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Affective Infrastructures: A Tableau, Altar, Scene, Diorama, or Archipelago
Can infrastructures be affective? How do systems of control and classification relate to today’s problematics of care? Which infrastructures assist in binding people together and in building new worlds? In the following conversation, Study Circle participants engage with such questions and bring in examples of objects, feelings, technologies, and practices that constitute affective infrastructures. Resisting the temptation to organize and classify, these entries are discussed but not defined. Wishing to keep the possibility for connections and associations open, what emerges is not a lexicon but rather an archipelago of items. Intentionally lacking a clear beginning or end, this conversation aims to stimulate thought and action about the interwoven realities of our times, and the need for living infrastructures that permit continuous shifts and transformations.
“What remains for our pedagogy of unlearning is to build affective infrastructures that admit the work of desire as the work of an aspirational ambivalence. What remains is the potential we have to common infrastructures that absorb the blows of our aggressive need for the world to accommodate us [...].”
Lauren Berlant, The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times
Imagine a cocktail party. People mingle, dip in and out of conversations, and wander in and out of rooms. This particular cocktail party was initiated by transmediale, had nine guests, and took place across five time zones and 20 days.cocktailparty Now, this party is over. The text you are reading is a transcript of the conversations that took place. The stage was set in late October when the Study Circle on affective infrastructures met for the first time in Berlin, with three of us appearing remotely from Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Bologna.