(Re-)Designing Affect Space

Re: The ‘Movement(s) of the Squares’

The so-called ‘movement(s) of the squares’1 did not precisely invent a new dynamic of mobilization of crowds and activation of public space – it rather revealed an emerging spatial order enabled by distributed electronic communication networks and the proliferation of wireless, mobile media inextremely ‘densified’ urban spaces. This emerging spatial order produced paradoxical spectacles that seemed at once strangely familiar and curiously novel, massive as well as evanescent.

Since 2011 we all (as a global predominantly online media audience) have witnessed recurrent spectacles of massive dissenting gatherings in public space. They originate in networked exchanges, then spill over into the streets and squares, effortlessly switching between geographic, cultural and sociopolitical contexts. We witnessed the action not via mainstream mass-media channels, but almost in real-time, live-streamed on social media feeds, blogs and activist sites, to our buzzing smartphones.

While revolving around a variety of heterogeneous issues / things, these gatherings remained remarkably constant in their patterns of mobilization / activation: in addition to online mobilization being followed by embodied gatherings in public space, the spaces became connective platforms in which to create synchronous and asynchronous feedback with electronic networks. This action in physical space drew even more subjects into an ‘attractive field’, iteratively generating further feedback between networked and embodied presences that dissolve and fade out as easily as they expand exponentially.

Beyond the non-linear and highly unpredictable dynamics at work here, these events seemed particularly impenetrable when the pattern started to replicate itself in self-similar manifestations where any substantive political, ideological or material issue / thing was explicitly absent.2 No longer was the issue the ‘thing that brings us together because it divides us most’,3 but in the absence of an issue the gatherings seemed almost ‘blind’, autonomous, self-organizing, pertaining only to some inscrutable internal logic as yet to be unveiled. And crucially: void of any particular content. Thus leaving the question of how to account for them wide open.

Technological: Namely, the Internet. In particular, pointing to the massive use of mobile and wireless media that perform a crucial function in mobilizing large groups of people around ever changing ‘issues at stake’.

Affective: The affective intensity generated and exchanged in these processes of activation and mobilization is instantiated in the body of the physical actors in the streets and squares. It indicates an insistent ‘somatic turn’ away from the symbolic towards a physically registered, felt intensity that resonates with other bodies and objects.

Spatial: Affective intensities generated in the activation process cannot be shared effectively in disembodied online interactions. This lack stimulates the desire for physical encounter, which can only happen in a physical spatial context, paradigmatically in (urban) public space.

This text expands on the above model. While some aspects of this conceptual model may seem speculative, the emerging techno-sensuous spatial order of Affect Space is already underway: in new forms of public assembly with often contradictory dynamics: in new forms of distributed policing and control in and of public space; and as part of a highly evolved system of technologically enabled ‘persuasion design’,4 deeply embedded in the structure of corporate technology giants.

The object of this model is not purely speculative, even if it speculates about the general characteristics and traits of an emerging order that hold important cultural and political implications. The emerging order of Affect Space conflates the functions of the most advanced media systems, the activation of public spaces and the individual subjective experiences engendered by their mingling – what Félix Guattari referred to as the subjective ‘universes of reference’.5 These different ‘registers’ are of crucial importance to the functioning of contemporary democracies, and need to be considered carefully in relation to each other.

To disentangle the network of associations that evolves here the following elements discussed below should at the very least be considered:

Both types of experience may be charged with intensity, but the mediated experience is necessarily characterized by delimitation, a lack of physical cues or proximity, an absence of participation in full. The more dramatic the witnessed action, the more anaemic the mediated experience feels. It is this tension between a charged event witnessed from afar and its intensity unfolding in the immediacy of embodied space that fuels the desire for physical encounter.

Still, the mediated experience in itself is also entirely synaesthetic, but here the felt tension is between what is witnessed / mediated on the screen and in sound from afar, and the body embedded in a strictly local environment, cued to that locality rather than the mediated action. This tension necessarily remains unresolved. The felt dissonance between these two simultaneous and interlacing experiences charges the witnessing subject with a potential as yet undirected energy.

