Affective jogging by Architecture+Philosophy

Affective jogging - a colouring-in book

Index Introduction.................................................................... 02 01 Affect and repetition...................................................... 04 02 The daily round............................................................ 06 03 Affect as stuttering......................................................... 08 04 I run, therefore I am....................................................... 10 05................................................................................ 12 06................................................................................ 14 07 The analogue and the digital jogger................................... 16

08 The jogger of exhaustion and exuberance............................ 18 Bibliography.................................................................... 20

Introduction This colouring-in book is the result of my reading of a number of texts that all somehow relate to architecture and philosophy, through some different concepts. In working with the texts I also added some ideas and concepts of my own, to exemplify, clearify and problematize. The notion of affect is treated extensively in many of the texts, which together present different ideas on affect theory. This concept might need a brief introduction. Affect is distinguished from feelings and emotions, although the three are closely dependent on and connected to each other. Comparing the three, feelings can be described as being connected to previous personal experience; they are biographical. Feelings can be kept personal, secret and inside the experincing body. Emotions, on the contrary, have to do with communication. As Eric Shouse puts it: ”We broadcast emotion to the world; sometimes that broadcast is an expression of our internal state and other times it is contrived in order to fulfill social expectations”.1 Unlike emotions and feelings, affect is described as non-concious and prepersonal. It is closely linked to the body, whereas feelings and emotions might be more tied to the conciousness of the brain. Affect is also considered as something not within, but outside of bodies, and is always occurring in-between. In my reading of affect, I added the concept of repetition, which for me seemed crucial. I also included the activity of running or jogging, being an example of a highly repetitive action. One could also think of running as example of being affected by repetition. There is obviously the repetition of putting one foot in front of the other, repeatedly. For joggers, there is also commonly the repetition of doing the same route each time, or even doing laps on a track. The coloring-in book is structured around 8 themes and 8 sets of texts. It holds 8 drawings to be colored in imaginative or completely predictable ways. Each couple of drawing and text is accompanied by an excercise of the day, relating the readings to the concept of running in a very hands-on way. Enjoy! - Cecilia Lundbäck

1 Shouse, E. (2005) Feeling, Emotion, Affect. M/C Journal, 8(6)

Excercise of the day:

Picture a circle of convenient size somewhere on the ground, preferably where thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s snow, sand or loose soil of some sort, that will allow your feet to leave prints. Run around for a while, then stop to look at your traces.

The result of the repetition of handdrawing a circle. The small differences of the many lines make up a surface or mass, making apparent the interval of variation, change or inprecision within the repetition.

01 Affect and repetition Reading the texts ”Affect”2 and ”An Inventory of Shimmers”3 the concept of affect seems to be an endless complexity. A complexity that cannot be described as consisting of distinguishable aspects or contents, but inherently acts as a single (inseparable?) force of forces. Gregg and Seigworth describe it as forces of encounter or ever-modulating force-relations and as something that ”emerges out of muddy, unmediated relatedness and not in some dialectical reconciliation of cleanly oppositional elements or primary units”.4 Yet, in attempting to grasp something that seems this blurry and complex I find myself trying to frame what I imagine could be possible differences, components or examples. This is perhaps the paradox of trying to analyze and understand something that is mainly seen or described as having no logic. How, then, to describe or relate to a seemingly ungraspable complexity? I often find myself in a state of repetition: asking the same question, thinking the same thought, moving from one point to another (that is not moving in the same direction, but actually moving from A to B over and over, though rarely from B to A). Jogging would be another example of a repetitive activity of mine. It is argued that in approaching the notion of affect it could be useful to consider movement and process rather than sets of positions. I imagine the state of repetition as a kind of process, though one with a hitch. The use of this expression in English lacks a nuance that can be detected in the Swedish translation. To have a hitch would translate into Swedish as ”haka upp sig”. The swedish expression implies a repetitive movement, a jumping back and forth, as in the case of a jammed record player that keeps on repeating the same sound. In trying to understand myself as an affected and affecting body, I hope to be helped by using the concept of repetition. Seigworth and Gregg ask ”How does a body/.../come to shift its affections (its being-affected) into action (capacity to affect)?”5 If affect leads to action, then how am I affected upon in these states of repetition? How does the complexity of affecting forces correspond to me (or anyone) acting similarly over and over? And how do I respond to a constant (if there is no such thing: a hardly changing) flow of affecting forces? That is, when the same or similar affect acts upon me during some time. Perhaps the affecting and the affected cannot be separated in the way that these questions imply. Nonetheless, I am interested in the concept of repetition in relation to the concept of affect, and hope that it can offer some clues. Or at least some new questions to repeat.

