Thinking through non-representational and affective atmospheres in planning theory and practice

Abstract

This article engages with recent debates surrounding non-representational theory and the affective turn in the social sciences, arguing that such thinking offers a particularly useful set of concepts for the discipline of planning. This includes a widened notion of agency to the inclusion of more-than-human bodies (i.e. material agency) and a focus on daily practice and the embodied experience of place. Calling upon the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the author puts forward affective atmospheres as a post-humanist way of studying socio-spatial processes associated with place identity and the spatial imaginaries that animate planning activity. Recognising the co-constitutive nature of research and social worlds, the article offers a performative methodology that situates researchers directly within the material and discursive environments they seek to investigate.

Keywords

affect becoming Deleuze non-representational theory performative planning theory

Introduction

Given the utter ubiquity of affect as a vital element of cities … you would think that the affective register would form a large part of the study of cities – but you would be wrong. (Thrift, 2004: 57)

What accounts for the aura and atmosphere of place experiences? More precisely, how might research go about capturing the buzz and energy of a place like Stokes Croft (a bohemian ‘creative quarter’ in Bristol, UK), the tranquillity of walks through the English countryside, or the awe felt glimpsing the New York City skyline? To what extent or in what ways do concepts such as aura, atmosphere and character reflect the imperceptible – the non-representational – and the affective relations, interactions and sensations produced and experienced in cities, neighbourhoods and environments?

Certainly, in the years since Thrift’s critique, affect has become an important concept for examining cities and urban relations, contributing to what some have labelled an ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences and humanities (Clough, 2007). However, the study of affect and its role in place experience has not yet found a significant foothold in planning (although see Dovey et al., 2009; Hillier, 2011; Wood, 2009). In this article, I suggest that with a focus on practice and situated, embodied experiences, affective thinking shares significant common ground with the concerns of planning practitioners and academics. Moreover, as the discipline is directly implicated in the production of agential matter (e.g. through processes of planning, design, construction, place-making and so on), planning scholars have a particular opportunity (one might say a responsibility) to contribute and even take part ownership of the affective turn in social research.

As such, the article seeks the development of an affective theory in planning and considers how situated and embodied affective experiences – those interactions with and between people and matter – inform how we construct, know and experience the world. Drawing on the post-structuralist, continental philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and recent non-representational theory, the article argues for critical engagement with the role of affect in cultural production, meaning-making and processes of becoming. In turn, it explores ways in which these concepts might support and enhance the consideration and study of relationships between built (and natural) form and social practices.

The article follows Dovey et al. (2009) who challenge planners to carefully examine relationships between place experience, built form and the common use of terms such as ‘character’. These authors argue that attempts to regulate or reduce character to a set of formal elements (e.g. physical, built form) do so at the expense of the everyday experience where the social and the physical are more subtly intertwined. The article can also be located alongside Michael Gunder’s Lacanian study and critique of the role of the unconscious in planning ideology and expertise. Gunder (2010) argues for a planning practice which moves away from the habitual and the safe and towards a more ‘creative process … that has greater regard in its prescriptions to the uniqueness and particularity of place’ (p. 208).

In this article, I develop and advance the notion of affective atmospheres – defined as the range of collective affects produced through dynamic, relational place encounters – to consider the imperceptible and the affective sensations situated in place experiences and relations (Anderson, 2009). This discussion draws upon recent work in human and cultural geography where affective thinking has significantly influenced the study of cities and places. There are, of course, significant commonalities and overlaps between geography and planning as both express an interest in place experience and socio-cultural production. However, as a discipline intimately involved in praxis (entailing a professional component directly implicated in the construction of place), planners will certainly look to develop these ideas further, possibly in alternative or contradictory ways. As such, the article seeks to develop this discussion and invites further elaborations.

The article is structured as follows. The section ‘Non-representational theory, Deleuze and the dogmatic image of thought’ introduces non-representational theory, attending to particular ideas related to thought and representation. This work is situated in the key ontological themes of Gilles Deleuze and his theories of becoming and affect. In the section titled ‘Affective atmospheres’ the author brings these ideas together, advancing the notion of affective atmospheres as a framework for examining situated place experience. Subsequently, the article draws out a range of methodological challenges and opportunities while the final part summarises the work and sets out a research agenda.