In their essay ‘idensifyingTM translocalities’, Vogelaar and Sikiaridi include a citation from Vilém Flusser’s essay ‘The City as Wave-Trough in the ImageFlood’ that provides a remarkably prophetic image of the variable densities of contemporary hybridized urban spaces, permeated by wireless media and information flows, and the ‘webs of interhuman relations’ that unfold in them:

The new image of humanity looks roughly like this: we have to imagine a network of interhuman relations, a ‘field of intersubjective relations’. The threads of this web must be conceived as channels through which information (ideas, feelings, intentions and knowledges etc.) flows. These threads get temporarily knotted and form what we call ‘human subjects’. The totality of the threads constitutes the concrete lifeworld and the knots are abstract extrapolations. (...) The density of the webs of interhuman relations differs from place to place within the network. The greater the density the more ‘concrete’ the relations. These dense points form wave troughs in the field (...). The wave-troughs exert an ‘attractive’ force on the surrounding field (pulling it into their gravitational field) so that more and more interhuman relations are drawn in from the periphery. (...) These wave troughs shall be called ‘cities’.7

The knotting of dense webs of interhuman relations identified by Flusser, is intensified exponentially by the proliferation of networked and mobile wireless media. Adrian Mackenzie, for instance, in his book Wirelessness, speaks of ‘overflows’ (spatial, thing, body, private-public) redrawing boundaries and reorganizing spaces of action.8 Crucially, though, Flusser recognizes these dense webs of interhuman relationships as constituting the concrete lifeworld of contemporary urban subjects, implying that both urban space and subjective experience are transformed simultaneously by these ‘densifications’.

This constellation should be regarded as inherently unstable. The density of Hybrid Space varies not only from place to place, but also from moment to moment. Carrier signals appear and disappear, sometimes because of an economic boom or collapse, sometimes because of government intervention (regulation), sometimes because of purely physical interference (overlapping signals can cause network failure). Connection speeds and capacities vary continuously. Thus the ‘knotted webs of interhuman relationships’ continuously tighten and loosen.

As observed earlier, the lack of an immediate embodied relation drives the quotidian media subject ‘beyond the screen’ into the streets and squares to find an unmediated connection. The resulting proximity of bodies, masses of bodies, in urban public space, cued to an as yet unarticulated intensity, galvanizes the flow of affect, further intensifying the webs of interhuman relations. What we have witnessed in these large gatherings since 2011 (and prototypical before) is the passing of an affective threshold. Mobile wireless media perform a crucial function in this ensuring the unmediated action / connection is immediately fed back into the integrated network, synchronous and asynchronously via uploads in higher bandwidth zones drawing in ‘more interhuman relations from the periphery’. The conditions for passing the affective threshold are strongest where the knotted webs are most dense / tight. Typically we find these ‘dense webs’ in large urban concentration zones where a diversity of (communication) technologies and people overlap.

It would be a mistake to argue that Affect Space has no content at all, however. On the contrary, it is filled with potential and differential content that can manifest itself at any time and in any place, often quite unexpectedly. The activation of Affect Space does not happen primarily around issues, but around performative presences that can produce strong affective intensities. It is necessary to understand these ‘performative presences’ more precisely. They can manifest themselves in public space on any scale in and through the bodies of multiplied singular actors (the protestor(s) in the case of the ‘movement(s) of the squares’). They can also manifest independent of this particular actor’s physical body. In this case images, sounds, objects, symbols, textual messages, videos, collective chants act as resonance objects that carry not a particular or specific meaning, but rather a limitless potential for producing meaning / sensation / intensity. I call these resonance objects ‘Affective Attractors’: instantiations of ‘potential[s] for interaction’,11 varied in strength and that can appear across the full range of sensory stimuli and any mediating structure. Different types of affective attractors operate in their own specific ways as resonance objects. Their strength depends on whether they produce a strong or weak resonance with the affective state of the participant in the action / event.

The eternal repetition of this visual cliche reveals its ‘true’ nature as a mediatized self-replicating meme. Not an expression of an ‘authentic’ desire, but a pure sign, operating in the mode of simulation, a copy without original, a simulacrum, and as Baudrillard states at the outset of his famous ‘Precession of Simulacra’ essay; ‘the simulacrum is true’, paraphrasing Ecclesiastes. The affective charge of the sign derives here not so much from its actual content, usually generic phrases, but from its instant recognition as a protest sign.

