"After Affect"

* Joseph Bedford: School of Architecture, Virginia Tech; [email protected]. This is an Open Access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-CommercialNoDerrivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not transformed in any way and is properly cited. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17939784 Received: February 28, 2025; Accepted: March 25, 2025 Original Scientific Article Joseph Bedford* “After Affect” ABSTRACT: From the late 1980s to the late 2010s, a discourse of affect was advanced by various architectural theorists who aimed to account for the relationship between human beings and their environment and how things in the world appear to them as phenomena, in ways that were more scientifically advanced and politically progressive than similar accounts that had previously been offered by post-structuralism and phenomenology. A particular group of theorists informed by psychology and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze—including Sylvia Lavin andJeff Kipnis—argued that it was crucial to focus on the experience of buildings, the sensual effects of their surfaces, the moods that they created, and the seductive power of such things as color, light, and atmosphere, without addressing meaning, language, and culture and without essentializing the body and its relationship to the environment. Furthermore, following the lead of affect theorist Brian Massumi, these architectural theorists often linked these arguments to what they claimed would be a more progressive political position. This paper historicizes the discourse of affect in architecture, analyzes the claims made by affect theorists both in architecture and in general and offers a critical evaluation of its various theoretical and political claims, by drawing upon the mounting evidence about the problematic nature of the original psychological and neuroscientific studies that inspired affect theory in the first place, and upon the mounting critical literature on affect theory that has begun to emerge in recent years. KEYWORDS: affect, phenomenology, appearances, surfaces, moods Joseph Bedford 58 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 Affect was a powerful concept that gave new life blood to architectural theory in the late 1990s, one that fueled new design speculations and energized the neo-avant-garde domains of the discipline for over a decade. Yet little has been written on the role that affect theory played as an episode in architectural theory, and certainly little that has engaged its core theoretical claims in a critical manner. In the absence of such a history, the affect moment in architecture has simply lingered on, like the undead, neither thriving nor being fully buried. We still accept many of its intellectual formulations, and the design tropes that affect theory set in motion continue on, while few can recall the philosophical origins of how affect came into being as a discourse in architecture, nor what was originally at stake. Since the concept of affect is the central focus of the history that follows, we should begin with the question of what we mean by affect. The term simply names a level of physiological experience that is viewed as being instinctive, autonomic, and directly connected to the nervous system, such that it is seen as bypassing the mediations of language, meaning, judgement, and conscious reasoning. To offer some examples, one might think of the way that bodies are moved, seemingly automatically, when individuals are repulsed by rotten food or by the discovery of nests of spiders or snakes. One might think also of situations when individuals yawn, smile, or blush in response to others doing the same. Or one might think of the way that one’s muscles tighten in response to the screams and sobs of a crying baby, or the way one’s bladder weakens at the sound and sight of running water. The key to understanding affect is that it aims to emphasize the primacy of the biological level of human experience. If psychological meaning comes into play at all, it is of the most primitive and archaic sort. From the late 1990s to the late 2010s, various architectural theorists sensitive to larger trends in the humanities, philosophy and culture, advanced a discourse of affect within architecture that echoes these larger trends. They included Sylvia Lavin andJeff Kipnis most especially, but also Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, Jason Payne and Heather Roberge, Mark Foster Gage, Hernan Diaz, Florencia Pita, and their students Ellie Abrons, Andrew Holder, and Michael Loverich. Together, these protagonists of the affect moment in architecture advanced a view that the qualities of architecture were of the utmost importance because of the way they addressed this biological and primitive psychological level of experience. These architectural qualities included the optical “After Affect” 59 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 kind such as color, hue, tone, vibrancy, dazzle, luminosity; the tactile kind such as softness, smoothness, roughness, or hairiness; and the formal kind such as sagginess, voluptuousness, fluidity, creatureliness. Such qualities were seen to hold the power to affect people’s feelings, moods and behaviors, certainly. Yet more than this simpler claim, that power was seen to be central to how politics in general should be understood, and how the politics of architecture in particular should be understood. The spark for the affective turn could be seen to be the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, whose quantitative manner of thinking about expe - rience in terms of intensities and amplitudes offered fresh intellectual terrain in the late 1980s after years of structuralist and post-structuralist discourse. Brian Massumi—who, along with his close friend Sanford Kwinter, had been key to bringing Deleuze’s thought to architecture in the late 1980s—was perhaps the most central intellectual source for a theory of affect drawn from Deleuze and with a sharp political edge. Yet Deleuze via Massumi and Kwinter was not the only source. Affect theorists in architecture also drew from a psychological discourse less interested in such things as the interpretation of dreams, and much more interested in a materialist, biologistic, and energistic conception of the mind’s relation to the body. In