Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces by Derek P. McCormack (review)

In 1957, Guy Debord delivered his Report on the Construction of Situations, his famous manifesto for the Situationist International Movement.¹ In the section of this address with the subheading “Towards a Situationist International,” Debord envisions an experimental affective orientation toward city space, arguing “spatial development must take the affective realities that the experimental city will determine into account,” and continues on to propose “a theory of states-of-mind districts, according to which each quarter of a city would tend to induce a single emotion, to which the subject will consciously expose herself or himself” (2006, 96–7). In Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces, geographer Derek P. McCormack undertakes a rigorous analysis of the potential of experimentation in space and affect, revealing Debord’s briefly articulated vision to be a rich area of research with implications for dance and performance studies, affect studies, urban studies, and geography, as well as their theoretical and practical intersections.

Although McCormack never links his work to Debord’s, his introductory chapter summarizes the project, following Debord’s one-time-fellow situationist, Henri Lefebvre, as a desire to understand how bodies and spaces produce one another. McCormack argues that this undertaking requires a focusing of attention on affect, which he views as key to apprehending the overflow of meaning that stems from an understanding of bodies and spaces as processes, always in excess of their materiality. It is vital for McCormack that space is both understood and referred to with respect to its rhythmic and durational aspects, hence McCormack, following Deleuze, refers to specific moments in a particular space as “spacetimes.” This term is used throughout the text. Within this fairly broad conceptual architecture, McCormack then foregrounds rhythm, atmosphere, and refrain, which he argues provide “ways of grasping the consistency or intensive ‘thisness’ of affective spacetimes without necessarily reducing these spacetimes to the status of containers for moving bodies” (5).For McCormack, these experientially oriented ideas—rhythm, atmosphere, and refrain —emphasize the “distinctively felt qualities of space,” and he draws heavily upon LeFebvre, Deleuze, and Félix Guattari to ground these concepts within established theoretical frameworks. This is deliberate, for McCormack’s proposition that these terms be understood as both conceptual and empirical is the primary thread weaving through the remaining chapters. In McCormack’s words:“Conceptual matters of concern can sensitize thinking to the affective qualities of spacetimes in ways that generate opportunities both for renewing the promise of experimenting with experience and, in turn, for thinking with concepts” (9). Of the three, rhythm and refrain emerge as the most potent conceptual links between the somatic, aesthetic, and spatial, since McCormack’s model for experimentation relies on the affective potential of spaces for thinking anew when durational and rhythmic qualities are engaged and attended to.

As a geographer, McCormack’s defines his fieldwork process as a “learn[ing] to be affected” such that “experience becomes a field of variation in which to experiment with the question of how felt differences might register in thinking” (11). After the requisite problematizing of the very category of experience and critique of representation, McCormack delves into such a practice of “experimenting experience” by participating in and analyzing a range of practices and performances—dance, sports-casting, music videos—creating a scaffolding for a forceful call for experimenting with affective experience. While McCormack writes with a sense of political urgency, the work tends to stay in the realm of potentiality, wherein the “ethico-poltical” impacts of his experimentation for actual moving bodies are never fully articulated.

In the first several chapters, McCormack focuses on laying the conceptual groundwork for the remaining chapters, many of which read as stand-alone essays. He does this by way of an analysis of his experiments with artist/scholars Petra Kuppers and Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, which took place in a corridor at the Chisenhale...