2 3 4 5

Gregg, M. (2005) Affect. M/C Journal, 8.6 Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. (eds) (2010) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press Gregg & Seigworth, p. 4 Gregg & Seigworth, p. 2

Excercise of the day:

Make a ”daily round”, moving similarly to the characthers of Bacon and Beckett. That is: run around your neighbourhood haphazardly for a while. Optional: place a camera that records your movements, for later analysis of your bodily deformations when running.

The running man of Muybridge in the format of Bacon’s triptych. Note especially the deformation of the feet.

02 The daily round ”There are two ways of going beyond figuration: either toward abstract form or toward the figure.”6 Deleuze goes on to say that the mode of abstraction acts mainly on the brain whereas the figure acts directly on the nervous system or the flesh. He argues that this direct and immediate impact on the body is what creates sensation in painting. What Deleuze here refers to as sensation seems closely related to the concept of affect, as described by Gregg and Seigworth. They write ”.../affect is integral to a body’s perpetual becoming (always becoming otherwise, however subtly, than what it already is)”.7 In describing sensation, Deleuze writes ”at one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation”.8 Thus, they all refer to the idea of becoming as essential to affect or sensation. Deleuze continues ”.../sensation is what passes from one ’order’ to another, from one ’level’ to another, from one ’area’ to another. This is why sensation is the master of deformations, the agent of bodily deformations.”9 Deleuze then tries to work out what is constituting these levels of sensation, using the paintings of Francis Bacon as example. ”The levels of sensation would be like arrests or snapshots of motion, which would recompose the movement synthetically in all its continuity, speed and violence/...” He also mentions Bacon’s fascination for decomposition of movement, as in the work of early photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Coincidentally, Muybridge also took sequenced still photos of running men. The role of movement and decomposed movement in Bacon’s paintings is described using the expression of making a ”daily round”. This seems to refer to an erratic or seemingly random movement, taking place within a limited area or contour. The mentioning of the ”daily round” as present in the works of both Bacon and Beckett, could perhaps be seen as corresponding to the daily round of the jogger. The depiction and exploration of deformations of the body, present in both Muybridge’s and Bacons’ work could also relate to the changing body of the athlete. Much of Bacon’s work is done as series of triptychs, depicting the same scene, person or object, but seemingly at different times, angles or versions. Seriation could also be said to relate to the idea of repetition, or even more so to variation within repetition.

6 7 8 9

Deleuze, G (2003) The Logic of Sensation, London: Continuum, p. 34 Gregg & Seigworth, p. 3 Deleuze, p. 35 Deleuze, p. 36

Excercise of the day:

Identify your usual or most apparent jogging route. Start running according to it, but make sure to make a couple of detours before you head home. Thus changing the position and tendency in your field of jogging.

The drawing represents my usual jogging route departing from Liljeholmen, Stockholm. Other possible (or virtual) routes are depicted as dotted lines. The splitting lines relate to the bifurcation points of Massumiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s field. My speed and direction when running could correspond to the idea of tendency in the field.

