Feelings in the Air Notes on Political Formation in Hybrid Space Eric Kluitenberg Research Fellow, Institute of Network Cultures Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, School of Design and Communication Amsterdam, The Netherlands Abstract. The concept of Hybrid Space, the layering of embodied and electronically mediated structural spatial relations, refers to a variable densified network of interhuman and intersubjective relationships, intensified in particular by the emergence and proliferation of wireless and mobile communication and media technologies. The volatile structures that result from this densification and intensification create a vastly expanded range of possible associations between previously unrelated actors (human and non-human) that generate a new complexity and unpredictability of social relations. Hybrid Space is marked by a number of characteristic features: discontinuity, instability, continuously varying spatial and temporal densities, heterogeneity of simultaneously operative spatial logics. These characteristics have profound significance for the social processes that (can) unfold in such hybridised spaces, and need to be taken into account when considering processes of political formation and mobilisation in Hybrid Space. This network of relationships between human and nonhuman actors is, however, not restricted to consciously articulated communicative exchanges and interactions of formalised network protocols. It also constitutes a densified networked sphere in which a multitude of nonconscious affects circulate, impinging on and influencing the bodies of the human political actors, further intensifying the complexity and unpredictability of the emergent resonance and feedback patters that shape our early 21st century political landscape. This text explores how this densification and intensification manifested itself in the series of street protests staged throughout the year 2011, often referred to as the ‘movement(s) of the squares’, and how these conditions affect their political significance. Keywords: mobilisation; affect; emotional habitus; hybrid space;
I.
INTO THE STREETS
The remarkable series of public protests that headlined news media throughout the year 2011, despite their heterogeneous geographical, economic and political background, have been linked together as the
‘movement(s) of the squares’ in a plethora of news reports, analyses and public discussions, as well as in the self produced media outlets of the activists that staged these protests. The naming of this constellation as a ‘movement’ or ‘movements’ suggests a coherence that seems to deny the heterogeneity of the local contexts from which the protests emerged, as well as the lack of fixed organisational structures ‘operating’ these protests. What is linked up quite uneasily here as the ‘movements of the squares’ is much rather a recurrent connective pattern that generates a phenomenal diversity of social relations. Nonetheless, the emergent pattern is certainly not entirely arbitrary. This state of things has left commentators and theorists thoroughly puzzled, and consequently is now the subject of the next plethora of commentaries, books, papers, publications, and research projects. To disentangle the constitutive elements that generated the complexity of this constellation we need to proceed with great caution. In my own reflections on this phenomenon (or phenomena) I have decided to use the naming ‘movements of the squares’ as a temporary place holder, justified only by its repeated use in reports and commentaries. Rather than suggesting coherence, I want to use this naming to tease out the complexity and heterogeneity of the phenomena under question, and interrogate their connective patterns. Two aspects stand out as distinctive in the ‘movements of the squares’: •
First the prominence of the use of selfmediating techniques and structures across a variety of media channels and platforms.
•
Secondly the resurgence of street protest, evidenced most prominently in the recurrent occupations of public urban squares.
Both these aspects need to be brought into relation to capture the specificity of the heterogeneous events that have been linked up so uneasily here. and assess their political significance. The concept of Hybrid Space, which addresses the layering and superimposition of embodied and electronically mediated spatial relations, can be tremendously helpful in bringing both these aspects, the simultaneity of