There is, however, a ‘second order’ of visual attractors that projects a much more powerful incipient connective force. This visual sign depends on a rupture of the semantic field, identified most precisely by Roland Barthes in his brilliant Camera Lucida as the ‘punctum’.14 In ‘Affect Space’ I analyse this mechanism in relation to the iconic Lady in Red image that became an immensely powerful affective attractor during the Gezi Park protests in Turkey in 2013. There the visual sign relies not on the instant recognition of a visual cliche become vernacular, but on producing a visual incongruity that disrupts interpretation opening up an interpretative and experiential void. Confronting this void, impossible to interpret breaches an infinite space of potential in which affect can flow freely. The connective force of these second order visual attractors derives from this impossibility of interpretation. They are then free to ‘connect that which is usually indexed as separate’.15 Visual attractors, such as the Lady in Red, can become particularly powerful affective resonance objects.

Aphoristic slogans, chants, short sentences create a vague but insistent sense of connection and turn out to be particularly powerful affective attractors (‘We are the 99%’ / ‘Je suis Charlie’), precisely because of their absence of particular content. Again, it would be a misconception (Massumi would gracefully say a ‘missed conception’)17 to derive from this that affect has no content. On the contrary affect has an overabundance of potential content, a ‘too much’ that forces its way to some expression / manifestation, building up as long as it escapes capture. This potential predicts future events without knowing where / when they will arrive because it can still connect that which is usually indexed and treated as separate (including diametrically opposed political positions). This is what determines its inherent unpredictability.

The human mike procedure used to amplify a single speaker to a crowd of any size without electrical amplification – practised in countless protest gatherings and immortalized in the #occupy gatherings on Wall Street and elsewhere in the United States and beyond – is a prime example of an auditory affective attractor. The procedure requires a speaker to speak in preferably short phrases, which are then repeated by the crowd (chorus) collectively. The triple ‘mike check’ is performed before each speech to temporarily synchronise the voices in the crowd.

Experience has shown that short and rhythmically well-constructed phrases work best in this type of setting, while the content of speeches filled with elaborate argumentation tends to dissipate. The true affective power of this auditory attractor lies not in the phrase itself (its syntactical or rhythmic construction), and certainly not in its content (semantics), but in the process of collective reproduction of the original phrase. The human mike is particularly inapt at initiating a process of deep and sophisticated (subtle) deliberation, yet it also creates an enormously powerful sense of connectedness across the crowd / chorus of participants. This connection is established not through what is specifically said (content / semantics), but in the collective speech act (the active participation in the collective action / event). In this sense the conventions of the human mike seem close in character to religious chanting, in which what is uttered is already known, focusing attention almost entirely on the collective process and its implied ritual meanings.

one’s own pre-existing state of affectedness (a state existing in advance of entering the crowd). When asked in a 2016 interview what comes before affect, Massumi replied ‘participation’.18 The participation in the crowd can in itself lead to a state of being affected by the intensities contained in others’ bodies, irrespective of one’s affective state before participation in the event: smell, hormonal exchange, body temperature, moist-level, gesticulation, facial expression, bodily posture and movement, murmur, conversation, cheering of the crowd / chorus – they all facilitate the capacity of affecting and being affected.

Through this recognised vitality of the body, the particular body starts to act as a corporeal resonance object, a corporeal attractor that galvanises the flow and amplification of affect in the crowd. Also here, an increased density (proximity and scale) of bodies (in a crowd) can facilitate the passing of the affective threshold and enable an exponential amplification of intensity / affect.

The erroneous conclusion too often drawn from this is that affect has no content. As observed earlier, we should rather regard affect as overfull with potential content and action. Massumi states: ‘the half second lapse between the beginning of a bodily event and its completion in an outward directed, active expression – this half second is overfull – in excess of its actually performed action and ascribed meaning. Will and consciousness are subtractive – limitative, derived functions that reduce complexity too rich to be functionally expressed.’21 In the process of mobilization of crowds and activation of public spaces this holds a crucial implication: under conditions where passing the affective threshold precipitates the primacy of affect over deliberation / conscious articulation, what acts as the connective tissue bringing together masses of previously unrelated actors is not so much a shared issue, but rather a shared affective resonance.

