Sam Hind

lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester, UK.

sam.hind@manchester.ac.uk

  • Political Affects in Public Space II

    I said I’d return to make a few comments on the Barnett (2008) paper I read yesterday (direct link to that post here). He understands the Thriftian notion of affect in two registers and calls up a number of problems:

    1. under the critical vision of the politics of affect.

    Are all affectual outcomes bad? Because that’s what Barnett thinks Thrift gets at for a large part. If affect matters politically it’s because ‘it opens up new surfaces for the exercise of manipulation’ (198). But Barnett says that excitement, joy, fear, compulsion, shame etc. ‘have no a priori political valence at all’ (198) and as such can’t be deemed bad per se. It’s a process of interpreting the outcomes from these affects that have the political dimension. Thrift needs to consider this in order to qualify this dimension.

    and

    2. under the affirmative vision of the politics of affect.

    The spaces of affect can be progressively appropriated in order to realise new ‘configurations of feelings’ (198). But why is Thrift making these somewhat covert attempts to open up political regimes of affect? Surely their value only comes from the kinds of political projects that are ongoing and are directed to anyway (’emotional liberty’, ‘ethos of engagement’ 198)? Thrift needs to engage with these political dimensions outright if he wants to make a project of the spaces of affect. Although something tells me that’s not what he wants to do. But Barnett says if that is what Thrift intends, then he has to clarify the implications of it for democratic principles (liberty, free-speech etc.), and for the people who should be participating in this process of commanding the spaces of affect (i.e. every single citizen).

  • Actor-Network Theory in Plain English

    Just found a cute little cut-and-paste video on YouTube about ANT:

  • Instagram REALLY wasn’t made for this…

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Some great posts on Dronestagram in the last few days. The Guardian ran a world news post on it this Monday, as did The Atlantic, here. Although David Gregory does the leg-work required to make sense of this over at his Geographical Imaginations blog, here. I’m going to re-quote what David has already quoted over at GI because it speaks to everything that’s critical about the kinds of technological distancing that goes on in drone warfare, and it’s by Dronestagram’s creator, James Bridle:

    The political and practical possibilities of drone strikes are the consequence of invisible, distancing technologies, and a technologically-disengaged media and society. Foreign wars and foreign bodies have always counted for less, but the technology that was supposed to bring us closer together is used to obscure and obfuscate. We use military technologies like GPS and Kinect for work and play; they continue to be used militarily to maim and kill, ever further away and ever less visibly.

    Yet at the same time we are attempting to build a 1:1 map of the world through satellite and surveillance technologies, that does allow us to see these landscapes, should we choose to go there. These technologies are not just for “organising” information, they are also for revealing it, for telling us something new about the world around us, rendering it more clearly.

    History, like space, is coproduced by us and our technologies: those technologies include satellite mapping, social photo sharing from handheld devices, and fleets of flying death robots. We should engage with them at every level. These are just images of foreign landscapes, still; yet we have got better at immediacy and intimacy online: perhaps we can be better at empathy too.

    I mean, come on, that’s such a rich chunk of text – a real, intelligent conceptualization of the US drone war project. James identifies everything that drone warfare pertains to be; bloodless, clinical, and distanced. He also brings together the war technologies of drone control and the play technologies of front-room computer gaming. He tells us that these technologies do more than ‘present’, more than ‘organize’: he tells us they engage and immediate and that we can do a whole lot better than confine them to other, a-sensorial worlds.  

  • ‘Political affects in public space’

    Reading through Clive Barnett’s ‘Political affects in public space: normative blind-spots in non-representational ontologies’ paper from Transactions (2008 – freely available here), and came across a quotable snippet of criticism for notions of affect in non-representational geography. Here it is:

    The ontologisation of affect as a layer of preconscious ‘priming to act’ reduces embodied action simply to the dimension of being attuned to and coping with the world. This elides the aspect of embodied knowing that involves the capacity to take part in ‘games of giving and asking for reasons’. While the ontologisation of theory in human geography has been accompanied by claims to transform and reconfigure understandings of what counts as ‘the political’, this project has been articulated in a register which eschews the conventions of justification, that is, the giving and asking for reasons. This is particularly evident when it comes to accounting for why the contemporary deployment of affective energy in the public realm is bad for democracy. (189-190)

    What Barnett is saying firstly is that by roping off the dimension of ‘affect’ as being pre-conscious, unthought, or of lacking reason (as background attunement), we mistakenly also deny a form of  individual political action in the process. That specifically, people are dupes to the political manipulation undertaken by those with access to affectual infrastructures, in ‘the half-second delay between action and cognition’ (Thrift 2007: 245 as quoted by Barnes: 191). In other words, that people are susceptible to sub-conscious manipulation by the powers that be!

    But then in turn, he says that Nigel Thrift’s non-rep vision (Barnett quotes his 2007 book Non-representational Theory) hides from justifying it’s own normative views on what politics should be (and specifically, what form democratic politics should take). As Barnett (p.190) then suggests, this ‘closes down the inconclusive conversations upon which democratic cultural politics depends (Rorty 2006)’.

    I’m still reading through it now but shall provide some more thoughts in another post. Although what I will say is that I too think that Thrift has somewhat under-theorized what this momentary ‘half-second delay’ consists of, and how exactly  this space is filled by other actors (the media etc.). It certainly does come across as a little scaremonger-y and maybe lacks the empirics to back up these claims. Barnett’s right to prise this space back open and question what lies within.

  • Map alignment and orientation

    …while we assume we know what any particular human action is and what it looks like and then quickly jump to what cognitive ability could have lain behind it, such an arrogant assumption has allowed us to pass by quite what the thing is that we began with. In other words, we think we know what map use, wayfinding and navigation in the world are, but really we are only beginning our inquiries.

    The closing lines of Laurier and Brown (2008) ‘Rotating maps and readers: praxiological aspects of alignment and orientation’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (2): 201-216. Although the Transactions version is subscription only (here), there is another (presumably earlier) version available open-access here.