embodied and self-mediated presences in the ‘movement(s) of the squares’, in relation. Such a spatial analysis is in itself not enough to capture the full complexity and the inherent heterogeneity of the phenomena we are confronted with. While the patterns of the protests showed strong similarities, and activists borrowed models, approaches, and tactics from each other (for instance directly sharing manuals online for how to occupy public urban spaces), the political, material and cultural contexts in which these protests unfolded were radically different. Another striking aspect was the tremendous heterogeneity of participants, particularly in the initial stages of the protests, suggesting the image of a broad popular revolt or protest. However, neither clear demands nor comprehensive new political formations have as yet emerged from the ‘movement(s) of the squares’. A variety of exasperated commentators have lamented this absence of clear demands in mass media (See for instance Naomi Wolf’s response in The Guardian’s newspaper, November 2011)i, as well as in discussions in activist and academic circles (see for instance Jodi Dean and Marco Deseriis essay “A Movement without Demands”, January 2012)ii. In the absence of new longer-term political formations emerging from the protests, the energies unleashed in the streets and squares have been partly absorbed by established strategic political players, or seem to have dissolved / dissipated altogether. This leads o a fundamental paradox: How could the activists who staged the protests be simultaneously so effective at mobilising huge and deeply heterogeneous groups of protestors, and at the same time be politically so deeply ineffective? My suggestion is that the paradox of success of mobilisation and apparent political ineffectiveness requires a counter-intuitive move: I start here from the premise that ‘content’ is not defining for the performativity of the ‘movement(s) of the squares’. Rather than claiming that there was no ‘content’ in the protests, or no ‘real’ material underpinnings for the outpourings of popular dissent, I hold that there was ‘too much‘ content, and ‘too many‘ material issues driving the protests to suggest or assume a coherent phenomenon. Even more so I believe that to focus on the qualified concepts of political strategies, aims, demands, and tactics does not help us to get any closer to understanding the dynamic that unfolded. Instead, we need (analytically) to make a ‘down-ward’ movement, into the microstructures of association, and even more tricky, into the slippery domain of ‘feelings. i
Naomi Wolf, ‘How to Occupy the Moral and Political High Ground.’ The Guardian, November 6, 2011. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/06/naomi-wolfoccupy-movement ii Dean, Jodi & Deseriis, Marco (January 3, 2012): A Movement Without Demands?, Possible Futures website, Social Science Research Council, New York. www.possible-futures.org/2012/01/03/a-movement-without-demands
For the moment, however, I will describe in a rather more ‘lateral’ movement the different constituent elements that need to brought into this analysis of the microstructures of association before such a downward analytic trajectory can be begun. These elements are: Marking presence, constituting subjectivity, the affective link, the body of the protestor, semantic openness, imperfect capture (of affective intensity), double presence, variable densities (of Hybrid Space), and finally impermanent associations. After considering these elements the actual trajectory can begin, but this will be were this paper ends. II.
MARKING PRESENCE
One important prediction that sociologist Saskia Sassen made in her seminal work ‘Territory, Authority, Rights’ of 2006, has come to pass in the ‘movement(s) of the squares’: the emergence of a new understanding of the local as multi-scalar. Her idea is that particular instantiations of the local can start to form global formations by creating lateral connections between each other through horizontal network connections. These emerge in particular when social groups become active simultaneously in multiple localities, across any distance, that share similar interests or concerns and start to communicate and coordinate directly among each other, foremost by using internet communication tools and protocols. These new formations can multiply local actions at different scales across vast distances and in very short time spans. In the ‘movement(s) of the squares’ this was evidenced most clearly in the sharing of manuals on occupations of public spaces, how to deal with police actions, legal advice, and more general organisational tactics. Via activist blogs and websites these documents could be easily shared, adapted, translated, re-used in a variety of contexts, without the necessity for formal organisational structures or even shared ideological or political aims. This horizontal networking logic leads, according to Sassen, to a new type of cross--border politics, creating “new linkages across space that emphasise the importance of networks of relations and partly bypass older hierarchies of scale”iii. These formations stand in marked contrast to the nested vertical hierarchies of entities such as the IMF and WTO, and similar institutions. Sassen: “An important feature of this type of multiscalar politics of the local is that it is not confined to moving through a set of nested scales from the local to the national to the international but can directly access other such local actors in the same country or across borders.”iv And Sassen summarises this new horizontal networking logic as the constitution of new forms of the global through the knowing multiplication of local practicesv. iii iv v
Sassen (2006), p. 369. ibid. p. 371. ibid. p. 375.
