- Email: [email protected]
Understanding space ethically through affect and emotion: From uneasiness to fear and rage in the city
Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Emotion, Space and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa
Understanding space ethically through affect and emotion: From uneasiness to fear and rage in the city Francesca Ansaloni*, Miriam Tedeschi IUAV di Venezia, San Polo 2468, 30125 Venezia, Italy Regional Planning and Public Policy, Universita
a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 1 October 2015 Received in revised form 23 September 2016 Accepted 26 September 2016
1. Introduction “Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing ‘given’ as real […] might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves […], as a primitive form of the world of affect, where everything is contained in a powerful unity before branching off and organizing itself in the organic process (and, of course, being softened and weakened)” (Nietzsche, 2002: 35e36). In recent decades, theories on affect and emotion have taken on increasing importance in a wide range of academic disciplines, including political science, planning, and urban studies. Many approaches have been formulated and promoted, from biological theorisations, to Deleuze-inspired definitions (Connolly, 2011; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010), and have in turn drawn vigorous critiques (Leys, 2011a, 2011b), to cite just a couple. Among Deleuzian theories, we are mainly interested here in the conceptualisation of affect and emotion as politically crucial subjects for understanding socio-spatial processes in urban contexts (Bille et al., 2015; Massumi, 2015; Thrift, 2014). In this sense, we first need to make clear what (urban) space is not for us: it is not “a metaphorics, nor is it a transcendental principle of space in general […], nor is it simply a series of local determinations of a repeating theme” (Thrift, 2008: 16). Rather, we interpret urban space as ontogenetically (i.e. always in becoming) multiple, rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), provided with proper agency, affects, and emotions per se and
* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (F. Ansaloni), miriam.tedeschi@ gmail.com (M. Tedeschi). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.09.006 1755-4586/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
~ iga, 2003; inseparable from bodies (Low and Lawrence-Zún Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2013, 2015; Simondon, 1989, 1992, 2005). In particular, we focus on how combinations of spatial bodies produce affect, which finds temporary and collective stabilisation in emotion (Simondon, 2005) and ultimately yields the ethical direction (Deleuze, 1988; Spinoza, 2009) towards which a space moves and unfolds. In this process of unfolding, space, qua multiple, might manifest itself as social control, which is implicitly backed by urban policy, whereas bodies, fighting for their survival (i.e. following their conatus), might react badly to attempts to frame them or limit their movement. These two faces of urban space are doomed to clash each time they meet e and the temporary results of these fights are ultimately the way urban space becomes and expresses itself. As we will see, the affective movements of a space, which is one and multiple at the same time, were eloquently depicted in the novel High-Rise (1975) by James Graham Ballard. The author carved a perfect hierarchical order into space: on the top five floors lives the upper class; from the 10th to the 35th floors, the middle class; on the lower nine floors, the lower class. Ballard's purpose is to show us how the residents' initial sense of uneasiness with this rigorously organised building might escalate into a very wide range of emotions (hatred, vengeance, and fear, among others) that will eventually disrupt the utopian construction and transform the whole society, miniaturised in the metaphor of the high-rise, into a new and completely different structure where bodies and space find a new order following apparently unruly trajectories (lines of flight). Far from being a mere metaphor, the novel very closely tracks a real case of socio-spatial division that reflected a precise economic divide, a case also considered in this article. Of the many various regenerative interventions (or ‘social cleansing’, as many residents call them) spread throughout London, there is one practice we consider particularly telling. We refer to the recent trend of designing buildings with two separate entrances: one for private residents and a second entrance for social housing tenants (the socalled poor door). This development model has been negatively affecting bodies so as to bring on violent emotions, such as fear and rage, the latter clearly conveyed in the protests that have exploded in various areas of the city, part of broader rallies against social cleansing and evictions. Our London case study is based on
16
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
ethnographic fieldwork carried out with reference to protest movements and initiatives for social cleansing. The investigation was then completed via a desk analysis of the specific example of poor doors. Using both Ballard's novel and the empirical case, we aim to show how affect and emotion collectively unfold ontogenetically into bodies and urban space, eventually creating a new ethics of space (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). In this sense, bodies cannot be separated from their environment. Indeed, the latter is an actual, active part of bodies' process of individuation (Simondon, 1992), of their conatus towards joyful and empowering combinations with other bodies (Deleuze, 1988; Spinoza, 2009). This is the new ethical understanding of space that we would like to introduce: a space that, being ontologically multiple and inseparable from bodies, constantly brings about affects and emotions, along with challenges, dismantling the social orders promoted by urban policy. Furthermore, it is a conceptualisation of urban space based on a philosophy of life that values as good what is empowering or brings joy (Nietzsche, 2002; Spinoza, 2009) and as bad what is harmful to a body's capacity to act e i.e., whatever leads to sadness, hopelessness, hatred, rage, fear, etc. Finally, such space has not only conative movements that are disruptive but may also manifest itself as a controlling and framing force, like poor doors and Ballard's examples of socio-spatial hierarchical organisation. In the same vein, according to Deleuze and Guattari, smoothing and striating forces occur simultaneously. The smooth space of intensive becomings and the striated space of territorial organisation “exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 474). While smoothing forces are uncontrollable, striation yearns for control. Indeed, these processes do not reach a final actualisation, because a space can never be completely striated or smooth. The paper proceeds by describing the phenomenon of the poor doors in London, and contextualising it as one among many redevelopment interventions and urban policies that have been generating affect that unfolds into uneasiness, fear, and rage. It then reads poor doors through the lens of Ballard's novel High-Rise (1975), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and Simondon's (1989, 1992, 2005) philosophy of becoming, as well as Spinoza's ethics (2009). Finally it suggests, through an ethical understanding of space, an alternative conceptualisation of urban space based on fights between affects and on emotions' lines of flight and controlling forces.
facilities such as concierge, etc. Moreover, inside the building, lifts are also separate, as access to facilities lower-income tenants have not paid for. All told, the two groups of residents are not supposed to meet inside the building. One example of a poor door is shown in Figs. 1e4. This is a brandnew building, One Commercial Street, right next to Aldgate East tube station, in London. The primary entrance (see Figs. 1 and 2) faces the main street, whereas the second entrance (see Figs. 3 and 4) is reached via a small path alongside the building: “the brochure for the upmarket apartments of One Commercial Street, on the edge of the City, boasts of a ‘bespoke entrance lobby … With the ambience of a stylish hotel reception area, it creates a stylish yet secure transition space between your home and the City Streets’. […] But the lobby is out of bounds to some of those who live in the building. What the brochure doesn't mention is a second door, with a considerably less glamorous lobby, tucked away in an alley to the side of the building, alongside the trade entrance for [a catering business]. This is the entrance for One Commercial Street's affordable housing tenants” (The Guardian, 2014b). This is only one example. Another is Queens Park Place (NW6, London) (The Guardian, 2014a), an apartment building that will have its secondary access built directly in the car park. The Mayor of London's original purpose was to create mixit e by having private residents and social renters share the same building (Ansaloni and Tedeschi, forthcoming). In housing policy, the belief is very common that, in order to create mixed communities in new developments, we should combine private, intermediate, and council rents. The suggestion is that, if people share the same space, therefore they will mix. This assumption, which is still taken for granted in a vast number of political platforms and urban policies,
2. London's emotional space “Brooke Terrelonga lives here with her nine-month-old son e they moved into a social rented flat four months ago and she was surprised to find that she wasn't allowed to use the front entrance. Her mother, who doesn't want to be named, said she felt unhappy about her daughter returning home at night to the poorly-lit alleyway. She motioned towards two lights on the wall, either side of the door, which were the only lighting in sight. She said: ‘It's like the cream is at the front and they've sent the rubbish to the back’” (The Guardian, 2014a). The phenomenon of poor doors in London is the unexpected result of what was meant to be “sensitive, local approaches to the tenure and dwelling size mix of new housing developments carefully combined with policy to maximise affordable housing” (Greater London Authority, Mayor of London, 2012: 102). However, as it turns out, what has been developed is a space (the entrance doors of a building) that embodies a moral stigma (Ansaloni and Tedeschi, 2015). The poor doors, reserved to the least well-off, are not close to the main entrance, but hidden in the car park or in a secondary street, are made of poor materials, and do not have
Fig. 1. Main entrance (for private residents) in One Commercial Street, Aldgate east, London © Miriam Tedeschi.
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
17
Fig. 3. Secondary entrance on the left-hand side of the building © Miriam Tedeschi.
Fig. 2. Detail of the main entrance (for private residents) © Miriam Tedeschi.
conceals a misleading understanding of space that conceives of space as a fixed, single, mostly passive portion of the urban realm, with residents considered independent from it. However, according to Simondon, this cannot be the case. The reason lies in that, first of all, the individual-environment pair cannot be separated. Secondly, the pair is always in a yet-to-becompleted state (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Simondon, 1992), possessing capacity to evolve and proceed in a non-linear becoming. This becoming is what Simondon calls individuation, which interprets evolution as “a dimension of the being, not something that happens to it following a succession of events that affect a being already and originally given and substantial” (Simondon, 1992: 311). Individuation is triggered by the affective dimension, which translates the former in the transindividual (namely, the collective individuation, the being and becoming of an individual in society). In other words, affectivity is the neverending possibility of becoming an individual in its environment, a continuous exchange between the preindividual (i.e. a reality preceding the temporary unity of the individual and functioning as its source of continuous becoming) and individual, without which a body could not succeed in its process of becoming a space and in space, nor could emotion take place (Massumi, 2002). The latter is but the “point of insertion of affective plurality in unity of signification” (Simondon, 1989: 107; our translation), i.e., it is affect transformed or translated into collective actions. Emotion has a crucial role here, because it is what eventually determines which ethical direction the individual-environment pair will take. All in all, bodies are space and vice versa (PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos, 2015). Moreover, the two are always in a (non-
Fig. 4. Detail of the secondary entrance © Miriam Tedeschi.
