Feelings in the Air

Notes on Political Formation in Hybrid Space

Eric Kluitenberg
Research Fellow, Institute of Network Cultures
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, School of Design and Communication
Amsterdam, The Netherlands


Abstract. The concept of Hybrid Space, the layering of
embodied and electronically mediated structural spatial
relations, refers to a variable densified network of
interhuman and intersubjective relationships, intensified
in particular by the emergence and proliferation of
wireless and mobile communication and media
technologies. The volatile structures that result from this
densification and intensification create a vastly
expanded range of possible associations between
previously unrelated actors (human and non-human)
that generate a new complexity and unpredictability of
social relations.
Hybrid Space is marked by a number of characteristic
features: discontinuity, instability, continuously varying
spatial and temporal densities, heterogeneity of
simultaneously operative spatial logics. These
characteristics have profound significance for the social
processes that (can) unfold in such hybridised spaces,
and need to be taken into account when considering
processes of political formation and mobilisation in
Hybrid Space.
This network of relationships between human and non-
human actors is, however, not restricted to consciously
articulated communicative exchanges and interactions
of formalised network protocols. It also constitutes a
densified networked sphere in which a multitude of non-
conscious affects circulate, impinging on and
influencing the bodies of the human political actors,
further intensifying the complexity and unpredictability of
the emergent resonance and feedback patters that
shape our early 21st century political landscape.
This text explores how this densification and
intensification manifested itself in the series of street
protests staged throughout the year 2011, often referred
to as the movement(s) of the squares, and how these
conditions affect their political significance.
Keywords: mobilisation; affect; emotional habitus;
hybrid space;
I. INTO THE STREETS
The remarkable series of public protests that
headlined news media throughout the year 2011, despite
their heterogeneous geographical, economic and
political background, have been linked together as the
movement(s) of the squares in a plethora of news
reports, analyses and public discussions, as well as in
the self produced media outlets of the activists that
staged these protests. The naming of this constellation
as a movement or movements suggests a coherence
that seems to deny the heterogeneity of the local
contexts from which the protests emerged, as well as the
lack of fixed organisational structures operating these
protests. What is linked up quite uneasily here as the
movements of the squares is much rather a recurrent
connective pattern that generates a phenomenal
diversity of social relations. Nonetheless, the emergent
pattern is certainly not entirely arbitrary.
This state of things has left commentators and
theorists thoroughly puzzled, and consequently is now
the subject of the next plethora of commentaries, books,
papers, publications, and research projects. To
disentangle the constitutive elements that generated the
complexity of this constellation we need to proceed
with great caution. In my own reflections on this
phenomenon (or phenomena) I have decided to use the
naming movements of the squares as a temporary
place holder, justified only by its repeated use in reports
and commentaries. Rather than suggesting coherence, I
want to use this naming to tease out the complexity and
heterogeneity of the phenomena under question, and
interrogate their connective patterns.
Two aspects stand out as distinctive in the
movements of the squares:
First the prominence of the use of self-
mediating techniques and structures across a
variety of media channels and platforms.
Secondly the resurgence of street protest,
evidenced most prominently in the recurrent
occupations of public urban squares.
Both these aspects need to be brought into relation
to capture the specificity of the heterogeneous events
that have been linked up so uneasily here. and assess
their political significance. The concept of Hybrid
Space, which addresses the layering and
superimposition of embodied and electronically
mediated spatial relations, can be tremendously helpful
in bringing both these aspects, the simultaneity of
embodied and self-mediated presences in the
movement(s) of the squares, in relation. Such a spatial
analysis is in itself not enough to capture the full
complexity and the inherent heterogeneity of the
phenomena we are confronted with.
While the patterns of the protests showed strong
similarities, and activists borrowed models, approaches,
and tactics from each other (for instance directly sharing
manuals online for how to occupy public urban spaces),
the political, material and cultural contexts in which
these protests unfolded were radically different. Another
striking aspect was the tremendous heterogeneity of
participants, particularly in the initial stages of the
protests, suggesting the image of a broad popular revolt
or protest.
However, neither clear demands nor comprehensive
new political formations have as yet emerged from the
movement(s) of the squares. A variety of exasperated
commentators have lamented this absence of clear
demands in mass media (See for instance Naomi Wolfs
response in The Guardians newspaper, November
2011)
i
, as well as in discussions in activist and academic
circles (see for instance Jodi Dean and Marco Deseriis
essay A Movement without Demands, January
2012)
ii
. In the absence of new longer-term political
formations emerging from the protests, the energies
unleashed in the streets and squares have been partly
absorbed by established strategic political players, or
seem to have dissolved / dissipated altogether.

