Alessandra Renzi Assistant Professor in Emergent Media Program in Media and Screen Studies & Department of Art + Design Northeastern University
[email protected]
Response to “Affect Space Witnessing the Movement(s) of the Squares” by Eric Kluitenberg Technology/ Affect / Space: A workshop exploring the politics and aesthetics of affect space E. Kluitenberg, L. Baladi, Alessandra Renzi, and S. Costanza-chock. Art, Culture and Technology, MIT, April 6, 2016.
For me, the article raises timely questions about the scale at which we think of social movements struggles. In fact, because dissent is tied to networked technologies and global financial crises, social struggle shows similar mobilization patterns across the planet. So, in response to Eric’s thoughtprovoking article I would like to start tackling this issue of scale and respond by touching on the 3 constitutive elements he identifies: affect, space, technology. I’ll do so with 3 provocations that build on or depart from his analysis. I hope that they will contribute to a lively conversation with our participants. !
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SLIDE Affect_Social struggle is always successful when it fails
- in their text “May ’68 Did Not Take Place” DG discuss how, in historical phenomena such as the revolution of 1789, the Commune, the revolution of 1917, there is always one part of the event that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains but historians restore causality after the fact. DG say: yet, the event itself is a splitting off from, a breaking with causality; it is a bifurcation that opens up a new field of the possible. An event can be turned around, repressed, co-opted,
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betrayed, but still something survives that is an opening onto the possible. It enters as much into the interior of individuals as into the depths of a society. May 68 is of the order of pure event, free from all normal, or normative causalities. …There were many agitations, gesticulations, slogans, idiocies, illusions in 68, but … What counts amounted to a visionary phenomenon, as if a society suddenly perceived what was intolerable in itself and also saw the possibility of change. … The possible does not pre-exist, it is created by the event. …The event creates a new existence, it produces a new subjectivity (new relations with the body, with time, sexuality, the immediate surroundings, with culture, work). When a social mutation appears, it is not enough to draw the consequences or effects according to lines of economic or political causality. Society must be capable of redeploying these new subjectivities to produce enough initiative and creativity that conceive new social states capable of responding to the demands of the event. It is important to look at how this potential from the past 5 years of mobilizations reverberate and how society is redeploying these new subjectivities”
What does it mean that a mobilization dissipates? What kinds of tools and frameworks can activists and critics use to understand its effects in the present, not in history? Who decides what counts as political efficacy? What counts as a successful revolution? Is consensus a marker of success? What other questions can be asked that attend to the event, its potential and its actualizations?
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- Occupy, Arab spring, Ferguson reverberate - People hit the streets more often, there are different conversations about social issues that seeped into political agendas, more attention to issues, different use of language, new grassroots projects and forms of organizing around debt and labor - I don’t believe that the movements of the current cycle of struggle have been ineffective. Still, the question of success and failure is an interesting, albeit ideological one because it opens up a discussion about the aftermath of spectacular manifestations of dissent. Here are my initial questions: What does it mean that a mobilization dissipates? What kind of tools and frameworks can activists and critics use to understand its effects in the present, not in history? Who decides what counts as political efficacy? What counts as a successful revolution? Is consensus a marker of success? What other questions can be asked that attend to the event, its potential and its actualizations?
