Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 39, Issue 1, January 2008, Pages 438-451
Geoforum

Airports, mobility and the calculative architecture of affective control

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.09.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Drawing on work surrounding the theorisation of concepts such as mobility, affect and emotion, the paper argues that their control is now being intertwined in places like airports which are employing a number of techniques that engineer affects. Airport affect is enacted, in one way, by planning and designing the situational affective context one inhabits – throwing up structures of ethological possibility that shape capacities for the corporeal body to move and be moved. It is shown that the engineering of airport affect is premised upon a wider discursive framework of calculation and indeterminacy, and that selective techniques summon a number of different modalities of control. The paper concludes with a series of implications for the understanding of power, and the study of mobility, emotion and affect.

Introduction

Airports are gateways that differentiate. They sort people through the latest surveillance techniques of retina scanning biometric systems, algorithmic recognition and through passenger profiling software (Curry, 2004, Lyon, 2003a). Power is often focused upon these sites as they act as the contact point between people and the state (van Houtum and van Naerssen, 2002). Forcing people through these bottlenecks means that those in the corridors of power may exert influence over those in the corridors of movement. We can take a recent article by political scientist Lisle (2003) to elucidate this further. Lisle explores the complex deployment of airport power through the different imperatives of the airport’s function. She asks, “what is political about the airport” (Lisle, 2003, p. 3). Lisle wants to uncover how power is enacted through security and surveillance measures (see for example Adey, 2004a, Adey, 2004b, Curry, 2004, Dodge and Kitchin, 2004, Lyon, 2003a, Lyon, 2003b), through techniques of commercial maximisation (Freathy and O’ Connell, 1998), or for operational purposes.

However, while Lisle wants to get at these different power plays, she questions the tendency for scholars to focus upon the personal feelings of loss, hope, anxiety, joy, and others. She writes:

“Although we may experience feelings of loss, hope, anxiety, joy, adventure, homecoming, and fear in airports, we seldom think beyond these personal experiences and ask how contemporary forms of power are being produced and deployed at the airport” (2003, p. 3).

While I am very sympathetic to Lisle’s call to explore the mediated way by which power is enacted in airports and other border zones, I think that she misses the way the power relations she labours to uncover are just as evident within the very ‘personal experiences’ she wants to move beyond. Perhaps Lilse’s approach is not surprising given that technological infrastructures can seem fairly remote from felt experiences. Stephen Graham refers to the way transportation infrastructure has often been metaphorically ‘sunk’ by academics, reinforcing infrastructure’s sunk physical reality as it lies beneath pavements, homes and cities (Graham, 2000). Sociologically, airports have similarly been defined as rather blank spaces and devoid of excitement and interest; they are considered abstract, boring, placeless – perhaps non-places (Augé, 1995; see also Adey, 2006, Merriman, 2004, Rowley and Slack, 1999).

In contrast, I argue that the movements, feelings, and emotions found in airports should not be subtracted from the powerful forces that permeate the airport terminal. While Augé, 1995, Castells, 1996 and others discuss the perceptual experiences of airport life, I will argue that these feelings, motions and emotions are predicated by a form of airport control; bodies, both physically and emotionally, are opened up to power (Agamben, 1998, Fuller and Harley, 2004). In other words, the paper seeks to examine how the affective expressions of hope, fear, joy, sadness, and many others, as well as the constitutive mundane bodily motions that occupy the airport terminal, may not be as distanced from power and control as we might think. In fact, they are central to their perpetuation as certain triggers – designed-into the terminal space – are intended to excite bodily and emotional dispositions at an unconscious and pre-cognitive register.

Thus, the paper uses the recent interest in ‘mobility’ and ‘affect’ to explore how these motions, feelings and emotions, as Lisa Adkins puts it, “have interests and interests that matter” (Adkins, 2005, p. 15; see also Thrift, 2004a, Thrift, 2004b). The paper explores how airport operators are realising that people are not ‘disembodied universal subjects’ (Imrie, 2000) – rational billiard ball-like objects that make logical decisions (an approach not unlike that practised by Geography’s positivist spatial science (Barnes, 2001, Sheppard, 2001). Rather, airports are recognising that passengers are embodied, and have important physical and emotional relationships with the airport terminal building.1 No doubt there is a sense that this realisation could be seen as a continuation of the ‘biopolitical border’ – delivered by biometric technologies which capture bodily information (see Amoore’s, 2006 recent article). This is important, for we must also realise that the techniques explored below also embody the calculative and probabilistic virtualities often associated with risk management practices employed at border zones and nodes on the global mobility regime (Salter, 2007). The knowledge of what bodies can do, how they will react to emotional and physical stimuli in an imaginative futurity opens up entirely new ways for manipulation as airport designers and operators attempt to engineer and facilitate affect.

To begin, the paper performs a discussion of mobility together with affect. While quite disparate, I argue that the two concepts are lacking in any understanding of the way they relate to each other in relationships of control, and just how they interact with built forms and architectures. I develop an understanding of architecture as a situational affective context that lays down root textures and motivations for movement and feelings. By examining the genealogy of airport affective techniques I move on to explore how their mobilisation cannot be separated from the airport’s discursive context of risk management and calculation. Before concluding, the paper explores a number of different affective techniques and strategies deployed by airports through which different modalities of control are enacted. The paper ends with an extended discussion of the various modes of power mentioned throughout.

Section snippets

Geographies of mobility, affect and architecture

According to Urry and Sheller (2006) disciplines such as Geography (Cresswell, 2001), Sociology (Urry, 2000), Cultural Studies (Morris, 1988) and beyond are undergoing a paradigmatic turn towards all things mobile. In this ‘mobility turn’ (Hannam et al., 2006) the movement of people, things and information are displaced from their previously static situations. Sites such as the airport facilitate and symbolically display the processes of international travel, migration, the mobility of capital

Calculation, contingency and the predictive passenger: a genealogy of airport affect

Thrift (2004b, p. 583) has suggested that, “artificial paratextual forces, invisible forms which constitute the bare bones of the world” are becoming “dependent upon and operationalized through all manner of forms of quantitative calculation, from the very simplest operations like listing and numbering and counting through to various kinds of analytical and transformative operations”. In this section of the paper I investigate how in thinking about affective triggers as the invisible forms and

Conclusion

Scholars have begun to focus upon the ways in which contemporary security and surveillance societies have found their apotheosis at the airport/border. Others have explored the perceptual experiences of these spaces, suggesting feelings of loss, dislocation, placelessness, or excitement and stress. In this paper I have tried to build a bridge between these two different perspectives in order to affirm how felt and emotional experiences can, in fact, be connected to the sorts of interests that

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the thoughtful comments of several people, particularly Tim Cresswell, John Urry, David Bissell, Gareth Hoskins and Martin Jones. Questions from participants at the AAG annual conference in Denver and the Non-Place workshop held in Edinburgh (both in 2005), where prior versions of this paper were presented, were very useful. The thoughts of several referees helped me to substantially revise and improve the paper, guided by editorial support from Katie Willis. Any errors are my

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