This leads o a fundamental paradox: How could the
activists who staged the protests be simultaneously so
effective at mobilising huge and deeply heterogeneous
groups of protestors, and at the same time be politically
so deeply ineffective?
My suggestion is that the paradox of success of
mobilisation and apparent political ineffectiveness
requires a counter-intuitive move: I start here from the
premise that content is not defining for the
performativity of the movement(s) of the squares.
Rather than claiming that there was no content in the
protests, or no real material underpinnings for the
outpourings of popular dissent, I hold that there was
too much content, and too many material issues
driving the protests to suggest or assume a coherent
phenomenon.
Even more so I believe that to focus on the qualified
concepts of political strategies, aims, demands, and
tactics does not help us to get any closer to
understanding the dynamic that unfolded. Instead, we
need (analytically) to make a down-ward movement,
into the microstructures of association, and even more
tricky, into the slippery domain of feelings.

i
Naomi Wolf, How to Occupy the Moral and Political High
Ground. The Guardian, November 6, 2011.
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/06/naomi-wolf-
occupy-movement
ii
Dean, Jodi & Deseriis, Marco (January 3, 2012): A Movement
Without Demands?, Possible Futures website, Social Science
Research Council, New York.
www.possible-futures.org/2012/01/03/a-movement-without-demands
For the moment, however, I will describe in a rather
more lateral movement the different constituent
elements that need to brought into this analysis of the
microstructures of association before such a downward
analytic trajectory can be begun. These elements are:
Marking presence, constituting subjectivity, the
affective link, the body of the protestor, semantic
openness, imperfect capture (of affective intensity),
double presence, variable densities (of Hybrid Space),
and finally impermanent associations. After considering
these elements the actual trajectory can begin, but this
will be were this paper ends.
II. MARKING PRESENCE
One important prediction that sociologist Saskia
Sassen made in her seminal work Territory, Authority,
Rights of 2006, has come to pass in the movement(s)
of the squares: the emergence of a new understanding
of the local as multi-scalar. Her idea is that particular
instantiations of the local can start to form global
formations by creating lateral connections between each
other through horizontal network connections. These
emerge in particular when social groups become active
simultaneously in multiple localities, across any
distance, that share similar interests or concerns and
start to communicate and coordinate directly among
each other, foremost by using internet communication
tools and protocols.
These new formations can multiply local actions at
different scales across vast distances and in very short
time spans. In the movement(s) of the squares this was
evidenced most clearly in the sharing of manuals on
occupations of public spaces, how to deal with police
actions, legal advice, and more general organisational
tactics. Via activist blogs and websites these documents
could be easily shared, adapted, translated, re-used in a
variety of contexts, without the necessity for formal
organisational structures or even shared ideological or
political aims.
This horizontal networking logic leads, according to
Sassen, to a new type of cross--border politics, creating
new linkages across space that emphasise the
importance of networks of relations and partly bypass
older hierarchies of scale
iii
. These formations stand in
marked contrast to the nested vertical hierarchies of
entities such as the IMF and WTO, and similar
institutions. Sassen:

An important feature of this type of multiscalar
politics of the local is that it is not confined to moving
through a set of nested scales from the local to the
national to the international but can directly access
other such local actors in the same country or across
borders.
iv
And Sassen summarises this new horizontal
networking logic as the constitution of new forms of the
global through the knowing multiplication of local
practices
v
.