Non-representational theory, Deleuze and the dogmatic image of thought

Generally associated with British geographer Nigel Thrift (2007), non-representational theory refers to ‘a mode of thinking which seeks to immerse itself in everyday practice’ (Cadman, 2009: 456). This diverse body of theory emerged in the mid 1990s partly out of a concern with the explanatory limitations of social constructivism and a critical engagement with how we understand social worlds. In developing a non-representational theory, Thrift and others have argued that during the 1980s and 1990s, the dominant stream of cultural geography overvalued ‘the cultural politics of representation’ (Cadman, 2009: 456) and by separating symbolism and semiotic order from particular situations, misunderstood the very actions and practices they sought to examine.

Thrift’s account is informed by the philosophy of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and other post-structuralists who critiqued the idea of being or truth as a ‘faithful image, copy or doubling of the present’ (Colebrook, 2000: 50). In this representational model, thought is experienced as a re-presentation in our mind of what is presented to us, as a mirror of nature. Deleuze rejects this ‘dogmatic image of thought’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 144) for its predisposition to habitual, taken-for-granted ways of thinking. Representation, he argues,

… fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing. (Deleuze, 1994: 55–56)

This ‘world of difference’ is vital for Deleuze’s critique and the development of his wider ontological project. For example, in conventional representational thinking, objects and matter – things in the world – are subordinated to a system of knowledge where differences emerge only through negation, as difference from already existing stable identities (e.g. distinguishing what is in the world by saying ‘A’ is not ‘B’ or ‘A’ is like ‘B’). Here, identity is always prior to difference, which can only be experienced as negation.

For Deleuze, negative difference imprisons philosophy within the realm of the familiar where it is unable to break with or challenge doxa (Deleuze, 1994; May, 2005). Recognising that sameness and identity are inventions of the human mind, he offers, in contrast, an ontology of affirmation – founded in celebration of the creativity and contingency of pure difference. This ontology is an argument to think of difference in itself – ‘in terms of how we differentiate in ourselves in our inevitable and ongoing process of transformation, rather than the difference between things, and being different from each other’ (Hultman and Taguchi, 2010: 528, italics in original). Seeing this way, in terms of pure difference, is an assertion to see the things, objects, matter and individuals around us as processes and as processes connected to other processes; it is an invitation to focus on the enigmatic, the edges that blur the individual and the strange becomings that a body undertakes. (Marks, 2011). Hence, Deleuze’s (1994) ontology is an escape from the familiar, the habitual and taken-for-granted and a provocation to think in terms of connections and difference – to think ‘without image’ (p. 167).

But how does one think of ‘difference-in-itself’ or without image as Deleuze advocates? More precisely, how might Deleuze’s ontology be applied to the discipline of planning where representations such as place identity and character seem so critical to the wider project of urban regulation and design? To explore these questions, I return to recent work in cultural geography where, following Deleuze’s representational critique and Thrift’s call for an affective study of cities, there has been a significant development of what can be called a non-representational way of thinking through the urban.

Indeed, non-representational scholarship is notable for efforts to escape from the dogmatic image of thought. For example, in attending to both life and thought as practice, the basis of meaning is commonly situated in actions, interactions and bodily experience, rather than discourse, semiotics and representation. Something like language, for example, is not a ‘picture of the world or vehicle of meaning’ but rather ‘continuous with action in the world’ (Colebrook, 2000: 56) as performance and event. In this account, representations and symbolic order – which previously formed the ontological basis for social understandings – are recovered as ‘performative presentations’, which enact and co-constitute social worlds (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 19).

