Affective Landscapes: An Introduction

This essay examines, in Ben Highmore’s words, the implications of “a materialist turn towards the immaterial, towards affect, towards thinglyness, the senses” and how this might be determined by “the social world that produced them.” In viewing the “social,” or “sociocultural,” as always affective, and in viewing the significance of landscape in terms of how people define themselves and their relations to the world, this essay explores affect’s key role in countering entrenched, predefined systems of thought and feeling and its potential for, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, “redistributing the sensible.”