18
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
predictable) multiple, ontogenetic becoming, which constitutes the very essence of being. This becoming on the part of bodies and space manifests itself as emotion, which therefore becomes the sense, the ethics of affect e namely, how affects collectively and ontogenetically unfold into the urban space. Let us point out here that, if we follow an ethical understanding of space, such as that presented below, both the poor entrance and the separation of common spaces are destined to make residents bear as much stigma as the space they inhabit does. Bodies are an actual part of the multiplicity of space e if a space is stigmatised, so are the bodies that constitute its material layers. As such, the stigma is not fixed but moves around as it becomes an actual part of the process of individuation of the individual-environment pair. The latter, in turn, reacts badly to the stigma (i.e. is unable to negotiate, to come into terms with it) and ends up generating harmful affects. These affects are distributed among space and bodies (Johansen, 2015), then collectively turned into negative emotions, such as the rage that has been explicitly expressed through protests in front of One Commercial Street. Actually, protests against social cleansing have been spreading through London over the last few years because of the sudden growth of the private housing market and the corresponding decrease in social housing provided by local authorities. In this sense, poor doors do guarantee affordable housing in prestigious buildings, so it is understandable that, in economic terms, they might be seen as an acceptable compromise by local authorities, developers, and housing associations. Poor doors and their stigma are also an expression of urban policy and the controlling side of space, which are fully part of its being multiple. However, some people are resisting this phenomenon. It is the humiliation and the uneasiness caused by the stigma that they are resisting. This sense of uneasiness escalates to become fear and rage, as Ballard so tellingly depicts in High-Rise. 3. On multiple spaces drawing affect and emotion In this section we endeavour to interpret the emotions of uneasiness, fear, and rage triggered by the poor doors, the consequent protests against One Commercial Street building, and the interventions of regeneration by working out a few concepts borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari's writings, namely, the rhizome and conatus. These seminal concepts are further reinforced through Simondon's notions of individuation and transindividuation, as well as Spinoza's Ethics. At the same time, for insight into the example of poor doors, we propose a corresponding analysis of a piece of literature, the novel High-Rise. In Ballard's work of fiction, a demiurge-architect designs an apartment building with the aim e we would say the hubris e to recreate a vertical social order by separating the least well-off from the wealthier, devising a bottomup ladder at the summit of which the architect-god himself resides. The novel is an interesting metaphor for what might happen when the quest for (i.e. conatus towards) social order, organisation, and efficiency clashes with a rhizomatic world of irrationality, unpredictability, and ethical happenings that wends along different lines of affect and emotion. Moreover, the novel lends us the perfect setting for a creative analogy in two ways. First, the building in High-Rise, much like One Commercial Street, clearly shows the longing of architecture, urban policy, and planning for selfpreservation (conatus), expressed through a hierarchical social order. Second, High-Rise describes what happens when bodies' movement and emotions are coercively caged into this order and demiurgically controlled. 3.1. The rhizome: emotion spreading like a virus “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing
reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension” (Ballard, 1975: 7). Under the surface of wealth and well-being, violent protests against inequalities and social cleansing keep erupting throughout London. Moreover, a sense of inexplicable uneasiness is spreading, like a contagion. “The atmosphere in London seems kind of heavy in these days, as if something were going to happen … There are more graffiti on the walls everywhere … Something might be exploding soon …” e this is what a Londoner told us when asked what the atmosphere of the city feels like. Not only do people feel uneasy; space itself emanates a sense of restlessness along with its dwellers. Indeed, it is easy to discover many people suffering from various forms of undefined anxiety. An old woman participating in one of the protests against social cleansing found herself screaming with no apparent reason, while a mother suffered a breakdown after being evicted by the local authority. Such spreading of fear and anxiety may be compared to the sinister atmosphere described at the beginning of High-Rise, a seemingly perfectly organised socio-spatial structure, that at some juncture started to bend, as it were, unleashing an undefined affect of something feels wrong that spreads like a virus, until the initially impalpable affect thickens and is transformed into blatant and violent collective (transindividual, as Simondon terms it) emotion whereby the order is overturned. We do not have, in London, such a disruptive effect as in High-Rise; however, we did find in this research a widespread feeling of uneasiness, a sinister dimension expressed in various, more or less explicit, collective emotions. Among them, hatred and rage are strongly conveyed by people protesting against urban policy that implicitly supports spatial barriers or divisions bearing moral stigma. Affect is a “set of flows moving through the bodies of humans and other beings” (Thrift, 2008: 236). Affects result from interactions of these rhizomatic multiplicities that represent a feature of territorial assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)1: multiple yet temporary compositions of bodies that “denote their ability to preserve the heterogeneity of their components and to form new assemblages and thereby expand their affects” (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 70). Analogously, emotion corresponds not to a state but can be understood as a becoming that promotes the collective process of individuation and “translates and maintains the possibility of individuation in the collective” (Simondon, 2005: 252; our translation). Otherwise stated, emotion propagates along rhizomatic lines that make its movements non-linear and its chance of dissemination unforeseeable. That is how, rather unexpectedly, the One Commercial Street building enters into connection with the self-defined ‘working-class action group’, which used the apartment block as an exemplary case within London's broader antigentrification movement. This triggered a regular series of protests that, in spring 2015, drew other social movements, the police, individual citizens, the street, and the media. One Commercial Street's residents unexpectedly found themselves right in the flow of Londoners' protests over gentrification, evictions, and the
1 We do not intend to discuss here in an extensive way the meaning of assemblage and its different interpretations in various research strands (see for instance Latour, 2005 or De Landa, 2013). Suffice it to say that for Deleuze and Guattari (1987) an assemblage is a heterogeneous multiplicity which faces the strata (a discernible, temporarily fixed form of the real) and the body without organs, the absolute possibility of becoming something else, “permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 40).
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
housing struggle. They are faced with the protests and cannot avoid sharing their space, at least once a week, with protesters, police, rallying cries, smoke grenades, threatening placards, and minor incidents. We assume our reality operating on a machinic basis, unfolding through autonomous and spontaneous arrangements of multiple and heterogeneous elements, which may be interconnected or isolated according to the particular nature of the contingent junction of bodies and space. The line of the next branching is not predetermined, nor is the becoming of the self-created arrangement, which can either be blocked by rigid lines e thus ending up temporarily organised with its flows frozen e or find free lines of change. Indeed, the rhizome does not admit biunique relationships, only multiple ones. Every axis of connection may be broken and regenerated along new lines. This rhizomatic understanding of the real enables nonhierarchical connections and relations that are determined by affect, namely by bodies' capacity to affect or be affected by other bodies (Deleuze, 1988). As we explain below, these capacities represent a body's power to act or be acted upon. They express the extent to which it can be enhanced or hampered when intersecting with other bodies, depending on the intrinsic ethical nature of the encounter itself. In this sense, the consequences of such encounters are rather unpredictable, for “bodily capacities are not linear effects of apparatuses and the acts, ideas and intentions that make them” (Anderson, 2014: 78). Encounters among bodies represent the eventfulness of life, the spur for social processes to keep on becoming, and the actualisation of manifold possibilities of connection. These possibilities are enabled by the nature of the space where (and with which) encounters take place: its being manifold and becoming, its being undistinguishable by those bodies that are parts of the same continuum. As Massey puts it, “if space is the sphere of multiplicity, the product of social relations, and those relations are real material practices, and always ongoing, then space can never be closed, there will always be loose ends, always relations with the beyond, always potential elements of chance” (Massey, 2005: 95). Returning to the rhizome, we have a multiplicity that is characterised by the potential for change, for forming new rhizomes and being transformed by their lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), and we have emotions that are not located in a single point (or body) but dispersed and moving along multiple lines of connection. In High-Rise, the sinister dimension that somehow emerges is an event placed between a past and a future, creating a rupture that is coextensive with the continuum of space and time where bodies move. It is impossible to locate the beginning of the chain of events, nor is it possible to locate the sinister dimension itself. We could call it uneasiness. It is an atmosphere that might grow and expand unpredictably as it is transmitted affectively along the rhizome, through a contagion-like dynamic, as Sloterdijk (2004) terms it. In the One Commercial Street case, our actualised version of High-Rise, with its engineered social order carefully organised through the public-private machinic assemblage of urban policy, planning applications, local authority, developers, and the housing association, a line of flight has emerged. This line rhizomatically heads for different spaces of action, but no one knows whether it is going to be blocked or flee elsewhere, or what consequences it will have on the immanent plan where the bodies intersect with each other and the space. Space and bodies that bear stigma react to it, becoming uneasy until their restlessness is thickened and transformed into violent emotions. The sense of uneasiness spreads, following the dimensions of the rhizome, sticking to the principles that belong to its unfolding, namely its starting ‘in the middle’ and carrying on becoming along its lines of connection. As
19
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos puts it, “to begin in the middle is to find oneself folded between the multiplicity of the world without a discernible origin, a specific centre and determined territorial limits” (2016: 81). We can give two readings of this notion. First, ‘things pick up speed’ rather unpredictably, but at the same time, just as unpredictably, they can slow down. In High-Rise, when the enforced order breaks down and fear and rage start propagating like a virus, no one can control the drift of those sinister events, for the action e along with the emotions that are its extension, in Simondon's terms e is not located at one point but emerges following the multiple folds of space. 3.2. The conatus: how emotion unfolds into space “Royal felt stronger and more confident than ever before. He had won his attempt to dominate the high-rise, and amply proved his right to rule this huge building, even though at the cost of his marriage. As for the new social order that he had hoped to see emerge, he knew now how his original vision of a high-rise aviary had been closer to the truth than he guessed. Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realized that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors” (Ballard, 1975: 129). If we focus on the One Commercial Street case, we may map wealthier people's desire to avoid their social housing neighbours so as to feel safe and secure at home. This desire unfolds into space through the controlling assemblage (i.e. local authorities' power aggregation, developers, housing associations, and urban policy) that separates functional parts of the building, such as entrances. We also may discern their fear at having to deal with the disruptive rage permeating protests in front of One Commercial Street, protests that aim to ‘devastate the avenues where the wealthy live’. We can as well observe those who are marked as less well-off feel uneasy and humiliated for bearing the stigma of having to use the rear entrance to their own dwellings. In this case, then, we find bodies entering into composition in a space that merely appears single, generating emotions that vary depending on whether a body is positively affected or repelled by it. These emotions are the multiple unfolding into space of conatus, the Spinozist term that describes active affect, i.e. each body's desire to keep on being and becoming, the primordial spark that triggers a body's movement. Conatus, or “the effort by which each thing strives to persevere in its being” (Deleuze, 1988: 21) and seeks joy, is the unconscious impulse for action (active and empowering affect) as well as the conscious desire (the emotion) we become aware of. Simondon refers to an individual's desire for eternity, for preserving its being (Scott, 2014), which he terms transduction (Simondon, 1992), the vital process that gives the sense of individuation (i.e., of the being's never-ending becoming), that moves the individual along multiple directions into the collective context, i.e. the transindividual, and, we may add, its space. By the same token, for Deleuze “all that I am determined to do in order to continue existing (destroy what doesn't agree with me, what harms me, preserve what is useful to me or suits me) by means of given affections (ideas of objects), under determinate affects (joy and sadness, love and hate …) d all this is my natural right” (Deleuze, 1988: 102). From a Spinozist perspective, this effort to push bodies to seek joy in new encounters and assemblages may enhance the body's own becoming as well as endanger it, because nobody knows what entering a new assemblage might entail. In particular, the consequences of an encounter might, at least temporarily, change a body's capacity to affect or be affected, to wit: its power to act. Deciding to live in the apartment block in One Commercial Street is an actual example of entering a new assemblage e with the