For these local actors to find and recognise each other, something else is still needed. They need to become ‘present’ to each other, and they need to do so across vast distances and across considerable cultural, lingual and socio-political divides. Much has already been asserted about the new types of a politics of presence in the ‘movement(s) of the squares’, but these accounts tend to emphasise primarily the embodied dimension in the protests and occupations themselves, which cannot explain the rapid multiplication of local practices across vast geographical divides. The prominent role of self-mediating techniques in these protests performs a crucial function for establishing the translocal and transnational co-presence of local actors. ‘Self-mediation’ refers to the constitution of mediated presence through the appropriation of media production and distribution tools and infrastructures by non-professional media producers. Self-mediation not only allows these citizen-protestors to become present towards the political context they are contesting, but crucially also towards each other, thus establishing a translocal presence that is recognisable and can precipitate more active linkages and interaction. And exactly this dynamic of new types of political actors becoming present first of all to each other, resonates closely with earlier observations of Sassen made about the urban context as a new frontier zone where such new and complex presences emerge. In her contribution to the theme-issue Hybrid Space of Open, Journal for Art and the Public Domain, Sassen reflects on the urban context as a frontier zone. Sassen: “The other side of the large complex city, especially if global, is that it is a sort of new frontier zone where an enormous mix of people converges. Those who lack power, those who are disadvantaged, outsiders, discriminated minorities, can gain presence in such cities, presence vis-à-vis power and presence vis-à-vis each other. This signals, for me, the possibility of a new type of politics centred in new types of political actors. It is not simply a matter of having or not having power. There are new hybrid bases from which to act. By using the term presence I try to capture some of this.”vi Already in this text she explores the idea that in a similar fashion as the urban context the interconnected media network, in particular the internet, could be regarded as a new type of frontier zone. And selfmediation can be regarded as a practice aimed at establishing mediated forms of presence by nonprofessional media producers. This allows for the possibility of these new political actors to become present to each other even when they were previously completely unaware of each others existence, and most likely not even intent on forging such new translocal linkages and connections. Self-mediation includes both political and nonpolitical forms of media practice. In fact, I have been studying these new forms of media production since
1999, and it has continuously struck me that the constitution of mediated presence appears to be the primary objective of these practices, much rather than the communication of a specific message or concern. In the essay ‘Media Without an Audience”vii , originally published in 2000, I have argued that self-mediation is primarily characterised by phatic forms of communication, i.e. forms of communication that serve primarily social or emotive purposes, not the transfer of information. (Jakobson, 1963 / Malinowski,1923). The principal aim of self-mediation, then, is the establishment of affective relationships not the communication or transfer of information. III.
CONSTITUTING SUBJECTIVITY
This claim should not be misread. I do not claim that there is no content in self-mediation, that there is no message, no concern, no political analysis, no opinion, or articulated feelings (emotions). Instead, I would argue that there is an excess of such, a too many, too disparate, too much to ever digest. Tens of millions of blogs are online, millions of hours of video accumulate daily on the servers of video platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube. We are continuously confronted with the paradox that publishing exceeds (in volume) the (capacity of) global readership and viewership. Even more so, the numbers of social media postings defy all imagination. This excess of authorship is not simply selfreflective. It operates in a potentially public context, in which publicity is often established unexpectedly through unpredictable chains of linkages and feedback loops. This inferred publicness is part of a process of articulation and constitution of subjectivity, which necessarily needs to take place in the face of others, and in the hope of some form of confirmation by these ‘others’. This subjectivity is a complex and problematic one: it is notably different from artistic subjectivity, which presupposes some professional stance, a specific context of practice. It defies the Foucauldian critique of the vacuousness of the historical subject, and the more recent critiques of commodification of the selfmediating subject by corporate self-publishing and social media platforms. Turning back to the squares, we can see that the predominant image of the protests is no longer that of the distanced media professional. It is not even the perspective of the ‘activist’, a designation that transcends a purely personal role or self-identification. Much rather the protests were crowed with ordinary citizens voicing their largely quotidian concerns. Again, there was no lack of material concerns, no lack of anger, no lack of political demands and aims, but much rather an ‘excess’ of all of these, no longer reducible to anything approximating a ‘movement’. And through all this a radical multiplication of singular viewpoints in self-mediated expressions, distributed across vast geographical, cultural and socio-political divides. What the protestors manifested first and foremost was a
vi
Saskia Sassen, Public Interventions - The Shifting Meaning of the Urban Condition, in: Open No. 11, Journal for Art and the Public Domain, SKOR / NAi Publishers, Amsterdam, 2006, p. 22.
vii
“Media Without an Audience”, 2000, reprinted in Kluitenberg (2008), pp. 294-303.
subjective presence, locally and translocally. Fuelled primarily (indeed) by outrage, but as yet without hope or direction. In my ‘Legacies of Tactical Media’ text, exploring the tactics of media and spatial occupation from Tompkins Square to Tahrir (Kluitenberg, 2012) I have asserted that within this radically enlarged constellation it becomes increasingly impossible to avoid the question exactly what kind of subjectivity is produced here. At that point (around October 2011) I proposed a deliberately ‘perverse’ understanding of the emerging formations of subjectivity engendered by the excess of self-mediation. This perverse subjectivity would be entirely conscious of its own illusory character, of its own constructed nature, of its incongruity, of its essential contradictory and incommensurate make up. As I wrote at the time: “It understands that the apparatuses underpinning the new media ecology guide and control it as much as it guides and controls them. It understands all this and still delights in an excess of mediation, embracing it and relishing it.”viii However, this conscious strategy did not yet sufficiently take into account the incipient connective forces of affect that flowed between these ‘perverse’ subjects, which I now consider a crucial omission. IV.