By way of example, in a recent article, John Wylie (2005) tells the story of a day’s walk along the South West Coast Path in North Devon, England. In this account, the author is not concerned with ‘the cultural practices and politics of the Path’ (p. 236) and does not ask questions related to inclusion/exclusion, cultural representations of the countryside, meanings associated with countryside walking or the social backgrounds of the people he encounters. Rather, Wylie (2005) narrates his personal experience of walking to ‘describe some of the differential configurations of self and landscape emergent within the performative milieu of coastal walking’ (p. 236, italics in original). Wylie forefronts embodied experience, performance and intensity alongside and embedded within landscape in seeking to draw attention to the emergence of self–landscape relations in practice. Of course, such an approach raises important concerns regarding the potential de-politicalisation of spatial encounters (e.g. can one remove ‘class’ from the countryside as a cultural product?) and signals the need for researchers to acknowledge their own social location in producing such accounts. Indeed, it is a post-humanist take on subjectivity, which attends to affective registers in order to move away from fixed cultural assumptions and meanings and towards a practice-orientated, more-than-human and post-phenomenological¹ (Ihde, 1993; Wylie, 2006) consideration of what a body can do. Following Deleuze, Wylie is exploring ways of thinking that escape static categories and the taken-for-granted in an effort to capture forces that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Thinking in this way marks a divergence from dominant social constructivist and deconstructive frameworks and challenges research to move beyond reflexivity and towards a more direct interaction with research worlds.

Starting in the middle and becoming-minor

one never commences; one never has a tabula rasa, one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms. (Deleuze, 1988: 123)

In Deleuze’s ontology, there is no transcendental ‘being’ serving as a stable model of what exists in the world, there is only becoming. This concept is central to Deleuze’s philosophy and is particularly useful towards understanding how difference might be thought of as an affirmation in itself. In general, becoming refers to a process of change – a line of flight – through which stable identities are dissolved. It is a continuous process where ‘things and thoughts advance or grow out from the middle … that’s where everything unfolds’ (Deleuze, 1990b: 161). In the concept of becoming, Deleuze counters the stability, sameness and fixed identity of being with the instability and creativity of pure difference.

In his collaborative work with Guattari, Deleuze explores all manner of becomings (e.g. becoming-woman; becoming-animal; becoming-imperceptible). One of the more remarkable and potentially useful of these for planning is their notion of becoming-minor. It is important to clarify that minor or minorities in this reading are not specific groups of people (e.g. based on race, class, gender). Rather, ‘they are fluid movements of creativity that subvert the dominant, i.e., majoritarian identities our current arrangements bestow upon us …’ (May, 2003: 149). Becoming-minor involves escape from majoritarian habits or norms and resistance to superior meanings and hierarchical codes (Taguchi, 2012). However, these de-territorialisations or molecular politics always emanate from and are part of the molar (i.e. majoritarian) regimes they subvert; they are intensive, imperceptible forces emerging from (and producing) the extensive, extended concrete world (Marks, 2011). In other words, for Deleuze, the world is made up of continual processes of becoming or de-territorialisations – demands, desires and imaginaries – away from dominant ways of organising the world. However, this is not a question of opposition or dialectic between major and minor but rather a sense of movement from within majoritarian aggregates and immobilisations (O’Sullivan, 2006).

For planning and the study of cities, we can imagine all manners of becoming-minor: lines of flight away from conventional place identities and static ways of categorising the urban and towards exploratory or unconventional ways of experiencing the world. For example, the way guerrilla gardeners recover some of the smallest and ‘irrelevant’ pieces of the city for fruitful urban agriculture or how the Reclaim the Streets² activists challenged the hegemonic assumptions associated with what was an appropriate and acceptable use of the street. Seen as a process of continual change – of always being in the middle – these becomings challenge us to see how the concrete world is made up of disruptive and creative affective encounters: imperceptible or molecular forces (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988) which cannot be fully captured in taken-for-granted discourse. At the most practical level, becoming-minor suggests that planners might rethink the way commonly used classifications about place and place identity are constructed and deployed and be open to unconventional or even radical understandings of the urban. However, Deleuze’s notion of becoming is also part of a wider critique of the humanist subject as a self-aware, conscious, subjective experience. The starting point for this alternative, post-anthropocentric concept of the subject is affect (Due, 2007).

