space and thereby highlighting the experiential relativity of space,

extending always from a specific point of view and conditioned by the receptive

capacities and inherent prejudices of the beholder.

These two notions of space pretty much cover the ways in which we think about space

and somehow intuitively conceive of space on an everyday basis and despite the fact that

they are obviously very different, we have learnt to combine them freely and flexibly by

locating relative space in absolute space and developing absolute space from relative

space, maneuvering freely, as it were, between the map and the territory. But these

notions also take us back to the predicament of the ancient cognitive architecture of

object and subject, leaving us without any choice but to consider space as either objective

or as subjective, and consequently with no real options for transgressing this polarity,

which represented the precise challenge should we be able to understand the atmospheric

nature of affectivity. This is where Harvey’s third notion comes in very usefully: that of

relational space. To Harvey, relational space is really a category for all the rest, i.e. for

that which does not fit into the two first and somehow more straightforward categories,

such as the spaces of memories, spaces of dreams, spaces of imagination, and so on, but

which nonetheless have a very real and effective importance for our understanding of

space. Memory is an interesting case in point. To be sure, one could claim the way in

which memory invests space with particular qualities would indeed be an example of a

relative space, tainted by a subjective perspective; but if we then add that memory is not

just an individual phenomenon, but really more often exists as a collective memory that is

culturally produced, inscribed and circulated, then the space of memory transcends the

neat polarity of the subjective and the objective: more than just subjective, but also

without becoming objective, and not quite objective, but without being squarely

subjective. This is thus precisely the merit to the notion of relational space: it outlines a

social and cultural construct, a relational distribution of things and ideas, of sensation and

imagination, which mark out a very real historical space that cannot be mapped according

to the traditional notions of absolute and relative space.

The usefulness of the ‘relational space’ concept very much resides in its simplicity. As an

analytical concept, it is directed towards an actual set of effective relations in an

environment, and additionally, it specifically focuses on how this distribution of relations

constitutes a spatial structure. In so doing, it draws on a very fundamental feature of

spatiality, namely that everything spatial is essentially defined by relationality. This very

generic definition of spatiality, going back to Leibniz and Kant, would eventually also

allow us to consider both absolute space and relative space as relational spaces, i.e.

pertaining to the special cases of metric relations and sensual or subjective relations, but

it moreover also invites us to chart all kinds of other relational distributions as well. In

particular, it would enable us to gauge relations that are not composed by the same kind

of elements, such as, for instance, the metrical relations of absolute space, but also

relations between, say, material elements, linguistic forms, haphazard sensations,

fragments of historical views, and so forth. In fact, this is the approach to space also

suggested by Henri Lefebvre, who insisted that the historical space in which people’s

lives unfold should always be considered as a compound space, merging, as he

systematically put it, material, symbolic and experiential components. These components

do not refer to different spaces but represent different aspects involved in the formation –

or, as Lefebvre (1991) has it, the production – of human space. Space, in this

understanding, is essentially a relational space, and lived space always a human

participation in the web of relational structures between all sorts of facets that together

make up its reality.

Clearly, such complex spatial assemblages can be considered in numerous different ways,

corresponding to different aspects of lived, human space, and the relational structures

they embrace, consequently, apprehended in different ways, momentarily highlighting

some lines of the web while ignoring others, depending on attention, receptivity and the

directions of agency followed at a given moment. When proposing the term affective

spaces, the intention is thus not to single out another particular spatial order, but to focus

in on the relational spatiality of lived human experience according to one specific aspect,

that is, the question of just which affects are produced in this relational economy.

Coming back to the methodological challenge of analyzing affects as ‘autonomous,’ as

something that pertains more to social situations than to individual states of mind, a

tentative answer would therefore be to examine how affects exist in the composition of

relational spaces. To acknowledge, in other words, that the real relational spaces in which

we live, and in the formation of which we take part as agents and participants in social

and material situations, have an affective dimension. If affects somehow are there, out

there, before they mature as inner sentiments and feelings, it is because they are spatial,

virtually present in the blueprint of relational structures in which we express and unfold

ourselves as spatial beings. Our interest in affects beyond psychology, in the social life of

affectivity – or in the historical formation of structures of feeling, following Raymond

Williams once again – direct us towards analyzing bodily situations and the different

social and material relations underpinning them. What we address here, and this is the

important lesson of modern relational geographies, is the spatial being of social existence,

inviting us to construe affectivity as a spatial phenomenon.