20
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
purpose of unfolding one's conatus into space, i.e. seeking joy in a safe and pleasant environment. Nevertheless, the composition of the new space with residents may trigger a whole range of unexpected affects (and, as we will see, emotions), which cannot be predicted, only experienced via the becoming-multiple-space (the process of individuation and transindividuation, in Simondon's words) of bodies. According to Spinoza, bodies' degree of power depends on whether they increase their capacity to act (a good composition in Spinozist terms) by composing with other bodies, or, on the contrary, diminish it (a bad composition). When a body encounters another body (not necessarily human) with which it does not enter into a good composition, its power to act is hampered, and vice versa. Deleuze and Spinoza interpret ethics as the dynamic result of these encounters, for good and bad are not forever-set values to be imposed demiurgically on space by urban policy; rather they are the temporary result of space's multiple compositions with bodies. Furthermore, we argue that what is experienced as emotion is precisely this ethical and spatial eventfulness. How does this come about? If we interpret Simondon's thought in a spatial fashion, the movement of affect (affectivity) is an apparent expression of becoming, namely individuation and transindividuation of one's body in space e and we may add, vice versa, i.e. individuation and transindividuation of space in bodies. Because there is not just one, but multiple modes of existence and of becoming-bodies-and-space, affectivity, at first scattered everywhere as generated by these different bodily and spatial compositions, seeks and ultimately finds its temporary unity in emotion: “affection is a slower emotion, it is emotion not yet constituted in unity and power of becoming […] emotion leads the living being, gives the latter a sense and attracts it, takes on its affectivity and unifies it” (Simondon, 2005: 260; our translation). In this sense, the significance of an ethical act resides not in its universality but in its actual integration into the becoming (Simondon, 2005) of multiple space, i.e. into the interlacing of spatial layers with multiple living beings. This integration finds its own sense, its own expression, via emotion. Therefore, ethical eventfulness is spatially situated, relentlessly negotiated, and emotionally expressed, depending on the outcomes of a specific encounter. If we interpret what happens at One Commercial Street spatially, the result of the engineering of space is that higher-class bodies end up ethically reinforced and empowered (good affects), while others are harmed (bad affects). Both entered One Commercial Street to seek joy and follow their conatus, but the result may vary in the two cases, for they compose (assemble) with space in different fashion. Therefore, when bodies' different composition and affect unfold into space, we witness conflict between bodies' conatus, as well as the movement of affect that eventually makes emotion emerge. Let us take One Commercial Street events to their extreme by applying our reasoning to Ballard's zoo-like building. Here, the high-rise and its social order are hostile to its inhabitants: the strict hierarchical organisation of apartments and facilities immobilises individuals' desires and spurs them to counteraction. The three leading characters in the novel are comfortable with the new arrangements of the bodies in the high-rise and have their power temporarily enhanced by their encounters. But this is not true for each body in the building. Power is not equally distributed among bodies e in the new dimension, as in the previous one e and some bodies end up yielding. Space draws conative lines that intertwine with bodies' affects and emotions. The result of this blend is something unexpected, unlike an architect's initial project for (i.e. conatus towards) perfect social order in the high-rise. Indeed, bodies (and space) react badly to this superimposed, demiurgic order, affectively setting up, in its stead, a rhizomatic aggregation
that escalates spatially and bodily from an initial sense of uneasiness, into fear and rage. Thus, after the disruption of the initial order, the inhabitants of the high-rise turn into nomads: they move from one apartment to another, climbing floors to meet their needs for food, sex or security, or simply to maintain their own affective conatus towards life, joy, and power. In turn, the high-rise, the habiter, a space initially striated (i.e. rigidly perfect machine a controlled) by the architect-demiurge, becomes a living creature, repelling its rhizomatic branch that unfolded as super-imposed demiurgic order and transmogrifying into chaos: facilities are out of order; every piece of technology has lost its functionality. As an actual part of the building's complete disruption, residents now feel free to express their full range of extreme emotions: hatred and rage have dislocated themselves into the building and move around freely. The building, in turn, spreads its own emotion, expressed as disorder and degradation, into bodies. From an ethical perspective, we can read the initial composition (the controlling space set up by the architect) as a bad one (in Spinoza and Deleuze's analysis), which triggers bodies' impulse to seek better composition (assemblage). However, this is only one of the possible outcomes of different bodies' conatus' fight for space. In this case, the disruptive force has taken over, but there is no predicting what direction a rhizome's branches will take next time around. All in all, from the initial indeterminate sense of unease among the residents, a full range of emotions is exacerbated as the assemblage evolves in ever more unpredictable ways. As Simondon would say, these emotions make residents' incompleteness (their never-ending becoming) apparent. Emotion, in this case, is the sense (the ethics) of actions (1989), the visible emergence of becoming-space that calls for reorganising (Baldissone, 2015) the building's whole structure and individuals' role in it. Emotion is the rising awareness of the modification in bodies' degree of power. This transformation stems from multiple bodily encounters and ends up bringing about the total disruption of the original social order, which actually degenerates into an uncontrollable jumble of bodies moving randomly within a corrupt, degraded, dirty, broken space. Rage and fear triumph because bodies and space have composed in a way harmful to both. Emotion has thus found its own way out of the imposed socio-spatial order, building a brandnew order. 4. Towards an ethical understanding of space “The key ethical move is to construct a body in which patterning is flexible, that is, to stay in a sustainable intensive ‘crisis’ situation, where the Body without Organs or the virtual can more easily be reached so that any one exclusive disjunction can be undone and an alternate patterning accessed” (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 64). Approaching reality as a rhizomatic becoming, we realise that, if space is observed ‘in the middle’, namely expressing its own agency, it attracts and actively takes part in the process of bodies' individuation. By doing so, it relentlessly generates happenings with ethical consequences in the urban realm. “Ethics is the sense [le sens] of an individuation […] the sense whereby the interiority of an act expresses a meaning in the world outside” (Simondon, 2005: 333; our translation). As we have seen, those ethical consequences, those ‘meanings’ are expressed in terms of emotion along the process of individuation. If we consider buildings, we may say that they individuate themselves into bodies (and vice versa). Hence, whatever shape the space takes, its very shaping will eventually affect the bodies that are meant to compose with it (Tedeschi, 2016), because bodies are space, and vice versa (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015). During the process of individuation, these affections may yield positive
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
(good) or negative (bad) effects, which is what we mean by an ethical understanding of space. Such effects can be understood as either positive or negative emotions, which may spread rhizomatically along multiple lines affecting connected bodies. Indeed, “emotion is not only internal transformation […]; it is also a certain impulse across a universe that has a sense [sens]; it is the sense of the action […] the emotion extends into the world as action the way the action extends into the subject as emotion. […] Actually, the emotion-action should be grasped in the middle, at the border between the subject and the world, at the boundary between the individual being and the collective” (Simondon, 1989: 109; our translation). If the composition is bad, bodies and space may tend toward disintegration (deterritorialisation) while seeking better composition, a sense of uneasiness may emerge, expanding to produce social consequences far out of grasp or control. And uneasiness may ultimately evolve into rage or fear, according to propagation mechanisms that cannot be foreseen. This can happen whenever the process of individuation between bodies and space is somehow spoiled or blocked (by stigma for instance): a movement (conatus) may push toward a new stabilisation (territorialisation) and, hence, a new ethics may arise through the affective renegotiation of bodies' own spatial position. In our case, vehement protest, part of a broader London revolt against spatial segregation, was triggered at One Commercial Street in reaction to construction of the apartment block. It looks as though the temporary assemblage that brought about One Commercial Street has imposed a stigma on space and bodies. The stigma's emotional movements have collided with manifold bodies, thus becoming the trigger (the conatus) for reaction, both spatially and emotionally. As for poor doors, urban policy's main purpose was to provide the greatest possible number of affordable houses: “the idea of the wealthy and the least well-off having separate entrances into the same housing block may offend but can also be a pragmatic way of improving the supply of ‘affordable’ homes” (The Guardian, 2015). However, even though the intention was meant to be good, and backed by a belief in mixit e as (always) positive, what has happened is that developers, in order to guarantee private residents high standard services (CCTV cameras, concierge, etc., which, according to the housing associations, social residents cannot afford) end up separating the rich from the poor.2 What we want to get across here is, first, that the outcome of mixing people together cannot be decided in advance. It may be successful or not, depending on the ethical direction that multiple combinations of bodies and space negotiate, temporarily deciding to agree upon. In other words, whether this direction is ethically good or bad (Deleuze, 1988; Spinoza, 2009) ultimately depends on how the multiple layers of bodies and space affect each other and, therefore, what emotion they generate. Secondly, urban policy utopias of order and control may actually spark negative emotions. Although we can foresee neither their direction nor their intensity, if we understand the stigma conveyed by urban segregation as a bad affect, we may expect it eventually to find its (temporary) stabilisation in fear and rage. What does this imply for urban policy? Can policymakers constrain their own conatus towards control and order? Can they accept that space, being “open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming” (Massey, 2005: 59), can never reach lasting stability? Is it possible for policymakers to discard their mainly demiurgic and monolithic understanding of space and to adopt a conception of reality that is rhizomatic,
2 We are not considering here that the poor doors often provide access only to socalled ‘affordable’ housing, whose rent level is up to 80% of market prices; in London this is not affordable for many people.