Affect

… Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition but of fundamental encounter … It may be grasped in a range of affective tones … In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. (Deleuze, 1994: 139)

The recent affective turn in the social sciences and humanities has been propelled, in part, by an interest in Deleuze and his engagement with 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s affectus. The concept – affect in English – is often associated with particular bodily responses and activity such as blushes, sweating and rushes of adrenaline as well as with concepts such as hope, fear and other representations of feeling states. However, the language of emotion, including expressions of feelings and subjective experiences, does not capture or adequately explain the particular qualities of affect. In Spinoza’s book, the Ethics, affect is the experience of ‘affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, helped or hindered, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections’ (Spinoza, E III, Def. 3; quoted in Ruddick, 2010: 27; see also Deleuze, 1978 for transcribed lectures on Spinoza). In this sense, thought and awareness become social acts where bodies are in a continual process of de-composition and re-composition in relation to other bodies. As Deleuze (2005) writes,

A body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies; it is this capacity for affecting and being affected that also defines a body in its individuality. (p. 58)

In non-representational theory, Brian Massumi’s (1996, 2002) translations and interpretations of Deleuze have been particularly influential in developing specific understandings of affect where three general characteristics or themes are commonly displayed. First, affects are transpersonal, positioned within and between bodies, and unlike emotions, they are not localised exclusively within personal experience. Second, affect is non-cognitive, or as such, affects ‘cannot be grasped, made known or represented’ (Pile, 2010: 9). In this sense, they are distinct from emotions, feelings and other means of perceiving and interpreting affective states. Third, embedded within this particular concept of affect is an interaction between bodies, including the way a person or some thing might ‘be affected’ by an event. For example, we can think about how the moon affects the tides, or how people are affected by music. Affect is an active force, a fluid and dynamic process that is continually made and remade; it is the ‘energetic outcome of encounters between bodies in particular places’ (Conradson and Latham 2007: 232, emphasis added).

It is this third sense that affect has most prominently been introduced into planning theory. For example, in her vivid account of the iron men of Another Place, Jean Hillier develops an account of human and non-human actants involved in processes of planning. Hillier attributes ‘material agency’ to the 100 iron statues of naked men (cast replicas of the artist Antony Gormley’s body) situated along Crosby beach (north of Liverpool), themselves part of a Deleuzian assemblage of (people, iron, the beach, sea, wind, etc.). Moreover, Hillier’s (2011) iron men have potential and capacity, triggering a range of affects in humans (joy, fascination and intrigue, anger, shame), contributing to the regenerative affects of city-led cultural industry strategies, while modifying natural features and habitats along the coastline (p. 874).

This widened field of non-human capacities coheres to a new materialist conception of matter as having agential qualities (Coole and Frost, 2010: 7) and a concomitant post-humanist de-emphasis on subjective human traits such as reason, meaning-making and imagination (Cresswell, 2012). Affect, as such, can be seen as a force or a type of energy that does not take for granted the idea of self-consciousness or subjective self-awareness (Due, 2007). Such a perspective has important implications for the study of urban experience as it challenges anthropocentric views on subjectivity and interpretation. Moreover, if the mind is a collection of imperceptible, pre-personal or pre-conscious affects, how can research efforts propose to make sense of the world and how might we understand what it means to experience particular urban environments?

In the next section, the article draws together notions of affect, becoming and difference and calling upon recent work in non-representational scholarship, advances towards a theory of affective atmospheres. It is hoped that such an approach might advance the ways in which planners attend to the experience of human interaction in physical spaces and provide a frame through which to consider the imperceptible and the affective sensations situated in place experiences and relations.

Affective atmospheres

‘We live through and in language’ (Gunder, 2010: 201). As planners, we are comfortable with expressions and words such as character, sense of place, identity and so on. For example, one might describe the character of a place like Stokes Croft, Bristol as ‘gritty’, ‘hip’ or perhaps ‘bohemian’. What I find particularly interesting about this language and this way of expressing concepts of place is that it is often an attempt to explore that which cannot be fully articulated or described. When we describe the character of a place as ‘bohemian’, we are using language to do more than re-present the world; we are seeking a way to move beyond the purely perceptible, extensive and concrete. However, as Gunder (2010) indicates, our use of these words often reflects habitual practice where meanings become taken-for-granted. As a consequence, our plans and policies become trapped in dogmatic thinking, unable to account for variation, the unconventional or to see difference in itself. In this section, I seek to move beyond conventional or representational place identity and in the direction of thinking place ‘without image’ (Deleuze, 1994). Towards this aim, I outline some ways in which the notion of atmosphere might be usefully applied to an affective theory of place.