iii
Sassen (2006), p. 369.
iv
ibid. p. 371.
v
ibid. p. 375.
For these local actors to find and recognise each
other, something else is still needed. They need to
become present to each other, and they need to do so
across vast distances and across considerable cultural,
lingual and socio-political divides. Much has already
been asserted about the new types of a politics of
presence in the movement(s) of the squares, but these
accounts tend to emphasise primarily the embodied
dimension in the protests and occupations themselves,
which cannot explain the rapid multiplication of local
practices across vast geographical divides.
The prominent role of self-mediating techniques in
these protests performs a crucial function for
establishing the translocal and transnational co-presence
of local actors. Self-mediation refers to the constitution
of mediated presence through the appropriation of
media production and distribution tools and
infrastructures by non-professional media producers.
Self-mediation not only allows these citizen-protestors
to become present towards the political context they are
contesting, but crucially also towards each other, thus
establishing a translocal presence that is recognisable
and can precipitate more active linkages and interaction.
And exactly this dynamic of new types of political
actors becoming present first of all to each other,
resonates closely with earlier observations of Sassen
made about the urban context as a new frontier zone
where such new and complex presences emerge. In her
contribution to the theme-issue Hybrid Space of Open,
Journal for Art and the Public Domain, Sassen reflects
on the urban context as a frontier zone. Sassen:
The other side of the large complex city, especially
if global, is that it is a sort of new frontier zone where
an enormous mix of people converges. Those who lack
power, those who are disadvantaged, outsiders,
discriminated minorities, can gain presence in such
cities, presence vis--vis power and presence vis--vis
each other. This signals, for me, the possibility of a new
type of politics centred in new types of political actors.
It is not simply a matter of having or not having power.
There are new hybrid bases from which to act. By using
the term presence I try to capture some of this.
vi
Already in this text she explores the idea that in a
similar fashion as the urban context the interconnected
media network, in particular the internet, could be
regarded as a new type of frontier zone. And self-
mediation can be regarded as a practice aimed at
establishing mediated forms of presence by non-
professional media producers. This allows for the
possibility of these new political actors to become
present to each other even when they were previously
completely unaware of each others existence, and most
likely not even intent on forging such new translocal
linkages and connections.
Self-mediation includes both political and non-
political forms of media practice. In fact, I have been
studying these new forms of media production since

vi
Saskia Sassen, Public Interventions - The Shifting Meaning of the
Urban Condition, in: Open No. 11, Journal for Art and the Public
Domain, SKOR / NAi Publishers, Amsterdam, 2006, p. 22.
1999, and it has continuously struck me that the
constitution of mediated presence appears to be the
primary objective of these practices, much rather than
the communication of a specific message or concern. In
the essay Media Without an Audience
vii
, originally
published in 2000, I have argued that self-mediation is
primarily characterised by phatic forms of
communication, i.e. forms of communication that serve
primarily social or emotive purposes, not the transfer of
information. (Jakobson, 1963 / Malinowski,1923). The
principal aim of self-mediation, then, is the
establishment of affective relationships not the
communication or transfer of information.

III. CONSTITUTING SUBJECTIVITY
This claim should not be misread. I do not claim that
there is no content in self-mediation, that there is no
message, no concern, no political analysis, no opinion,
or articulated feelings (emotions). Instead, I would
argue that there is an excess of such, a too many, too
disparate, too much to ever digest. Tens of millions of
blogs are online, millions of hours of video accumulate
daily on the servers of video platforms such as Vimeo
and YouTube. We are continuously confronted with the
paradox that publishing exceeds (in volume) the
(capacity of) global readership and viewership. Even
more so, the numbers of social media postings defy all
imagination.
This excess of authorship is not simply self-
reflective. It operates in a potentially public context, in
which publicity is often established unexpectedly
through unpredictable chains of linkages and feedback
loops. This inferred publicness is part of a process of
articulation and constitution of subjectivity, which
necessarily needs to take place in the face of others, and
in the hope of some form of confirmation by these
others. This subjectivity is a complex and problematic
one: it is notably different from artistic subjectivity,
which presupposes some professional stance, a specific
context of practice. It defies the Foucauldian critique of
the vacuousness of the historical subject, and the more
recent critiques of commodification of the self-
mediating subject by corporate self-publishing and
social media platforms.
Turning back to the squares, we can see that the
predominant image of the protests is no longer that of
the distanced media professional. It is not even the
perspective of the activist, a designation that
transcends a purely personal role or self-identification.
Much rather the protests were crowed with ordinary
citizens voicing their largely quotidian concerns. Again,
there was no lack of material concerns, no lack of anger,
no lack of political demands and aims, but much rather
an excess of all of these, no longer reducible to
anything approximating a movement. And through all
this a radical multiplication of singular viewpoints in
self-mediated expressions, distributed across vast
geographical, cultural and socio-political divides. What
the protestors manifested first and foremost was a