03 Affect as stuttering In an interview with Professor of philosofy Brian Massumi, he describes affect as transition. A transition from one state of capacitation to another. This transition is felt, and leaves a memory or trace in the affected body. Thus we carry with us our past in patterns of repetition and reactivate the past as we act. Massumi encourages the rethinking of the terms memory, seriation and repetition. He states that ”The logic of affect is entirely bound up with the logic of serial repetition and difference that applies to events.” 10 Massumi also identifies relation as a key term when discussing affect. He describes it as having no starting point, and no end, and tells us to think of it more as a field of constantly varying relations, out of which affect emerges. It emerges through movement. Repetition, rather than start and finish, seems crucial to the logic of this movement. ”.../the relational event will play out differently every time. In repeating, it takes up the past differently. In taking up the past differently, it creates new potentials for the future.” 11 The series of repetitions thus have the potential of movement, of adjusting one’s capacitation or position in the field. The creation of potential through repetition can be derived from what Massumi refers to as tendency. I wonder if tendency is realted to some kind of directionality in this field. That the process of movement seems to be unlocked or triggered through repetition may sound like a paradox. But it curiously coincides with me relating an experienced hitch, jam or stutter, to the notion of affect. I think of it as that it’s the slight change in the repetition, the discontinuity, that makes apparent, or even constitutes, the transition. In Massumi’s words: ”For things to continue, they have to re-continue. They have to re-jig around the interruption”. He describes affect as microperceptual shock which acts as a ”re-cueing of our bodily powers of existence/.../a kind of recoil, not to withdraw from the world, but rather to brace for it again, and for how else it will be.”12 I am also interested in the idea of the field being divided by a kind of dynamic thresholds. I imagine the rejigging, the recoiling or the repetition to be crucial when launching at these thresholds. Potential rises in moments of suspense, in the discontinuities or interruptions, because the interruption calls for a re-continuation. The interruption extracts what Massumi refers to as the bifurcation point. The bifurcation point holds what is to come or what potentially could come; it holds the virtual.

10 Massumi, B. (2009) Of Microperception and Micropolitics Inflexions online journal, 3 11 Massumi (2009), s. 2 12 Massumi (2009), s. 2

Excercise of the day:

Go running barefoot!

The image shows the developement of the feet of a bare-foot runner: the feet get wider and shorter, the arch becomes higher, the toes spread, muscles grow in size, the padding of the heel and forefoot grows thicker, pronation decreases.

04 I run, therefore I am Thrift argues that there’s an increased awareness of and access to the so-called affective system. Which also gives new possibilities for manipulating or controlling affective moments, in turn evoking certain emotions or actions. He writes ”...affect has become part of a reflexive loop which allows more and more sophisticated interventions in various registers of urban life. Second, these knowledges are not just being deployed knowingly, they are also being deployed politically”.13 I don’t have the time to think before each time I put my foot to the ground and lift the other one. It’s like my feet are moving on their own. Could this be the missing half-second at work? It could also correspond to the Spinozan world where ”everything is part of a thinking and doing simultaneously”. Does this make running comparable to a dwelling in what Massumi describes as suspension? Or could it imply a potential for manipulation? Just as the flickering of today’s media.. The last couple of years, a trend has emerged in running: the (urban) phenomena of barefoot-running. By running without shoes, the feet are re-shaped (or deformed). They grow in certain ways and wear in certain areas. This process of skin, muscles and bones transforming, caused by thousands of tiny impacts, can be described a a micro modulation of the body. I find it illustrative to the way I imagine affect to function.

13 Thrift, N. (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London: Routledge, p. 172

Excercise of the day:

Go running in a gym, using a treadmill. Make sure the treadmills of your gym are placed in front of a panorama window (as they commonly are) offering you a nice view to the street and displaying the image of you on a treadmill to passers-by.

06 In the text ”On the Museum’s Ruins” Douglas Crimp presents one aspect of the museum as being a sanctuary or mausoleum for art, thus considering objects of art to be dead as they reach the museum, also implying that they were once alive. The museum is also described as a historical archive for art, holding previously attained knowledge and accomplishments. The museum is thus considered as a tomb for art, a tomb where we visit the dead, the dead that in turn act as a reference for the present - just as the library, the archive or any type of (historical) collection. Crimp points out that the content of such a collection of saved or stored objects is often heterogenous and even contradictory. At the same time the museal collection usually presents its material in an orderly manner, according to categories of cronology, style or species. In this way it attempts to constitute a coherent catalogue of knowledge. He cites ”The set of objects the museum dispalys is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe...Such a fiction is the result of an uncritical belief in the notion that ordering and classifying, that is to say, the spatial juxtaposition of fragments, can produce a representational understanding of the world.Should the fiction disappera, there is nothing left of the museum but ”bric-a-brac”, a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects...” In the case of running the equivalent of the archive of references would of course be the record statistics of championships, or on a local scale the club records or the timing from the last rounds of jogging. What’s striking in the comparison is the extreme intolerance for any kind of heterogeneity in running (competitions). Running can always be quantified and evaluated in terms of distance and duration. But one could argue that many aspects of running thereby are ignored or set aside. The subjective experience of rythmicly moving your body, the health aspects of training, the bodily transformations, the pain, the feeling of stepping on asphalt compared to soil, sand or moss, and so on. The museum and the lists of records can both be seen as the product or result of attemptimg to present a continous story based on a number of singularities. To be able to do this, an order or structure is established. A structure of categories such as sculpture, painting, graphic work or marathon, cross-country and sprint, as well as a number of more or less defined parameters used for measuring and evaluation. The sorting, the classification, the evaluation all call for some kind of reduction. In the case of runners it is staying on a certain track, being of a certain age or gender and not having certain chemical substances running through your veins. In the case of art it is of course more questionable to say that such restrictions exist, nevertheless the museets format och ambition att sammanfatta och återberätta may restrict its contents and interfere with the inherent heterogeneity and contradictions of the woks of art. In the text of Tony Bennett, the withdrawl of punishment from the gaze of the public by the establishment of prisons is paralleled

