Emotion, Space and Society 10 (2014) 35e43

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Emotion, Space and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa

Atmospheres of consumption: Shopping as involuntary vulnerability

Stephen Healy
The School of Humanities, University of New South Wales, Kensington, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history: Received 21 November 2011 Received in revised form 19 October 2012 Accepted 25 October 2012 Keywords: Affective atmosphere Bio-politics Consumption assemblage Shopping Subjectication Thermal comfort

a b s t r a c t
Shopping is predominantly characterised as an activity realized by purposive subjects in which emotion is sometimes identied as a contributory factor. This article argues that contemporary retail environments also promote shopping through affective forces that facilitate the subdual of intentional subjectivity. It is shown how, in addition to stimulating purposive subjects, the affective atmosphere of these spaces may regulate the auto-affective attention of potential shoppers exposing them to further, relatively unfocused inducements to shop. This quality of the affective atmosphere of these spaces is explored through a focus upon the ambient platform air conditioning provides for this achievement. The discussion explores the implications for the affective, subjective and bio-political dimensions of the socio-material assemblages constituting contemporary consumption more generally. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Malls affect people. Theyre designed to. But in some ways, either by their nature or by a side effect caused by their main ingredients, they do things to people that people are unaware of or dont understand, but if they knew or understood, they probably wouldnt like it (Kowinski, 2002: 399e400). Shopping is predominantly characterised as an enterprise accomplished by purposive subjects intent on instrumental requirements and/or social imperatives. Emotion is sometimes identied in, for example, the way shopping is related to processes of building and maintaining identity (Illouz, 2009), or perceptions of status and self-worth (Rafferty, 2011). This article identies another dynamic at play in contemporary retail spaces involving the subdual of intentional subjectivity through affective forces that act to expose potential shoppers to further, relatively unfocused inducements to shop. Going beyond existing work describing how contemporary retail spaces are engineered to promote shopping (e.g. Goss, 1993; Manzo, 2005; see also, in particular, Adey, 2008 on airports) it is proposed that, in addition to stimulating purposive subjects, the affective atmosphere of these spaces may regulate the auto-affective attention of potential shoppers making them more vulnerable to a variety of further inducements to shop.

Few analyses of shopping engage with affective and material considerations of the kind explored here. A recent study by Rose et al. (2010) is one exception that mobilises the notion of feeling to interrogate the strengths and weaknesses of actor network theory (ANT) compared with affect theory analyses. Their analysis of UK malls nds that while affect theory is insufciently attentive to rationality, understood in terms of the interrogative role of subjectivity (346), ANT might learn from the emphasis on multiplicity that characterizes accounts of affect (347). While this account supports their conclusion that analysts would do well to work with a richer and more complex sense of . human entrainment in buildings (346) it also suggests that their identication of three components to the feeling of the malls they examined1 underplays the complex multiplicity of their affective character. One problem such integrative analyses face is that the available cultural-theoretical vocabulary specic to affect remains underdeveloped relative to that available for matters of emotion and feeling (Massumi, 2002: 27). Rose et al. (2010) make an important

E-mail address: s.healy@unsw.edu.au. 1755-4586/$ e see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2012.10.003

1 Firstly, there is . the feel of affect: a more-or-less intense eld of assemblages, in which the shopping centres are cohered into a smooth, light, glossy and grey building in which bodies must continually be on the move in linear ows. Secondly, we have asserted the importance of feelings in buildings . the things that people feel in relation with both the building and their own memories. These emotions can be weak or strong, straightforward or contradictory. And nally . feelings about buildings . the considered, reexive opinions that people hold of buildings, often based on comparisons with other remembered buildings (Rose et al., 2010: 346).

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contribution in exploring how affective considerations intersect with more conventional normatively framed ones.2 This article does not seek to delineate precisely how the dynamics of shopping identied here intersects with more conventional accounts but assumes, following Rose et al. (2010), that the two are complementary. This assumption also echoes the stance on nonintentional subjectivity drawn upon here that views such vulnerable states as an inevitable complement to the purposive subjectivity generally grounding work across the social sciences and humanities (Harrison, 2008). Harrison (2008: 424) asserts that the pervasive preoccupation with purposive, intentional subjectivity marginalises the signicance of passivity, exposure, susceptibility and vulnerability, other than as a prelude to action. While Harrison (2008: 424) is concerned with phenomena such as . lassitude, exhaustion, and sleep this analysis argues that the affective atmosphere of contemporary retail spaces can induce a corresponding state. Corresponding because, echoing Harrisons assertion that bodies [i]n their sensate materiality . become overwhelmed (425) in such states, these spaces involuntarily engage the affective sensibilities of potential shoppers so as to open them to enticements to shop further than they had originally anticipated. Affect is pivotal to this account because it is distinguished from the more commonly subjectively conceived notions of emotion and feeling, with which it is associated, by its dependence on a sense of push in the world (Thrift, 2004: 64). This might be the pull and push of place (Duff, 2010: 893) or of bodies or other entities in particular places. Affect is, thus, relationally constituted and does not reside in an object or a body, but surfaces from somewhere inbetween (Adey, 2008: 439) emerging as a relation between bodies, objects, and technologies (Bissell, 2010: 272). However, affects tend to push relationships in some directions rather than others. To be concerned with affect, therefore, is to highlight corporeal, experiential and material considerations commonly overlooked in accounts focused by the notions of emotion and/or feeling. The concern with the affective dimensions of spaces and places explored here resonates with recent thinking about affect, place and practice including the concept of affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009; Bissell, 2010) and recent work on the affective imbrication of place and practice (e.g. Bissell, 2008, 2010; Duff, 2010). The concept of affective atmospheres highlights the affectively charged quality of certain spaces and places (Anderson, 2009; Bissell, 2010). Anderson (2009: 78) describes them as simultaneously indeterminate and determinate . a class of experience that occur[s] before and alongside the formation of subjectivity, across human and non-human materialities, and in-between subject/ object distinctions. Potentially acting as a shared ground from which subjective states and their attendant feelings and emotions emerge (Anderson, 2009: 78) they can shape circumstances in the sense of giving rise to a propensity . pull or a charge that might emerge . which might (or might not) generate particular events and actions, feelings and emotions (Bissell, 2010: 273). While these collective affective inuences may, as Brennan (2004) argues, have a basis in biology they can be manipulated in the pursuit of specic outcomes. Architecture is one means to this end (e.g. Adey, 2008; Allen, 2006; Kraftl and Adey, 2008) that Kraftl and Adey (2008: 226) argue can both engender . new elds of virtual potential .