vii
Media Without an Audience, 2000, reprinted in Kluitenberg
(2008), pp. 294-303.
subjective presence, locally and translocally. Fuelled
primarily (indeed) by outrage, but as yet without hope
or direction.
In my Legacies of Tactical Media text, exploring
the tactics of media and spatial occupation from
Tompkins Square to Tahrir (Kluitenberg, 2012) I have
asserted that within this radically enlarged constellation
it becomes increasingly impossible to avoid the question
exactly what kind of subjectivity is produced here. At
that point (around October 2011) I proposed a
deliberately perverse understanding of the emerging
formations of subjectivity engendered by the excess of
self-mediation. This perverse subjectivity would be
entirely conscious of its own illusory character, of its
own constructed nature, of its incongruity, of its
essential contradictory and incommensurate make up.
As I wrote at the time:
It understands that the apparatuses underpinning
the new media ecology guide and control it as much as
it guides and controls them. It understands all this and
still delights in an excess of mediation, embracing it and
relishing it.
viii
However, this conscious strategy did not yet
sufficiently take into account the incipient connective
forces of affect that flowed between these perverse
subjects, which I now consider a crucial omission.
IV. THE AFFECTIVE LINK
Much has been made of feelings in the
movement(s) of the squares. Manuel Castells speaks
of outrage and hope (Castells, 2013), Paolo Gerbaudo
speaks of an emotional choreography of assembly
(Gerbaudo, 2012). However, when dealing with the
slippery terrain of feelings it is important to draw a
clear distinction between emotion and affect. I
follow philosopher Brian Massumi here in regarding
affect as a non-conscious and never to be conscious
intensity impinging on the body, while emotion is the
capture and qualification of that intensity, which implies
a radical closure.
ix
Communication scholar Lilie Chouliaraki has
observed that self-mediation is informed by a
characteristic performative publicness that can
generate a particularly forceful intensity, especially
when intense libidinal energies need to be displaced (in
this case the various forms of frustration fuelling the
protests). Affect flows not just between the protestors,
but also from the images and sounds produced on the
streets and squares and circulated in the media network,
as well as in the very communication act.
Affect emerges in the link, in the establishment of a
connection: The image flashing by on the street, the
flows of incoming twitter feeds or e-mail messages, the
vibration of the mobile phone receiving SMS messages
- the soft brimming in the hand or on the thighs, the
vibration of the table, the humming inside a sealed bag:

viii
Media Without an Audience, 2000, reprinted in Kluitenberg
(2008), pp. 294-303.
ix
My principal reference here is Brian Massumis essay The
Autonomy of Affect, in Massumi (2002), pp. 23-45.
Each and every instance confirming the existence of a
social tie in the act of establishing it - a sublime joy of
connection putting the existential threat of privation of
the social at bay. In the excess of message exchanges
during the various square occupations this joy of
connection became a true jouissance, bordering on and
transcending the orgasmic.
Clearly here, the affective link does not reside in the
message conveyed through this linkage, but much rather
must be understood to be coextensive with it.
Massumi points out that language is not simply in
opposition to intensity (affect), it is differential in
relation to it.
x
Language (articulation) does not serve to
capture or even qualify this intensity, but it moves, as
Massumi says, on parallel tracks. Language should be
understood to resonate with intensity (affect). It can
both dampen as well as amplify it. Affect and language
thus can form complex resonance and feedback patterns
operating on each other in unpredictable but yet not
arbitrary ways.