with the developemnet of exhibitionary complexes, such as the museum. He describes how they both relate to an architecture of display and compare how they use principles of organization of people and their gazes. Thus he relates the museum to ideas of dicipline and surveillance, and to order, not just of objects but also of people, the museum visitors. To once again recall the institution of running, one could consider the stadium as a similar form of display, in many ways similar to the panopticon. There is also the more recent phenomena of gym display windows, often exposing a number of runners aligned on their machines, as emblems of an active, healthy lifestyle. Bennett quotes â&#x20AC;?please remember when you get inside the gates you are part of the showâ&#x20AC;? when describing the museum visitor both as spectators and watched objects. The quote also applies quite well to the indoor runner becoming part of a gym display, while being offered a view out the window. The tying of a body to the fixed space of the running machine behind a window also bears some resemblance to being in a cage or a cell. About the developement of spaces for running: Whereas the runner in the stadium move across a large field and the olympic competators of ancient egypt would leap between columns at a distance of 800 m. This could be seen as examples of different dispositions of the running body, corresponding to different architectures for running. The marathon or olympic race as moving from one point to another, the race track of a stadium as running in circles, returning to your starting point, and the fixing of the body to the treadmill, where the progress and movement inherent in running seems gone.

07 The analogue and the digital jogger In the chapter ”Postscript on Control Societies”, Deleuze compares what he calls ”disciplinary societies” of the 18th and 19th centuries with the emerging ”control societies” of today. The disciplinary society, he states, ”operate by organizing major sites of confinement.” He describes these two different forms of organizing society as having different inherent logics: ”Confinements are molds, different moldings, while controls are a modulation, like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next...” The logic of the disciplinary could thus be described as producing predetermened forms or rules, whereas the idea of the control society could correspond to a kind of regulated (even self-regulating?) system of internal forces. Deleuze also refers to the disciplinary society as being analogical and the control society as being digital. ”The old sovereign societies worked with simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks...control societies function with a thrid generation of machines, with information technique and computers.” Translating these ideas into the activity of jogging, the disciplinary jogger would run her or his 10 kilometers every tuesday, thursday and sunday. The route taken would always be the same, and the time elapsed always comparable. This could be described as a quite clearly defined and mechanical way of jogging. Predictibility, measurability and monotony are other traits of such an approach to running. The jogger of the control society would probably be the person who is always carrying a step-counter and whose every move in a day becomes part of a never-ending training activity. One could imagine the step-counter being connected to information on what or when the jogger last ate, number of sleeping hours, live-feed information on pulse and blood sugar level. The step-counter, or rather computerized jogging advisor, would continually analyze the data and suggest an adequate step frequency. Possibly, it could also be updated with weather forecasts, and suggest a visit to the closest gym on a rainy day. It could also be compatible with the jogger’s digital calender, advising to make use of the 7 minutes of waiting for the bus or the slot between lunch and an afternoon appointment. Deleuze writes ”In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again...while in control societies you never finish anything” He goes on ”Control is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continous and unbounded, whereas discipline was longterm, infinite, and discontinous. A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt.” As in the case of the jogger it is a matter of being tied to a static but legible scheme or being in constant debt to a flexible but slightly incomprehensible computerized network system.