21
ethically situated, and ready for emotion to attach to action rather than being dismissed? Otherwise stated, is it possible for policymakers to translate into practice such a conceptualisation of space, making it “a prerequisite for history to be open and thus a prerequisite, too, for the possibility of politics” (Massey, 2005: 59)? The crucial point here is that policy-based controlling spaces are actual branches of rhizomatic, multiple spaces, thus indeed having their own conatus, affect, and emotion. If, as we have seen, the relentless struggle over space and bodies between striating forces and smoothing forces prevents urban policy from achieving its ultimate goal of the highest possible control, on the other hand, the conatus towards control cannot be completely eradicated from public policy. Indeed, policy cannot perceive itself as part of a multilayered structure. Rather, it keeps reproducing the mono-layered logic of set borders and clear frames. Hence, conflict between controlling forces and the lines of flight fleeing them seems unavoidable. However, this constitutes the very nature of space, how the space is reproduced and how it eventually becomes. Urban policy struggles to achieving control and order but cannot fully succeed. In the end: one can strive to establish boundaries, raise walls, set codes, separate flux; yet, one will end up with leaks, breaches, detours, violation, transgression. In between, there is always space for reversal: smooth space can be striated; striated space can be smoothed. In order to solve this conundrum, Lindblom (1959: 81) suggests “the method of successive limited comparisons” that he contrasts with “the rational-comprehensive method.” These (incremental) limited comparisons build out “from the current situation, step-bystep and by small degrees; the latter starting from fundamentals anew each time, building on the past only as experience is embodied in a theory, and always prepared to start completely from the ground up” (ibid.). Therefore, policy's chance to accommodate the becoming of space lies, in our opinion, in the slow opening of the policymaking process, in its transformation towards a less rigid and more flexible modus operandi. If we adhere to Simondon's idea that emotions spread across our reality by means of action, then policymakers should take collective emotion very seriously, acting to dismantle temporary negative stabilisations by being ready to redefine options for action at each turn, thus leaving room for new, hopefully more positive, compositions to arise. References Anderson, Ben, 2014. Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. Ashgate, Farnham. Ansaloni, Francesca, Tedeschi, Miriam, 2015. On stigmatisation of bodies and spaces. An ethical reading of the poor doors in London. In: Conference Proceedings of the Regional Studies Association Winter Conference on “Great Transformation: Recasting Regional Policy”, London, UK, 19-20 November 2015. Regional Studies Association, London, pp. 7e9. Available from: http://www. regionalstudies.org/uploads/documents/Winter_2015_Conference_Book.pdf (accessed: 21.04.16.). Ansaloni, Francesca, Tedeschi, Miriam. Demiurgic versus rhizomatic planning. Towards an ethical understanding of the urban realm. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on New Urban Languages: Tales and Images of Spatial Justice, TUDelft, Delft, 24e26 June 2015 forthcoming. Baldissone, Riccardo, 2015. I and another: rethinking the subject of human rights with Dostoyevsky, Bachtin and Simondon. In: Ward, Ian (Ed.), Literature and Human Rights: the Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights Discourse. Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston, pp. 83e100. Ballard, James Graham, 1975. High-rise. Jonathan Cape, London. Bille, Mikkel, Bjerregaard, Peter, Sørensen, Tim Flohr, 2015. Staging atmospheres: materiality, culture, and the texture of the in-between. Emot. Space Soc. 15, 31e38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.11.002. Bonta, Mark, Protevi, John, 2004. Deleuze and Geophilosophy, a Guide and Glossary. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Connolly, William E., 2011. Critical response I. The complexity of intention. Crit. Enq. 37, 791e798. De Landa, Manuel, 2013. A New Philosophy of Society. Bloomsbury Academic, London.
22
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
Deleuze, Gilles, 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. City Lights Publishers, San Francisco. Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Felix, 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi Trans.). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Greater London Authority, Mayor of London, 2012. Housing Supplementary Planning Guidance, November 2012. Greater London Authority, London. Available from: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Housing%20SPG%20FINAL %20Low%20Resolution_0.pdf (accessed: 27.09.15.). Gregg, Melissa, Seigworth, Gregory J., 2010. An inventory of shimmers. In: Gregg, M., Seigworth, G.J. (Eds.), The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, Durham & London, pp. 1e38. Johansen, Birgitte Schepelern, 2015. Locating hatred: on the materiality of emotions. Emot. Space Soc. 16, 48e55. Latour, Bruno, 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Leys, Ruth, 2011a. The turn to affect: a critique. Crit. Enq. 37, 434e472. Available from: http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/uploads/pdf/Leys_Turn_to_Affect.pdf (accessed: 21.04.16.). Leys, Ruth, 2011b. Critical response II. Affect and intention: a reply to William E. Connolly. Crit. Enq. 37, 799e805. Available from: http://criticalinquiry.uchicago. edu/uploads/pdf/Leys_Affect_Intention_Reply.pdf (accessed: 21.04.16.). Lindblom, Charles E., 1959. The science of ‘muddling through’. Public Adm. Rev. 19 (2), 79e88. Available from: https://faculty.washington.edu/mccurdy/ SciencePolicy/Lindblom%20Muddling%20Through.pdf (accessed: 09.05.16.). ~ iga, Denise, 2003. Locating culture. In: Low, S.M., Low, Setha M., Lawrence-Zún ~ iga, D. (Eds.), The Anthropology of Space and Place. Blackwell Lawrence- Zún Publishing, Malden, Oxford, Carlton, pp. 1e47. Massey, Doreen, 2005. For Space. Sage Publications, London. Massumi, Brian, 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, Durham & London. Massumi, Brian, 2015. Politics of Affect. Polity Press, Cambridge, Malden. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2002. Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, 2013. Atmospheres of law: senses, affects, lawscapes. Emot. Space Soc. 7, 35e44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.emospa.2012.03.001.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, 2015. Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere. Routledge, New York. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, 2016. Milieu, territory, atmosphere: new spaces of knowledge. In: Cusinato, A., Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (Eds.), Knowledge-creating Milieus in Europe. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 79e95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45173-7_5. Scott, David, 2014. Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation: a Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Simondon, Gilbert, 1989. L'Individuation Psychique et Collective. Aubier, Paris. Simondon, Gilbert, 1992. The Genesis of the Individual. In: Crary, J., Kwinter, S. (Eds.), Incorporations, Zone Books, pp. 297e319. New York. la lumie re des notions de forme et Simondon, Gilbert, 2005. L’individuation a ro ^me Millon, Grenoble. d’information. Editions Je €ren III: Sch€ €rologie. Suhrkamp, Sloterdijk, Peter, 2004. Spha aume: Plurale Spha Frankfurt-am-Main. Spinoza, Baruch, 2009. The Ethics (Ethica More Geometrico Demonstrata). Project Gutenberg. Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/ 3800-h.htm (accessed: 27.09.15.). Tedeschi, Miriam, 2016. Towards an ethical turn in urban studies: on the role of information and power in contemporary cities. plaNext 2, 9e27. http:// dx.doi.org/10.17418/planext.2016.2vol.02. The Guardian, 2014a. 'Poor Doors': Not the Worst Thing about Social Housing. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecturedesign-blog/2014/jul/30/poor-door-social-housing-apartheid (accessed: 27.09.15.). The Guardian, 2014b. Poor Doors: the Segregation of London's Inner-city Flat Dwellers. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/25/ poor-doors-segregation-london-flats (accessed: 27.09.15.). The Guardian, 2015. What Would a Ban on 'poor Doors' Achieve? Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/davehillblog/2015/aug/03/londonhousing-what-would-a-ban-on-poor-doors-achieve (accessed: 27.09.15.). Thrift, Nigel, 2008. Non-representational Theory. Space j Politics j Affect. Routledge, Abingdon. Thrift, Nigel, 2014. The ‘sentient’ city and what it may portend. Big Data Soc. 1, 1e21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2053951714532241.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Emotion, Space and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa
Understanding space ethically through affect and emotion: From uneasiness to fear and rage in the city Francesca Ansaloni*, Miriam Tedeschi IUAV di Venezia, San Polo 2468, 30125 Venezia, Italy Regional Planning and Public Policy, Universita
a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 1 October 2015 Received in revised form 23 September 2016 Accepted 26 September 2016
1. Introduction “Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing ‘given’ as real […] might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves […], as a primitive form of the world of affect, where everything is contained in a powerful unity before branching off and organizing itself in the organic process (and, of course, being softened and weakened)” (Nietzsche, 2002: 35e36). In recent decades, theories on affect and emotion have taken on increasing importance in a wide range of academic disciplines, including political science, planning, and urban studies. Many approaches have been formulated and promoted, from biological theorisations, to Deleuze-inspired definitions (Connolly, 2011; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010), and have in turn drawn vigorous critiques (Leys, 2011a, 2011b), to cite just a couple. Among Deleuzian theories, we are mainly interested here in the conceptualisation of affect and emotion as politically crucial subjects for understanding socio-spatial processes in urban contexts (Bille et al., 2015; Massumi, 2015; Thrift, 2014). In this sense, we first need to make clear what (urban) space is not for us: it is not “a metaphorics, nor is it a transcendental principle of space in general […], nor is it simply a series of local determinations of a repeating theme” (Thrift, 2008: 16). Rather, we interpret urban space as ontogenetically (i.e. always in becoming) multiple, rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), provided with proper agency, affects, and emotions per se and
* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (F. Ansaloni), miriam.tedeschi@ gmail.com (M. Tedeschi). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.09.006 1755-4586/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
~ iga, 2003; inseparable from bodies (Low and Lawrence-Zún Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2013, 2015; Simondon, 1989, 1992, 2005). In particular, we focus on how combinations of spatial bodies produce affect, which finds temporary and collective stabilisation in emotion (Simondon, 2005) and ultimately yields the ethical direction (Deleuze, 1988; Spinoza, 2009) towards which a space moves and unfolds. In this process of unfolding, space, qua multiple, might manifest itself as social control, which is implicitly backed by urban policy, whereas bodies, fighting for their survival (i.e. following their conatus), might react badly to attempts to frame them or limit their movement. These two faces of urban space are doomed to clash each time they meet e and the temporary results of these fights are ultimately the way urban space becomes and expresses itself. As we will see, the affective movements of a space, which is one and multiple at the same time, were eloquently depicted in the novel High-Rise (1975) by James Graham Ballard. The author carved a perfect hierarchical order into space: on the top five floors lives the upper class; from the 10th to the 35th floors, the middle class; on the lower nine floors, the lower class. Ballard's purpose is to show us how the residents' initial sense of uneasiness with this rigorously organised building might escalate into a very wide range of emotions (hatred, vengeance, and fear, among others) that will eventually disrupt the utopian construction and transform the whole society, miniaturised in the metaphor of the high-rise, into a new and completely different structure where bodies and space find a new order following apparently unruly trajectories (lines of flight). Far from being a mere metaphor, the novel very closely tracks a real case of socio-spatial division that reflected a precise economic divide, a case also considered in this article. Of the many various regenerative interventions (or ‘social cleansing’, as many residents call them) spread throughout London, there is one practice we consider particularly telling. We refer to the recent trend of designing buildings with two separate entrances: one for private residents and a second entrance for social housing tenants (the socalled poor door). This development model has been negatively affecting bodies so as to bring on violent emotions, such as fear and rage, the latter clearly conveyed in the protests that have exploded in various areas of the city, part of broader rallies against social cleansing and evictions. Our London case study is based on
16
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
ethnographic fieldwork carried out with reference to protest movements and initiatives for social cleansing. The investigation was then completed via a desk analysis of the specific example of poor doors. Using both Ballard's novel and the empirical case, we aim to show how affect and emotion collectively unfold ontogenetically into bodies and urban space, eventually creating a new ethics of space (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). In this sense, bodies cannot be separated from their environment. Indeed, the latter is an actual, active part of bodies' process of individuation (Simondon, 1992), of their conatus towards joyful and empowering combinations with other bodies (Deleuze, 1988; Spinoza, 2009). This is the new ethical understanding of space that we would like to introduce: a space that, being ontologically multiple and inseparable from bodies, constantly brings about affects and emotions, along with challenges, dismantling the social orders promoted by urban policy. Furthermore, it is a conceptualisation of urban space based on a philosophy of life that values as good what is empowering or brings joy (Nietzsche, 2002; Spinoza, 2009) and as bad what is harmful to a body's capacity to act e i.e., whatever leads to sadness, hopelessness, hatred, rage, fear, etc. Finally, such space has not only conative movements that are disruptive but may also manifest itself as a controlling and framing force, like poor doors and Ballard's examples of socio-spatial hierarchical organisation. In the same vein, according to Deleuze and Guattari, smoothing and striating forces occur simultaneously. The smooth space of intensive becomings and the striated space of territorial organisation “exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 474). While smoothing forces are uncontrollable, striation yearns for control. Indeed, these processes do not reach a final actualisation, because a space can never be completely striated or smooth. The paper proceeds by describing the phenomenon of the poor doors in London, and contextualising it as one among many redevelopment interventions and urban policies that have been generating affect that unfolds into uneasiness, fear, and rage. It then reads poor doors through the lens of Ballard's novel High-Rise (1975), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and Simondon's (1989, 1992, 2005) philosophy of becoming, as well as Spinoza's ethics (2009). Finally it suggests, through an ethical understanding of space, an alternative conceptualisation of urban space based on fights between affects and on emotions' lines of flight and controlling forces.
facilities such as concierge, etc. Moreover, inside the building, lifts are also separate, as access to facilities lower-income tenants have not paid for. All told, the two groups of residents are not supposed to meet inside the building. One example of a poor door is shown in Figs. 1e4. This is a brandnew building, One Commercial Street, right next to Aldgate East tube station, in London. The primary entrance (see Figs. 1 and 2) faces the main street, whereas the second entrance (see Figs. 3 and 4) is reached via a small path alongside the building: “the brochure for the upmarket apartments of One Commercial Street, on the edge of the City, boasts of a ‘bespoke entrance lobby … With the ambience of a stylish hotel reception area, it creates a stylish yet secure transition space between your home and the City Streets’. […] But the lobby is out of bounds to some of those who live in the building. What the brochure doesn't mention is a second door, with a considerably less glamorous lobby, tucked away in an alley to the side of the building, alongside the trade entrance for [a catering business]. This is the entrance for One Commercial Street's affordable housing tenants” (The Guardian, 2014b). This is only one example. Another is Queens Park Place (NW6, London) (The Guardian, 2014a), an apartment building that will have its secondary access built directly in the car park. The Mayor of London's original purpose was to create mixit e by having private residents and social renters share the same building (Ansaloni and Tedeschi, forthcoming). In housing policy, the belief is very common that, in order to create mixed communities in new developments, we should combine private, intermediate, and council rents. The suggestion is that, if people share the same space, therefore they will mix. This assumption, which is still taken for granted in a vast number of political platforms and urban policies,
2. London's emotional space “Brooke Terrelonga lives here with her nine-month-old son e they moved into a social rented flat four months ago and she was surprised to find that she wasn't allowed to use the front entrance. Her mother, who doesn't want to be named, said she felt unhappy about her daughter returning home at night to the poorly-lit alleyway. She motioned towards two lights on the wall, either side of the door, which were the only lighting in sight. She said: ‘It's like the cream is at the front and they've sent the rubbish to the back’” (The Guardian, 2014a). The phenomenon of poor doors in London is the unexpected result of what was meant to be “sensitive, local approaches to the tenure and dwelling size mix of new housing developments carefully combined with policy to maximise affordable housing” (Greater London Authority, Mayor of London, 2012: 102). However, as it turns out, what has been developed is a space (the entrance doors of a building) that embodies a moral stigma (Ansaloni and Tedeschi, 2015). The poor doors, reserved to the least well-off, are not close to the main entrance, but hidden in the car park or in a secondary street, are made of poor materials, and do not have
Fig. 1. Main entrance (for private residents) in One Commercial Street, Aldgate east, London © Miriam Tedeschi.
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
17
Fig. 3. Secondary entrance on the left-hand side of the building © Miriam Tedeschi.
Fig. 2. Detail of the main entrance (for private residents) © Miriam Tedeschi.
conceals a misleading understanding of space that conceives of space as a fixed, single, mostly passive portion of the urban realm, with residents considered independent from it. However, according to Simondon, this cannot be the case. The reason lies in that, first of all, the individual-environment pair cannot be separated. Secondly, the pair is always in a yet-to-becompleted state (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Simondon, 1992), possessing capacity to evolve and proceed in a non-linear becoming. This becoming is what Simondon calls individuation, which interprets evolution as “a dimension of the being, not something that happens to it following a succession of events that affect a being already and originally given and substantial” (Simondon, 1992: 311). Individuation is triggered by the affective dimension, which translates the former in the transindividual (namely, the collective individuation, the being and becoming of an individual in society). In other words, affectivity is the neverending possibility of becoming an individual in its environment, a continuous exchange between the preindividual (i.e. a reality preceding the temporary unity of the individual and functioning as its source of continuous becoming) and individual, without which a body could not succeed in its process of becoming a space and in space, nor could emotion take place (Massumi, 2002). The latter is but the “point of insertion of affective plurality in unity of signification” (Simondon, 1989: 107; our translation), i.e., it is affect transformed or translated into collective actions. Emotion has a crucial role here, because it is what eventually determines which ethical direction the individual-environment pair will take. All in all, bodies are space and vice versa (PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos, 2015). Moreover, the two are always in a (non-
Fig. 4. Detail of the secondary entrance © Miriam Tedeschi.
