Towards temporal affective oscillations

The intention of this chapter has been to identify affect through the different temporal dimensions encountered in practices of architecture. Rather than directing towards any one time, such as present or future, the discussion has considered the in-between of these temporalities through stutters, both stilled and quickened. It suggests that stuttering occurs as a temporal relation of proximity between present and future in practices of architecture. Importantly, the time of affect (the affect-vector) shifts linear-time through addition and succession of moments, instigating changes of level - genuine jumps - and the reworking of systems.

In addition, the chapter sought to address the relation between stilled and quickened stutters. It suggests that the temporal nature of architectural practice is necessarily oscillating between stilled stutters and quickened stutters. The discussion has separated the two temporal relations to clarify the potential of each. Stilled stutters generate an affective connectedness, while quickened stutters generate a sense of the new and better or affective possibilities. While there will always be points of friction between these two intensities, both act to connect across different temporalities by a holding together between the ‘now to the not-yet,’¹⁴⁶ between the extended present and the near future. Further, when we understand these acts of stuttering as affective oscillations, we may begin to observe how the most intense affective processes in practices of architecture are crowded together at the extremities of these two forms, made more intense through the contrast between the stilled and the quickened temporalities.

The question at the beginning was: What can stuttering temporalities (i.e., times of stillness and quickening) tell us about the relation and link between affect and architectural practice? The following offers a few considerations. While the stilled temporalities of the practice of architecture are essential to producing a heightened attunement to affects, stillness also provides the possibility for quickened stutters that act to repel and push affects.¹⁴⁷ Such affective forces generate instances of change, genuine jumps that erupt through the gaps and stutters of practice.¹⁴⁸ These temporal in-between forces bring about the practice’s potential: an inclination for promising actions. Therefore, it is through the stutter, brokenness and disorder that practice may effectively embrace difference. Graham and Thrift describe stuttering of practice as ‘born out of the ever-present presence of failure and malfunction and error - and the consequent opportunity to learn from them.’ Further, they examine ‘“breakdowns” as the means by which [practices] learn and learn to reproduce.’¹⁴⁹ To consider the temporal stutters of practice allows us to highlight practice’s capacity to wait or stay still, as well as act or react to unforeseen happenings. Following Flarrison, it is ‘a movement of withdrawal from, and separation between, the existent and world, movements that are, at the same time, the very chance of every contact or involvement.’¹⁵⁰ Stuttering may be the slow or stilled counterweight to bodies-in-action, an ‘interruption of the flowing of . . . durations,’¹⁵¹ yet it serves as a creative and affective intervention to architectural practices and design processes.

The discussion and exploration of these two forms of stutters in affective interplay do not attempt to cover all that occurs in architecture practices. Rather, this chapter has considered views enabling us to observe how architectural bodies, things, activities, and processes hold together in affective temporal oscillations; and how these come to have real effects in the practice of architecture. Importantly, a discussion of the temporality of practice offers a productive and powerful way of understanding the place of affect in architecture. This is especially so when the discussion focusses on a disruptive temporality through stuttering, where the assumed flow of practice is made disjunctive, and a space is opened up in time that throws light into the capacities of bodies and their relations with one another. In the stillness of the stutter - manifesting as boredom, purposelessness, error, and process discontinuities; getting stuck - and senses heightened to the acceleration of time in future projections, are zones of potential arising from teleological disconnections, a lack of explanatory language, and the vagueness and tension in the (in)capacity of bodies. It is here that context and practice opens in ways not framed by familiarity, habit, technology, and accepted histories of progress, but which allows new relations to ‘bloom’ and other practices to ‘flourish.’¹⁵² Above all, affect is not assignable. It can be analysed not in terms of presence but only in terms of heaviness or valence, emanating and imparting across and through bodies-in-relation. Therefore this chapter should be seen as a bridge, one between the theoretical attachments of affect and practice, and the more grounded and practical attachments examined in the following main chapters of the book.