The passing of the affective threshold induced by the intense densification of Hybrid Space dislocates traditional conceptions of social action and social movements. Shared ‘collective action resources’ are no longer the primary source of activation of public space and large scale social / political formations. The shift from collective action to connective action proposed by Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg also does not fully capture this new condition.22 Bennett and Segerberg argue that the communication structures take the place of traditional organizational structures (unions, political parties, NGOs, action committees) and the ‘collective action resources’ that social movement theory attributes to these strategic actors. The communication structures themselves become the organizational structure, they argue, mobilized by connective action around a shared sociopolitical issue.

What their view fails to take into account, however, is the primacy of the connective force of affect under conditions of intense densification and its inherent semantic openness. The shared affect under such conditions can accommodate a theoretically unlimited range of personal and / or collective issues, while the strength of its connective force is strongest when a designation to any particular issue remains absent, or is only vaguely indicated (‘We are the 99%!’).

This new understanding of recent forms of collective gatherings of dissent and the activation of densified public spaces stands in stark contrast to the recent propositions of ‘thing-politics’ by Bruno Latour and the foundational work done by sociologist Noortje Marres on Issue Politics that Latour builds upon.23 Latour’s general hypothesis is that: ‘we might be more connected to each other by our worries, our matters of concern, the issues we care for, than by any other set of values, opinions, attitudes or principles.’ And he considers this seemingly ‘trivial’ observation part of a process of becoming a ‘realist’ in politics.24

It is then in this view the ‘Issue’ (Marres), or ‘Thing’ (Latour) that brings a public into being. In her analysis Marres defers to the Lippmann-Dewey debate of the 1920s to discuss the wider displacement of politics outside of conventional democratic arrangements, particular transnational institutions and global networks of Non-Governmental Organizations, where singular issues become the activating units for engendering a constantly moving political formation – or, in Latour’s terms, ever shifting modes of assembly. The title of Marres’ PHD thesis makes the centrality of this mechanism immediately clear: ‘No Issue, No Public’.

In Latour’s analysis the ‘Issue’ is expanded into the ‘Thing’, which is not just an object of controversy, but also a place of gathering (sometimes even a physical place). Latour introduces a highly elegant formula for understanding the connective force of the Thing: ‘(..) long before designating an object thrown out of the political sphere and standing there objectively and independently, the Ding or Thing has for many centuries meant the issue that brings people together because it divides them.’25

Both analyses share the common approach that after the displacement of politics outside of conventional democratic arrangements it is the controversies over issues / things that drive the new types of political formation, and indeed bring ‘the public’ into being. However, when considering the affect-driven types of political formation scrutinized here we can no longer assume this singular

Issue / thing as the activating unit of events given the lack of semantic ordering, the semantic openness, of affect. The relationship of affect to issues / things is not singular but differential. Affect can attach itself to any and every particular tssue / thing, and connect ‘that what is normally indexed as separate’.26

As a result, in events operating under the primacy of affect, Massumi argues in Politics of Affect, Virilio there is no sameness of affect, there is only affective difference in the same event, a process he labels ‘collective individuation’:

Say there are a number of bodies indexed to the same cut, primed to the same cue, shocked in concert. What happens is a collective event. It’s distributed across those bodies. Since each body will carry a different set of tendencies and capacities, there is no guarantee that they will act in unison even if they are cued in concert. However different their eventual actions, all will have unfolded from the same suspense. They will have been attuned – differentially – to the same interruptive commotion. ‘Affective attunement’ – a concept from Daniel Stern – is a crucial piece of the affective puzzle. It is a way of approaching affective politics that is much more supple than notions more present in the literature of what’s being called the ‘affective turn,’ like imitation or contagion, because it finds difference in unison, and concertation in difference. Because of that, it can better reflect the complexity of collective situations, as well as the variability that can eventuate from what might be considered the ‘same’ affect. There is no sameness of affect. There is affective difference in the same event – a collective individuation.’27

In events operating under the primacy of affect then, there is no immediate relation to a singular connective issue, but a differential relation to a multitude of possible, potential, implicit and explicit issues. The connective force of this type of affective gathering dissipates when the issues / things at stake become singular. We should raise the question here if it is still legitimate to call these social formations ‘publics’. And if there is no public, only differential affective ties, what does this mean for the democratic arrangements already displaced by issue / thing politics?

