Together with Paul Schuetze, Imke von Maur and Jan Slaby, I have published a paper titled "Affect as Disruption: Affective Experimentation, Automobility, and the Ecological Crisis" in the just-released "Methodologies of Affective Experimentation" Anthology at Palgrave.
Find the abstract below, the link to the anthology here and the link to the paper here.
"In this text we construe affect as a conservative force, as glue that
holds social life in place. With this starting point, we direct our
attention towards the unfolding of the ecological crises. Using the case
of ‘automobile supremacy’, we discuss a paradigmatic affective
formation that keeps Western societies deadlocked in a loop of business
as usual, preventing them from adequately addressing the climate
catastrophe. Drawing on the concepts of affective arrangement and
affective milieu, we chart some of the affective groundings of
automobile supremacy and of the widespread failure to overcome the
status quo. In response to this conservative thrust of affect, we then
survey how ossified affective formations can be disrupted and eventually
left behind. Can affect itself be deployed as a resource to disturb,
fracture, and break sedimented social formations and patterns? In search
of an answer, we explore prospects of obstruction leaning on affective
experimentation as a creative method of disruption. By discussing ways
to disturb automobility in its unfettered flow, we provide an angle on
modes of disruption as small-scale openings that abruptly and
momentarily halt the affective relations that were sustaining social
formations before."