the process of developing what they claimed would be seen as a new account of the human-environment relationship, architecture’s theorists of affect attempted to distinguish it from post-structuralism and phenomenology. To do so, they were often critical of both post-structuralism and phenomenology. While one might think affect theory and phenomenology are close to one another because they share a similar rejection of the intellectualist account of reality in which language and concepts determine consciousness and action, and because they share what might appear to be a similar attention to sensations and experience, affect theorists were quick to argue that phenomenology was too essentialized, universalized and timeless and as a result unable to understand the political nature of experience—a critique of phenomenology that displays affect theorist’s ongoing debt to post-structuralism. And while one might also think that affect theory and post-structuralism are close to one another because of their shared anti-essentialism, affect theory was also quick to critique post-structuralism because its nominalism had led it to become detached from the real, to withdraw into a purely negative criticality and to become hostile to the possibilities of architectural design. Joseph Bedford 60 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 Affect theory’s claims to superiority, then, were multifold. It claimed to be more politically progressive than phenomenology because it considered that its materialistic and physicalist conception of experience had freed it from the romantic and nostalgic yearning for an original holistic experience. It claimed to be breaking out of the ivory tower of linguistic analysis that dogged post-structuralism and to become engaged with the world as it really was. And because affect theory drew upon recent psychological and neurological experiments it also claimed to be more scientifically accurate. But of the various claims to being a superior discourse, one stands out above the rest; affect held the key to the way that political power was formulated in the postmodern age such that it could challenge postmodern power on its own terrain. Affect theory thus assumed a conception of the disoriented and fragmented nature of public reason and it argued that feelings and moods were most important to contemporary politics, being politically urgent aspects for the left to address. In what follows, I will historicize architecture’s discourse of affect from the 1990s to the 2010s, tracing its path through the writings of this specific group of architectural affect theorists. In the process of doing so, I will critically evaluate this history, as well as the theoretical and political claims made within it, by drawing upon the substantial literature that has emerged in recent years which criticizes it. I will thus draw upon the mounting criticisms of some of the original psychological and neuroscientific experiments that affect theorists like Massumi often evoked in support for their claim that language, intentions, and rationality are secondary to biological instincts in the formation of human actions. I will also draw upon criticisms of the claims that immediacy and anti-intentionalism are inherently politically progressive, and criticisms of affect theory’s complicity with an especially neoliberal phase of capitalism. 1. The Ascendency of Affect in the 1990s Two distinct tributaries in the history of architectural theory fed the ascendency of affect as a discourse at the end of the 1990s. The first one was the gradual translation and migration of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze into the Anglo-American academic world and subsequently into architecture. The second, yet intertwined, tributary was a renewed interest in psychoanalysis. While psychoanalysis was used by critical theorists in architecture as an instrument of what Paul Ricœur once called “After Affect” 61 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 the“hermeneutics of suspicion,” alongside post-structuralism and deconstructivism, it contained within it the possibilities of more vitalistic and biologistic readings, especially when either referring to the early work of Freud, or the later work of second generation Freudians like Wilhelm Reich who developed electrophysiological theories of the body. I say intertwined because the biophilosophical and materialist dimensions of Deleuze’s philosophy primed the more biologistic interpretations of psychoanalysis and psychology within affect theory. One of the first figures to read Deleuze in architecture was Sanford Kwinter, who was applying a vitalistic, energistic and materialistic philosophy derived from Deleuze to his study of modern architecture during his PhD in comparative literature at Columbia University in New York between 1983 and 1987.1 A native of Toronto, Kwinter was also a close friend of his fellow compatriot Brian Massumi in these years, and the two men supported each other intellectually as they worked on their respective doctorates at Columbia and Yale in the late 1980s. Massumi would go on to play a central role both by introducing Deleuze’s philosophy to the Anglo American world, by translating Deleuze’s books, and through his own books such as A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, which Kwinter published through Swerve, an imprint of Zone books in 1992.2 Kwinter had become immersed in architectural culture as he began his PhD and was by 1984 already close friends with Sylvia Lavin, who was also at Columbia at that point as an undergraduate student. Kwinter had launched Zone 1-2 with fellow doctoral students Jonathan Crary, Hal Foster, and Michel Feher in 1985, and this lavish magazine already thrust Kwinter into architecture in the way it featured architects Christopher Alexander, Kenneth Frampton, Peter Cook, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas and Raymond Abraham, alongside Kwinter’s own essay on the architect Sant’Elia, and essays by Manuel De Landa, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Zone 1–2 was highly influential and played a central role in introducing a new Deleuzian paradigm that linked architecture and thebroader 1 S. Kwinter, “La Citta Nuova: Modernity and Continuity,” in Zone 1|2: The Contemporary City, Zone Books, Cambridge, MA, 1986, pp. 88–89. Interview with Sanford Kwinter by Joseph Bedford (August 14, 2024). On Kwinter’s role in bringing Deleuze’s thought into architecture see S. Brott, “Deleuze and ‘The Intercessors’,” Log, 18, 2010, pp. 135–51. 