Thrift. Intensities of Feeling

Thrift, N. 2004 “Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect.” Geograkiska Annaler Series B 86: 57–78

Thrift claims that there is a need for considering affect as a constitutive force of cities (largely ignored in the bibliography) , he considers it both as a field of new forms of the political and for the construction of knowledge about the city. He identifies three (plus one) lines of defining of affect: 1) coming from a phenomenological tradition as a set of embodied practices, that produce visible conduct as a response (rather than thought), the emergence of emotions are in relation to particular contexts of interaction, a process which escapes representation (it can rather support it); 2) originated in psychoanalytic ideas which understands drive as a main motor of human motivation and identity, emotions are in direct relation to desire, some reformulations recognize a series of motivations apart for drive; 3) building over Spinoza and Deleuze and Guatari on the idea of affect as adding capacities to a body of through it interactions with a world "which is constantly becoming"-this section is very long- ; 4) a Darwinian interest in the facial expressions as universal and not just human way of expressing physiological processes. His main question is how to think the way affect works as a political force, in the face that contemporary power is linking knowledge, technique and affect that tends towards an "engineering of affect" (64) expanding in urban landscape in 4 ways: 1) a change in the form of the political, from party politics to the emergence of agencies of choices that make more and more areas of life be part of a set of responsibilities also called "choice"; 2) the mediatization of politics that enhance the importance of the perfomative, by concentrating on affective sites and magnifying details, "one line of movement can become a progression of meaning able to actualized and implanted locally" (65)-here he refers to massumi's example of regan- and that "provide a new means of creating fractal subjects challenged to perform across a series of different situations in a way which demands not so much openness as controlled flexibility [ok, but then a perfomativity in front of the camera and space of ambiguity, or affect os always ambiguous?]; 3) new forms of calculation in sensory registers that allow manipulation of very small spaces of time politically (form managing small body movements to producing knowledge about them) embodiment is expanded once opned it can be manipulated politically, generating a new type of power is created through a "microbiopolitics".
We should think of the opening of the politic of affect in different ways: 1) as a care of the self or a reflexivity that triggers forms of channelling and repressing affect in relation to the circumstances; 2) as a politics of virtual as decorporizations and deterritorializations that can both limit encounter or generate new forms of it; 3) as a politics of hope as productive sense of life as positive engaging with the world. All this can contribute to building a politics of affect that are beyond forms of articulation. Finally there are 4 ways in which microbiopolitics is being constituted (in relation to the definitions of affect): 1) as an enhancement of receptivity by developing skilful response; 2) working on negative affects through reparative rejoining different range affects; 3) widen the potential number of interactions (of play, of changing effects of sensory modes into others -synesthesia?- and recognizing the neuropolitics (ver Collony); 4) the transmission of emotion through the face in order to trigger common emotion in "redemptive" and even therapeutic ways (his ex. Bill Viola's work).
His conclusion are kind of intriguing: the politics of affect can reunite the passions and thought; it is been done currently through collaborations between theoretical and practical knowledge. This can both open new fields of the political as well as restoring old forms of it (bring back politics to discussion).

Bueno todo esto es interesante. Me quedan muchas preguntas de todos modos. Un poco confuso como es que se espacializa el affecto, si es solamente en estos micromovimientos y estos microespecios de tiempo, pero entonces que pasa con los punto de operacion de mayor esacala y que pasa con efecto de mayor escala, la ciudad que es en definitiva su interes. Algo de eso hay en la multiplicidad de formas de actualizar una misma linea de sentido. Que pasa con las formas mediatizar el espacio urbano por ejemplo o como el espacio puede disparar afectos en el cuerpo, en y fuera de la ciudad. Me generan dudas el enfasis en la mediatizacion visual, pesnando en el trabajo de Hirschkind, por ejemplo. Estaría buena alguna mensión a como se relaciona el proyecto the Thrift con los rusos hablando de desautomatizar la percepsión.