[and] . simultaneously delimit, design(ate), and demarcate strict performative and often moral possibilities. Duff (2010: 881e882) ags a similar capacity in describing affective atmospheres as capturing the store of action-potential, the dispositions and agencies, potentially enactable in them, while Thrift (2004: 68) suggests a microbiopolitics of the subliminal that might be understood to underpin attempts to mold the possibilities depicted by Kraftl and Adey (2008). This article focuses upon one aspect of the affective atmosphere of contemporary retail spaces e the form of thermal comfort generated by air conditioning e in order to investigate how it might contribute to the possibility of shopping. Comfort is particularly germane here because although there is a lack of consensus on what comfort actually is (Bissell, 2008: 1699) its history is closely aligned to that of contemporary consumption. Crowley (1999, 2001, 2003), the preeminent historian of comfort, asserts that the predominant contemporary understanding of comfort as a sense of self-conscious satisfaction with the relationship between ones body and its immediate physical environment (1999: 750) developed circa 1700 and gave meaning (2001: 143) to the eighteenth century consumer revolution (142e149). Prior to this the term had referred primarily to psychological and spiritual, not physical, circumstance (69) with political economy making comfort a legitimising motive for popular consumption patterns in the rst half of the eighteenth century (143). The sensibility of physical comfort articulated innovative relationships between minds, bodies and material entities forming some of the more signicant assemblages involved in the new consuming practices.3 Crowley notes that comfort: had to be taught and learned . [and] . drew the attention of political economists, moral philosophers, scientists, humanitarian reformers, even novelists . [who] . gave . comfort . a new physical emphasis as they reconceptualised values, redesigned material environments, and urged the relearning of behaviours (Crowley, 2003: 135). So although physical comfort is today widely assumed to reect innate human traits and dispositions its naturalisation involved considerable time, effort, institutional support and resources. Bissell (2008: 1700) has recently developed three interrelated denitions of comfort through an analysis of sitting in a chair: an objective capacity, an aesthetic sensibility and an affective resonance. He relates the rst of these to Crowleys (2003) work, noting that it was engendered partly by the consumer revolution during the eighteenth century (Bissell, 2008: 1700). An aesthetic denition of comfort builds on the objective . but considers more seriously the relationality of the object and particular user with marketing and the remit of architects singled out as specic examples of this aesthetic sensibility (Bissell, 2008: 1700). However, comfort as an affective resonance: move[s] away from comfort as objectied or as intentional and instead present[s] comfort as a complex set of affective resonances circulated through a variety of tactile, visual and audio media. Comfort is no longer an attribute of an object but more a set of anticipatory affective resonances where the body has the capacity to anticipate and fold through and into the physical sensation of the engineered environment promoted (Bissell, 2008: 1701). This analysis elaborates Bissells use of Coopers (1998) description of the way early movie theatres used air conditioning

2 For example: [w]e found ample evidence of the affective materiality of the centres in Milton Keynes thinning out in moments of sociability, when the bodies of the centres visitors were no longer constituted in large part with the buildings materiality but rather more with other things e talk, daughters, food, laughter, phones e when other affects, and other things, are induced (Rose et al., 2010: 344).

3 A good early example are the social protocols that evolved in tandem with the utensils/tableware associated with the consumption of the, then still relatively novel, hot beverages tea and coffee.

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to market themselves (Bissell, 2008: 1701) as an example of comfort as an affective resonance. In particular it will argue that the affective resonance between a body and proximate environment in the case of physical comfort differs from that of thermal comfort. The following section provides a brief account of the emergence of air conditioning (a/c) explaining how the constructed sensibility of thermal comfort delivered by it became characteristic of contemporary retail environments. The subsequent section develops an analysis of the affective atmospheres of, in particular, shopping malls, developing the notion of shopping as involuntary vulnerability that describes how shoppers are rendered more vulnerable to enticements to shop. The ensuing section explores the role of such vulnerable states in determining sensibility, how this might shed light on contemporary consumption assemblages and the implications of these matters for contemporary bio-politics. These matters are further taken up and explored in the concluding discussion.