2 B. Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, Zone Books, Cambridge, MA, 1992. Other books in the Swerve imprint also included M. DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Zone Books, Cambridge, MA, 1997. Joseph Bedford 62 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 topic of the urban metropolis to the history of science, chaos theory, and theories of complexity and emergence. The key moment in which the discourse shifted, after which Deleuze was taken up in architecture at an accelerated pace came with “The Strategies of Architectural Thinking” Conference at the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism in 1988. The conference was meant to be the consolidation of a new group of critical theorists fluent in post-structuralist discourse, and particularly deconstructivism. It brought together those involved in the MoMA deconstruction show based at Princeton, with those based at Harvard working on the journal Assemblage. The group, which formed at an infamous scene in Jeff Kipnis’s hotel bedroom during a conference in Miami earlier that year, agreed to put on the conference in Chicago to demonstrate their shared deconstructivist project in architecture.3 Yet no sooner had the project of Deconstruction in architecture been consolidated in Chicago than Kipnis, who had done so much to advance Deconstruction and had masterminded the Chicago conference, spontaneously “jumped ship” to a Deleuzian position.4 Sanford Kwinter, who had been invited to the conference to serve as a respondent, and who had a passionate disdain for Derrida’s philosophy by this point, mounted an attack from the audience after which a tense conflict erupted between Wigley and Kwinter. As Kipnis put it, “what Sanford said [and] the way he formulated it was amazing” and I decided “to side with Sanford.” As Kipnis dramatized the scene in recalling it, “everybody looked at me and Mark [Wigley] looked at me and Sanford looked at me, and we [Mark and I] broke, it was amazing.”5 Lynn, who was also there at the Chicago conference has similarly recalled shifting abruptly from being a Derridean to being a Deleuzian at that conference.6 Through the early 1990s, Kwinter’s and Kipnis’s teaching became one of the main conduits by which a Deleuzian discourse spread in architecture. Kwinter soon became part of Eisenman’s social circle, writing texts for him. It is likely as a result of the conversations with both Kipnis 3 Interview with Jeff Kipnis by Joseph Bedford (July 25, 2018); Interview with Beatriz Colomina by Joseph Bedford (December 16, 2018); Interview with Michael Hays by Joseph Bedford (July 12, 2018) and Interview with Catherine Ingraham by Joseph Bedford (July 17, 2018). On the Miami conference see also B. Colomina, L. Kogod, “At Home with His Parents,”Assemblage, 30, 1996, pp. 108–12. 4 Interview with Jeff Kipnis by Joseph Bedford (July 25, 2018). 5 Interview with Jeff Kipnis by Joseph Bedford (July 25, 2018). 6 Interview with Greg Lynn by Joseph Bedford (October 31, 2018). “After Affect” 63 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 and Kwinter in the late 1980s and early 1990s that Eisenman picked up on the concept of affect also, putting it into circulation in “The authors affect” (1991) and “‘The Affects of Singularity” (1992).7 Though while Eisenman understood the significance of affect as a sensate response to the environment that did not involve language, he tended to equate it with Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura, worrying about its loss at the hands of technical reproduction, thus giving it a nostalgic cast that Kipnis and Lavin would avoid giving it in the years to come. Despite having no training in architecture, Kwinter began teaching studios and seminars at Harvard in the early 1990s where he inspired other soon-to-be-influential figures such as Alejandro Zaera-Polo to develop his own Deleuzian discourse.8 Kwinter taught in Kipnis’s new graduate program that he launched at the AA in London in the early 1990s and the two of them, along with Greg Lynn, attended a number of influential conferences at the AA on topics such as “the fold” and “complexity.”9 Kwinter, Kipnis and Lynn were also part of an influential group of young architects teaching in New York and based at Columbia University’s School of Architecture who were thinking through the possibilities of new digital tools such as those offered by the animation software, Maya, and how the kinds of ideas about dynamic process and complex systems discussed in such books as Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus—recently translated by Brian Massumi—might help in understanding the significance of the new digital forms.10 Kipnis’s writings in the early 1990s already began to lay out some of the arguments within which the discourse of affect would soon be situated. In 1991, for example, in his “Moonmark” article, Kipnis turned to “space” and “aesthetics” in architecture to shift away from what he took to be the current focus on architecture as a source of meaning and symbolism and to address in their place simply the qualities of buildings and the effects of these qualities on the subject.11 Through the middle of 7 P. Eisenman, “The Authors Affect: Passion and the Moment of Architecture,” in Cynthia Davidson (ed.), Anyone (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), pp. 200–211, and P. Eisenman, “The Affects of Singularity,” Architectural Design Profile, 100, Nov–Dec 1992, pp. 42–45. 8 Interview with Sanford Kwinter; Interview with Jeff Kipnis; and Interview with Alejandro Zaera-Polo by Joseph Bedford (January 12, 2025). 9 The Fold conference took place at the AA on June 14, 1993, and the Architecture and Complexity conference took place on May 6, 1994. 10 G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987. 