In The Vision Machine (1988), Virilio observes that under pressure of continued strategic acceleration, time itself becomes the object of technological research and development.28 Processes formerly handled by human operators are accelerated to a point where human consciousness and cognition no longer gain access because of their pure speed. This ‘fatal strategy’ is most clearly recognizable in military conduct, where increased speed constitutes a strategic advantage over the adversary, or at least the prevention of a strategic disadvantage. The same trend can also be observed in the civil domain, for instance, in automated screen trading, which has intensified exponentially both in speed and volume (the one being an expression of the other) since Virilio wrote his acid critique of these systems.

This trend towards technological acceleration / intensification beyond the human limit of access, leads to a split into two disparate time forms. Virilio calls human time, of conscious perception and articulation, ‘Extensive Time’, where past, present and future are still available to consciousness. Its threshold is the time it takes for a visual impression to be fixed by the retina, for impulses to travel and be processed by the visual cortex, and for auditory signals to be registered by the ear and neurologically filtered.

Any process beneath this critical threshold, too short in duration to be consciously registered and processed, simply disappears from conscious perception. Such processes and events accelerated to an ever-shrinking ultrashort duration below the threshold of conscious perception give rise to a new technologically constructed time-form. Virilio calls this new time-form ‘Intensive Time’. Here we see the true meaning of the word simulation for which he argues: simulation does not aim to represent anything, instead it substitutes that which it simulates – in this case human perception. And these artificial perception systems (perceptrons) do so under a strategic operative where the continuous drive for acceleration is guided by strategic (military / economic) necessity.

As humans we no longer have access to these processes. We can only imagine their operations, similar to how we can imagine the inaccessible electrochemical exchanges in our brains that precede cognition. These accelerated processes disappear into the time / space of ultrashort duration. They only become apparent and intelligible to us when there is a breakdown, an accident, a catastrophe, at which point they become visible to us as the fall-out of a fatal strategy gone wrong.

Virilio’s image also suggests the active presence of a multitude and ever growing number of non-human agents in public spaces. Network nodes, signal transmitters, routers, software agents, portable media clients and their continuously active communication protocols, surveillance systems, smart objects, location aware devices, automated traffic control systems and many other systems that ‘operate’ public spaces. Performing their actions in the ultrashort duration of Intensive Time they remain invisible to us ‘mere’ humans, disappearing from perception into the new technologically constructed time-forms. Affect and the new technological processes thus share the Intensive Time form of the ultrashort duration.

A good example of this new ‘affective’ approach to policing is the CityPulse pilot project, begun in 2015 by the City of Eindhoven in co-operation with digital services company Atos and the Dutch Institute for Technology Safety and Security (DITTS). The CityPulse pilot is focused on Stratumseind, a popular drinking area in the city, regularly welcoming up to 20,000 visitors on a given weekend, on which there will typically be a large number of public order disturbances. CityPulse intends to deploy police capacities more effectively to deal with these, reacting earlier based on a set of indicators that predict sudden ‘mood-changes’.

As project-leads Paul Moore and Albert Seubers explain in a short article for the Atos / Ascent Magazine,29 CityPulse uses five key methodologies to analyse data from the streets in near real-time: social listening, real-time alerts, sentiment analysis, sound monitoring and movement tracking. To generate street behaviour and mood data, an elaborate system of sensors, trackers, and automated and integrated video surveillance analysis is deployed using multiple cameras (aiming to eliminate blind spots), and constant, real-time analysis of mood-shift indicators pertaining to traffic intensity (monitoring mobile media use) and area-specific social media activity. The data sets are crosslinked to insure reliability. In a sense this ‘predictive policing’ strives to generate increasingly reliable behavioural (affective) profiles of behaviour in public space to detect anomalies as early as possible and alert police before disturbances occur. Affective profiling and behavioural codification through automated surveillance systems become key instruments of affective policing.