eighteenth century emergence of physical comfort, helped in domesticating and normalizing the use of technologies that might at rst seem frightening . [while] . also ultimately marginalizing those who still refuse[d] to use them (Ackermann, 2002: 125). Arsenault (1984: 628) underscores how air conditioning . affected nearly every aspect of southern [US] life. He argues that although the, typically black, poor were still commonly excluded from these developments a/c: inuenc[ed] everything from architecture to sleeping habits . contribut[ing] to the erosion of several regional traditions: cultural isolation, agrarianism, poverty, romanticism, historical consciousness, an orientation toward non-technological folk culture, a preoccupation with kinship, neighborliness, a strong sense of place, and a relatively slow pace of life (Arsenault, 1984: 616). Although only one of a number of co-constitutive inuences Arsenault shows how a/c was pivotal to such changes. For example, the demise of a vernacular architecture e open porches, high ceilings, breezeways etc e that a/c helped bring about not only facilitated the replacement of front porch conversations by a retreat behind closed doors and windows, but also inuenced the character of southern family life (Arsenault, 1984: 624) in other subtle yet fundamental ways. In tandem with other, sometimes linked, developments, such as shopping malls and TV, Arsenault concludes that even if, on balance, residential air conditioning strengthened the nuclear family, the impact on wider kinship networks probably went in the opposite direction (Arsenault, 1984: 625). Numerous studies have since documented similar developments elsewhere. Brager and de Dear (2003: 193e195), for example, point to correlations between Arsenaults observations and those of others, including Wilhite who described how in Kerala, among the poorest of Indian states, notions of comfort are rapidly changing and the heavy marketing of air-conditioning is resulting in the evolution of traditional climate-adapting buildings towards newer climate indifferent designs (Brager and de Dear, 2003: 194). Among the more extreme observations is that of Hitchings and Lee (2008) who describe the routine human encasement of a younger Singaporean generation who consider a/c an entitlement; have adopted dress codes and bodily dispositions to suit, and seem compliantly happy to retreat indoors (Hitchings and Lee, 2008: 261). These developments all involve an increasingly global regime of homogenous thermal monotony supplanting a heterogeneity of traditional climatically inuenced and thermally congured practices and associated spaces (Brager and de Dear, 2003: 195e197). Such traditional practices and spaces include not only the hearth of Northern Europe and America, but also the sauna of Nordic cultures, Japanese onsen, the evening paseo of the Mediterranean, the siesta of Hispanic culture, and the cool of Mosques and Islamic gardens. Thermal monotony has undermined many of these with Shove (2003: 62), for example, pointing out that the siesta is not only in decline but was banned in Mexican government ofces in 1999. Unlike invariant thermal monotony traditional thermal practices and spaces are commonly marked by, and even celebrate, thermal variation. The Nordic predilection for icy cold respites from the Sauna and that of the Japanese for scalding hot, and traditionally communal, baths (onsen) being specic examples. Heschongs (1979) account of the rich sensual and symbolic elements of traditional thermal sensibilities underscores the impoverished character of thermal monotony while Brager and de Dear (2003) highlight a potential physiological concern. They point out that all human sensory modalities are more sensitive to dynamic stimuli and readily habituated to constant stimuli and that deliberately engineering our indoor environments to minimise thermal stimuli . may be making them increasingly

2. Producing and exploiting a new sensibility [T]hought constructs its irreal worlds through very material procedures . that is to say, becomes real by harnessing itself to a practice of inscription, calculation and action (Rose, 1999: 32). The current a/c standard of optimal thermal comfort dening air-conditioned spaces emerged from an early twentieth century US controversy regarding the character of healthy indoor environments between fresh air advocates and engineers predisposed to a mechanical outcome. The engineers decided that thermal comfort was a universal category best described by a uniform space mapped by the parameters of temperature and humidity. The Comfort Chart that resulted graph[ed] . the combinations of temperature and humidity at which most people felt comfortable (Cooper, 1998: 71) and still frames the current a/c standard ASHRAE Standard 55.4 The Comfort Chart exemplies how once mapped such spaces tend to take on a life of their own, and are invested with powers which appear to allow the mastery of the phenomena they imagine or model (Rose, 1999: 38). Physical mastery is facilitated, in this case, by ambient parameters that along with the complementary provision of instruments for their measurement allowed the indoor conditions so dened to be reproduced on demand anywhere. Subjective mastery thence facilitated through the normalisation of these conditions such that they became socially worthy, statistically average, scientically healthy and personably desirable (Rose, 1999: 76). This achievement required signicant institutional support that helped ensure that a/c broke free of its geographic limits (Cooper, 1998: 79) and, increasingly, conditioned not only the spaces in which it was deployed but also those dwelling in these spaces. The current global ascendency of a/c started with its farreaching inltration of the post-WWII US built environment while its homogenizing implications are illuminated by its contribution to the decline of a distinctive Southern US culture (Healy, 2008). The post-WWII success of a/c was not a matter of consumer choice, however, but of how [a]rchitects and builders made the decision to air-condition American homes and ofces, then lenders and regulators stamped the change with institutional approval (Cooper, 1998: 142). Ackermann (2002) suggests that promotion and marketing played important roles and, as with the

