ABSTRACT
Affect for architecture, when taken merely as the production of feelings or emotions as aroused in what is presumed to be a stable, self-same, phenomenological subject apprehending a discrete architectural object, overlooks the concatenating effects of the political power of affect. By enrolling Gilles Deleuze’s Spinozist account of affect, the reciprocal, if unbalanced power relations produced between affected and affecting bodies pertinent to architecture can instead be acknowledged. Bodies here are not exhausted through an enumeration of human bodies, but include all manner of body, a body of water, a body of thought, a built body, and how bodies impact and overlap on each other to produce greater or meaner compositions. By returning to the oft-cited Deleuze–Spinoza formula, the capacity to affect and to be affected, this chapter challenges the habit of locating architecture as an autonomous object in sensual (non)relation with autonomous and circumscribed (human) subjects. I venture instead an expanded account of architecture at the scale of infrastructure, from transport to telecommunications to Special Economic Zones, so as to open architecture up to its unruly socio-political and ecological outside. In the immediate present, this pertains to the challenge of how to cope amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and how a thinking with architecture understood as a spatial support to infrastructures becomes all the more important for affect studies.
