<underfire> Response

[Thrift, Nigel]

These are two fascinating responses to which I am responding too quickly. What I am most interested in at the moment is a historicized political psychogeography, which takes in the increasing engineering of affect, in part because the evidence suggests that it is possible to sway quite a lot of the people quite a lot of the time by using the range of devices that are now on offer. In turn, this engineering has obvious political impacts, most of which are detrimental. Retort is quite right, by the way. I should have added radio to the table.

 

I am particularly interested in the work of Gabriel Tarde at this time because he provides a way of thinking about affect as contagion which seems to me to be better fitted to contemporary highly mediatized times than it was to his own time. Tarde saw societies as shifting imitative fields and this seems to me to be exactly right - as well as posing a challenge to how we think about activism and mobilization along the way. Thus, some of the most successful examples of recent political activism seem to me to be attempts to initiate imitative chains in very interesting new ways. They are aided by a lot of the thought being put into this field by artists and designers, which is now, I think, beginning to bear fruit in showing up new ways of doing political.

 

In amongst, there is some very interesting thinking about spaces and how they can dampen or boost affect. What I think is interesting about modern life are the attempts to build spaces which are massively rich semiotically, rather like designing environments in computer games. These spaces are bringing back the kind of nondiscursive registers of writing and display that seem to have characterised early modern times, but boosted by information technology. I am not sure if this is the society of the spectacle or not, in part because it rather depends on what is meant by an image. One thing that does strike me, however, is that these spaces are not meant to induce passivity so much as they are meant to harness creativity and invention by drawing on every bodily register (Lazzarato's worlding). 

 

By the way, I came across a book by an ex-Israeli soldier who was also a psychologist on warfare, Menachem Student, which includes a foreword by Terry Kupers. I am looking out Ducat's work, which I didn't know.

 

 

 

Nigel Thrift

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