In common parlance, the word atmosphere can be used in a range of ways, many of which relate to the way planners speak. For example, we can use the word to describe particular moods or feeling states and say that the atmosphere at a public consultation meeting was tense. We can also use atmosphere as a way to describe something like character or sense of place, the neighbourhood has a bohemian atmosphere. Moreover, atmosphere can speak to any number of possible referents. As Anderson (2009) notes, ‘epochs, societies, rooms, landscapes, couples, artworks, and much more are all said to possess atmospheres (or be possessed by them)’ (p. 78). In the section below, I outline three thematic statements outlining relational, post-humanist and affective make-up of affective atmospheres.

Atmospheres are relational

It is useful to begin by exploring the word atmosphere’s etymology. The first part, atmos, means vapour or steam while sphere indicates the shape of a globe or ball. As an element which surrounds, atmospheres ‘fill the space with a certain tone of feeling like a haze’ (Böhme, 1993: 114). For Anderson (2009), it is a spatiality of enclosure and circulation or envelopment and radiation outwards – a type of ‘diffusion within a sphere’ (p. 80). There is a certain inherent ambiguity and opposition here – for example, between dispersal and containment – which challenges attempts at static or reductionist categorisation. For example, think of the atmosphere at a popular sporting event. The excitement that builds up in the stadium, the way this energy moves and circulates yet simultaneously contains and envelops.

In the meteorological sense of the word, atmosphere draws out lively and energetic imaginaries such as fluidity, contingency or instability. Here, the word captures those elements of place which are ‘perpetually forming and deforming, appearing and disappearing as bodies enter into relation with one another’ (Anderson, 2009: 79). Returning to the stadium example, we can easily imagine how there are always atmospheres forming and dissipating – on the way to the game, outside the stadium, in relation to action on the field and so on. It is the particular make-up of bodies and affects that produces these singularities and shared resonances of place.

Of course, both meanings described above (diffusion/containment and fluidity/instability) resonate with several decades of thinking in philosophy, human geography and planning, which emphasise how social constructs are relationally constituted (Healey, 2007; Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 1997). From this spatial perspective, we can imagine how in daily experience, one might experience any number of affective atmospheres – coalescing and collapsing, erupting and dissipating along with shifting relationships and movements between bodies and objects. However, this is not a ‘free floating’ (Böhme, 1993: 122) expression or spatial entity, but rather a quasi-autonomous affect that emerges from and is constructed by relational encounters between human and non-human bodies.

Atmospheres are ‘in the middle’

Following from these relational accounts, atmospheres can be said to proceed from the transpersonal relationships between and beyond bodies engaged in affective experience. In this sense, it is unclear whether they can be attributed to some thing or environment from which they emerge or to some individual or collective subject who experiences a particular atmosphere (Böhme, 1993). As such, they represent an ambiguity or middle-ground between both object and subject (Anderson, 2009). Consider again the stadium example, the atmosphere was electric – here, the atmosphere is not owned by the stadium nor is this electricity exclusive to any individual or body. Yet, there is something distinctly shared and singular about the affective qualities of these place experiences. In this sense, we can imagine that atmospheres take on an almost quasi-autonomous expression of place encounters.

Bissell (2010) explores this type of affective experience and the decentring of subjectivity through the daily practice of train commuting. For Bissell, these affects do not reside in the body of individuals, materials or places. Rather, they reflect the dynamic interrelationship of bodies caught up within momentary encounters where neither human nor non-human body can be accurately described as subject or object.

Bissell’s work positions affective atmospheres as already and always in the middle, encompassing physical environments and human experience or states. For Deleuze, it is the conjunction and that helps to think in terms of the middle, away from identity and towards diversity (Marks, 1998):

AND is neither one thing nor the other it’s always in between, between two things; it’s the borderline, there’s always a border, a line of flight or flow, and we don’t see it, because it’s the least perceptible of things. And yet it’s along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape. (Deleuze, 1990b: 45)

Positioned in the middle, affective atmospheres unsettle distinctions between subject/object and can be seen as part of the wider post-humanist corrective to idealism and the construction of an ontology where ‘the intellectual and the corporeal are equal expressions of being’ (Hardt, 1993: 74). For the affective study of cities, the indication is a post-anthropocentric way of thinking about place as not only as fluid or in flux but also as expressive of material agency.