11 J. Kipnis, “Moonmark,” Assemblage, 16, 1991, pp. 6–13. Joseph Bedford 64 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 the decade, Kipnis was attempting to define a “new architecture” based on the possibilities that curvilinear forms could create heterogeneous qualities of spatial experience.12 This line of thought was best captured in a short text, “(Architecture) After Geometry,” in which Kipnis wrote about a “spatial sensibility” that was liquid, boundless, fluid, and emergent and which escaped language and signification. As Kipnis put it, “no codes, no clever meanings. Looks cool.”13 But it was in 1997, with the publication of “The Cunning of Cosmetics” that Kipnis began to invest his discourse with a vocabulary rooted in affect, writing of “the cosmetic effect” of Herzog and De Meuron’s work as “more visceral than intellectual.”14 As he went on, “The reductions of cosmetic minimalism, on the other hand, are anorexic, a compulsion to starve the body until it dissolves into pure (erotic) affect….”15 What then of the second trajectory; that which passed via psychoanalysis? Here, we can start by looking to the work done by Anthony Vidler beginning at the end of the 1980s on the theme of the uncanny, as well as on the themes of spatial phobias in the urban metropolis. His collection of essays, The Architectural Uncanny had been published in 1992, and he was completing his follow-up book Warped Space in the late 1990s.16 While the theme of estrangement, the unhomely, shock and psychological disturbance supported the dominant critical discourses in architecture, Vidler’s research on the psychology of the metropolis could also be seen to have pointed the way towards a post-critical discourse of affect. Like Rem Koolhaas before him in Delirious New York, Vidler was focusing attention upon the enervation of the new mass subjects and crowds of the dense 19th century metropolis and raising questions about how political and social life was being transformed by the new scale, speed and sensory stimulation of modern life. Though Vidler had not yet adopted the same kind of celebratory stance towards the metropolitan life of crowds as Koolhaas had done, the fact that the topic of the irrational 12 J. Kipnis, “Towards a New Architecture,” Architectural design, 63, 3–4, March–April 1993, pp. 40–49. 13 J. Kipnis, “(Architecture) After Geometry: An anthology of Mysteries. Case Notes to the Mystery of the School of Fish,” Architectural Design, 67, 5–6, May–June 1997, pp. 42–47. 14 J. Kipnis, “The Cunning of Cosmetics,” El Croquis, 84, 1997, pp. 22–28. 15 Ibid. 16 A. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994, and A. Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000. “After Affect” 65 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 aspects of metropolitan experience, came to the fore in the dawning age of cyberspace, suggests the possibility of a more positive valence to come. Vidler’s close friend Mark Cousins, an architectural theorist trained in psychoanalysis, hosted a substantial conference on the theme of “Psychoanalysis and Space” at the Architectural Association (AA) in 2000 in honor of the publication of Warped Space.17 The gathering afforded an opportunity for a certain realization at least on the part of one figure in the audience, Jeff Kipnis, that affect would become a major discourse in the coming years. As we have seen, Kipnis was one of the first to adopt the vocabulary of affect in his writing and had done so three years earlier, but he has recalled being guided by a renewed engagement with Freud’s early writings at this moment, especially “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” 18 and saw in that text untapped potential in Freud’s account of the affects as distinct from meaning.19 Yet, it was likely one of the conference papers in particular, that delivered by Sylvia Lavin, that caught Kipnis’s attention; a paper titled “Open the Box: Richard Neutra and the Psychology of the Domestic Environment” which she had already published in Assemblage in 1999.20 By the time of the psychoanalysis conference, Lavin had already also published a short manifesto text titled “The New Mood or Affective Disorder” that called for an affective architecture as a program for contemporary design, and here at the AA her paper demonstrated to the audience—which included Kipnis—what an architecture that embodied the “new affective sensibility” looked like.21 17 The Psychoanalysis and Space Conference took place at the Architectural Association in London on December 11–12, 2000. 18 S. Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916), The Hogarth Press, London, 1957, pp. 111–140. 19 As Kipnis put it in an interview with Hans Tursack in 2014, “[Freud wrote about] two different kinds of interpretations, one is based on meaning, which the linguistic school had focused so heavily on, and the other one which is based on what Freud called affect.” J. Kipnis, “Affect: Interview with Hans Tursack,” Attention, 2, 2014, episode 2E, 30:00 mins, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/attention-audio-journal-for-architecture/ id1103549975?i=1000451911741, (accessed November 22, 2024). 20 S. Lavin, “Open the box: Richard Neutra and the psychology of the domestic environment,” Assemblage, 40, 1999, pp. 6–25. 21 S. Lavin, “The New Mood or Affective Disorder,” Assemblage, 41, 2000, p. 40. When Lavin was working on her book on Neutra, she advertised the title of the book as “Affective Environments: Richard Neutra and the Culture of Psychoanalysis,” See S. Lavin, “What You Surface Is What You Get,” Log, 1, Fall 2003, p. 106. Joseph Bedford 72 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 technical conditions of the age had favored this new kind of politics not by reasoned decision-making but by warm reassuring feelings. Affect, then, became for Massumi a name for the kind of persuasion that is regularly deployed in the media in our postmodern world. It results from the kind of sense stimulation and nervous enervation experienced by individuals exposed to a flood of media messages that arouse their feelings in various ways. As Massumi put it in concluding his text, affect is key to our: late-capitalist, imageand information-based economies. Think of the image/expression-events in which we bathe. Think interruption. Think of the fast cuts of the video clip or the too-cool TV commercial. Think of the cuts from TV programming to commercials. Think of the cuts across programming and commercials achievable through zapping. Think distractedness of television viewing, the constant cuts screen to its immediate surroundings, to the viewing context where other actions are performed in fits and starts as attention flits. Think of the joyously