2) Space_Affect is always everywhere SLIDE: Versus video of real time visualization of a protest in Rome on October 15, 2011 by Art is Open Source
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space_affect is always everywhere
This is an animated map of the affects and emotions circulating at different times of the day, with intensity peaking as police attack protestors and more people join in on the streets. The map uses data collected from major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare, and Flickr, and analyzes it through natural language analysis and artificial intelligence that isolates words indicating affects, emotions, and participation. The visualization helps us consider how the socio-technical space of social media networks and the proximity of bodies with mobile technologies on the streets of Rome function together to create milieus where circulating feelings like joy and
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belonging or outrage and panic reposition individuals within and among groups. - Drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon and Brian Massumi, in this “affect space,” the individual and the collective are not already formed and distinct entities partaking in protest through rational choices. The two poles of individuality and collectivity emerge simultaneously as the result of newly established relations (instead of having individuals and collectivities be the preexisting terms of a relation). They call this process of becoming transindividuation. Simondon and Massumi think of transindividuation as happening within a milieu that is layered and includes a variety of socio-political and economic forces, discourses, materialities, and technologies. The genesis of individuals and collectivities unfolds in this milieu at multiple levels, from the micro-sensorial (affects and emotions) to that of action, both individual and collective action. Through affect, the tension between constituted individuality and the collective is first felt; emotion arises from the difficulty of rendering an affective plurality into a unitary meaning. Both psychosensory reactions engender the collective when structured across many subjects (Simondon 2006, 111–22). In this context, the VersuS map can be read as a real time simulation (rather than visualization) of the intensities that traverse the transindividual milieu. It is a simulation of the process of becoming collective as activity, i.e. as a set of practices, perceptions, significations, communications, and so on (Simondon 1989, 13).
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How do these different layers and scales help us think about mobilizations and transindividuation? It there another way to conceive of these processes than as happening in space? How do dominant power structures intervene in these processes of emergence as they discipline bodies through bylaws, crowd control, surveillance but also technological design that modulates affects and creates docile users?
- Since affect is always at the basis on ongoing sense-making between the individual and the world, between the I and the We, it returns us to a need to qualify the relations that shape the individual and the collective, that is, not only the processes of transindividuation but also their milieu of emergence-with its power relations, discourses, platforms, and so on. Once we need to qualify the affective relations at work at the micro-scale of the movement of the squares, it becomes difficult to identify patterns at the macro-scale. Techno-sensuous space itself has multiple scales: from the microsensorial and the bit of information to the collective, cloud infrastructure and satellite communication. How do these different layers and scales help us think about mobilizations and transindividuation? It
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there a better way to conceive oft these processes than as happening just in “space”? How do dominant power structures intervene in these processes of emergence as they discipline bodies through bylaws, crowd control, surveillance but also technological design that modulates affects and creates docile users?
3) Technology_Affective circulation is often more choreographed than it seems
technology_affective circulation is often more choreographed than it seems
Affective circulation is often more choreographed than it seems. There are algorithms, APIs, share buttons, open or closed networks, protocols, and users who think hard about “semiotically open” !
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slogans, which to different degrees influence what seem like blind processes of meme production. These forces all channel and intensify the circulation of resonance objects within the transindividual milieu. In some cases, the process of designing and assembling these objects and infrastructures is itself key in producing new relations between the I and the we. +
Let me use the example of an art project I did in 2010-2012, Activism beyond the interface: the Sandbox project with Roberta Buiani
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Description: itinerant labs that came out of a need to think about forms of engagement among disparate activists groups that are not consensus based but create the space for experimentation and ad hoc collaboration after large mobilizations like counter-summits, encampments and other kinds of protests
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use of exercises and lab techniques that displaced identity-based interaction and tried to produce and harness different affects
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How can affect help us understand and strengthen contemporary forms of activism when we focus on their specificities and think about the genesis of collective action on a continuum from the individual and small activist group all the way to the squares and back again (in a feedback loop)? How can we examine what worked (which includes what didn’t work specifically and how it can be improved) at all these scales?
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translated some of the constraints and discourses of online, like those from proprietary platforms for collaboration, into a semi-structured space of interaction and reflection on how to dream of a different techno-social infrastructure for activism
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Results of experiment pointing towards need for new practices of co-design as a process of mobilization and harnessing of affect that creates flexible and modular assemblages o fostering autonomy in design to oppose forms of power and discipline connected to available technologies o experimenting with forms of temporary composition
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How can affect help us understand and strengthen contemporary forms of activism when we focus on specificities and think about the genesis of collective action on a continuum from the individual and small activist group all the way to the squares and back again (in a feedback loop)? How can we examine what worked (which includes what didn’t work specifically and how it can be improved) at all these scales?
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