Atmospheres are made meaningful through bodily encounters

In their study of the experiences of recent immigrants from New Zealand to the United Kingdom, Conradson and Latham (2007) forefront the interaction of bodies in place and examine particular affective possibilities associated with London. Places, in this reading, are distinctly relational ‘moments of encounter’, not fixed, but ‘variable events; twists and fluxes of interrelation’ (p. 231). Similarly, in an examination of place-making in Vancouver (Canada), Cameron Duff found that particular atmospheres contributed to young people’s ability to transform space in creative, spontaneous ways. Highlighting their exploitation or particular sites of the city for skateboarding, informal dance sessions or social interaction, Duff argues that this affective process of space production and cultivation can strengthen notions of self and belonging, sensations noted for their ability to enhance health and well-being (Duff, 2010: 893; see also Duff et al. 2011). In this sense, affective geographies encompass the ‘action-potential, the dispositional orientations, conveyed within place’, or, as Duff (2010) explains, the ‘push and pull of place’ (p. 893).

Following Duff’s example, we can see how place becomes meaningful through affective encounters. Indeed, it is affect that cultivates these senses of belonging (as well as its non-belonging, or its in-between-ness) (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). Moreover, such ‘dispositional orientations’ cohere to Spinoza’s notion of power where ‘what a body can do is the nature and the limit of its power to be affected’ (Deleuze, 1990a: 218). A body’s power, its composition and capacity to affect and be affected is cultivated by and through active and relational engagement with other bodies. Through these encounters, urban experience is always a process of becoming, and there are always affective atmospheres coalescing and dissipating. Imagined this way, as a force of bodily encounter, atmosphere outlines a means to engage with that which belongs to and yet transcends individual bodies. In planning, it is a route towards rendering visible that which is imperceptible: a non-representational way of thinking about place experience, urban design, place-making and the regulatory aspects of urban planning which both enable and constrain affects.

Refrain: affective atmospheres

This discussion of concepts and examples is intended to indicate some of the ways that affects can be expressed in complex spatial patterns. By attending to those elements of life that are more-than-representational, affective atmospheres allow for a range of experiential thinking about people, place, materiality and the social worlds they make up. Encompassing a set of relational spatial concepts (e.g. fluid, circulating, radiating, enclosing), they provide a means to consider the ways collective affects are not reducible to the individual bodies from which they emerge, yet they also provide insights into how place experience informs cognitive meaning-making around themes of identity and subjectivity. Indeed, a key argument of this article is simply that daily practices are bursting with affective experiences that have important and far-ranging consequences for the way people act, the attachments they create and the way they make sense of the world. It is in this recognition of the interplay between the social and the material, the conscious and the unconscious that affective atmospheres can be seen as escaping representationalism and the dogmatic image of thought.

Methodological challenges, innovations and opportunities

At the centre of non-representational thinking is a rejection of objectivist, essentialist understandings of knowledge and research processes. These assertions follow and should also be considered alongside Haraway (1991) and others who recognise that human accounts are individuated and situated, and those who critique the notion of perfectly ‘objective’ knowledge and a singular, unsituated truth (i.e. acknowledging one’s own social situation). Moreover, these claims are situated in an understanding of the world as socially and physically complex that cannot be reduced to ‘elementary laws or simple processes’ (Urry, 2005: 3). There is resonance here within planning scholarship, for example, as Hillier (2008) has argued for a new theoretical foundation through which to understand the ‘dynamic complexities and contingencies of today’s world’ (p. 25).

The approaches outlined in this article signal a search to expand what we know and how we study social processes by challenging commonly held assumptions about knowledge and research. Methodologically, this implies a shift away from after-the-fact reconstructions and towards a blurring of the boundaries between researcher and research subject (Dirksmeier and Helbrecht, 2008). Within materialist–feminist scholarship, Taguchi (2012) refers to this blurring as ‘becoming-with the data’ (p. 265, italics in original) where matter and discourse are mutually constituted and interconnected. This process of becoming-minoritarian-researcher involves drawing out or devoting greater attention to the material (the non-human) and installing oneself directly into research data and research events. As an ontological stance, it is rejection of claims to an objective separation between researcher and research data.