‘Objective’ versus ‘Subjective’ Space

The final distinction I want to introduce is the objective versus subjective character of Affect Space. There is an obvious tension between the subjective experience of a felt bodily intensity described by Massumi and others as affect, and its objectification in measurable physical units and flows. It makes little difference whether this happens in the cognitive psychologists’ and neuroscientists’ laboratories, or in datafied surveilled urban spaces.

The tendency here is towards a quasi-objectification of subjective experience by registering bodily cues (galvanic skin resistance, heart-rate, breathing patterns, respiration, blood pressure) and behavioural indicators. Increasingly, sensor technologies are built into wearable apparatuses (fitness trackers, smart watches, et cetera) that detect these cues continuously in a fully automated process with dedicated software and online platforms on which data are registered over time. Behavioural patterns can be distilled from this information, with lifestyle suggestions tailored to the user.

The objectification of affective markers has a specific type of quasi-objective visual language. Visualizations are most impressive when these affective markers are linked to the body’s movements in space (a.o. through position tracking in location aware devices), or to the movements of masses of bodies in (public) space. A good example is the visual analysis by interdisciplinary research laboratory AOS (Art is Open Source) of the activity on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare during the 15 October 2011 protests in Rome in response to the global protest call issued by activists involved in #Occupy Wall Street.30

The visualizations and explanation of technological methods for data capture suggest a quasi-scientific view of an affectively highly charged event, where the cumulative physical indicators (movement, network traffic, participants) suggest that the affective charge can be captured by ‘objective’ methods. There is an obvious gap between the anaemic visualizations and the intensity of the embodied events. Although the visualizations were meant to contest media and police focus on violence in protests, challenging the dominant narrative of ‘power structures’ that discredit protests, they instead seem to pacify the affective intensity.

Yet in less intense and entirely non-violent situations the gap between subjective experience and objective capture of affective intensity persists. Artist / researcher Christian Nold realized this predicament in his early and highly original and innovative project series in bioand emotion mapping, and ‘emotional cartography’. He too used quasi-objective data visualization, linking affective markers to time-based cartographic explorations. He gradually realized he needed a different visual language to ‘map’ different perspectives of the situations he investigated: that is, data-driven perspectives alongside subjective participant accounts of terrains. In the Stockport Emotion Map, produced in 2007 with approximately 200 people involved in re-mapping their local area, Nold provides a contrast to the static architecture excluding humans of conventional maps. He instead aims to ‘present a picture of Stockport that represents the emotions, opinions, and desires of local people’,31 using sensor data collected during the public Emotion Mapping process (measuring emotional arousal) with Drawing Provocations (participants’ descriptions and drawings of significance held by these mapping locations). The result is a more diversified representation of the subjective experience of the terrain explored and the data-capture of arousal indicators. One interest find is the lack of coincidence between heightened arousal levels and subjective recollections of ‘remarkable’ places, indicating a split between how participants subjectively absorbed the experience and how their bodies actually reacted to the terrain. This clearly indicates the space between conscious experience and affect at the heart of the discussion of Affect Space.

1. Practical engagement: As stated previously, this new techno-sensuous spatial order is not a speculative matter – it is already in full operation. It is neither accidental nor an unintended by-product of technological development. The mobilization and scrutiny of ‘feelings’ (affect and emotion) in the intensified densities of contemporary hybrid spaces serves a variety of strategic agendas (economic and political involving surveillance and control structures and strategic forms of disruption). While this emergent order is rife for manipulation, due to its nonlinear dynamics no single actor is in full control of its outcomes. Understanding these dynamics can help to develop more responsible design approaches to the key elements that drive them. The prospect of all-inclusive control structures invading our most subjective experiences, through consumerist and political manipulation, is obviously undesirable. Such forms of advanced affective policing and persuasion compromise both our ‘mental ecology’ and the public sphere.