To briefly sketch how such an analysis might work, I would like to evoke two recent

novels by John DeLillo and J.G. Ballard, not particular to propose an interpretation of

them as literary artworks but rather to show how they in fact interpret two specific

historical spaces and their affective infrastructures. DeLillo’s Falling Man from 2007 is

an examination of the reverberations of terror in the urban atmosphere of New York City

in the aftermath of 9/11. Some of the challenges of writing this novel had already been

formulated in DeLillo’s 2001 essay “In the Ruins of the Future”:

The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. (…) In its desertion of every basis for comparison, the event asserts its singularity. There is something empty in the sky. The writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space. We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations. Where we live, how we travel, what we think about when we look at our children. For many people, the event has changed the grain of the most routine moment. (…) What has already happened is sufficient to affect the air around us, psychologically. We are all breathing the fumes of lower Manhattan, where traces of the dead are everywhere, in the soft breeze off the river, on rooftops and windows, in our hair and on our clothes. (DeLillo, 2001)

There are a number of important insights in this text, which have in turn been reworked in

Falling Man. First of all, it pinpoints the atmospheric nature of the collective shock and

outrage: that it “affects the air around us.” And furthermore, that this affect remains

present, not just as a feeling, but through the ways in which it “change[s] the grain of the

most routine moment.” The story of the novel is about a survivor from the Twin Towers

who literally climbs out of the ashes and somehow by instinct heads back to his beloved

ones, his wife and son. However, by the time of the catastrophe they had already long

since been divorced and home but a faint memory; going back to this idea of normalcy, in

other words, is not just going back to before the crash, but further back, before the

average life-form of a NY corporate worker, into which the catastrophe intervened, was

put in place. Consequently, the novel is not about overcoming and the restoration of what

was before, as in much bad 9/11-fiction, but about the reverberation of the event in three

people’s lives (the father’s, the mother’s and the son’s), as they follow their own erratic –

and indeed diverging – pathways.

The three protagonists remain affected throughout but DeLillo seems to very consciously

avoid any overly easy designation of this affect, such as fear, sense of danger, the feeling

your life-form is being contested, vulnerability, and so on. Instead, he examines how the

affect actually works as a transfiguration of “the grain of the most routine moment,” as a

monumental and at times almost anaesthetizing defamiliarization of everything known

and intuitively taken for granted. Through the protagonists, he diagnoses the affect in the

ways in which the life of the city seems to stutter, how sensation becomes myopic and

disoriented, how the familiar spaces of everyday life become partly unrecognizable,

partly spaces of punctual wonder and strange beauty. Don DeLillo, to be sure, is an

uncontested master of detailing those small fissures in the surface of the normal, where

the well known breaks up in moments of inconsequential and bereaved contemplation of

the ordinary and reveals something monstrous. This is the protagonist walking the city:

Keith walked through the park and came out on West 90th Street and it was strange, what he was seeing down the community garden and coming toward him, a woman in the middle of the street, on horseback, wearing a yellow hard hat and carrying a riding crop, bobbing above the traffic, and it took him a long moment to understand that horse and rider had come out of a stable somewhere nearby and were headed toward the bridle path in the park. / It was something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring that resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, street, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash. (DeLillo, 2007: 103)

Such a passage reveals the working of affect in its most primitive way. All the relations

that make up the innocuous space of this everyday scene are shattered, disfigured, as if

struck suddenly with a spell of meaninglessness, and in the same instant, then evoked and

reiterating the power that was able to disrupt the solidity of the everyday. It is this very

basic logic of the affect that DeLillo keeps developing throughout the novel, the

collective state of being affected, of losing balance, of being unable all of a sudden to

read and understand what is around. De Lillo’s art is that of the still life, of spatial

arrangements that stand out clear-cut but nonetheless vacillating in terms of what they

might mean. Perception constantly stops dead, pieces of ingoing information that do not

carry any meaningful knowledge along, lots of signs, but no signification. “She was

arguing with herself but it wasn’t an argument, just the noise the brain makes” (p. 236).

The affect hovering over the city effectively subverts the routines and habits of those

living there, and much of the novel’s plot is really about whether it will be possible to re-

cultivate habits sufficiently robust to uphold a human life. The child concentrates on

learning to talk only in monosyllables, the mother takes up volunteer aid for Alzheimer

patients, in whose company she finds some relief, the father embarks on professional

poker rather than going back to his job: they all struggle to obtain a life in the guise of a

habit, but eventually never seem really to make it. They remain suspended in the affect in

an unnaturally protracted moment of hesitation and disorientation, inhabitants of a city

between two breaths, unsure whether it is processing the affect or simply waiting, waiting

for the blessing of forgetting.

DeLillo’s novel reads like a map, as a cartographical recording of an affect that resounds

and reverberates in the very fabric of the urban space. A similar affective cartography,

albeit starting out from a quite different set of parameters, can be found in J.G. Ballard’s

late novels. With the three novels published after 2000, Ballard became increasingly

known as an unsurpassed chronicler of his present. Shortly after his death in 2009, his

younger colleague Jonathan Lethem wrote an essay on him in the New York Times,

praising “the stark visionary consistency of the motifs that earned him that rarest of

literary awards, an adjective: Ballardian”. This term, Ballardian, is now furthermore

defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions

described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak

man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or

environmental developments." Lethem also calls him a “poet of desolate landscapes”

(Lethem, 2009).