18
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
predictable) multiple, ontogenetic becoming, which constitutes the very essence of being. This becoming on the part of bodies and space manifests itself as emotion, which therefore becomes the sense, the ethics of affect e namely, how affects collectively and ontogenetically unfold into the urban space. Let us point out here that, if we follow an ethical understanding of space, such as that presented below, both the poor entrance and the separation of common spaces are destined to make residents bear as much stigma as the space they inhabit does. Bodies are an actual part of the multiplicity of space e if a space is stigmatised, so are the bodies that constitute its material layers. As such, the stigma is not fixed but moves around as it becomes an actual part of the process of individuation of the individual-environment pair. The latter, in turn, reacts badly to the stigma (i.e. is unable to negotiate, to come into terms with it) and ends up generating harmful affects. These affects are distributed among space and bodies (Johansen, 2015), then collectively turned into negative emotions, such as the rage that has been explicitly expressed through protests in front of One Commercial Street. Actually, protests against social cleansing have been spreading through London over the last few years because of the sudden growth of the private housing market and the corresponding decrease in social housing provided by local authorities. In this sense, poor doors do guarantee affordable housing in prestigious buildings, so it is understandable that, in economic terms, they might be seen as an acceptable compromise by local authorities, developers, and housing associations. Poor doors and their stigma are also an expression of urban policy and the controlling side of space, which are fully part of its being multiple. However, some people are resisting this phenomenon. It is the humiliation and the uneasiness caused by the stigma that they are resisting. This sense of uneasiness escalates to become fear and rage, as Ballard so tellingly depicts in High-Rise. 3. On multiple spaces drawing affect and emotion In this section we endeavour to interpret the emotions of uneasiness, fear, and rage triggered by the poor doors, the consequent protests against One Commercial Street building, and the interventions of regeneration by working out a few concepts borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari's writings, namely, the rhizome and conatus. These seminal concepts are further reinforced through Simondon's notions of individuation and transindividuation, as well as Spinoza's Ethics. At the same time, for insight into the example of poor doors, we propose a corresponding analysis of a piece of literature, the novel High-Rise. In Ballard's work of fiction, a demiurge-architect designs an apartment building with the aim e we would say the hubris e to recreate a vertical social order by separating the least well-off from the wealthier, devising a bottomup ladder at the summit of which the architect-god himself resides. The novel is an interesting metaphor for what might happen when the quest for (i.e. conatus towards) social order, organisation, and efficiency clashes with a rhizomatic world of irrationality, unpredictability, and ethical happenings that wends along different lines of affect and emotion. Moreover, the novel lends us the perfect setting for a creative analogy in two ways. First, the building in High-Rise, much like One Commercial Street, clearly shows the longing of architecture, urban policy, and planning for selfpreservation (conatus), expressed through a hierarchical social order. Second, High-Rise describes what happens when bodies' movement and emotions are coercively caged into this order and demiurgically controlled. 3.1. The rhizome: emotion spreading like a virus “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing
reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension” (Ballard, 1975: 7). Under the surface of wealth and well-being, violent protests against inequalities and social cleansing keep erupting throughout London. Moreover, a sense of inexplicable uneasiness is spreading, like a contagion. “The atmosphere in London seems kind of heavy in these days, as if something were going to happen … There are more graffiti on the walls everywhere … Something might be exploding soon …” e this is what a Londoner told us when asked what the atmosphere of the city feels like. Not only do people feel uneasy; space itself emanates a sense of restlessness along with its dwellers. Indeed, it is easy to discover many people suffering from various forms of undefined anxiety. An old woman participating in one of the protests against social cleansing found herself screaming with no apparent reason, while a mother suffered a breakdown after being evicted by the local authority. Such spreading of fear and anxiety may be compared to the sinister atmosphere described at the beginning of High-Rise, a seemingly perfectly organised socio-spatial structure, that at some juncture started to bend, as it were, unleashing an undefined affect of something feels wrong that spreads like a virus, until the initially impalpable affect thickens and is transformed into blatant and violent collective (transindividual, as Simondon terms it) emotion whereby the order is overturned. We do not have, in London, such a disruptive effect as in High-Rise; however, we did find in this research a widespread feeling of uneasiness, a sinister dimension expressed in various, more or less explicit, collective emotions. Among them, hatred and rage are strongly conveyed by people protesting against urban policy that implicitly supports spatial barriers or divisions bearing moral stigma. Affect is a “set of flows moving through the bodies of humans and other beings” (Thrift, 2008: 236). Affects result from interactions of these rhizomatic multiplicities that represent a feature of territorial assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)1: multiple yet temporary compositions of bodies that “denote their ability to preserve the heterogeneity of their components and to form new assemblages and thereby expand their affects” (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 70). Analogously, emotion corresponds not to a state but can be understood as a becoming that promotes the collective process of individuation and “translates and maintains the possibility of individuation in the collective” (Simondon, 2005: 252; our translation). Otherwise stated, emotion propagates along rhizomatic lines that make its movements non-linear and its chance of dissemination unforeseeable. That is how, rather unexpectedly, the One Commercial Street building enters into connection with the self-defined ‘working-class action group’, which used the apartment block as an exemplary case within London's broader antigentrification movement. This triggered a regular series of protests that, in spring 2015, drew other social movements, the police, individual citizens, the street, and the media. One Commercial Street's residents unexpectedly found themselves right in the flow of Londoners' protests over gentrification, evictions, and the
1 We do not intend to discuss here in an extensive way the meaning of assemblage and its different interpretations in various research strands (see for instance Latour, 2005 or De Landa, 2013). Suffice it to say that for Deleuze and Guattari (1987) an assemblage is a heterogeneous multiplicity which faces the strata (a discernible, temporarily fixed form of the real) and the body without organs, the absolute possibility of becoming something else, “permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 40).
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
housing struggle. They are faced with the protests and cannot avoid sharing their space, at least once a week, with protesters, police, rallying cries, smoke grenades, threatening placards, and minor incidents. We assume our reality operating on a machinic basis, unfolding through autonomous and spontaneous arrangements of multiple and heterogeneous elements, which may be interconnected or isolated according to the particular nature of the contingent junction of bodies and space. The line of the next branching is not predetermined, nor is the becoming of the self-created arrangement, which can either be blocked by rigid lines e thus ending up temporarily organised with its flows frozen e or find free lines of change. Indeed, the rhizome does not admit biunique relationships, only multiple ones. Every axis of connection may be broken and regenerated along new lines. This rhizomatic understanding of the real enables nonhierarchical connections and relations that are determined by affect, namely by bodies' capacity to affect or be affected by other bodies (Deleuze, 1988). As we explain below, these capacities represent a body's power to act or be acted upon. They express the extent to which it can be enhanced or hampered when intersecting with other bodies, depending on the intrinsic ethical nature of the encounter itself. In this sense, the consequences of such encounters are rather unpredictable, for “bodily capacities are not linear effects of apparatuses and the acts, ideas and intentions that make them” (Anderson, 2014: 78). Encounters among bodies represent the eventfulness of life, the spur for social processes to keep on becoming, and the actualisation of manifold possibilities of connection. These possibilities are enabled by the nature of the space where (and with which) encounters take place: its being manifold and becoming, its being undistinguishable by those bodies that are parts of the same continuum. As Massey puts it, “if space is the sphere of multiplicity, the product of social relations, and those relations are real material practices, and always ongoing, then space can never be closed, there will always be loose ends, always relations with the beyond, always potential elements of chance” (Massey, 2005: 95). Returning to the rhizome, we have a multiplicity that is characterised by the potential for change, for forming new rhizomes and being transformed by their lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), and we have emotions that are not located in a single point (or body) but dispersed and moving along multiple lines of connection. In High-Rise, the sinister dimension that somehow emerges is an event placed between a past and a future, creating a rupture that is coextensive with the continuum of space and time where bodies move. It is impossible to locate the beginning of the chain of events, nor is it possible to locate the sinister dimension itself. We could call it uneasiness. It is an atmosphere that might grow and expand unpredictably as it is transmitted affectively along the rhizome, through a contagion-like dynamic, as Sloterdijk (2004) terms it. In the One Commercial Street case, our actualised version of High-Rise, with its engineered social order carefully organised through the public-private machinic assemblage of urban policy, planning applications, local authority, developers, and the housing association, a line of flight has emerged. This line rhizomatically heads for different spaces of action, but no one knows whether it is going to be blocked or flee elsewhere, or what consequences it will have on the immanent plan where the bodies intersect with each other and the space. Space and bodies that bear stigma react to it, becoming uneasy until their restlessness is thickened and transformed into violent emotions. The sense of uneasiness spreads, following the dimensions of the rhizome, sticking to the principles that belong to its unfolding, namely its starting ‘in the middle’ and carrying on becoming along its lines of connection. As
19
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos puts it, “to begin in the middle is to find oneself folded between the multiplicity of the world without a discernible origin, a specific centre and determined territorial limits” (2016: 81). We can give two readings of this notion. First, ‘things pick up speed’ rather unpredictably, but at the same time, just as unpredictably, they can slow down. In High-Rise, when the enforced order breaks down and fear and rage start propagating like a virus, no one can control the drift of those sinister events, for the action e along with the emotions that are its extension, in Simondon's terms e is not located at one point but emerges following the multiple folds of space. 3.2. The conatus: how emotion unfolds into space “Royal felt stronger and more confident than ever before. He had won his attempt to dominate the high-rise, and amply proved his right to rule this huge building, even though at the cost of his marriage. As for the new social order that he had hoped to see emerge, he knew now how his original vision of a high-rise aviary had been closer to the truth than he guessed. Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realized that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors” (Ballard, 1975: 129). If we focus on the One Commercial Street case, we may map wealthier people's desire to avoid their social housing neighbours so as to feel safe and secure at home. This desire unfolds into space through the controlling assemblage (i.e. local authorities' power aggregation, developers, housing associations, and urban policy) that separates functional parts of the building, such as entrances. We also may discern their fear at having to deal with the disruptive rage permeating protests in front of One Commercial Street, protests that aim to ‘devastate the avenues where the wealthy live’. We can as well observe those who are marked as less well-off feel uneasy and humiliated for bearing the stigma of having to use the rear entrance to their own dwellings. In this case, then, we find bodies entering into composition in a space that merely appears single, generating emotions that vary depending on whether a body is positively affected or repelled by it. These emotions are the multiple unfolding into space of conatus, the Spinozist term that describes active affect, i.e. each body's desire to keep on being and becoming, the primordial spark that triggers a body's movement. Conatus, or “the effort by which each thing strives to persevere in its being” (Deleuze, 1988: 21) and seeks joy, is the unconscious impulse for action (active and empowering affect) as well as the conscious desire (the emotion) we become aware of. Simondon refers to an individual's desire for eternity, for preserving its being (Scott, 2014), which he terms transduction (Simondon, 1992), the vital process that gives the sense of individuation (i.e., of the being's never-ending becoming), that moves the individual along multiple directions into the collective context, i.e. the transindividual, and, we may add, its space. By the same token, for Deleuze “all that I am determined to do in order to continue existing (destroy what doesn't agree with me, what harms me, preserve what is useful to me or suits me) by means of given affections (ideas of objects), under determinate affects (joy and sadness, love and hate …) d all this is my natural right” (Deleuze, 1988: 102). From a Spinozist perspective, this effort to push bodies to seek joy in new encounters and assemblages may enhance the body's own becoming as well as endanger it, because nobody knows what entering a new assemblage might entail. In particular, the consequences of an encounter might, at least temporarily, change a body's capacity to affect or be affected, to wit: its power to act. Deciding to live in the apartment block in One Commercial Street is an actual example of entering a new assemblage e with the