2. Political engagement: The so-called ‘movement(s) of the squares’ has demonstrated the connective force of affect-driven forms of mobilization and activation of public spaces. Yet despite success virtually all of these ‘movements’ have been hampered by a dramatic lack of political efficacy. This conundrum presents itself as a paradox – how to account for the simultaneous success in mobilization and lack of any substantive progressive political outcomes. One reason is the semantic openness of affect. I have argued already that the connective force of these affect-driven formations relies primarily on the degree of affective resonance produced by the ‘affective attractors’ deployed by these ‘movements’. And furthermore that the most semantically void resonance objects create the strongest affective resonance. But this absence of a semantic structure with designated concepts (demands, issues, things) is deeply problematic when creating new and effective political formations. The moment a connection is established with an articulated political issue / thing, the connective tissue of the shared affective resonance breaks apart. The primarily affect-driven social formation then dissolves. This principle has rendered these ‘movements’ deeply ineffective when confronted with adversarial strategic political actors. The success of affect-driven forms of mobilization becomes a trap for activists staging the ‘choreography’ of protest, a liability rather than a possibility. It turns out when affective resonance is used tactically (through invention and deployment of forceful affective attractors), it becomes very difficult to bend it to a strategic purpose.

The other reason is less obvious, but perhaps more crucial in order to resolve the paradox of success in mobilization and lack of political efficacy. We have witnessed not so much the ‘mobilization of a crowd’, but modes of ‘activation of public space’. The ‘crowd’ is a by-product of public space when it is reconfigured under conditions of intense densification of hybrid space. Affect in this process holds more primacy over any deliberation, above the affective threshold. The process of activation is essentially blind – it accommodates virtually every issue or ‘matter of concern’ (Latour), and connects normally separate or even opposite issues.

The path of affect-driven forms of activation / mobilization is seductive, given their surprising short-term success in bringing together previously unrelated actors. However, continuing along it runs the risk of simply creating further instances of ‘political’ formation ineffective by design. Instead, it seems necessary to develop forms of political mobilization and organization that avoid, bypass, or transcend modes of affective activation of densely hybridized public spaces. In effect what is required are public modes of engagement that foreground deliberation over affect. I would describe this act as engaging in deliberative forms of political design.

The most notable exception to the rule of lacking political efficacy in the ‘movement(s) of the squares’ is ‘Laboratory Spain’. The country’s prolonged social crisis, with staggering levels of youth unemployment, a virtual war of generations in the labour and social system, a deeply entrenched anti-foreclosure movement and the coming together of a variety of other issue-driven social groupings has created a fertile climate for political experimentation. Different ‘political designs’ are deployed here to invade and take over political systems, enforce radical democratic changes and even used to incarcerate prominent representatives of the financialist elite who bear direct responsibility for the Spanish chapter of the financial and economic crisis of 2008.32

3. Experiential engagement: Art can play an enormously powerful role in experientially revealing the (hidden) play of / on affective registers employed by a variety of strategic actors, which mostly remains implicit within the structure of Affect Space. The classic urban driftwork procedure established by Guy Debord in his ‘Theory of the Dérive’,33 already served to reveal how the built environment influences its inhabitants on a non-conscious affective level. Location-aware mobile media pushed this work much further. Emotion and biomapping procedures developed by Nold mentioned above are good examples of artistic practices that reveal the implicit affective pre-ordering of the environment. The recent work on sound cartography by Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum is another example that contrasts the articulated descriptions of a terrain, in this case using Google Earth cartographic images, with the subtle inflections and resonances of the captured environmental soundscapes but there are many other approaches that can intensify this process.34 By breaking open the black box of the vast array of tracking and persuasion technologies that accompany our everyday movements, artistic experiments can help to reveal, experientially, for a non-expert audience, the presence and role of these non-human agencies in everyday life, whose operations normally remain covert.

If we redefine ‘design’ as ‘any deliberate form of intervention’, then we can see all of these different approaches to the exploration and reconstitution of Affect Space as part of the larger project of (re-)Designing Affect Space. The crucial question in this process of (re-)designing Affect Space is: who has agency in this emerging order, and what type of design interventions are required to distribute agency more equitably across different actors operating in this space (citizens, corporations, public agencies, civic organizations, local, national and transnational authorities)? We can consider this collective enterprise as part of the ‘progressive composition of the good common world’.35