The landscapes of Ballard’s three last novels are the new European urban (or post-urban)

designed landscapes of the thriving middle classes. In Super-Cannes from 2000, it is a

new-built settlement around a hi-tech industrial production plant, with its innate life

around empty swimming pools, verandas with a view from where nobody views and twin

carports made for expensive cars. In Millennium People from 2003, it is a refurbished

dockland area in London replete with Range Rovers, kids in expensive public schools and

a population of affluent lawyers, doctors and symbol managers. And in Kingdom Come,

finally, from 2006, it is the new suburban sprawl in southwest London around Heathrow

and M25 with pompous new or refurbished houses with lawns, fountains and flags,

interspersed by corporate headquarters behind empty and evergreen lawns and gigantic

shopping malls. In Kingdom Come, this new territory of the affluent and hardworking

upper middle class is charted by an intruder, a successful advertising agent from London

who comes to bury his father who has died under suspicious circumstances. As a

professional in advertising, he knows quite a lot about this kind of place (and its

potentials for consumption) but not from actually having spent time in the area. Thus, the

reader explores this landscape together with the protagonist, as the latter meanders about,

following the itineraries of his late father and his acquaintances. The topography of the

site is quite simple; framed by the huge and constantly humming transportation

infrastructure, there are four different landscape types: the extended sprawl of habitations,

the malls, the sports arenas, and the derelict villages overgrown by the ramifying sprawl.

And the life form of the area is partitioned along the same lines. In the sprawl, general

boredom reigns, only partially kept in check by endless and industrious refurbishment

works. The malls and the sports arenas then offer temporary relief from boredom by

offering endless opportunities for consumption and for watching violent spectacles,

respectively. And when this cocktail of boredom, buying and watching does not bring

sufficient relief, the disciplined inhabitants transform into a violent mob and attack the

Pakistani restaurants and Polish-owned garages of the villages. Ballard describes an ever

more fragile sense of order and an atmosphere where aggression surfaces as a way out for

an otherwise blocked propensity for acting. In this environment, as Ballard boldly

describes it, “consumerism and a new totalitarianism had met by chance in a suburban

shopping mall and celebrated a nightmare marriage” (Ballard, 2006: 188).

Ballard’s critique of consumerism (where “everything good comes with a barcode”) as

existentially hollow is of course not particularly new. However, he very aptly portrays the

logic of frustration as he subtly plays out the perennial substitution of the new with more

of the same in an algorithm neatly spelled out by Rosi Braidotti: “In a totally

schizophrenic double pull, the consumerist and socially enhanced faith in the new is

supposed not only to fit in with, but also actively to induce, the rejection of in-depth

changes” (Braidotti, 2006: 2). In Kingdom Come, Ballard offers a full-scale mapping of

the atmosphere induced by this logic and how it permeates virtually everything that goes

on in this slightly futuristic, but still chillingly recognizable settlement. The novel,

however, also takes another few steps beyond this casuistic mode. It is narrated in the

first person, and throughout large parts of the book, the protagonist and the reader so to

speak share the outsider’s observation mode, but eventually, and quite strangely, this

accord between reader and narrator is somehow uprooted. What happens is that an

uncanny amount of unpredictability enters into the universe. First, we experience this

through the narrator, as the other characters he encounters inexplicably seem to develop

striking inconsistencies in their actions and utterances, switching alliances and agendas in

unpredictable ways and thus inconveniently blurring the distinction between friends and

foes. This lability adds another layer to the already high-strung affective climate, as if

everybody is constantly negotiating some tipping-point and maneuvering somehow

blindly among all sorts of stratagems. And further down the road this infection also seems

to take grip of the narrator himself, whereby the reader is somehow gradually brought to

ask whether the alliance with the narrator is dissolving. This results in quite a powerful

reading experience, as a first hand report of a progressive transformation of a

consciousness when exposed to the affective climate of this particular place.

Both DeLillo and Ballard are experimenting with developing techniques of mapping

affective spaces and of recording how spatial being also implies a participation in

affective transactions and becomings. As cartographers of affect, they delineate the

relational diagrams of spaces with prominent contemporary interest: the city under the

spell of terror, and the suburb under the spell of consumerism, and test the affective

impact of living in these spaces. By charting affects as “appearances in a field of forces”,

they contribute to the understanding of the contemporary micro-politics of affects and the

changing relational geographies underpinning them and thus eventually also to

understanding how affective spaces mould our lives and the selves we come to embody.

References

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