Towards a Digital Theory of Affect

By Martin Bressani Associate Professor, McGill University

A few words of introduction: The digital offers the opportunity to reflect upon the discipline and to reposition architecture on its own ground. In some of the talks, a certain nostalgia crept in: David Gersten recalling architectures traditional role of sheltering us from the otherness of the world: architecture as a mediator. Or Antonino di Raino seeing architecture as caregiver and putting the human body at the centre of the design process. Or Ingebor Rocker saying that parametric tools should be revisited for their qualitative and semantic potential. In these instances, we are told that architecture should be going back towards the qualitative rather than quantitative. I am also interested in this turn towards the qualitative, because I do think that the qualitative is the architects proper domain: the domain of sensibility. For that reason I thought it was interesting to turn to the notion of affect or the affective, As Picon briefly mentioned yesterday, there has been reflections on affect within the discourse of digital architecture. But, unless I missed something important, it has been rather cursory. Yet affect is currently a much-discussed theme in cultural theory, a discourse often influenced by the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Drawing particularly on his book on Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensations. My talk takes a somewhat curious form: not so much an argument, as a set of somewhat detached observations on the nature of affect, and its link to architecture and the digital. Not conclusive. It constitutes, rather, a preliminary discussion, a sort of prolegomena to a future theory. The images that come with it are simply meant as illustration of certain of the ideas I am enunciating. Not as architectural examples that would somehow reflect the theory. To tell you the truth I have no precise ideas of what a future architecture of affect can look like.

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An Architecture of Affect

Let me start by saying what an architecture of affect is not:

1- (Slide 1) An architecture of affect cannot be object based. It is not the building of sensational bodies, like the design of cars. It is not e-motive styling, to use a term coined by Kas Oosterhuis. 2- (Slide 2) Affect is immersive, a sort of edifice of sensations. It deframes as it envelops. We live within affect, and affect lives through us. In order to emerge as affective landscapes, buildings must be conceived in terms of intensification, of sensational intensification, an environment in which the boundary between subject and object is blurred. 3- An architecture of affect must propose an augmented reality (Anijos lecture): the contamination of the virtual with the actual, and the actual with the virtual. 4- (Slide 3) In this regard, the development of digital technologies eases our understanding of affective landscapes. Thanks to the deliberate, conscious injection of the virtual into our daily lives, it becomes increasingly difficult to conceive space as stable, autonomous, homogeneous. We become aware that space is invaded with affective agents, compounds of sensations running through space, like ghosts. 5- (Slide 5) Architecture has always been aware that human material existence is made of a composite of visible and invisible forces. In her critique of style, architect Farshid Moussavi explored, through the notion of ornament, how figures and affects can emerge from the material substrate of buildings. She sought to extract, through the skilful manipulation of material composition and processes of construction, the expression of embedded forces. Through the setting up of incidental, unfocused, and haptic sensations, architecture emphasizes the affective. Specific tactile sensations suggest specific muscle movements, enhance certain sensory activities, and can thus condition social and even cognitive processes. 6- (Slide 6) Digital tools have obviously the capacity to renew the range and richness of tactilities in architecture.

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7- (Slide 7) Yet media theorist Timothy Murray has appropriately described the promise of digital aesthetics as the creation of an enhanced zone of interactivity through which the beholder or the user enters within the orbit of the art work, projecting their own visualizations, fantasies, and memories in consort with the artwork, assuming a critique of traditional notions of environment. The interactivity between the work and the beholder, each acting and reacting, is one of the uncanny potentials of new media art: the world becomes populated with sensations, as if haunted by ghosts. 8- (Slide 8) In terms of architecture, the aim would therefore be to catalyze the production of affect by working on the interface between the domain of information (the digital) and the human body, or human embodied experience. A simulational circuit must be open between the body and information processing in order to generate an effect of deframing. 9- A digital architecture of affect must trigger the bodys capacity to work with and within technology, collaborating with information, so that the body becomes a medium of exchange with the technical work. Penetrated with a flux of information. 10- It therefore assumes that we see no inherent rupture between human embodiment and technical mediation. We must forge contact with the domain of information, whereby digitization generates sensibilities.

Now a few observations on the nature of affect:

12- (Slide 9) Affect is the investment of energy that anchors people in particular practices, identities and meanings. Affect is a pre-semantic topography of sensationsit does not provide its own justification. It is pre-rational. 13- It is the affective investment in particular sites that bonds particular representations and realities just as it is the affective investment in a set of practices that enables ideological relations to be internalized and, consequently, naturalized. (Grossberg 1992, 83.) 14- Recent cultural theory has increasingly come to realize that affect is one of the central categories in understanding communication and Instructions to Authors for Publishing ACADIA Conference Papers 3