incongruent juxtapositions of surfing the Internet. Think of our bombardment by commercial images off the screen, at every step in our daily rounds. Think imagistic operation of the consumer object, as turnover time increases as fast as styles can be recycled. Everywhere, the cut, suspense—incipience. Virtuality, perhaps?39 And as he went on, citing Deleuze’s observations in his essay, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” an essay in which Deleuze wrote of the new logic of control society as being a logic in which individuals are free but in which their collective behaviors are modulated and controlled as crowds: Affect holds a key to rethinking postmodern power. For although ideology is still very much with us, often in the most virulent of forms, it is no longer encompassing. It no longer defines the global mode of functioning of power. It is now one mode of power in a larger field that is not defined, overall, by ideology. This makes it all the more pressing to connect its real conditions of emergence. For these are now manifest, mimed by men of power.40 39 Ibid., pp. 103–104. 40 Ibid., p. 104. See also G. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Society of Control,” October, 59, Winter 1992, pp. 3–7. Emphasis added. “After Affect” 73 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 The argument that the analysis of affect would serve in the fight against postmodern forms of power on its own terms was taken up by many on the Left including Nigel Thrift who argued in 2001 that “[t]he envelope of what we call the political must increasingly expand to take note of the ‘way that political attitudes and statements are partly conditioned by intense autonomic bodily reactions that do not simply reproduce the trace of a political intention and cannot be wholly recuperated within an ideological regime of truth’.”41 Massumi’s and Thrift’s diagnoses might seem dark, foreboding, and the opposite of an avant-garde program, yet it nonetheless appeared to contain the positive proposition that the progressive Left can still reshape the world for the better by engaging the very forces that coerce and distract the subjects of late capitalism, redirecting them to alternate ends. Sylvia Lavin, in particular, can be seen to have directly recapitulated this Massumian argument, when in the conclusion to an essay encouraging architects to address themselves to the sensual effects of color in architecture she wrote that “effects have taken over as techniques in the production of political and cultural change once accorded to technology. Effects are the new instruments of power.”42 3. Affect in the 2000s: From Theory to Practice Let us return to our history of the discourse of affect in architecture by following Lavin as she played a central role as an administrator in a school of architecture by advancing affect as one of the contemporary “conversations” that she sought to foster within architecture. Lavin was Greg Lynn’s partner by the mid-1990s and it was also through Lynn— who was closer to Massumi personally at this point—that Lavin became ever more socially connected to the discourse on Deleuze that was being further cultivated by Lynn, Kwinter, Kipnis, and others at Columbia in the mid 1990s.43 After becoming the chair of the architecture program at UCLA in 1996 (a position she held until 2006), she further supported the cultivation of an affect discourse there, helping to bring Robert Somol in 1997, Greg Lynn in 1998, and Jason Payne and Heather Roberge in 2002—both former students of Lynn. 41 N. Thrift, “Thinking the Post-Human: Literature, Affect and the Politics of Style,” Textual Practice, 15, 1, 2001, p. 24, cited in R. Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry, 37, 3, Spring 2011, pp. 434–472. 42 See S. Lavin, “What Color Is It Now?,” Perspecta, 35, 2004, pp. 111. Emphasis added. 43 S. Lavin, Pers. Comm. Joseph Bedford 74 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 By the late 1990s, Robert Somol, an especially influential advocate of Deleuze’s philosophy in architecture, was also writing on themes of repetition and diagrams in his texts. But by 1999, he came to make very similar claims to those of Lavin in her text on Neutra of that year. As Somol postulated in 1999, architecture could leave behind the critical project, invested as it was in representation and language and pursue instead an “ambient architecture [that] mixes the intoxicants of the contemporary, setting the scene for diverse behaviors, desires, and demands.” And referring to Julius Schumlan’s infamous photograph of a bachelor putting on a record in a Pierre Koenig case study house in LA, Somol wrote “This is architecture .... as seduction scene: not architecture for paying attention to (not about its meaning), but an environment for acting in, for instigating new events and traits.”44 In Lavin’s “New Mood” polemic in the following year, she too positioned the affective against the critical in much the way that Somol had done using the analogy of psychoanalysis to make her case more vivid. The critic, she wrote, had become an analyst and had placed architecture under analysis such that everything including “the structure of the profession, the mechanisms of its discourses and modes of representation, as well as the very concepts that make architecture architectural” had been analyzed to reveal latent and sublimated desires “for power.”45 Yet, as she went on: Ironically, emotion itself came to be repressed in the analytic discourses of criticality and an affective disorder began to emerge in which the pathological symptoms of the unconscious were identified with great abandon but the passionate drives theoretically generating these symptoms were nowhere to be found. The house had become a neurotic bundle of tics and compulsions but affect itself no longer had a home. As a deeper context for Lavin’s remarks, it is worth noting that only a few years earlier she had been engaged as a guest professor running a master class with Liz Diller at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, in which their students had been tasked with exploring the house through the analysis of the themes of paranoid hygiene, claustrophobia, agrophobia, 44 R. E. Somol, “Intracenter: The Seduction of the Similar,” Assemblage, 40, 1999, p. 75. 