THE AFFECTIVE LINK
Much has been made of feelings in the ‘movement(s) of the squares’. Manuel Castells speaks of ‘outrage and hope’ (Castells, 2013), Paolo Gerbaudo speaks of an ‘emotional choreography of assembly’ (Gerbaudo, 2012). However, when dealing with the ‘slippery terrain’ of ‘feelings’ it is important to draw a clear distinction between ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’. I follow philosopher Brian Massumi here in regarding affect as a non-conscious and never to be conscious intensity impinging on the body, while emotion is the capture and qualification of that intensity, which implies a radical closure.ix Communication scholar Lilie Chouliaraki has observed that self-mediation is informed by a characteristic ‘performative publicness’ that can generate a particularly forceful intensity, especially when intense libidinal energies need to be displaced (in this case the various forms of frustration fuelling the protests). Affect flows not just between the protestors, but also from the images and sounds produced on the streets and squares and circulated in the media network, as well as in the very communication act. Affect emerges in the link, in the establishment of a connection: The image flashing by on the street, the flows of incoming twitter feeds or e-mail messages, the vibration of the mobile phone receiving SMS messages - the soft brimming in the hand or on the thighs, the vibration of the table, the humming inside a sealed bag:
Each and every instance confirming the existence of a social tie in the act of establishing it - a sublime joy of connection putting the existential threat of privation of the social at bay. In the excess of message exchanges during the various square occupations this joy of connection became a true ‘jouissance’, bordering on and transcending the orgasmic. Clearly here, the affective link does not reside in the message conveyed through this linkage, but much rather must be understood to be coextensive with it. Massumi points out that language is not simply in opposition to intensity (affect), it is ‘differential’ in relation to it.x Language (articulation) does not serve to capture or even qualify this intensity, but it moves, as Massumi says, on parallel tracks. Language should be understood to ‘resonate’ with intensity (affect). It can both dampen as well as amplify it. Affect and language thus can form complex resonance and feedback patterns operating on each other in unpredictable but yet not arbitrary ways. A complicating factor in understanding these resonance and feedback patterns is the speed of affect. Massumi notes that affect moves at approximately double the speed of conscious perception and qualification of impressions and states of the body. Cognitive experiments have shown that conscious qualification of such bodily impressions and their ‘completion in an outward directed, active expression’ takes on average 0.5 seconds. Massumi calls this lapse the ‘missing half second’.xi Bodily responses to such impressions can, however, already be measured (for instance in changes in galvanic skin resistance) within 02 to 0.3 seconds. Averaged on 0.25 seconds this implies that the affective link takes half the time to establish itself and operates at twice the speed of conscious qualification. Conscious responses, it would follow, are eternally running behind such affective linkages, never able to catch up. V.
THE BODY OF THE PROTESTOR
Affect, in Massumi’s understanding, is always directly embodied. Given the speed of bodily responses to such ‘impingements’, the body of the protestor becomes enormously important for the analysis of the affective linkages in the ‘movement(s) of the squares’. Their physical proximity is crucial as affect is never just contained within the body. Massumi’s notion of the autonomy of affect is constituted exactly through its capacity to transcend the individual body. He describes this autonomy of affect as ‘the degree to which affect escapes the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction it is‘.xii It is the proximity of bodies of protestors in the streets and squares that amplifies the vitality of affect and thus heightens the potential for interaction of the protestors themselves. Affect is never simply in the
viii
“Media Without an Audience”, 2000, reprinted in Kluitenberg (2008), pp. 294-303. ix My principal reference here is Brian Massumi’s essay “The Autonomy of Affect”, in Massumi (2002), pp. 23-45.
x xi
Massumi (2002), p. 25. Ibid. p. 29. ibid. p. 35.
