Feeling Motion

Revisiting Mobility History through Affect and Emotion

Mikkel Thelle
Aarhus University

Moving around in the field of mobility history, one finds a certain resilience in its
core subjects. While mobility research integrates and digests results from a number
of other disciplines—tourism studies, migration studies, and architecture, for exam-
ple—it does so without losing its focus on transport modes and practices. It seems,
though, that mobility research thrives and grows most when fed perspectives from
the wider academic Umwelt. Reviewing the recent workshop Feeling Space: Towards
a History of Emotion, Affect and Space, held at the University of Copenhagen in De-
cember 2013, this article will suggest that emergent historical research in emotion
and affect represents a potentially productive addition to mobility history.1
Why mention this event in a T2M yearbook? For starters, mobility issues
shaped the event itself. The week of the workshop a storm disrupted all train and
flight traffic in Denmark. As a result, participants were delayed in stations and
airports, joining the discussions in Copenhagen throughout the event at almost
rhythmic intervals. So, before it even began, a natural occurrence had shaped
the event and given it a rhythm. A similar motion will guide this text as it moves
in and out of the workshop in order to use it as a platform for gazing around the
field of mobility and cultural history.
Of course, a Danish storm is not the sole reason for bringing this theme to
the yearbook. I will argue that the workshop’s focus on the analytic landscape of
feeling offers an exciting new approach for mobility historians to consider. The
concepts and perspectives developed within affect theory and history of emo-
tions could inspire historians of transport and mobility to look for novel ways to
understand their subjects, as they have already been inspired by cultural geogra-

1. The Feeling Space workshop notice has been taken down, but the details are cached here:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://saxoinstitute.ku.dk/brea
kingbonds/activities/workshop_saxo-institute/.

Mobility in History Volume 6, 2015: 63–69 © Mobility in History

ISSN: 2296-0503 (Print) ISSN: 2050-9197 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-78238-814-2
doi: 10.3167/mih.2015.060107
64 • Mikkel Thelle

phy and anthropology. On a broader scale one could claim that feeling and affect
belong to the thematic turns of cultural history and theory that have occurred
over the past four decades. Mobility historians are not ignorant of these trends,
incorporating questions of linguistics, space and materiality into their work. If
we are to pay greater attention to emotion in mobility history, scholars must
engage with the current work being produced on emotion and affect at existing
research centers across the globe and presented in several academic journals,
such as Passions in Context.
Etymologically, emotion and affect are both derived from meanings of “move-
ment,” and as I will try to argue, this broader understanding of “being moved” can
be metaphorically fruitful in order to sharpen cultural aspects in the history of
transportation. Moving things, services, and people, it seems, is connected to and
to a degree dependent on movements within the “embodied mind,” as well as on
strands of knowledge you could call “navigational.”
In order to introduce this claim in more specific terms, I will start outside of
the workshop with the work of Swedish ethnologist Orvar Löfgren, whose work
concerns the cultural history of travel.2 Inspired by theorists such as Norbert
Elias and Michel Foucault, and evoking cultural theorists like Wolfgang Schivel-
bush and Michel de Certeau, who have both worked theoretically with train
travel and other mobilities, Löfgren looks at the culture of travel in Scandinavian
ethnology.3 This perspective provides Löfgren with a set of tools to address the
ways in which mobility continuously develops within, around, and between peo-
ple as they move in ways that affect and adjust their cultural competence. That
traveling by train requires a complex set of technologies, practices, and mean-
ings is not a controversial statement in transport history. That this assemblage,
or “technological ensemble,” in Shivelbusch’s terms, was by and large defined
during the eighteenth century, as Löfgren implies, will not surprise T2M mem-
bers either.4 What is interesting here is the way Löfgren understands the change
going on while the train is becoming a mundane everyday practice.

2. Orvar Löfgren, “The Atmospheres of Railway Stations: On the Ethnography of Moods,” in Ir-
regular Ethnographies (Lund: Lund Universitet, 2010); Orvar Löfgren, “Motion and Emotion:
Learning to Be a Railway Traveller,” Mobilities 3, no. 3 (2008): 331–351; Orvar Löfgren and
Billy Ehn, The Secret World of Doing Nothing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
3. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the
19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Michel de Certeau, L’Invention
Du Quotidien, Vol 1., Arts de Faire (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1980). Schivelbusch was
commemorated in an earlier issue of the T2M yearbook; see George Revill, “Perception,
Reception and Representation: Wolfgang Schivelbusch and the Cultural History of Travel
and Transport,” in Mobility in History: Reviews and Reflections (T2M Yearbook 2012), ed. Peter
Norton et al. (Neuchâtel: Alphil, 2011), 31–48.
4. Löfgren does not use the concept of assemblage, which I apply here, by and large in the
meaning developed by Manuel de Landa: Manuel de Landa, A New Philosophy of Society:
Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2007).
 Feeling Motion • 65

