Panel #3
Affective Connections Part 1: Relationality & Movement

Abstracts

'Odd Companionships: Affective orientations and Co-Becomings'

Tuuli Innola (Tampere University, Finland)

Significant and life-defining companionships take shape and become lived in many forms. My doctoral dissertation in Social Sciences, Gender Studies, titled Odd companionships – the everyday  affectivity of sharing lives, dives into the less-studied and less-acknowledged area of close relations,  as I study companionships that do not fit into the norms of couple relationships and existing family  models. Such companionships may also include other-than-human companions. 

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I collected interview data in Spring 2021, consisting of 18 semi-structured individual or couple interviews with people whose most significant life companion is other than a couple relationship.  The interviewees name their companions as friends, flatmates, relatives, animal companions, ex partners, or experience companionship as a web of multiple relationships.  

Drawing from affect theories, I ask how companionships co-become lived and experienced as  affective material-discursive practices. How are the companionships formed and maintained in  everyday life? And how does the embodied sense of meaningfulness become through the  assemblage of affective orientations, life circumstances, and social, material and societal  surroundings? I also analyse the affective intensities that emerge in my diffractive reading and  coming-together of affect theories, feminist knowledge and the interview data: as I am writing my  preliminary analysis, I pay attention to how some aspects of the companionships glow as more  emotional, confusing, joyful, important, or anxious than others.  

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Furthermore, I consider the enabling and restricting potentialities that unfold in the process of co becoming, and how those become connected to wider societal, cultural, and political surroundings  and power relations. Some affective inequalities connected to “odd companionships” emerge in  relation or comparison to couple-relationships and normative expectations. A companionship that does not fix its parties into a normative life-course or have a self-evident status (not necessarily to  the parties of the companionship themselves, either) may be experienced as empowering and  liberating from the heavily regulated hetero/mono-normative coupledom, and include considerable  vulnerabilities. 

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'Transits of Light in Projective Moving Image Art: A Queer Phenomenology of the Dark Corridor'

Danilo Barauna (The Glasgow School of Art)

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This paper aims at analysing the phenomenon of the body transitioning from a brightly-lit space to a darkly-lit space where projective moving image art is installed in galleries. This procedure has been used by a range of artists in situations where a ‘dark corridor’ is built with the purpose of materialising this transition into an intermediary environment. Therefore, the purpose of this exploration is to understand the ‘dark corridor’ as a suspended space where queer affects are constructed in transit and in relation to the expectation of the encounter with the moving image. Thus, the ‘dark corridor’ is the main element of the orientation and disorientation of the viewer’s body whilst crusing these spaces. I utilise a queer phenomenological methodology (Ahmed, 2006) to analyse the artworks SafO5 (2019) by Charlotte Prodger and No history in a room filled with people with funny names (2019), by Kokakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic. After the dark corridor, an emotional and physical distress is generated from two main situations: 1) the viewer can encounter a completely dark space that disorientates the body as the eyes are still not accustomed to the light transition, such as in the work of Charlotte Prodger, where a single screen slowly starts to be the responsible for the body’s orientation and where a queer autobiography is explored in the content projected, and 2) the viewer faces a profusion of artificial light emanating from multiple projections and other sources, as in Arunanindchai and Gvojic’s artwork. In both situations the viewer’s body is engulfed by the transit of light situation in order to create a physical discomfort that lead the viewer to engage with the stage of absorption provided by the moving image projected.

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'Affective Drifting: Repurposing the Situationist International Dérive as a Disruptive Tactic Against the Contemporary Capitalist Realism'

Leon Hughes (University of London Institute in Paris)

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This paper, entitled ‘Affective Drifting: Repurposing the Situationist International Dérive as a Disruptive Tactic Against the Contemporary Capitalist Realism’, looks to update the Debordian Dérive – rapid passage through urban space as a method disruption of the Capitalist Spectacle – in response to the more insidious and diffuse advanced Capitalist variant of Capitalist Realism, as promulgated by Mark Fisher. This paper will first establish how the Debordian Spectacle has transposed into the Capitalist Realism of Fisher, with focus on the contemporary urban as a city of flows (Amin and Thrift, 2002) and speeds (Virilio, 2006). 

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Next, this paper will assert that drift deliberately situates the drifter as a body-for-encounter, a contact zone through which one can affect, and be affected; and hence, momentarily rupture Capitalist Realism. This paper will use Rosi Braidotti’s figuration of nomadic subjectivity, following Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomadology (2010), to reconfigure the drifter-as-nomad, emphasising both the spatial and epistemological apertures of the drifter. The drift will be posited as a process ontology in which the subject is one of successive and multiple becomings, as well as providing a ‘flow of connections’ which are grounded in ‘emphatic proximity, intensive interconnectedness’ (Briadotti, 1994, 6). 

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This paper will then argue for updating Debord and Jorn’s original figuration of ‘Plaque Tournantes’ into updated ‘Plaque Rhizomatiques’ where the becoming-multiple will be emphasised as a momentary gathering. This momentary gathering of bodies holds the potentiality to rupture the Capitalist Realist affective regime. These momentary ruptures will be elaborated on through consideration of their phenomenological (re)orientation, especially regarding the territorialisation of affective atmospherics which can bring other actants into each with each other. Through recognising and instrumentalising atmospheric disruption of Capitalist Realism, drift, it shall be argued, holds a generative and affective virtuality to both disrupt the artifice of Capitalist Realism, and cultivate nomadic subjectivities.