xii
message, the image, the sound, the haptic sensation, nor is it in the body alone. Instead, the emergent resonance and feedback patterns are what needs to be studied here. When writing the Network Notebook in 2011 it struck me that there was something, some force that seemed to drive the protestors beyond conscious articulation. A connective force that was somehow operating beyond consciousness and simultaneously stirring it, driving the protestors beyond themselves. I did not have proper terms for it, but it was shining through in the images from the protests: “There is an air of intense excitement that pervades the photographs and videos of the revolution, a seemingly transgressive type of ecstasy. In videos it is indicated by the excited gesturing. In photographs it is embodied in the gaze, a certain shimmer in the eyes. A gaze, often turned upward, points to some kind of ‘other space’, perhaps infinity. This excited gaze seems not to be directed at anything or anyone in particular, but appears to embrace something else. One might be tempted to call it ‘sacred’. A connection is established to something other, not regular life, not social convention, not religious prescript. This image of connection goes beyond the existing social order to enter a potentially infinite space.”xiii VI.
SEMANTIC OPENNESS
Another characteristic of affect observed by Massumi, is its semantic openness. It connects the heterogeneous in all sorts of counter-intuitive ways. According to Massumi the level of intensity is characterised by ‘a crossing of semantic wires’, which means that it is not semantically or semiotically ordered. Massumi: “it vaguely but insistently connects what is normally indexed as separate.”xiv This semantic openness of affective intensity can provide us with more definite clues for the success of the mobilisations processes witnessed in the ‘movement(s) of the squares’. Particularly in the early stages of the protests they were able to gather a remarkable heterogeneity of participants, something repeatedly observed by commentators, also in analyses that mostly assumed a sceptical view on the protests. We can assume that the composition of the protest and encampment crowds changed over time and gradually became more homogeneous, but this still needs to be established on the basis of participant surveys.xv The semantic openness of the affective link was a key factor in overcoming a vast array of ideological, material, cultural, and political differences. It certainly played a prominent role in establishing translocal and transnational expressions of solidarity and support. It seemed that participants in the protests were drawn into the protests even before they realised whether or not these events actually corresponded with their particular
affiliations. An incipient connective force was driving them beyond and before the conscious articulation of outwardly expressed action or the capture of intensity in (group) emotions. The semantic openness of affect also precipitates specific linguistic formations to which it resonates particularly strongly. Generally the most generic types of slogans and phrases, those most void of content, resonate most strongly with affective intensity. The famous “We are the 99%” slogan of Occupy Wall Street is a prime example. While the slogan vaguely refers to the excessively dis-balanced division of wealth in US society, it makes an impossible claim to represent the concerns of a dizzyingly complex and contradictory constituency (i.e. 99 percent of the US population). Moreover, the slogan was subsequently copied by other occupations, among others in the EU where radically other political issues were put on the table, but where the 99 versus 1 percent division of wealth was not the issue at all. The slogan “We are the 99%” should therefore be regarded as semantically void, which is exactly what made it so highly effective as a resonance object for the displacement of affective intensity across ideological, cultural, and political divides. To a certain extent, though more specifically associated with the Egyptian context, the slogan “We are all Khaled Said” operated on a similar level as resonance object in the eruption of anti-Mubarak protests, where it served to temporarily unite a deeply divisive demographic structure. VII. IMPERFECT CAPTURE OF AFFECTIVE INTENSITY In Massumi’s understanding ‘formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage’ are the capture and closure of affect, of which emotion is ‘the most intense, most contracted, expression’.xvi Emotion can thus be considered instrumental to constricting the free flow, the autonomy, of affect. In her recent book and PHD thesis, ‘Moving Politics’ (Gould, 2009), Sociologist Deborah Gould builds on experiences gained from her extensive personal presence in the ACT-UP aids activism coalition. Gould accords a central role to emotion as the capture of affective intensity in emergent processes of political formation. She argues that emotions should be recognised as a ubiquitous feature of human life informing all of social life including the realm of political action and inaction.xvii Following Massumi, Gould considers emotions as the ‘conventional or coded expression of affect in gesture and language’.xviii She connects emotion to the social by building on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘habitus’ to designate a social grouping's collective and only partial conscious emotional dispositions, which she terms as the ‘emotional habitus’. Gould observes that affect can generate a strong desire to make sense of
xiii
Kluitenberg (2011), p. 45. Massumi (2002), p. 24. xv See for instance the Occupy Research Network project, whose outcomes still need to be comprehensively published: http://occupyresearch.wikispaces.com xiv
xvi xvii
Massumi (2002), p. 35. Gould (2009), p. 18. Gould (2009), p. 19 / Massumi, (2002), p. 232.