A complicating factor in understanding these
resonance and feedback patterns is the speed of affect.
Massumi notes that affect moves at approximately
double the speed of conscious perception and
qualification of impressions and states of the body.
Cognitive experiments have shown that conscious
qualification of such bodily impressions and their
completion in an outward directed, active expression
takes on average 0.5 seconds. Massumi calls this lapse
the missing half second.
xi
Bodily responses to such
impressions can, however, already be measured (for
instance in changes in galvanic skin resistance) within
02 to 0.3 seconds. Averaged on 0.25 seconds this
implies that the affective link takes half the time to
establish itself and operates at twice the speed of
conscious qualification.

Conscious responses, it would follow, are eternally
running behind such affective linkages, never able to
catch up.
V. THE BODY OF THE PROTESTOR
Affect, in Massumis understanding, is always
directly embodied. Given the speed of bodily responses
to such impingements, the body of the protestor
becomes enormously important for the analysis of the
affective linkages in the movement(s) of the squares.
Their physical proximity is crucial as affect is never just
contained within the body. Massumis notion of the
autonomy of affect is constituted exactly through its
capacity to transcend the individual body. He describes
this autonomy of affect as the degree to which affect
escapes the particular body whose vitality, or potential
for interaction it is.
xii
It is the proximity of bodies of protestors in the
streets and squares that amplifies the vitality of affect
and thus heightens the potential for interaction of the
protestors themselves. Affect is never simply in the

x
Massumi (2002), p. 25.
xi
Ibid. p. 29.
xii
ibid. p. 35.
message, the image, the sound, the haptic sensation, nor
is it in the body alone. Instead, the emergent resonance
and feedback patterns are what needs to be studied here.
When writing the Network Notebook in 2011 it
struck me that there was something, some force that
seemed to drive the protestors beyond conscious
articulation. A connective force that was somehow
operating beyond consciousness and simultaneously
stirring it, driving the protestors beyond themselves. I
did not have proper terms for it, but it was shining
through in the images from the protests:
There is an air of intense excitement that pervades
the photographs and videos of the revolution, a
seemingly transgressive type of ecstasy. In videos it is
indicated by the excited gesturing. In photographs it is
embodied in the gaze, a certain shimmer in the eyes. A
gaze, often turned upward, points to some kind of other
space, perhaps infinity. This excited gaze seems not to
be directed at anything or anyone in particular, but
appears to embrace something else. One might be
tempted to call it sacred. A connection is established
to something other, not regular life, not social
convention, not religious prescript. This image of
connection goes beyond the existing social order to
enter a potentially infinite space.
xiii
VI. SEMANTIC OPENNESS
Another characteristic of affect observed by
Massumi, is its semantic openness. It connects the
heterogeneous in all sorts of counter-intuitive ways.
According to Massumi the level of intensity is
characterised by a crossing of semantic wires, which
means that it is not semantically or semiotically ordered.
Massumi: it vaguely but insistently connects what is
normally indexed as separate.
xiv
This semantic openness of affective intensity can
provide us with more definite clues for the success of
the mobilisations processes witnessed in the
movement(s) of the squares. Particularly in the early
stages of the protests they were able to gather a
remarkable heterogeneity of participants, something
repeatedly observed by commentators, also in analyses
that mostly assumed a sceptical view on the protests.
We can assume that the composition of the protest and
encampment crowds changed over time and gradually
became more homogeneous, but this still needs to be
established on the basis of participant surveys.
xv
The semantic openness of the affective link was a
key factor in overcoming a vast array of ideological,
material, cultural, and political differences. It certainly
played a prominent role in establishing translocal and
transnational expressions of solidarity and support. It
seemed that participants in the protests were drawn into
the protests even before they realised whether or not
these events actually corresponded with their particular