20
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
purpose of unfolding one's conatus into space, i.e. seeking joy in a safe and pleasant environment. Nevertheless, the composition of the new space with residents may trigger a whole range of unexpected affects (and, as we will see, emotions), which cannot be predicted, only experienced via the becoming-multiple-space (the process of individuation and transindividuation, in Simondon's words) of bodies. According to Spinoza, bodies' degree of power depends on whether they increase their capacity to act (a good composition in Spinozist terms) by composing with other bodies, or, on the contrary, diminish it (a bad composition). When a body encounters another body (not necessarily human) with which it does not enter into a good composition, its power to act is hampered, and vice versa. Deleuze and Spinoza interpret ethics as the dynamic result of these encounters, for good and bad are not forever-set values to be imposed demiurgically on space by urban policy; rather they are the temporary result of space's multiple compositions with bodies. Furthermore, we argue that what is experienced as emotion is precisely this ethical and spatial eventfulness. How does this come about? If we interpret Simondon's thought in a spatial fashion, the movement of affect (affectivity) is an apparent expression of becoming, namely individuation and transindividuation of one's body in space e and we may add, vice versa, i.e. individuation and transindividuation of space in bodies. Because there is not just one, but multiple modes of existence and of becoming-bodies-and-space, affectivity, at first scattered everywhere as generated by these different bodily and spatial compositions, seeks and ultimately finds its temporary unity in emotion: “affection is a slower emotion, it is emotion not yet constituted in unity and power of becoming […] emotion leads the living being, gives the latter a sense and attracts it, takes on its affectivity and unifies it” (Simondon, 2005: 260; our translation). In this sense, the significance of an ethical act resides not in its universality but in its actual integration into the becoming (Simondon, 2005) of multiple space, i.e. into the interlacing of spatial layers with multiple living beings. This integration finds its own sense, its own expression, via emotion. Therefore, ethical eventfulness is spatially situated, relentlessly negotiated, and emotionally expressed, depending on the outcomes of a specific encounter. If we interpret what happens at One Commercial Street spatially, the result of the engineering of space is that higher-class bodies end up ethically reinforced and empowered (good affects), while others are harmed (bad affects). Both entered One Commercial Street to seek joy and follow their conatus, but the result may vary in the two cases, for they compose (assemble) with space in different fashion. Therefore, when bodies' different composition and affect unfold into space, we witness conflict between bodies' conatus, as well as the movement of affect that eventually makes emotion emerge. Let us take One Commercial Street events to their extreme by applying our reasoning to Ballard's zoo-like building. Here, the high-rise and its social order are hostile to its inhabitants: the strict hierarchical organisation of apartments and facilities immobilises individuals' desires and spurs them to counteraction. The three leading characters in the novel are comfortable with the new arrangements of the bodies in the high-rise and have their power temporarily enhanced by their encounters. But this is not true for each body in the building. Power is not equally distributed among bodies e in the new dimension, as in the previous one e and some bodies end up yielding. Space draws conative lines that intertwine with bodies' affects and emotions. The result of this blend is something unexpected, unlike an architect's initial project for (i.e. conatus towards) perfect social order in the high-rise. Indeed, bodies (and space) react badly to this superimposed, demiurgic order, affectively setting up, in its stead, a rhizomatic aggregation
that escalates spatially and bodily from an initial sense of uneasiness, into fear and rage. Thus, after the disruption of the initial order, the inhabitants of the high-rise turn into nomads: they move from one apartment to another, climbing floors to meet their needs for food, sex or security, or simply to maintain their own affective conatus towards life, joy, and power. In turn, the high-rise, the habiter, a space initially striated (i.e. rigidly perfect machine a controlled) by the architect-demiurge, becomes a living creature, repelling its rhizomatic branch that unfolded as super-imposed demiurgic order and transmogrifying into chaos: facilities are out of order; every piece of technology has lost its functionality. As an actual part of the building's complete disruption, residents now feel free to express their full range of extreme emotions: hatred and rage have dislocated themselves into the building and move around freely. The building, in turn, spreads its own emotion, expressed as disorder and degradation, into bodies. From an ethical perspective, we can read the initial composition (the controlling space set up by the architect) as a bad one (in Spinoza and Deleuze's analysis), which triggers bodies' impulse to seek better composition (assemblage). However, this is only one of the possible outcomes of different bodies' conatus' fight for space. In this case, the disruptive force has taken over, but there is no predicting what direction a rhizome's branches will take next time around. All in all, from the initial indeterminate sense of unease among the residents, a full range of emotions is exacerbated as the assemblage evolves in ever more unpredictable ways. As Simondon would say, these emotions make residents' incompleteness (their never-ending becoming) apparent. Emotion, in this case, is the sense (the ethics) of actions (1989), the visible emergence of becoming-space that calls for reorganising (Baldissone, 2015) the building's whole structure and individuals' role in it. Emotion is the rising awareness of the modification in bodies' degree of power. This transformation stems from multiple bodily encounters and ends up bringing about the total disruption of the original social order, which actually degenerates into an uncontrollable jumble of bodies moving randomly within a corrupt, degraded, dirty, broken space. Rage and fear triumph because bodies and space have composed in a way harmful to both. Emotion has thus found its own way out of the imposed socio-spatial order, building a brandnew order. 4. Towards an ethical understanding of space “The key ethical move is to construct a body in which patterning is flexible, that is, to stay in a sustainable intensive ‘crisis’ situation, where the Body without Organs or the virtual can more easily be reached so that any one exclusive disjunction can be undone and an alternate patterning accessed” (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 64). Approaching reality as a rhizomatic becoming, we realise that, if space is observed ‘in the middle’, namely expressing its own agency, it attracts and actively takes part in the process of bodies' individuation. By doing so, it relentlessly generates happenings with ethical consequences in the urban realm. “Ethics is the sense [le sens] of an individuation […] the sense whereby the interiority of an act expresses a meaning in the world outside” (Simondon, 2005: 333; our translation). As we have seen, those ethical consequences, those ‘meanings’ are expressed in terms of emotion along the process of individuation. If we consider buildings, we may say that they individuate themselves into bodies (and vice versa). Hence, whatever shape the space takes, its very shaping will eventually affect the bodies that are meant to compose with it (Tedeschi, 2016), because bodies are space, and vice versa (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015). During the process of individuation, these affections may yield positive
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
(good) or negative (bad) effects, which is what we mean by an ethical understanding of space. Such effects can be understood as either positive or negative emotions, which may spread rhizomatically along multiple lines affecting connected bodies. Indeed, “emotion is not only internal transformation […]; it is also a certain impulse across a universe that has a sense [sens]; it is the sense of the action […] the emotion extends into the world as action the way the action extends into the subject as emotion. […] Actually, the emotion-action should be grasped in the middle, at the border between the subject and the world, at the boundary between the individual being and the collective” (Simondon, 1989: 109; our translation). If the composition is bad, bodies and space may tend toward disintegration (deterritorialisation) while seeking better composition, a sense of uneasiness may emerge, expanding to produce social consequences far out of grasp or control. And uneasiness may ultimately evolve into rage or fear, according to propagation mechanisms that cannot be foreseen. This can happen whenever the process of individuation between bodies and space is somehow spoiled or blocked (by stigma for instance): a movement (conatus) may push toward a new stabilisation (territorialisation) and, hence, a new ethics may arise through the affective renegotiation of bodies' own spatial position. In our case, vehement protest, part of a broader London revolt against spatial segregation, was triggered at One Commercial Street in reaction to construction of the apartment block. It looks as though the temporary assemblage that brought about One Commercial Street has imposed a stigma on space and bodies. The stigma's emotional movements have collided with manifold bodies, thus becoming the trigger (the conatus) for reaction, both spatially and emotionally. As for poor doors, urban policy's main purpose was to provide the greatest possible number of affordable houses: “the idea of the wealthy and the least well-off having separate entrances into the same housing block may offend but can also be a pragmatic way of improving the supply of ‘affordable’ homes” (The Guardian, 2015). However, even though the intention was meant to be good, and backed by a belief in mixit e as (always) positive, what has happened is that developers, in order to guarantee private residents high standard services (CCTV cameras, concierge, etc., which, according to the housing associations, social residents cannot afford) end up separating the rich from the poor.2 What we want to get across here is, first, that the outcome of mixing people together cannot be decided in advance. It may be successful or not, depending on the ethical direction that multiple combinations of bodies and space negotiate, temporarily deciding to agree upon. In other words, whether this direction is ethically good or bad (Deleuze, 1988; Spinoza, 2009) ultimately depends on how the multiple layers of bodies and space affect each other and, therefore, what emotion they generate. Secondly, urban policy utopias of order and control may actually spark negative emotions. Although we can foresee neither their direction nor their intensity, if we understand the stigma conveyed by urban segregation as a bad affect, we may expect it eventually to find its (temporary) stabilisation in fear and rage. What does this imply for urban policy? Can policymakers constrain their own conatus towards control and order? Can they accept that space, being “open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming” (Massey, 2005: 59), can never reach lasting stability? Is it possible for policymakers to discard their mainly demiurgic and monolithic understanding of space and to adopt a conception of reality that is rhizomatic,
2 We are not considering here that the poor doors often provide access only to socalled ‘affordable’ housing, whose rent level is up to 80% of market prices; in London this is not affordable for many people.