4 Shove (2003: 29e34) provides an excellent discussion of the development of the current standard and associated issues.

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enervating and soporic (2003: 179). Under such conditions of thermal monotony or thermal boredom (195) the brain ceases to function in an adequate way (196, quoting Heron) and personal idiosyncrasy, culture, and socially conditioned value judgements all inuence subjective response and preference (179). So although a/c may induce a languid state this condition might also leave us susceptible to external inuence. 2.1. Effortless shopping Shopping could not have become as effortless without air conditioning . Along with the escalator, mechanically engineered climates enabled an explosion of the depth of the interior, creating spaces increasingly divorced from the outside, [and] increasingly inescapable (Leong and Weiss, 2001: 93). While movie theatres dominated early public space a/c a New York department store was the rst to be air-conditioned in 1919, only two years after the rst air-conditioned movie theatre (Leong and Weiss, 2001: 109). This was the rst of many and practically eliminate[d] the unpredictable, sudden uctuations in sales caused by changes in weather and increased [the] ow of customers attracted to the new consistent levels of comfort mak[ing] possible larger shopping spaces (2001: 109). Soon ideas such as windowless stores were being oated with architects front and centre of these developments. For architects the use of a/c was inevitable and a key to reshap[ing] every element of the modern store (Leong and Weiss, 2001: 114). This architectural interest resulted in the invention of the shopping mall . [which is] . the rst retail type to exist because of air conditioning (2001: 116). The rst of these, the 1956 Southdale Shopping Centre in Minneapolis, set the pattern for malls from this time, with groups of stores lined inward facing a central court. The designer of Southdale Victor Gruen is best known as the inspiration behind the Gruen Effect, which refers to the disorientation experienced on entering a mall further detailed in the following section. Malls everywhere, resonating with the character of thermal monotony, tend to possess a very distinctive and uniform ambience echoed in layout, ttings and commonly, also, brands and stores. In addition to attracting shoppers through removing the vagaries of weather, a/c partners other techniques for marketing purposes (Grandclement, 2004). Among the best understood of these is spatial design to regulate movement (Goss, 1993; see also Adey, 2008 on affective control in airports), while Goss (1993: 18) further points to a symbolic landscape that provokes associative moods and dispositions in the shopper at work in malls. In business management such considerations are generally framed as a matter of retail atmospherics facilitated through facility-based environmental cues (Turley and Milliman, 2000: 193). A widely cited review article in the Retail Atmospherics special edition of the Journal of Business Research notes the practice of creating inuential atmospheres should be an important marketing strategy for most exchange environments (2000: 193), and concludes that: retail consumers can be induced to behave in certain manners based upon the atmosphere created by retail management . [although] . consumers may not always be aware of particular facets of the retail atmosphere, even when it is inuencing their behavior (Turley and Milliman, 2000: 209). Turley and Milliman stress, however, that there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding both the character and content of these effects, a point echoed in more recent work (e.g. Bakamitsos and Siomkos, 2004: 313). Framed, for the most part, by the assumptions of cognitive psychology, this research tends to emphasize

a cognitive reading of subjective states and interpret shopping as buying behavior (Csaba and Askegaard, 1999: 34). This perspective narrows the range of atmospheric factors investigated (e.g. lighting and olfractory cues have been major foci)5 adding weight to Crawfords claim that: [t]he jargon used by mall management demonstrates not only their awareness of these side-effects, but also their partial and imprecise attempts to capitalize on them (Crawford, 2000: 130). This partial and imprecise character likely reects the limited understanding of retail managers of how the atmospherics they create encompasses the affective atmosphere of these spaces, something further explored below.

3. Mall atmospheres and air-conditioning [T]hats the whole idea . to turn off your mind and let you oat; to create a direct and unfettered connection between eying and buying; and the more you do the easier it becomes. Malls make for great eye/hand-on-credit-card coordination (Kowinski, 2002: 405). Although the direct promotion of shopping through the design of both space and the symbolic character of Malls is generally well understood (Crawford, 2000; Csaba and Askegaard,1999; Goss,1993; Manzo, 2005), this is not the case for other aspects of retail atmospherics. And while these strategies generally assume purposive individuals there is also a long-standing, parallel focus upon ensuring that retail environments encourage shopping through inducing a disorientated, somewhat languid condition. Indeed: [t]he transfer from a task-oriented buying to less focused shopping experience is known in the mall industry as the Gruen effect. It refers to inducing a dreamlike state in which consumers lose track of time and place (Csaba and Askegaard, 1999: 36). Kwinter goes as far as to suggest that as a result: [t]he unconsciously bewildered shopper, rendered docile, cannot help but drift into the prepared pathways and patterns of externally induced consumer activity, unfocused yet exquisitely suggestible to gentle but rm environmental cues (Kwinter, 1996: 96). The Gruen Effect, or Gruen Transfer as its sometimes called, is widely understood to operate on the basis of a scripted disorientation brought about by environmental cues (Walsh, 2002). While some of these e such as limited entrances and escalators congured to maximise exposure to retail activity e are well known, other disorienting aspects of mall design, such as the absence of clocks or daylight, are less so (e.g. Goss, 1993). Such techniques are constantly being rened with, for example, Daniel Herman claiming that the architecture of contemporary Mall architect Jon Jerde provokes the Jerde Transfer in which: shoppers movements break down under excessive spatial stimulation. Shoppers become bewildered as to where they are, where they are going, and how they will get there (Herman, 2001: 405). Kowinski (2002: 401) summarises such effects in terms of mallaise or mal de mall in which [s]imultaneously lulled and stimulated by the controlled mall environment and abundance of