45 S. Lavin, “The New Mood or Affective Disorder,” p. 40. “After Affect” 75 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 boredom, eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder and optical paranoia, such that Lavin may have had as a result the critical attitude of Elizabeth Diller in the late 1990s in her mind as she wrote her critical lines about the house being seen as a neurotic bundle of compulsions.46 As she went on, offering an alternative strategy to that of the analyst of architecture’s disorders: Reconfiguring this psychodynamic has emerged as a major potential of the postcritical era. The work of Gilles Deleuze has permitted the affective terrain of buildings to organize itself anew and the discipline seems to be entering an almost hyperemotional state. Increasingly uninhibited by repressive regimes of regular geometry and Taylorist modes of production, architecture is instead nurtured by the ardent expressions of consumer desires and the secret pleasures of new, soft materials. Buildings can now be animated, ecstatic, and rapturous. [And] criticism must now understand sensibility as a form of intelligence rather than as opposed to intellect.47 One of the ways in which a specifically Massumian interpretation of affect can be traced in architectural discourse, then, was in the sharp distinction that he drew between experience and meaning, or between a level of unconscious behavior that responded automatically to the environment and a level of conscious intellectual reflection that involved meanings, symbolism language, and culture. As we have seen repeatedly, it was said by Kipnis that affect involved a mode of interpretation that did not involve meaning and by Somol that it was “not about its meaning.” And as Lavin went on to claim in the 2000s, affect was “without signification,”48 it was “the internalization of perception and not personal feelings shaped by symbolism, language, and other forms of cultural predeterminations.”49 Massumi’s interpretation of Libet’s experiment and his focus on the “half second” between the EGS signal and the movement of the finger reinforced this same argument that conscious reasoning comes only after decisions have already been made by the 46 S. Lavin, E. Diller, “Domesticating Space: Elizabeth Diller and Sylvia Lavin,”Berlage Cahiers, 7, 1998, pp. 62–65. 47 S. Lavin, “The New Mood or Affective Disorder,” p. 40. Emphasis added. 48 S. Lavin, “Plasticity at Work,” in Mood River, Wexner Center, Columbus, OH, 2002, p. 81. 49 S. Lavin, “Kissing Architecture: Super Disciplinarity and Confounding Mediums,” Log, 17, Fall 2009, pp. 9–16. Joseph Bedford 76 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 body. As Massumi put it in the Parables of the Virtual in 2002, affect is an “intensity” that is “not semantically or semiotically ordered.”50 Indeed, Kipnis also argued for the primacy of feeling over reason in his catalogue essay accompanying his 2002 “Mood River” exhibition at the Wexner Center in Columbus. That exhibition presented a range of contemporary artifacts of design, from chairs to toothbrushes that used smooth surfaces, color, and other qualities in ways that were seductive. In his essay, one of Kipnis’s main arguments for why the realm of feelings and emotions solicited by affect were important was that new feelings precede and lead to new ideas. As he wrote: New feelings erupt into the world ... [D]esign and the arts give diverse and specific material moment to these new feelings, help make them choate and concrete, and spread them about like the wind spreads pollen, like mosquitoes spread disease. After these new feelings have materialized, taken shape, taken various shapes, and disseminated, they eventually evolve into their most auspicious incarnation as new ideas.51 Kipnis went so far in the essay as to suggest that Leibniz could only have invented calculus because of a feeling that had been put into widespread circulation by experiences that had been engendered by the invention of the microscope. Calculus, Kipnis said, was like putting a curve under a microscope.52 The claim that Kipnis was ultimately making about architecture was that it would be like the microscope in his analogy; architecture too could engender new experiences that would spread new feelings and lead to ideas that could change the world in the way that calculus had done. The attraction of the argument that ideas, meanings, and words were secondary in importance had everything to do with the local context of disciplinary debates in architecture in which this particular group of thinkers sought to distinguish their project from those who had, in the years prior, invested so heavily in linguistic analyses, semiological theo - ries of the sign, Derridean word-play, and the critique of ideology. It had everything to do with the larger political shift they attempted to initiate from the negative project of critical theory—which they saw as tending 50 B. Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, pp. 24–25. 51 J. Kipnis, “On those who Step into the Same River…,” Mood River, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 2002, pp. 34–44. 52 Ibid. “After Affect” 77 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 to undermine the power of design—to an affirmative and positive project that celebrated the power of design. The best documentation of the discourse that Lavin cultivated at UCLA in particular is the publication Crib Sheets, which documented the more informal conversations and ideas that circulated through the school after a conference in 2003 called “The Good, The Bad and the Beautiful.” In what is in effect a collection of quotations from articles, books, but also transcribed speech from conferences, we find several entries on topics related to the discourse of affect such as “surface,” “atmosphere,” and “environment” that suggest the intellectual milieu in the school at the time. Lavin’s own transcribed remarks on the topic of surface read, for example, “The surface [becomes] manifestly effective rather than tectonic when architecture seeks mood instead of meaning.”53 Her remarks on atmosphere read: Of paramount importance in the reorientation of architecture toward a field of effects de-emphasize volume, the logic of the plan, and the ethics of rationalism, in favor of atmospheres produced through the curation of the surface. Through accumulation, lamination, decoration, colorization, agitation, plastification, and environmentalization, these surfaces curate effective moods and when these effects are special, they catalyse the contemporary.54 Her remarks were echoed by younger members of faculty such as Jason Payne, who is similarly recorded as having said: People respond viscerally to atmospheres. Increasingly they respond to institutions with ennui. We are becoming ever more a species that thrives on immediate, palpable stimulation, on material fact. It’s not what it is so much as how it feels. One of the things we feel most potently in buildings is their atmosphere. Maintaining and even extending the public role of buildings demands they produce a saturated experience that almost clings to the skin of the people moving through them.55 53 S. Lavin, “Surface,” in S. Lavin, H. Furján (eds.), with Penelope Dean, Crib Sheets: Notes on the Contemporary Architectural Conversation, Monacelli Press, New York, 2005, p. 63. 