practices of our information-based society (Massumi 2002, 27). In fact, our current condition may be characterized by a surplus of affect. With the eclipse of grand narratives, it is through affect, or affective maps, that people know where and how they can become absorbed into the world and their lives. (Slide 10) (Anijo yesterday described this as the triballization of the world. We live within tribes.) 15- According to Lawrence Grossbergs work on popular culture, we live today within affective alliances rather than fulfill functional social roles (as Foucault would have it). Everyone is constantly located within a field of the popular, writes Grossberg, for one cannot exist in a world where nothing matters (Grossberg, 84). Even religion today is the product of affective investment rather than a matter of faith in a stable set of beliefs. Perhaps it has always been like that. 16- Affect is thus the new mapping of belonging and identification (Grossberg, 84). To find ourselves at home in the social world, we must be part of affective alliances. It makes me think of Goethes Elective Affinities or Charles Fouriers passionate attraction. Today these affective alliances are concretized in social networking. 17- There is no precise cultural-theoretical vocabulary to describe the phenomenon of affect. Yet, cognition can be seen as emerging from affect: psychic life being nothing but a flux of affects. 19- (Slide 11) It is important, in this regard, to distinguish emotions from affect. Anger, fear, envy, or jealousy are emotions. Emotions being reactions to determinate objects. It is object base. I am angry against somebody. I fear something. I envy or am jealous of someone. Even if my fear is irrational, even if its object is fictitious or imagined, the emotion is still aimed at something, or maintains a symbolic link to an object, whether fictional or real. Emotions are thus always caught in a subject/object and form/content relationship. They are open to cognitive articulation. 20- (Slide 12) Affect, in contrast, is a bundle of sensationsdiffused. It partakes of moods, ambiance, and atmosphere. Affects do not have determinate objectsthey are non-intentional; they permeate our thoughts, desires, and motivations and thus have an unbounded claim on our attitudes. Affects, as I said earlier, are immersive, like a sort of broad emotional climate. We live through and within them. We slip into affect, like we slip into moods. Affects deteriorate, disperse, vanish, and reappear. They are a dynamic realities.

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21- Affect is a de-territorialized emotionfeelings in movement. 22- One of the interest of affectone of the reason for its architectural pertinence--is that affect is the results of processes occurring at the pre-individual level. It is not a subjective reality, in the sense of the emotional disposition of a given person; it is rather immanent, a general tonality that enfolds people and things at a given place, at a given time; it constitutes the world as lived reality. 23- (Slide 13) Affect is thus a corporeal, material phenomena: there is a specific physicality of affective transmission. According to late feminist theorist Teresa Brennan, affects are real entities like ghosts that pass through the air from one body to another she describes it as a scent, as a perfume, as the transformation of hormone into pheromone. Affect is essentially tactile, transmitted as contagion, as olfactory entrainment. We project unconscious affect onto others and we introject affects that others project on to us. As we transmit affects to one another, the boundaries of our bodies are breached. 24- (Slide 14) There is thus a virtualization of the body through the medium of affectivity. Virtualities, writes media philosopher Pierre Lvy, are inherent to a being, its problematic, the knot of tensions, constraints, and projects that animates it. (Levy 1998, 14). The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of [expectations] and tendencies, is a realm of potential. Affect is precisely this becoming-active, a state in-between activity and passivity.

(Slide 15) Now Id like to return very briefly to architecture, and conclude with a discussion of it as the construction of affective sites

25- Various practices transform the world in various ways. But only certain dimensions can be changed by any single practice, whether material, economic, social, cognitive, etc. Only by knowing which aspects of reality are transformed by any given discipline, can that discipline begin to hone its tools effectively. 26- Material reality is architectures domain. Architecture coordinates materials into specific configurations at the service of institutions and property: it compartmentalizes and allocates space; it creates limits and boundaries to serve social functions. (This of course follows Foucaults line of argument.) 27- (Slide 16) From an architectural perspective, however, the material configuration of the world is not merely a matter of quantities, the architect being acutely aware that the worlds appearance is always meaningfully given. His work is precisely to bring qualities Instructions to Authors for Publishing ACADIA Conference Papers 5

in what first seemed merely quantities. 27b- The architectural project concentrates energy in particular places or sites, demonstrating not only that we care about these places and sites but also describing how we care about them. 28- It is perhaps the intensity of energy invested that is important, not the exercise of judgment or cognition. The relationship between levels of intensity and qualification does not depend on a specific form/content relationship, but rather on levels of resonance and amplification. It is a question of affect. 29- The source of architectures power can be identified by the way space comes to play a role in peoples affective lives. The coherence of a work of architecture depends upon the affective relationships it sets up, and how it can allow or resist integration within peoples passionate landscapes. 30- Architecture thus invests space with a principle of excessivenessmarking sites with unusual intensity. 32- Architecture thus transforms or acknowledges that the world is divided into affective sites. It can be anticipativethe creation of new sitesor retrospectivethe identification of existing ones. 33- (Slide 17) Coming back on the question of the digital, the question becomes : how can we introduce the affective into the simulational circuit? How can the tactility of architecture overfill experience, so as to elicit a special interactivity at the edge of the olfactory and the hormonal? Can we create an architecture of pheromone?

Works Cited and Bibliography Ahmed, Sarah (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotions, New York: Routledge. Brennan, Teresa (2004). The Transmission of Affect, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Davidson, Joyce, Bondi, Liz, & Smith, Mick, ed., (2005). Emotional Geographies, Aldershot, England and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing. Dcosterd, Jean-Gilles, & Rahm, Philippe ed., (2002). Physiological Architecture, Basel, Boston& Berlin: Birkhaser. Grossberg, Lawrence (1992). We gotta get out of this Place. Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture, New York & London: Routledge. Hansen, Mark B.N. (2003). Affect as Medium, or the Digital-Facial-Image, Journal of Visual Culture, 2, 205-228. Massumi, Brian (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Instructions to Authors for Publishing ACADIA Conference Papers 6

Moussavi, Farshid, & Kubo, Michael, ed. (2006). The Function of Ornament, Barcelona: Actar. Murray, Timothy (2008). Digital Incompossibility: Cruising the Aesthetic Haze of New Media, Digital baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Previously published in CTHEORY, 2000.) Oosterhuis, Kas (2003). Hyperbodies. Towards an E-motive Architecture, Basel, Boston & Berlin: Birkhaser. Riley, Denise (2005). Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect, Durham: Duke University Press. Sizer, Laura (2000). Towards a Computational Theory of Mood, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 51, 743-769.

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