xiii
Kluitenberg (2011), p. 45.
xiv
Massumi (2002), p. 24.
xv
See for instance the Occupy Research Network project, whose
outcomes still need to be comprehensively published:
http://occupyresearch.wikispaces.com
affiliations. An incipient connective force was driving
them beyond and before the conscious articulation of
outwardly expressed action or the capture of intensity in
(group) emotions.
The semantic openness of affect also precipitates
specific linguistic formations to which it resonates
particularly strongly. Generally the most generic types
of slogans and phrases, those most void of content,
resonate most strongly with affective intensity. The
famous We are the 99% slogan of Occupy Wall Street
is a prime example. While the slogan vaguely refers to
the excessively dis-balanced division of wealth in US
society, it makes an impossible claim to represent the
concerns of a dizzyingly complex and contradictory
constituency (i.e. 99 percent of the US population).
Moreover, the slogan was subsequently copied by other
occupations, among others in the EU where radically
other political issues were put on the table, but where
the 99 versus 1 percent division of wealth was not the
issue at all.
The slogan We are the 99% should therefore be
regarded as semantically void, which is exactly what
made it so highly effective as a resonance object for the
displacement of affective intensity across ideological,
cultural, and political divides. To a certain extent,
though more specifically associated with the Egyptian
context, the slogan We are all Khaled Said operated
on a similar level as resonance object in the eruption of
anti-Mubarak protests, where it served to temporarily
unite a deeply divisive demographic structure.
VII. IMPERFECT CAPTURE OF AFFECTIVE INTENSITY
In Massumis understanding formed, qualified,
situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions
of actual connection or blockage are the capture and
closure of affect, of which emotion is the most intense,
most contracted, expression.
xvi
Emotion can thus be
considered instrumental to constricting the free flow, the
autonomy, of affect.

In her recent book and PHD thesis, Moving
Politics (Gould, 2009), Sociologist Deborah Gould
builds on experiences gained from her extensive
personal presence in the ACT-UP aids activism
coalition. Gould accords a central role to emotion as the
capture of affective intensity in emergent processes of
political formation. She argues that emotions should be
recognised as a ubiquitous feature of human life
informing all of social life including the realm of
political action and inaction.
xvii
Following Massumi, Gould considers emotions as
the conventional or coded expression of affect in
gesture and language.
xviii
She connects emotion to the
social by building on Pierre Bourdieus notion of the
habitus to designate a social grouping's collective and
only partial conscious emotional dispositions, which she
terms as the emotional habitus. Gould observes that
affect can generate a strong desire to make sense of

xvi
Massumi (2002), p. 35.
xvii
Gould (2009), p. 18.
xviii
Gould (2009), p. 19 / Massumi, (2002), p. 232.
itself. It mobilises the emotional habitus, which offers
means of interpretation and naming of ones affective
states through processes of collective association.

Gould argues, however, that the capture of affective
intensities by the emotional habitus is always imperfect,
leaving behind a residue, what Massumi calls a non-
conscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic
remainder.
xix
Emotion for Massumi is both the most
intense expression of the capture of affective intensity
and of the fact that something has always and again
escaped.
xx
Both social movements and strategic political
formations can be seen to attempt to capture affective
intensity and bring about its closure, by forging an
emotional habitus or by directing it towards strategic
political objectives. But this capture remains inherently
incomplete, generating a continuous source of
instability, which can erupt unpredictably and
seemingly spontaneously.
The impingement of this autonomic remainder on
the self-mediating subject and the body of the protestor
can be recognised as an incipient force driving the
subject to find new forms of connection beyond these
coded expressions of affect, which can account for the
recurrent pattern of street protests and public square
occupations: A meeting of bodies of protestors creating
new (semantically open) resonance patterns of affective
intensity, thereby escaping fixation by any strategic
political formation.
VIII. DOUBLE PRESENCE IN HYBRID SPACE
The physical protest spaces created through the
occupation of mostly urban public spaces, are in turn
permeated by media flows, primarily because of the
massive presence of wireless and mobile media. This
layering of functional infrastructures enabled an
intensive self-mediated presence of the protestors on the
squares and in the streets, at times constituted in near
real-time through the use of public live streaming
platforms. The protestors in the movement(s) of the
squares thereby established a double presence (both
embodied and mediated) that dramatically increased the
range of possible association between what were
previously mainly unrelated social actors. Such
associations concurrently operate locally and
translocally on a wide variety of scales, potentially
scaling up to global formations, intensifying and
extending the multi-scalar politics of the local that
Sassen observed to a near real-time connection.
The layering of physical space with disembodied
and mediated flows of information and exchange is
beautifully captured by the concept of Hybrid Space - a
concept proposed and developed initially by architects
Frans Vogelaar and Elisabeth Sikiaridi.
xxi
Through the conceptualisation of Hybrid Space as a
spatial unity in which a wide variety of heterogenous

