on. These may or may not be valid criticisms but I am more interested in why Viola’s
work can elicit strong emotional reactions in the first place.
29 Often extreme slow motion. For example, film is often shot at 300 fps and played back
at 30 fps.
30 It is worth remembering that in its original Greek form mimesismeant performance
(understood as enactment and re-enactment rather than imitation) and, of course,
mimesis is still very rarely the production of an exact copy (Rush 1999).
31 Slow-motion film of the face has been a constant in artwork for some time, but I think
Viola has managed to get the right speed, unlike some earlier, interminable experiments.
32
It effectively assists us in discovering the material world with its psychophysical
correspondences. We literally redeem this world from its dormant state, its state of
virtual non-existence, by endeavouring to experience it through the camera. And
we are free to experience it because we are fragmented.
(Kracauer 1960: 300)33 In using this term , I mean to imply the way in which engineering is always born out
of concrete encounters which allow the world to speak back. I am not trying to imply
that engineering is just make-it-up-on-the-spot.
9 But malice aforethought
1 As well as gleefully adding more such representations to the stock, I might add.
2 As in the recent conference on metropolitan catastrophes held at the Institute of
Historical Research by the Centre for Metropolitan History, which featured a series of
historians who were moving their attention from the battlefield to the city as battlefield.
3 I hope that my intention in these papers is clear. I want to begin to place side-by-side
a series of themes in my work which have remained relatively separate, notably the
articulation of non-representational theory, and especially the exploration of affect, with
the changes now taking place in the nature of technologies and the technical. I have
consistently tried to bring themes like these (and others, like time) back to the living
fabric of the city, but what the juxtaposition of these themes has pushed me to do, in
turn, has been to challenge what is meant by the ‘living’ in the city. In making this
rapprochement, I wanted to take particular account of a criticism sometimes made of
non-representational theory – and the politics of performance that flows from it – that
it is entirely too optimistic. As I hope is clear from what follows, I think that this is both
a valid criticism and at the same time names an important political task: to construct a
positive politics of affect in what is an increasingly ‘intimate public sphere’, to use
Berlant’s phrase (cf. Cvetkovich 2003)
4 This is, of course, a classical Freudian point, as is the point made later that destructiveness
is very close to love. Freud’s work acts, fittingly perhaps, as a perpetual undertow in this
paper.
5 Mouffe’s work has, of course, been much influenced by Schmitt.
6 None of this, of course, is to suggest that no attempt should be made to rid the world
of all manner of horrors: wars, genocides, tortures, famines, and so forth. Rather, as
will become clear, it may be better to attempt to institute lower-level forms of kindness,
as a first step at least.
7 In other words, and importantly, I want to stay faithful to Tarde’s micrometaphysics
which refuses to make a distinction between the complexity of ‘large’ and ‘small’, nor
necessarily therefore their transformative powers. Following Tarde’s reading of Spinoza,
everything can be a society.
8 It also points to the fact, often forgotten, that demolitionis as much a part of the history
of cities as construction. But I know of remarkably little work on this aspect of cities,272 Notes