xviii
itself. It mobilises the emotional habitus, which offers means of interpretation and naming of one’s affective states through processes of collective association. Gould argues, however, that the capture of affective intensities by the emotional habitus is always imperfect, leaving behind a residue, what Massumi calls a ‘nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic remainder’.xix Emotion for Massumi is both the most intense expression of the capture of affective intensity and of ‘the fact that something has always and again escaped’.xx Both social movements and strategic political formations can be seen to attempt to capture affective intensity and bring about its closure, by forging an emotional habitus or by directing it towards strategic political objectives. But this capture remains inherently incomplete, generating a continuous source of instability, which can erupt unpredictably and seemingly spontaneously. The impingement of this autonomic remainder on the self-mediating subject and the body of the protestor can be recognised as an incipient force driving the subject to find new forms of connection beyond these coded expressions of affect, which can account for the recurrent pattern of street protests and public square occupations: A meeting of bodies of protestors creating new (semantically open) resonance patterns of affective intensity, thereby escaping fixation by any strategic political formation. VIII. DOUBLE PRESENCE IN HYBRID SPACE The physical protest spaces created through the occupation of mostly urban public spaces, are in turn permeated by media flows, primarily because of the massive presence of wireless and mobile media. This layering of functional infrastructures enabled an intensive self-mediated presence of the protestors on the squares and in the streets, at times constituted in near real-time through the use of public live streaming platforms. The protestors in the ‘movement(s) of the squares’ thereby established a ‘double presence’ (both embodied and mediated) that dramatically increased the range of possible association between what were previously mainly unrelated social actors. Such associations concurrently operate locally and translocally on a wide variety of scales, potentially scaling up to global formations, intensifying and extending the multi-scalar politics of the local that Sassen observed to a near real-time connection. The layering of physical space with disembodied and mediated flows of information and exchange is beautifully captured by the concept of Hybrid Space - a concept proposed and developed initially by architects Frans Vogelaar and Elisabeth Sikiaridi.xxi Through the conceptualisation of Hybrid Space as a spatial unity in which a wide variety of heterogenous xix
Massumi (2002), p. 25. ibid. p. 35. xxi See: Vogelaar & Sikiaridi (1999) and Kluitenberg & Seijdel (2006). xx
spatial and temporal logics operate and interact concurrently, the multiplication of possible associations between social actors (human and non-human) can be analysed much more precisely. The presence of mediated information and communication flows does not constitute this spatial hybridity in itself, but increases the density of Hybrid Space dramatically. IX.
VARIABLE DENSITIES
Hybrid Space is marked by a number of characteristic features: discontinuity, instability, heterogeneity of simultaneously operative spatial logics, and continuously varying spatial and temporal densities. The densities of Hybrid Space vary not only from place to place, but also from moment to moment. The (temporary) presence or absence of signal carrier waves and electronic networking structures greatly contributes to these variable densities. In densely populated urbanised zones the densities of Hybrid Space are most intense. It is here that we find the economies of scale, the presence of overlapping networks of economic, social, military, and political activity that support these different functional and technological infrastructures. In their text ‘idensifying™ translocalities’ Vogelaar and Sikiaridi refer back to the seminal work of media theorist Vilém Flusser. Flusser elegantly describes a network of densifying interhuman and intersubjective relationships that can be recognised as both an urban as well as a communicative structure. Flusser: "The new image of Man looks roughly like this: we have to imagine a network of interhuman relations, a 'field of intersubjective relations'. The threads of this web must be conceived as channels through which information (ideas, feelings, intentions and knowledges etc.) flows. These threads get temporarily knotted and form what we call 'human subjects'. The totality of the threads constitutes the concrete sphere of life and the knots are abstract extrapolations. […] The density of the webs of interhuman relations differs from place to place within the network. The greater the density the more 'concrete' the relations. These dense points form wave troughs in the field […] The wave troughs exert an 'attractive' force on the surrounding field (pulling it into their gravitational field) so that more and more interhuman relations are drawn in from the periphery. […] These wave troughs shall be called 'cities'." (Flusser, 1988) In the protests the variable densities of Hybrid Space were demonstrated most clearly by the extensive use of wireless media networks, live transmissions from urban spaces, mobile media streams, SMS and twitter feeds across and between protest spaces, the use of geolocation enabled devices for co-ordination, but also in the interventions of authorities shutting down and reenabling mobile and internet communication networks, blockages of websites and social media platforms, the intense use of military communication infrastructures, satellite and aerial observation and analysis, and realtime satellite communications used by (global) media networks, authorities and protestors alike. The break-up
of connections is as significant here as their establishment. A continuously shifting volatile communication landscape emerged, characterised by ever-fluctuating densities. X.