5 See, for example, Chebat and Michon (2003) and Dennis et al. (2010) and references therein.

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products, the affected person at rst feels a sudden inability to concentrate, often accompanied by a loss of coherent speech or thought. This formulation highlights the contrast between the direct stimulation of shopping and induction of a condition variously described as dreamlike, bewildered, docile, unfocused, and suggestible in contemporary retail environments, notably malls.6 This section develops an explanation for this unfocused condition starting with an exploration of the thinned out character of contemporary retail spaces below. 3.1. Malls as thin places Casey (2001) viewed the orientation to place, exemplied by landscape, as a matter of constitutive coingredience in which place and self are thoroughly enmeshed such that there is no place without self and no self without place. This facilitates a distinction between thick places, such as landscapes that invite a rich enmeshing so as to enable human ourishing, and thinned out places in which thoroughly enmeshed relationships do not hold and that, as a result, become more simply like space (684).7 Casey does not, however, engage with affect. Duff (2010) remedies this in his assimilation of Caseys insights for his project on the ways young people negotiate and transform place and the impact these practices have on the characteristic orientations of self and belonging. Duffs concern with the practical and affective dimensions of . placemaking (881) is particularly pertinent to the focus of this account on the affective dimensions of shopping in contemporary retail spaces. He translates thinned out places into thin places: that have been erased of any local specicity, any unique quality or feature that might enable individuals and groups to actively engage with place, to secure some kind of purchase. These leveled down . places trade the specicity, the uniquely differential character of thick places for the fungible uniformity of the same, the familiar, and the navigable . one might note the strange consistency of international airport terminals, shopping malls, and fast-food restaurants, which increasingly resemble one another no matter which corner of the globe one encounters them in (Duff, 2010: 886). Thin places do not support resonant . placial experience unlike the rich, placed based affective and experiential connections achievable in thick places (882). Whereas [t]hick places invite the individuals concernful absorption e a deepening and broadening of the individuals lived experience of place e while supporting various practices of personal enrichment (886), the absence of sustained affective and experiential connections in thin places encourages distraction. Duff further underscores how such affective characteristics are not only a matter of subjective mood but also frame the array of activities and practices that might be realized in such spaces (884). We can surmise from this that the disorienting character of malls, and relatively unfocused subjective condition they can facilitate, reects a diminishment, relative to thicker places, in the quality and intensity of the affective experience achieved in them.8 Thermal

monotony, or more precisely the diminishment of thermal stimuli this involves, provides an ambient platform well suited to the facilitation of such a diminished affective experience. Experientially diminished by denition thermal monotony is known to facilitate a languid condition in which subjective response and preference might be opened up to further inuence (Brager and de Dear, 2003: 179). How this can be understood to facilitate shopping is further explored below.

3.2. Shopping as involuntary vulnerability [T]here are aspects of existence . which take place in the failure of the purview and horizons of the intentional or auto-affective subject. (Harrison, 2008: 436) Harrison (2008) argues that the general preoccupation with active, intentional subjects tends to overlook how we are also, sometimes, passive, exposed and vulnerable. While Harrison focuses upon conditions in which such characteristics are evident, such as exhaustion, and sleep, this section argues that his emphasis upon the, widely overlooked, signicance of vulnerability and analogous states is of further, specic importance for understanding shopping. This is because contemporary retail spaces induce a condition comparable to those of interest to Harrison. Comparable in the sense that retail spaces, such as malls, render shoppers potentially vulnerable to inuences specically designed to induce shopping above and beyond any original purposive intention. While this quality of the thin spaces hosting contemporary retail activities is enacted through a variety of inuences9 this section explores how thermal monotony might contribute to this achievement. The following section elaborates this by examining how optimal thermal comfort may reect Harrisons (2008) arguments regarding the role of vulnerability in constituting sensibility. The previous section suggested that thermal monotony can be understood to underwrite thin places thermal variation known to facilitate languor and allow subjective response and preference to be opened up to external inuence (Brager and de Dear, 2003: 179). These affects, in parallel with additional design cues intended to disorientate and confuse (see footnote 9), facilitate the involuntary opening of the subjective response and preference of shoppers to a battery of direct stimuli and other, more indirect, environmental cues designed to induce shopping. Bissells (2008) conceptualisation of comfort as a specic affective resonance, introduced in the rst section above, helps clarify how thermal monotony can be understood to contribute to this achievement. Bissell (2008) argues that comfort circulate[s] between and through both objects and bodies allowing bodies to anticipate and fold through and into the physical sensation of the engineered environment promoted (1701). However this embodied contingency forged between the body and the proximate environment (1703) is implicated and folded through the discursive constitution of subjectivities (1704) partially constituting, in the case of shopping, a subject vulnerable to inuence and suggestion. An examination of how the affective resonance involved in sitting in

6 The popular recognition of retail therapy suggests that some may nd pleasure in such states. 7 Reected in Auges (1995: 77e78) characterization of such spaces as nonplaces, which cannot be dened as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity. 8 Duffs study (2010) interrogates how thin-places can be made thick-places by way of the quality and intensity of the affective engagement achieved with, and in, them. As a result what for some is a thin-place is simultaneously for others a thick-place, with the place-making activities of the urban youths that focus Duffs study a specic example of this.

9 Walsh (2002) identies: subtle gradients of angling veer people down the pathways, especially in the food court areas. Along with climate control, a lack of clocks, and centrally controlled lighting, the consumer loses all sense of direction, time of day, and duration of their stay. Coupled with the maze-like design of the walkways (as well as of the shops themselves), the mall becomes a very disorienting experience. Mirrors and glass windows accentuate this confusion, along with reective walkways and mannequins, which unconsciously infer the illusion of more motion and human activity.