54 S. Lavin, “Atmosphere,” in S. Lavin, H. Furján (eds.), with Penelope Dean, Crib Sheets: Notes on the Contemporary Architectural Conversation, Monacelli Press, New York, 2005, p. 70. 55 J. Payne, “Atmosphere,” in S. Lavin, H. Furján (eds.), with Penelope Dean, Crib Sheets: Notes on the Contemporary Architectural Conversation, Monacelli Press, New York, 2005, 70. Joseph Bedford 78 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 While the discourse of affect in architecture was pioneered by theorists such as Lavin, Somol, and Kipnis in the years around 1999-2002, it was inherited and developed by a generation that had been their students but who were now teaching alongside them. This generation, seeing itself as a generation committed to practice as much as to theory was trying to build and to exemplify the persuasive power of design when thought of in affective terms. In their NGTV Reception Bar of 2006, for example, Jason Payne and Heather Roberge worked with translucent materials and methods of forming surfaces with vacuum molding to create a bar that glowed hot-red. And by 2009 when Diller and Scofidio, now in a phase of prolific building, adopted a similar approach in their renovation for the Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center in New York (Figures 1 and 2), the walls not only glowed red but pulsed as the lights behind came up and went down. By 2008-2009, Payne, Roberge, Gage, Pita and others were grouping themselves behind the related concept of “sensation.” They did so in a group show called “Matters of Sensation” at Artist Space in New York in 2008, and in conjunction, Gage and Pita guest edited a special issue of Log—number 17—that included the publication of a transcript of a conversation about the show and individual essays by Gage and Pita, Payne, and Lavin. Payne’s essay brought together and summarized much of what had gone before in the previous decades. It continued to argue that the discourse of affect was to be distinguished from phenomenology, though without going into much detail about the matter other than to write that phenomenology was a “darker, disciplinary codified doctrine.” 56 It also continued to argue that meaning was irrelevant to the power of aesthetics in our postmodern age. Nobody is interested in the question, Payne claimed, of what a specific color, tone, shade, or curve means to any one particular group of people in any one context. Taste and symbolism had been replaced by intensity, he wrote, and interpretation had been replaced by reaction. He argued that there was no need to worry about the precision of the concepts involved in his essay, because the feelings that words evoke were the real way they mean anything, such that one could use “mood, atmosphere, sensibility, sensation, [and] feel” as synonyms for affect without much consequence.57 56 J. Payne, “Hair and Makeup,” Log, 17, 2009, pp. 41–48. 57 Ibid. “After Affect” 79 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 Figure 1. Jason Payne and Heather Roberge, NGTV Reception Bar and Film Set, Beverly Hills, California, 2006. Photograph by Deborah Bird. Joseph Bedford 80 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 Figure 2. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Alice Tully Hall Renovation, Lincoln Center, New York, 2009. Photograph by Iwan Baan. “After Affect” 81 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 In addition to the work of this younger generation of practitioners, the teaching of a younger generation still, especially at UCLA, led to further design explorations, both in the studio context and in gallery exhibitions, of the way that forms and their variously shiny or hairy surfaces could evoke feelings of attraction to the cute or repulsion to the horrifying. Ellie Abrons and Andrew Holder were creating forms that looked ambiguously adorable or disgusting as little embryonic creatures, insect-like or animal figures, posed to fall from cliff edges or appearing to be soon crushed by a great weight (Figures 3 and 4). And Michael Loverich created haunting abject sculptures that ambiguously combine the cuteness of babies with the animal-like hairy forms (Figure 5). 3. The Critique of Affect in the 2010s The changes taking place in architecture as it shifted from the cordial rivalry between phenomenology and post-structuralism to the new reigning discourse of affect were not happening in isolation. The discourse of affect was part of similar post-critical developments happening elsewhere in the arts and humanities wherever they had been touched by the spread of post-structuralist discourses. Affect was above all part of a response to the perceived exhaustion of the critical claims made by post-structuralism. In English, Rita Felski and others were already emphasizing pleasure as a dimension of the experience of the reader.58 And by 2010 students of Brian Massumi, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, were able to document in The Affect Theory Reader a whole host of discourses and texts indebted to the affective turn.59 But a quarter century on from these developments, surely it is time to step back and assess the validity of their scientific and political claims which underpinned their neo-avant-garde stance. The discourse of affect certainly seems behind us now in many ways. Few architects speak of, or let alone read, Deleuze anymore. There have been strong critiques of the association between the discourse of affect and neoliberalism by the resurgent Marxism that swelled after the financial crash of 2008, and that was 58 R. Felski, Uses of Literature, Wiley Blackwell, London, 2008, and The Limits of Critique, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2015. 