Excercise of the day:

Go running exuberantly. That is, don’t try and save any of your energy for coming activities, or even for the next step of your run. Make sure to get completely exhausted: run ’til you can’t run no more. Then rest.

08 The jogger of exhaustion and exuberance In the essay ”Exhaustion and exuberance”, Jan Verwoert identifies the pressure to perform as significant in today’s societies and economies. He seems to imply that the capitalist logics make values of quantity, efficiency and perfect timing into ends in themselves. ”Living this life of high performance we constantly face two questions: ’Are we (still) in charge?’ and ’Are we (still) happy?’”. The quote suggests that capital and currency are ruled by logics that conflict other more important values, such as ethics and quality of life. Throughout the essay, he therefore seeks out ways to defy this pressure to perform. Verwoert points out that acting ethically, or making ethical choices, is becoming problematic in today’s consumer society, where people are asked to make active choices in every action they take. However, he questions if this seemingly innumerable amount of choices can be considered as real freedom of choice and instead refers to this tendency as ”...a false premise of opening up limitless possibilities - which is, in fact, merely pressure to enact predefined options...” It is thus suggested that the predefined option or the binary choice of yes or no rule out other possible (unarticulated) choices. To Verwoert, these other choices are crucial in defying the pressure to peform, since they could allow for some to be exuberant, unnessecary, excessive, inefficient and badly timed, instead carrying aesthetic/poetic or ethical values. How does running relate to ideas of performance and choice making? Jogging or exercising could of course be considered as practising a pressure to perform. Pressure to run faster, trim one’s body, improve one’s strenght and so on. However, moving our bodies in a productive way, or according to the logics of capitalism, often means transportation. That is moving from one point to another. Jogging is commonly done in the form of rounds or laps, which means moving but returning to the starting position. This aspect of jogging could be considered as holding some of the unproductive exuberance Verwoet is after. There are some typical choices posed on a Stockholm jogger of today, such as myself. For example: inside or outside (treadmill or trail)? Barefoot or shoes on? Interval training or long-distance running? Doing the extra lap today or not? Early morning jog or evening run? And so on. Applying the idea of other choices to jogging could perhaps mean choosing to run beyond this logic. It could mean abandoning the trail to run laps in the school corridor, make a few rounds in a cool shopping mall or randomly run around a parking lot. It could mean not choosing between intervals or long-distance, but instead run as fast as you can to the closest lamppost, then staying put, or possibly go car chasing by foot. ”As a state of suspension between exhaustion and activity, between the ’I Can’t and the ’I Can’, the state of convalescence is the epitome of an empty moment of full awareness. In this moment the illusion of potency, interrupted through illness, is not yet restored...

but still the sense of appreciation is redeemed as the ’I Care’ returns in it’s full potential: you begin to care about life again, more than ever.” The concept of exhaustion is undoubtebly already closely related to running. Could one think of jogging as a way of practicing the condition of convalescence and producing an exuberance of some kind? As emtying oneself to the state of exhaustion, thus creating these moments of interruption, care and awareness of one’s own potential. Maybe this could also invite for new types of joggers, other than the jogger of binary choices. There could be joggers of exhaustion and exuberance, running inefficiently and way too fast. Running backwards or constantly out of step, until they reach a state of exhaustion, and running any further becomes impossible. The end of the jogging would be defined by exhaustion and the impossibility to run any further, and not by a finish line. This would mean actively bringing the body into a state of convalescence, where at first all that matters is lying down on the ground, saying ”I Can’t run”.

Bibliography Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London: Routledge Deleuze, G. (2003) The Logic of Sensation, London: Continuum Deleuze, G. (1995) Negotiations: 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press Foster, H (ed.) (1985) Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto Press Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin Foucault, M (1989) The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, London: Routledge Fuglsang, M. & Meier Sorensen, B. (eds.) (2006) Deleuze and the Social, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Gregg, M. (2005) Affect. M/C Journal, 8(6) Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. (eds) (2010) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham and London: Duke University Press Massumi, B. (2009) Of Microperception and Micropolitics Inflexions online journal, 3 Ricupero, C., Vaillant, A. & Hollein, M (eds.) (2011) Secret Societies, Cologne Shouse, E. (2005) Feeling, Emotion, Affect. M/C Journal, 8(6) Thrift, N. (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London: Routledge Verwoert, J. (2010) Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, Sternberg Press