AFFEKT OG RUM

Abstract

AFFECT AND SPACE | Emotional qualities are not only something that pertain to individual psychic lives, they are also to be found, as the saying goes, ”in the air”, i.e. as atmospheres, shared collective experiences of events and places. However evident this insight may be, languages to describe such experiences are nonetheless quite rare, and most of them tend to simply apply the concepts of individual psychology to collective states of mind. The present article will suggest two closely related approaches to the understanding of atmospheric and collective emotional experiences. The first will develop the notion of affects and affectivity, as theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. The second approach will focus specifically on the spatial nature of such atmospheric and social affects. Profiting from the recent ‘spatial turn’ in cultural studies, which has radically extended our understanding of space and enabled us to map spatial relations that go beyond the merely positional, the paper will highlight the affective component in the relational production of human space. Combining a more traditional phenomenological understanding of human space with contemporary mappings of social space, the article examines how geographic, social and existential relations are involved in the production of affects and, inversely, how the affective takes part in the production of social experiences of space. The endeavor is partly theoretical, discussing these conceptual moves, and partly draws on a number of literaryand cinematic works in which important contemporary affective spaces are mapped and examined.