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a chair differs from that involved in thermal monotony illuminates how a vulnerable subject might be constituted in the case of shopping. In answer to the question: which end of the scale comfort should be placed on. Put simply, is desirable comfort an intensication of affect or conversely a waning of affect? Could the apotheosis of an affective comfort paradoxically be a deadening of affect, a nonintense sensibility; (Bissell, 2008: 1706) Bissell suggests that [o]ptimum comfort . might be best conceived as occupying the middle ground (1706). This is because sitting in a chair is never stable and . always at risk of transformation (1707) unlike the affective intensity characteristic of thermal boredom, which involves a deadening of thermal stimuli (Brager and de Dear, 2003: 195).10 Reminiscent of Andersons characterization of boredom as a malady of a bodys capacity to affect and be affected in which a will-to-connect differently . exist as tendencies and latencies (Anderson, 2004: 751), thermal boredom facilitates comparable tendencies and latencies to be otherwise connected as a result of the diminishment of thermal stimuli. Whereas Anderson (2004) focuses upon an incapacity in habit involving a diminishing or lessening in the affective intensity of everyday life, thermal boredom involves a narrower, but comparable, minimisation of thermal stimuli. Thermal monotony can thus be identied as the kind of nonintense sensibility that Bissell suggests might be the apotheosis of an affective comfort making the acquiescent sedentary body at rest or pushed further, at sleep . the ultimate comfortable body (Bissell, 2008: 1706). Bissell specically notes how this link to the lexicon of relaxation and restfulness (1706) indicates how Harrisons (2008) arguments regarding vulnerable states might apply to such an ultimate comfortable body. The nonintense sensibility of optimal thermal comfort can thus be understood to contribute to the thin affective atmosphere of spaces such as malls by helping facilitate states in which shoppers are rendered more vulnerable to the wide variety of stimuli designed to incite shopping. If we accept this as an, at least partial, explanation for the unfocused condition induced in contemporary retail environments a question remains regarding the character of this state. Harrison (2008) distinguishes the states of passive desubjectication he discerns in conditions such as sleep from those of passionate desubjectication others have discerned in skillful ow-like practices from sport to religious ritual (424). The vulnerability of shoppers resulting from the disorientating and, in the sense of a diminishment of purposive intention, desubjectifying affect of contemporary retail spaces identied here is, however, neither passive nor passionate but regulated. It is regulated in the sense that it is externally induced in order to render subjects susceptible to shop further than they had originally intended. While this involuntary character is not necessarily the case for all (see footnote 6) the general intention is to induce shoppers to purchase above and beyond their original intentions. I call this process of regulatory desubjectication in support of shopping involuntary vulnerability. Thrifts (2004) discussion of a spatial politics of affect throws light on how the regulatory intervention rendering shoppers involuntarily vulnerable might be understood. Going beyond Foucault Thrift proposes a microbiopolitics of the subliminal . that

produce[s] effective outcomes, even when the exact reasons may be opaque (2004: 71). However, while this notion usefully highlights the subliminal and bio-political aspects of involuntary vulnerability Thrifts (generally implicit) emphasis upon intentional subjectivity, a matter detailed by Harrison (2008: 431, footnote 10), presents a problem for its use here. The section below takes up the biopolitical implications of this analysis. Complementing, in practice, the purposive aim directed activity shopping is usually taken to be, the precarious achievement of involuntary vulnerability underscores that although corporeal life does not escape its implication in the elds of social normativity, this does not mean that it is reducible to these implications. (Harrison, 2008: 442). This excess and the light it might shed on contemporary bio-politics are taken up below. 4. Vulnerability, sensibility and consumption assemblages Before discussing some of the broader implications of this analysis a brief recap of the account to this point is appropriate. Early 20th century US a/c engineers invented standards that helped constitute the sensibility of thermal monotony that has a lineage going back to the eighteenth century invention of the contemporary notion of physical comfort. This nonintense sensibility (Bissell, 2008: 1706) contributes to the affective atmosphere characteristic of the thin places, such as shopping malls, in which the majority of contemporary retail activity is accomplished. This affective atmosphere can involuntarily subdue the auto-affective attention of consumers, making them more vulnerable to stimuli designed to encourage shopping. This subliminal affectively mediated mechanism is a form of bio-politics, helping sustain contemporary neo-liberalism, but before exploring this further its important to examine other implications of this account. Emerging as an innovative sensibility marking the new assemblages central to the rst distinctly contemporary patterns of consumption, comfort is a far from straightforward quality. Although comfort is widely assumed e reecting the pervasive emphasis upon intentional subjects and subjectivities e to be an innate trait or disposition, here it has been shown to be various, relationally constituted, things. While, for Bissell (2008), sitting in a chair is optimised when its affective intensity occupies the middle ground (2008: 1706) I have argued that thermal monotony is better conceived as a minimisation in affective intensity. Comfort can, therefore, be viewed as a variegated affectual complex (Bissell, 2008: 1704, see footnote 10). Harrison (2008) offers an illuminating insight into how this complex may have become constitutive of consumption assemblages from the eighteenth century consumer revolution onward. He does this by arguing that sensibilities, such as comfort, do not result from the purposive endeavours of intentional subjects but rather emerge from our corporeal and experiential vulnerability to relationships with the world external to us. 4.1. Sensibility as an external accomplishment Harrison, drawing primarily upon Levinas, argues that vulnerability is a relation to the exterior: which is not one of intention, disclosure, recognition, utility, or will and therefore . a relation which cannot be reduced to a matter of function, cognition, comprehension, or representation. Or at least not without remainder (Harrison, 2008: 436). However, prevalent frameworks focused by intentional action oriented subjects and subjectivities have difculty conceiving of such openness to the external world and of how the world external to a subject might constitute sense, thought and action. Most specically Harrison argues that this acts to obscure a

10 Bissell (2008: 1704) points out that [m]any commentators would argue that . comfort should be conceptualised as a variegated affectual complex acknowledging the potential for such differences.