59 M. Gregg, G. J. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2010. Joseph Bedford 88 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 that done by Marcel Brassa, Ariel Furstenberg, and Alfred R. Mele in 2019, that have argued that while neural activity can be detected in advance of a decision, there is no evidence that it represents a decision being made unconsciously. They argue that many of the more convincing critical studies place the moment of decision as well as the ability to veto a decision very close to the time when patients think they are deciding, which as they put it, reinforces the “common idea or feeling that we decide at the moment of conscious intention.”71 They ultimately argue that the pulse observed in the brain at 0.3 seconds before the decision to move is specifically related to what Aaron Schurger has called “stochastic neural fluctuations,”72 which appear to be related to the process of accumulating evidence prior to a decision, but not to a decision itself. They point out that these neural fluctuations are correlated to the arbitrariness of the decision-making scenario in the experiment and suggest that it is precisely because there is no natural context by which perception guides the making of a decision that decisions are made in a way that required more of this internal neural noise. As Brassa et al. put it: In typical cases, when people make a decision about whether to accept or reject a job offer, whether or not to make a bid on a certain house, and so on, their leading options differ from one another in ways that are important to them. In such cases, people often have a wealth of information to mull over. There is no need to depend primarily on subthreshold neuronal noise. 73 The literature is also critical not only of the conclusions drawn by Libet from his experiments but of the methods and assumptions in his study. They point out the critiques within the literature of the artificial nature of Libet’s experiment and the way that the instructions of the experiment influenced the experiment by leading the patient to adopt a “metacognitive strategy” where they attend to their own attention in ways that are unnatural in everyday experience. This in turn, Brassa et al. claim, leads to the fundamental problem that whatever the experiment 71 M. Brassa, A. Furstenbergb, A. R. Mele, “Why Neuroscience Does Not Disprove Free Will,” in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 102, 2019, p. 263. 72 A. Schurger, J.D. Sitt, S. Dehaene, “An Accumulator Model for Spontaneous Neural Activity Prior to Self-Initiated Movement,” in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of Americas, 109, 2012, pp. 2904–2913. 73 M. Brassa, A. Furstenbergb, A. R. Mele, “Why Neuroscience Does Not Disprove Free Will,” p. 263. “After Affect” 89 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 finds in the laboratory context cannot be generalized as an explanation for human experience per se. 74 They point out the significant differences between making decisions in an arbitrary manner such as lifting a finger randomly when prompted by an instruction to do so and making decisions in a situational context of meaning and significance, such as hitting the brake when you see a pedestrian crossing the road.75 Conclusion In retrospect, the claims made by affect theorists like Massumi, Lavin, Kipnis, and others, that the level of affect is prior to and distinct from the realm of significance and meaning, seem evermore difficult to sustain given that the scientific studies that were once supposed to underpin these claims are no longer widely supported. It is not entirely clear anymore that it is accurate or desirable to demote the role of such things as reason, meaning, the imagination, culture, and history in human decision making and actions. As these qualities of human nature are being daily undermined by the media-technical systems of “too late capitalism,” it no longer seems a progressive gesture to embrace a logic of immediacy that is in fact a symptom of these systems. Throughout this article I have charted, through a number of protagonists and their writings, an intellectual history of affect theory in architecture. In the course of doing so, I have pointed out how affect has historically displaced or supplanted the discourse of phenomenology, largely on the strength that its claims were more politically progressive and on the aspersion that phenomenology was a “dark,” closed, or “essentializing” philosophy. Yet as affect theory’s own politics looks far from progressive, it is unclear why phenomenology would remain so understudied as an alternative means of understanding experience. There was not space in this paper to analyze the ways in which phenomenology offers a means to think about how the qualities of buildings are experienced, and this analysis will have to wait for another occasion. Yet, we can say that within the historical triangle between post-structuralism, affect theory and phenomenology, phenomenology occupies a 74 The same critique is offered by Przemysław Strzyyski. See P. Strzyyski, “Benjamin Libet’s Experiment and Its Critique Between 2000–2012,” Filozofia Chrze Cijañska, 10, July 2013, pp. 83–102. 75 M. Brassa, A. Furstenbergb, A. R. Mele, “Why Neuroscience Does Not Disprove Free Will,” p. 252. Joseph Bedford 90 Khōrein, VOL. III, NO. 2, 2025 position that evades the nominalism by which everything is viewed as a discourse without resorting to immediacy. Phenomenology’s account of experience, far from essentializing or adopting an a priori conception of space, could be demonstrated to understand experience in terms of the historical, cultural, and social significance of situations that are deeply wired into all human experience from the moment a child is born and during the process of child development, such that there is no such thing as experience prior to cultural mediation, because cultural mediation is what enables human beings to orient themselves in the world, to perceive their environment, and to act intentionally in the world. 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