Technical frames of affect: Design-work and brand-work in a shopping mall

Abstract

This article is concerned with the dense network of politics and practices through which experts and institutions frame, instrumentalize and act on the problem-space of affect. Focusing on a new shopping mall cum residential tower in Singapore, I show how urban planners, architects, tourism regulators and retail managers were motivated by a self-reflexive awareness of the indeterminate nature of affect to continually experiment on defining and capturing its value. By highlighting the heterogeneous conditions of practice across multiple domains of expertise, I argue that each expert domain conceptualizes and intervenes into the problem-space differently, reflecting existing professional boundaries and technologies of control as well as divergent political interests. Because the perceived values of affect as well as the points of intervention are not consistent, the work of one group of experts can be negated, undermined or ignored by the work of another. This article argues that it is important to acknowledge the constructed and contested nature of affect, and analyze how its emergence in specific contexts, as discourse and practice, becomes imbricated in the structures of governance that in turn frame affect as the declared object-target.