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consideration of a heterological determination of sensibility (2008: 430). This is the idea that sensibility might occur because of: a relation with an exterior . composed from the outside, through and as a passive exposure which inspires, holds, and binds the subject in relations which it does not and did not choose and which lie before and beyond any of its abilities to comprehend, conceptualise, or represent (Harrison, 2008: 430). So rather than the prevalent emphasis upon intentional subjects for whom sensibility [is] subservient to comprehension (2008: 429) Harrison argues for conceiving of sensibility as something that may result from a rapport with alterity (439). Such a rapport involves an unconstrained openness to the exterior and an enactment of relations with external entities formed in passivity rather than in action. Under such conditions a subject does not form itself; it is incapable of folding in on itself or pulling itself together. Rather, it is closed from the outside by the touch of the other (438). Comfort, as detailed here, can be understood to be just such a relation not contained in knowing, grasping, or comprehending but [rather] traced in their condition in exposure (439). Optimal thermal comfort, for example, produced in susceptibility to airconditioned spaces can result in the development of new forms of bodily disposition and new kinds of physical sensitivity, as Hitchings and Lea observe in their study of the inuence of a/c on Singaporean youth (2008: 262). While the increasing homogeneity of practices and dispositions associated with a/c use is typically attributed to purposive subjects many of these e from shopping to merely being comfortable e can be seen to be traced in exposure to the proximate environments constitutive of them.11 The priority of exposure to an exterior, relative to the intentions of purposive subjects, is similarly witnessed in the way physical comfort had to be taught and learned . [and involved] . reconceptualised values, redesigned material environments, and . the relearning of behaviours in the eighteenth century (Crowley, 2003: 135). An examination of the consumption assemblage most proximate to malls shows how similar arguments might apply to consumption related sensibilities more broadly. Malls merge with other, related affectively infused assemblages. For example, other than their block like, typically windowless faade one of the most striking features of malls is the vast car parking space within which they are embedded, a relationship both fundamental and many layered. Malls are not only functionally dependent upon people driving to them but inversely, they provided one means of producing a long-term irreversibility in automobility (Urry, 2004: 32). The very size of this domain in which the emotional geography of the car (Sheller, 2004) overlaps with the affective atmosphere of malls underscores a not only instrumental, but also affective intersection between these focal contemporary consumption assemblages. Shellers observation that automobility is implicated in a deep context of affective and embodied relations between people, machines and spaces of mobility and dwelling, in which emotions and the senses play a key part (2004: 221) is also highly suggestive of the way such affective relations may be a more extensive characteristic of contemporary life. While poorly appreciated and understood, affective and embodied relations of a form similar to those examined here might, thus, be characteristic of consumption assemblages, and

even perhaps further mundane behaviours and practices, more generally. If so, the insight that sensibility might result from external connections suggests the potential for new sensibilities to evolve in tandem with new assemblages (e.g. social media). Currently, however, the world-shaping character of key consumption assemblages, from the more familiar such as automobility through to the emergent such as rapidly evolving information and communication technologies, is not reected in what is currently known about their affective and experiential qualities. The following sub-section explores the bio-political implications of involuntary vulnerability focussing on the role of thermal comfort in constituting it.

4.2. Involuntary vulnerability as bio-politics homo economicus now becomes the correlate of a governmentality which will act on the environment and systematically modify its variables (Foucault, 2008: 271). From a foucauldian perspective the standardization of optimal thermal comfort can be identied as a case of heterogeneous normalization involving, as detailed in Section 2, the complementary normalisation of ambient parameters and of the sensibility constituted through these parameters. The Comfort Chart, and instruments allowing the conditions it dened to be reproduced elsewhere, facilitated the normalisation of optimal thermal comfort within particular spaces that provided platforms for the normalisation of a sensibility attuned to it. As with comfort in the eighteenth century, much time, effort, resources and a great deal of institutional support and reinforcement were required in order to make this sensibility socially worthy, statistically average, scientically healthy and personably desirable (Rose, 1999: 76). However, unlike Rose whose concern with norms of conduct reects the predominant focus upon purposive, intentional subjects, the concern here is with a corporeal sensibility prompted by external conditions as much as by any internal purposive intention. While the notion of bio-politics centres upon a recognition that power commonly operates upon life itself this is generally understood to take the form of intentional subjectivities and rarely, explicitly, taken to encompass matters of affect. The regulative, affectively mediated, form of desubjectication that is involuntary vulnerability highlights an inherently affective dimension to contemporary bio-politics that is, however, at variance with the way others have depicted affective bio-politics. The previous section indicated how Thrifts microbiopolitics of the subliminal (Thrift, 2004: 71) tends to assume that subjectivity is intentional. However, this analysis is further distinguished through the focus upon the experiential dimensions of corporeal relations with particular spaces. Andersons (2012) recent discussion of affective bio-politics emphasises macro-scale dimensions to affective bio-politics, such as state-phobia a term that Foucault (2008: 76) coins for antistatism. However, involuntary vulnerability provides an exemplary example of a microphysics of power working at the level of individual bodies with, alongside and through better known processes of normalisation/normation,12 as the case of optimal thermal comfort illustrates. Thrift suggests that affective bio-political practices are gradually changing what we regard as the sphere of the political (Thrift, 2004: 58) but is optimistic that various forms of positive affective engagement might provide a platform for a progressive politics. Anderson (2012) similarly feel[s] [the]