Ontological issues notwithstanding, there remains no single non-representational method to put forward. Rather, it is perhaps more useful to note that the type of questions researched and data deemed important are informed by an interest in embodied experience and daily practice (picking up on research foci which feminist scholars have attended to for a long time). On the one hand, one can identify a type of post-phenomenological privileging of the body (Pile, 2010: 11) that coheres to an interest in embodied experience typical of contemporary feminist geography. On the other hand, while this research takes the body seriously as a research focus, it is also informed by an interest in the somatic and the background realms of non-cognition. Here, the body is a ‘volatile subject’ (Dewsbury, 2010: 326): a device that ‘enables the researcher to reveal the trans-human, the non-cognitive, the inexpressible that underlies and constitutes social life …’ (Pile, 2010: 11). However, if the body is the focus but emotions are un-representative, what are the implications for research methodologies?³ For Conradson and Latham (2007), as affects reflect the multiple interactions between of bodies and objects, ‘the unit of analysis is therefore no longer the individual alone, but the individual and the broader constellations of living and inanimate things within which they are imbricated’ (p. 235). In this context, emotional expressions, human actions and representations (and the development of identity and subjectivity) emerge within the context of affective experience. These multiple interactions could be seen as a type of ‘trans-corporeality’ where human bodies interact and overlap with other human and non-human bodies, matter and physical landscapes (Alaimo, 2010: 15). From this perspective, one can imagine how a body (or something like subjectivity or place identity) is never finished, but always open.

Generally speaking, it is possible to describe much of the recent work concerned with the spatiality of affect as performative (Dirksmeier and Helbrecht, 2008). At the foundation, performative methodologies ask researchers to question how they configure and question the world (Dewsbury, 2010) and draw on the paradigmatic shift away from representation. Furthermore, they recognise the ways in which social science investigations are directly implicated in the construction of social worlds. In this instance, the act of research is performative in the sense that the choice and deployment of particular methods will ‘have effects; they make differences; they enact realities; and they can help bring into being what they also discover’ (Law and Urry, 2004: 393).

For feminist theoretician Karen Barad (2003), such a move towards performative alternatives ‘… shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality (e.g. do they mirror nature or culture?) to matters of practices/doings/actions’ (p. 802). In this way, there are important relationships to phenomenology and a primary interest in embodied, sensory practices and experiences. Wylie (2007) argues that non-representational theory not only ‘recuperates and reinvigorates’ phenomenological conceptions of embodiment (p. 165), but simultaneously contradicts and challenges humanist perspectives of being-in-the-world through a new materialist (Coole and Frost, 2010) ontology informed by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1988). The product is a post-humanist notion of performativity which incorporates the ‘material and discursive, social and scientific, human and nonhuman, and natural and cultural factors’ (Barad, 2003: 808, emphasis added; see also Haraway, 1991).

Yet, how might such a transformation in research practice occur? For planners embedded in practices of engagement, participation and intervention, it is not difficult to identify a range of performative elements situated within our work (e.g. public meetings, design charrettes and community outreach initiatives, including the creativity involved with presentation and dissemination). However, to what extent do these processes simply reflect our experiential understanding of ‘what planners are supposed to do’? Might a more critical, performative methodology help resist a formulaic, best-practice orientation? Channelling these concerns, Gunder (2011) calls for a planning practice that ‘takes risks, accommodates difference and encourages the new and creative’ (p. 208) in order to move away from the habitual and towards greater regard for the particularities of context and place. These challenges coincide with Dewsbury’s call for experimentation and creativity, a process continually reinvented through practices of reflection and questioning (e.g. why embark on a particular piece of research? and what assumptions are made about the design, the conduct, the presentation and dissemination?). For planning research, continued and serious engagement with these reflective moments might helpfully support and expand empirical study of the present-moment and the particular.

Of course, good planning research will always be reflexive and will consider assumptions made in research decisions, analytical models employed and so on. However, reflexivity alone cannot account for the non-cognitive, the habitual or the transpersonal. Moreover, if we accept that cause and effect explanations of social phenomena and post hoc representations do not adequately capture the complexity of social worlds, if we agree that social inquiry does not solely describe but also makes realities and enacts social worlds (Law and Urry, 2004), then it is worth further developing and incorporating alternative methodologies which account for these performative dimensions into planning research.