IMPERMANENT ASSOCIATIONS
The semantic openness of the affective links established in and through the performative publicness of self-mediation in the ‘movement(s) of the squares’ was particularly effective in facilitating and gathering a wide variety of heterogeneous political actors. This can help to account for the remarkable success of the mobilisations in these protests. This mobilising potential is further enhanced by the multiplication of connections resulting from the widened field of interaction (mediated and embodied) in Hybrid Space, linking up a multiplicity of previously unrelated actors. The semantic openness of affect may, however, simultaneously account for the apparent lack of political efficacy of these groupings: The direction of affective energies towards some outward action, a common goal, and even more so towards specific strategic political objectives, implies a semantic closure that dissipates the affective energies in the moment of their capture and thereby dissolves the temporary affective links. The associations formed in such moments of affective linkage therefore appear destined to remain temporary. The idea of an imperfect capture of affective intensity by the emotional group habitus and strategic political formations implies the ever-present potential for the emergence of new and largely unpredictable (yet not arbitrary) affective feedback loops, generating a source for continued political instability. This instability is further amplified by the increasing densities of Hybrid Space, and the webs of interhuman and intersubjective relationships that form there. It seems then that once we transcend the domain of articulated political strategies, aims, demands, ideologies, and institutional structures, moving in a downward (Feynmanian) motion into the microstructures of association that constitute the social, we encounter an enormous complexity that is as yet still largely unaccounted for. These conditions are, however, certain to have a wide variety of as yet unpredictable effects on the flow and capture of future political processes. We could state that there is plenty of room at the bottom here for analysis and research. Perhaps, indeed, we may find a field ‘which seems to be bottomless and in which one can go down and down.’xxii There is certainly a growing urgency to address this.
References Castells, Manuel (2013): Networks of Outrage and Hope, Polity Press. Chouliaraki, Lilie (2012): Self-Mediation - New Media, Citizenship and Civil Selves, Routledge, Abingdon / New York, 2012. Reproduction of Critical Discourse Studies, volume , issue 4 (2010). Flusser, Vilém: “The City as Wave-Trough in the Image-Flood”, translated by Phil Gochenour in: Critical Inquiry 31 (1988 - transl. by Phil Gochenour, Winter 2005), pp. 320-328. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ci.2005.31.issue-2 Gerbaudo, Paolo (2012): Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. Pluto Books, London and New York. Gould, Deborah B. (2009): Moving Politics Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against Aids, University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London. Jakobson, Roman (1963): Essays de linguistique générale. Les fondations du langage, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris. Kluitenberg, Eric (2011): Legacies of Tactical Media - The Tactics of Occupation: From Tompkins Square to Tahrir, Network Notebooks No. 5, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. Kluitenberg, Eric (2008): Delusive Spaces - Essays on Culture, Media and Technology, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures / NAi Publishers. Kluitenberg, Eric & Seijdel, Jorinde (eds.) (2006): Hybrid Space: How Wireless Media Mobilize Public Space, OPEN #21, Journal for Art and the Public Domain, Amsterdam: SKOR / NAi Publishers. Latour, Bruno (2005): Reassembling the Social - An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Malinowski, Bronislaw (1923): "The problem of meaning in primitive languages." Supplement to C. Ogden and I. Richards, “The meaning of meaning.” London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pp. 146-152. Massumi, Brian (2002): Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. In particular: “The Autonomy of Affect”, pp. 23 - 45. Sassen, Saskia, (2006 ): Territory, Authority, Rights - From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ). Vogelaar, Frans & Sikiaridi, Elisabeth (1999), idensifying™ translocalities, Logbook NRW.NL (catalogue), De Balie, Amsterdam.
xxii
I am using a phrase here from the classic talk by physicist Richard P. Feynman on December 29th 1959, at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology. www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html