11 Business suits are illustrative. The standard article of clothing assumed in the a/c standard e the clo e equates to a business suit. So while the global, and increasingly gender neutral pervasiveness of this form of clothing can be attributed to many things it is far from coincidental that people clad this way commonly dwell in airconditioned spaces.

12

See Foucault (2007: 57) for explanation of this relationship.

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political and ethical promise of work on the dynamics of affective life (29), however this account suggests grounds for caution. If the deep context of affective and embodied relations (2004: 221) identied with automobility by Sheller (2004: 221) were characteristic of contemporary life more generally then affective bio-political relations similar to those identied here might also be more pervasive. A potential supported by the affective intersection of automobility and malls detailed above. While the regulative character of such affective relations would likely be highly variable, and might be deemed entirely unproblematic in many cases, this account suggests that these relationships might encompass affective sensibilities generated from corporeal and sensate susceptibilities to the world external to us rather than, simply, from purposive intention. If this were the case a progressive politics capable of engaging these relations constructively would necessitate better and further insight into these dynamics than is currently available.

5. Sense, sensibility & bio-politics Similar to how an affective atmosphere unsettles the distinction between affect and emotion (Anderson, 2009: 80), this account has endeavored to unsettle and augment received perspectives on shopping, subjectivity and sensibility. In particular it has identied a process in which affective forces facilitate the subdual of the intentional subjectivity of shoppers acting to expose them to further, relatively unfocused inducements to shop. Most specically it has been suggested that the diminution in thermal stimuli delivered by a/c provides an ambient platform well suited this purpose. This is because the condition of optimal thermal comfort delivered by a/c can induce a languid state that can render subjects more open to subjective inuence. This more vulnerable state echoes Harrisons (2008) arguments regarding the importance of these states. However, unlike the passive desubjectication that Harrison (2008) identies with conditions such as sleep the desubjectication induced in shoppers is regulative in character, being externally induced in order to render shoppers susceptible to shop further than they had originally intended. This state of regulative desubjectication that may render shoppers more vulnerable to stimuli specically designed to incite shopping was termed involuntary vulnerability. Involuntary vulnerability results from the affective qualities of the assemblage within which shopping is accomplished and it was further suggested that analogous affectively infused assemblages may be a more general characteristic of contemporary life. This nal discussion takes up and further explores these matters. This account has underscored the signicance of the atmosphere infused through the consumption assemblage centred upon malls. While many features of this atmosphere, specically designed to induce shopping, such its spatial and semiotic elements are fairly well understood, I have argued that there is also a significant, and generally opaque, affective and sensible element. One aspect of this being a sensibility to thermal monotony that can help facilitate involuntary vulnerability. Following Harrison (2008) I have also suggested that this sensibility is determined, to at least some degree, by subliminal exposure to the world external to us. Shellers (2004) situating of automobility within a deep context of affective and embodied relations (2004: 221) and the, primarily externally institutionally induced, emergence of physical comfort as a dening feature of early consumption assemblages both support the idea that similar sensibilities may be a feature of consumption assemblages more generally. These are matters likely worthy of further investigation.

The regulatory character of involuntary vulnerability acts to induce shopping behaviours beyond those originally intended. This regulatory character differs from the affective bio-politics discussed by others (Anderson, 2012; Thrift, 2004), however. Involuntary vulnerability comprises sensate and more broadly affective relations with a thoroughly constructed, and in large part technologically constructed, exterior that facilitate a non-intentional subjective state. The emphases of this account on subliminally facilitated sensible relations with constructed exteriors and upon the nonpurposive subjective state constructed through these relations, distinguishing it from the analyses of both Thrift (2004) and Anderson (2012). The pervasiveness of such constructed exteriors and potential for comparable sensate and affective relations in other assemblages underscoring that analogous atmospheres might feature elsewhere. Involuntary vulnerability illuminates another way in which affective life is imbricated in the working out of the neoliberal problem of how to organise life according to the market (Anderson, 2012: 40). It suggests that the proclivity of neoliberalism for colonising affective life may be more pervasive than is generally understood. While reinforcing Andersons contention that affective life is an object-target of bio-politics (2012) it suggests that this targeting may be more pervasive and intimate than has been generally understood. While this might challenge those concerned to enact progressive political strategies intended to engage contemporary bio-political realities it may also ag potential strategies. These might, for example, embrace arenas, such as that of design, concerned with determining the content and character of assemblages, including their affective dimensions such as the sensibilities they may give rise to. However, unlike the partial and imprecise attempts of retail managers to optimise retail environments in the service of shopping (Crawford, 2000: 130) this would require better informed and sophisticated initiatives focused upon supporting the ourishing of those targeted by these endeavours. References
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