Summary and conclusion

Following recent scholarship in cultural geography, planning and philosophy, this article argues that non-representational thinking and affective atmospheres hold a particular value for planning research and scholarship. Calling upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and other post-structuralis, non-representational theory responds to a perceived overreliance on social constructivism and representation. Similar arguments could be made for research within planning and other fields by examining the built environment where the focus on interpretation and inference is prevalent. As the examples in this article demonstrate, a move away from constructivist approaches, unreflexive human interpretation and towards the incorporation of non-cognitive, transpersonal, more-than-human accounts can provide new insights and strengthen theory and understanding.

Drawing on Deleuze’s ideas around difference, becoming and affect, the article offers new ways of thinking about place and communities. This includes a wider consideration of the way bodies (human and non-human) interact and the ways these interactions produce and transform space and social worlds. Bound up within this approach is a post-phenomenological sensitivity to particular experiences, daily practices and daily life within place. Moreover, recognition of the particular affective possibilities of place is critical to the quality of place experience, including, for example, how affective states contribute to the notions of community cohesion, belonging and/or exclusion (Duff et al. 2011). These concepts have been a critical part of urban policy for the last several decades and are directly relevant to the issues and concerns positioned within the field of planning.

Broadly stated, these perspectives illuminate the moments of vitality and disruption where the interaction of human and non-human bodies produces particular feeling states, emotional responses and material outcomes. Implicated in the production of space and built form, the work of planners is critical to these place experiences. This article argues that affect-based research and the concepts situated within non-representational theory can usefully expand the ways planners think about space. Exploring the relationships between people and built form is, of course, the natural territory of planners. Planners are quite comfortable thinking about and designing ‘walkable environments’, ‘safescapes’ and so on. In this context, a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between the conscious and the unconscious, human and non-human bodies and the dynamic emergence of collective affects can usefully inform how we interpret place experiences, how we analyse and critique space, how we think about place-making and the types of solutions planners put forward.

However, returning to Delueze’s critique of the dogmatic image of thought, it is useful to examine the ways in which planners deploy concepts and terms related to place. For example, to what extent are practices such as zoning, visioning, character mapping and so on implicated in dogmatic, representational thinking? How might a line of flight be forged through which to explore more complex ways of thinking about place? Indeed, for planning, a crucial value of this way of thinking is to expose majoritarian thinking as a constraining process or re-territorialisation. To constrain in this sense is to live within a pre-existing idea of what exists, rather than to be open to what overflows, is imperceptible and beyond representation. Becoming minor, in contrast, indicates a move away from norms and habits by exploring new encounters and connections.

As I have argued here, the concept of affective atmospheres provides a framework through which research might adopt a greater sensitivity to place experience. Calling upon a relational way of thinking, affective atmospheres are dynamic spatial patterns, radiating outwards while simultaneously encompassing and containing. Moreover, while they are characterised by collective/shared qualities, they are transpersonal and quasi-autonomous. Finally, they emerge and shift through bodily interactions. As such, they encompass a particular action potential and a capacity to transform.

Engagement with performative methodologies and the interplay between the conscious and unconscious, the human and the more-than-human might also engender a more nuanced understanding of place experiences and challenge orthodox thinking about appropriate practice. While it is common to note disconnect or dissonance between planning theory and planning practice, situated in the ‘present-moment’ of place experiences, non-representational thinking could provide a useful bridge between how planners act in place and how they theorise about social action.

To conclude, the study of affective atmospheres is embedded in a particular thinking about knowledge that values the non-representational, the pre- and transpersonal, the unconscious and the more-than-human (in addition to representations, cognitive expressions and human accounts). In order to uncover and examine these relations, performative and trans-corporeal (Alaimo, 2010) approaches have been put forward to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, invite risk-taking, and support experimentation and creativity. Within planning, this coincides with and advances recent critiques against the habitual and towards an alternative, counter-hegemonic practice (Gunder, 2011) as well as wider calls for research which joins together embodied practice and more-than-human bodies and material agency in the study of socio-spatial phenomena.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to sincerely thank the journal editor as well as the anonymous referees for their helpful critique and suggestions. Special thanks to Kate Boyer and Emma Roe for reading and commenting on earlier drafts.

Notes

Author biography

Michael Buser has a PhD in planning from the University of the West of England, Bristol where he is now a Researcher in the Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments. His research interests concern urban politics, democracy, community activism and planning theory.

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