21
ethically situated, and ready for emotion to attach to action rather than being dismissed? Otherwise stated, is it possible for policymakers to translate into practice such a conceptualisation of space, making it “a prerequisite for history to be open and thus a prerequisite, too, for the possibility of politics” (Massey, 2005: 59)? The crucial point here is that policy-based controlling spaces are actual branches of rhizomatic, multiple spaces, thus indeed having their own conatus, affect, and emotion. If, as we have seen, the relentless struggle over space and bodies between striating forces and smoothing forces prevents urban policy from achieving its ultimate goal of the highest possible control, on the other hand, the conatus towards control cannot be completely eradicated from public policy. Indeed, policy cannot perceive itself as part of a multilayered structure. Rather, it keeps reproducing the mono-layered logic of set borders and clear frames. Hence, conflict between controlling forces and the lines of flight fleeing them seems unavoidable. However, this constitutes the very nature of space, how the space is reproduced and how it eventually becomes. Urban policy struggles to achieving control and order but cannot fully succeed. In the end: one can strive to establish boundaries, raise walls, set codes, separate flux; yet, one will end up with leaks, breaches, detours, violation, transgression. In between, there is always space for reversal: smooth space can be striated; striated space can be smoothed. In order to solve this conundrum, Lindblom (1959: 81) suggests “the method of successive limited comparisons” that he contrasts with “the rational-comprehensive method.” These (incremental) limited comparisons build out “from the current situation, step-bystep and by small degrees; the latter starting from fundamentals anew each time, building on the past only as experience is embodied in a theory, and always prepared to start completely from the ground up” (ibid.). Therefore, policy's chance to accommodate the becoming of space lies, in our opinion, in the slow opening of the policymaking process, in its transformation towards a less rigid and more flexible modus operandi. If we adhere to Simondon's idea that emotions spread across our reality by means of action, then policymakers should take collective emotion very seriously, acting to dismantle temporary negative stabilisations by being ready to redefine options for action at each turn, thus leaving room for new, hopefully more positive, compositions to arise. References Anderson, Ben, 2014. Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. Ashgate, Farnham. Ansaloni, Francesca, Tedeschi, Miriam, 2015. On stigmatisation of bodies and spaces. An ethical reading of the poor doors in London. In: Conference Proceedings of the Regional Studies Association Winter Conference on “Great Transformation: Recasting Regional Policy”, London, UK, 19-20 November 2015. Regional Studies Association, London, pp. 7e9. Available from: http://www. regionalstudies.org/uploads/documents/Winter_2015_Conference_Book.pdf (accessed: 21.04.16.). Ansaloni, Francesca, Tedeschi, Miriam. Demiurgic versus rhizomatic planning. Towards an ethical understanding of the urban realm. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on New Urban Languages: Tales and Images of Spatial Justice, TUDelft, Delft, 24e26 June 2015 forthcoming. Baldissone, Riccardo, 2015. I and another: rethinking the subject of human rights with Dostoyevsky, Bachtin and Simondon. In: Ward, Ian (Ed.), Literature and Human Rights: the Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights Discourse. Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston, pp. 83e100. Ballard, James Graham, 1975. High-rise. Jonathan Cape, London. Bille, Mikkel, Bjerregaard, Peter, Sørensen, Tim Flohr, 2015. Staging atmospheres: materiality, culture, and the texture of the in-between. Emot. Space Soc. 15, 31e38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.11.002. Bonta, Mark, Protevi, John, 2004. Deleuze and Geophilosophy, a Guide and Glossary. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Connolly, William E., 2011. Critical response I. The complexity of intention. Crit. Enq. 37, 791e798. De Landa, Manuel, 2013. A New Philosophy of Society. Bloomsbury Academic, London.
22
F. Ansaloni, M. Tedeschi / Emotion, Space and Society 21 (2016) 15e22
Deleuze, Gilles, 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. City Lights Publishers, San Francisco. Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Felix, 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi Trans.). University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Greater London Authority, Mayor of London, 2012. Housing Supplementary Planning Guidance, November 2012. Greater London Authority, London. Available from: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Housing%20SPG%20FINAL %20Low%20Resolution_0.pdf (accessed: 27.09.15.). Gregg, Melissa, Seigworth, Gregory J., 2010. An inventory of shimmers. In: Gregg, M., Seigworth, G.J. (Eds.), The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, Durham & London, pp. 1e38. Johansen, Birgitte Schepelern, 2015. Locating hatred: on the materiality of emotions. Emot. Space Soc. 16, 48e55. Latour, Bruno, 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Leys, Ruth, 2011a. The turn to affect: a critique. Crit. Enq. 37, 434e472. Available from: http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/uploads/pdf/Leys_Turn_to_Affect.pdf (accessed: 21.04.16.). Leys, Ruth, 2011b. Critical response II. Affect and intention: a reply to William E. Connolly. Crit. Enq. 37, 799e805. Available from: http://criticalinquiry.uchicago. edu/uploads/pdf/Leys_Affect_Intention_Reply.pdf (accessed: 21.04.16.). Lindblom, Charles E., 1959. The science of ‘muddling through’. Public Adm. Rev. 19 (2), 79e88. Available from: https://faculty.washington.edu/mccurdy/ SciencePolicy/Lindblom%20Muddling%20Through.pdf (accessed: 09.05.16.). ~ iga, Denise, 2003. Locating culture. In: Low, S.M., Low, Setha M., Lawrence-Zún ~ iga, D. (Eds.), The Anthropology of Space and Place. Blackwell Lawrence- Zún Publishing, Malden, Oxford, Carlton, pp. 1e47. Massey, Doreen, 2005. For Space. Sage Publications, London. Massumi, Brian, 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, Durham & London. Massumi, Brian, 2015. Politics of Affect. Polity Press, Cambridge, Malden. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2002. Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, 2013. Atmospheres of law: senses, affects, lawscapes. Emot. Space Soc. 7, 35e44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.emospa.2012.03.001.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, 2015. Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere. Routledge, New York. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, 2016. Milieu, territory, atmosphere: new spaces of knowledge. In: Cusinato, A., Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (Eds.), Knowledge-creating Milieus in Europe. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 79e95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45173-7_5. Scott, David, 2014. Gilbert Simondon's Psychic and Collective Individuation: a Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Simondon, Gilbert, 1989. L'Individuation Psychique et Collective. Aubier, Paris. Simondon, Gilbert, 1992. The Genesis of the Individual. In: Crary, J., Kwinter, S. (Eds.), Incorporations, Zone Books, pp. 297e319. New York. la lumie re des notions de forme et Simondon, Gilbert, 2005. L’individuation a ro ^me Millon, Grenoble. d’information. Editions Je €ren III: Sch€ €rologie. Suhrkamp, Sloterdijk, Peter, 2004. Spha aume: Plurale Spha Frankfurt-am-Main. Spinoza, Baruch, 2009. The Ethics (Ethica More Geometrico Demonstrata). Project Gutenberg. Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/ 3800-h.htm (accessed: 27.09.15.). Tedeschi, Miriam, 2016. Towards an ethical turn in urban studies: on the role of information and power in contemporary cities. plaNext 2, 9e27. http:// dx.doi.org/10.17418/planext.2016.2vol.02. The Guardian, 2014a. 'Poor Doors': Not the Worst Thing about Social Housing. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecturedesign-blog/2014/jul/30/poor-door-social-housing-apartheid (accessed: 27.09.15.). The Guardian, 2014b. Poor Doors: the Segregation of London's Inner-city Flat Dwellers. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/25/ poor-doors-segregation-london-flats (accessed: 27.09.15.). The Guardian, 2015. What Would a Ban on 'poor Doors' Achieve? Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/davehillblog/2015/aug/03/londonhousing-what-would-a-ban-on-poor-doors-achieve (accessed: 27.09.15.). Thrift, Nigel, 2008. Non-representational Theory. Space j Politics j Affect. Routledge, Abingdon. Thrift, Nigel, 2014. The ‘sentient’ city and what it may portend. Big Data Soc. 1, 1e21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2053951714532241.