xix
Massumi (2002), p. 25.
xx
ibid. p. 35.
xxi
See: Vogelaar & Sikiaridi (1999) and Kluitenberg & Seijdel
(2006).
spatial and temporal logics operate and interact
concurrently, the multiplication of possible associations
between social actors (human and non-human) can be
analysed much more precisely. The presence of
mediated information and communication flows does
not constitute this spatial hybridity in itself, but
increases the density of Hybrid Space dramatically.
IX. VARIABLE DENSITIES
Hybrid Space is marked by a number of
characteristic features: discontinuity, instability,
heterogeneity of simultaneously operative spatial logics,
and continuously varying spatial and temporal densities.
The densities of Hybrid Space vary not only from place
to place, but also from moment to moment. The
(temporary) presence or absence of signal carrier waves
and electronic networking structures greatly contributes
to these variable densities.
In densely populated urbanised zones the densities
of Hybrid Space are most intense. It is here that we find
the economies of scale, the presence of overlapping
networks of economic, social, military, and political
activity that support these different functional and
technological infrastructures. In their text idensifying
translocalities Vogelaar and Sikiaridi refer back to the
seminal work of media theorist Vilm Flusser. Flusser
elegantly describes a network of densifying interhuman
and intersubjective relationships that can be recognised
as both an urban as well as a communicative structure.
Flusser:
"The new image of Man 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 sphere of life 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'."
(Flusser, 1988)
In the protests the variable densities of Hybrid Space
were demonstrated most clearly by the extensive use of
wireless media networks, live transmissions from urban
spaces, mobile media streams, SMS and twitter feeds
across and between protest spaces, the use of
geolocation enabled devices for co-ordination, but also
in the interventions of authorities shutting down and re-
enabling mobile and internet communication networks,
blockages of websites and social media platforms, the
intense use of military communication infrastructures,
satellite and aerial observation and analysis, and real-
time satellite communications used by (global) media
networks, authorities and protestors alike. The break-up
of connections is as significant here as their
establishment. A continuously shifting volatile
communication landscape emerged, characterised by
ever-fluctuating densities.
X. IMPERMANENT ASSOCIATIONS
The semantic openness of the affective links
established in and through the performative publicness
of self-mediation in the movement(s) of the squares
was particularly effective in facilitating and gathering a
wide variety of heterogeneous political actors. This can
help to account for the remarkable success of the
mobilisations in these protests. This mobilising potential
is further enhanced by the multiplication of connections
resulting from the widened field of interaction
(mediated and embodied) in Hybrid Space, linking up a
multiplicity of previously unrelated actors.
The semantic openness of affect may, however,
simultaneously account for the apparent lack of political
efficacy of these groupings: The direction of affective
energies towards some outward action, a common goal,
and even more so towards specific strategic political
objectives, implies a semantic closure that dissipates the
affective energies in the moment of their capture and
thereby dissolves the temporary affective links.
The associations formed in such moments of
affective linkage therefore appear destined to remain
temporary. The idea of an imperfect capture of affective
intensity by the emotional group habitus and strategic
political formations implies the ever-present potential
for the emergence of new and largely unpredictable (yet
not arbitrary) affective feedback loops, generating a
source for continued political instability. This instability
is further amplified by the increasing densities of
Hybrid Space, and the webs of interhuman and
intersubjective relationships that form there.
It seems then that once we transcend the domain of
articulated political strategies, aims, demands,
ideologies, and institutional structures, moving in a
downward (Feynmanian) motion into the
microstructures of association that constitute the social,
we encounter an enormous complexity that is as yet still
largely unaccounted for. These conditions are, however,
certain to have a wide variety of as yet unpredictable
effects on the flow and capture of future political
processes.
We could state that there is plenty of room at the
bottom here for analysis and research. Perhaps, indeed,
we may find a field which seems to be bottomless and
in which one can go down and down.
xxii

There is certainly a growing urgency to address this.

xxii
I am using a phrase here from the classic talk by physicist Richard
P. Feynman on December 29th 1959, at the annual meeting of the
American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology.
www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html
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