In Scandinavian cultural history prior to the 1960s, it was assumed that the
transition to modernity was marked by a loss of cultural knowledge connected to
traditional, rural cultures, that is, a process of unlearning.5 A strain in Löfgren’s
research has been to refute this notion and instead explore the ways in which
modern subjects were actually acquiring new knowledge of everyday life, that is,
learning modernity. One of his prime examples is the mobile assemblage of the
railway. His argument about such assemblages instilling patterns of modernity
produces a range of relevant questions for the cultural history of mobility and
transport.
Löfgren’s focus is on how this learning covered a range of emotions and spa-
tial atmospheres connected to the train: social norms in the compartment, move-
ment patterns at the station, reading timetables, and recognizing figures such as
the “peasant catchers” lurking at the gates to the city.6 In all of these cases, the
body of the passenger is being moved physically and emotionally, and the two
forms of movement are interrelated. What is also present in Löfgren’s text is
the notion, developed by Michel de Certeau, among others, that movement and
space are intertwined. In short, when we talk about space, it is place that is im-
printed with meaning by the movements of people across it. Through his enth-
nological approach, Löfgren implicitly suggests a methodological and conceptual
link between affective studies and mobility history. This connection overlaps
with a long-running discussion of place versus space in cultural geography. Both
topics were prominent among those discussed in Copenhagen.
Turning now to the Copenhagen workshop, in his keynote speech, Tim Cress-
well focused on a section of his ongoing study of Maxwell Street in Chicago, Illi-
nois. Cresswell discussed the changing definition of the street over time, showing
that many observers assigned ideas of exoticism and chaos to it, which helped
form its reputation as a place without order. Culling descriptions of Maxwell
Street’s unique characteristics from the historical texts of journalists and intel-
lectuals, Cresswell showed how such depictions could provide the place with
certain choreographies of objects and practices. This discussion adds to Cress-
well’s earlier work on concepts of space, place, and mobility, through all of which
he engages in an ongoing dialogue between poststructuralist thought and more
established geographical concepts.7 Another notable scholar in this field, more
explicitly working on affective mobility, is Peter Adey, who has published exten-

5. See, e.g., Palle O. Christiansen, Kulturhistorie Som Opposition: Træk Af Forskellige Fagtraditio-
ner (Copenhagen: Samleren, 2000); Orvar Löfgren, “Scenes From a Troubled Marriage: Swe-
dish Ethnology and Material Culture Studies,” Journal of Material Culture 2 (1997): 95–113.
6. See Löfgren, “Motion and Emotion.”
7. Tim Cresswell, “The Vagrant/Vagabond: The Curious Career of a Mobile Subject,” in Ge-
ographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, ed. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman
(Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011); Tim Cresswell, Geographical Thought: A Critical Introduction
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2013); Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World
(London: Routledge, 2006).
66 • Mikkel Thelle

sively on the topic of flying and security.8 Adey’s Aerial Life highlights a similar
junction of interests as Cresswell, and while they disagree on a number of topics,
both scholars bring forth the connection between mobility and affect.9
The concept of affect stems from a philosophical tradition of thinking about
bodies and motion, driven by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation
of Spinoza. Deleuze’s thinking, in turn, was brought to a wider public by Brian
Massumi, also in his own right an important theoretical thinker on affect. In short,
affect theory is trying to approach an influence of and on the body, conceptual-
ized as “pure movement” or “intensities,” before it becomes articulated as an emo-
tion.10 In considering affect in relation to flight, Peter Adey is able to show a very
different universe than the one experienced by most travelers, highlighting flight
as a landscape of security and risk. Another researcher working on affect and mo-
bility is Stephen Graham, an urban cultural geographer widely interested in tech-
nological networks and public space.11 So in talking about affect and place in Co-
penhagen, Tim Cresswell was implicitly touching on discussions between cultural
geographers working around feeling, mobility, and history that outline a cluster of
results. One such cluster very much on the move, so to speak, in recent years is
the theme of security and securitization of technologies and patterns of mobility.
Affect was also discussed in the Feeling Space workshop as a question of ob-
serving movements and influences within and around the body. Or rather, the
idea was used to see the world as an infinite amount of bodies, continuously
influencing each other. As Danish literary theorist Frederik Tygstrup writes, to
approach affect is to talk about “relational space.” Tygstrup notes how movement
and influence penetrate the body at the same time as it is surrounding it. This is,
according to him, one of the aspects that sets affect apart from emotion: “While
emotions are something you have, affect is something you are in.”12 This “traffic
of affect,” as you might call it, through and around the body, could be interesting
to develop further in relation to mobility questions such as security spaces, urban
rioting, or warfare, to mention a few.

8. Peter Adey, Mobility, Key Ideas in Geography (London and New York: Routledge, 2010); Peter
Adey, “Anticipating Emergencies: Technologies of Preparedness and the Matter of Security,”
Security Dialogue 43, no. 2 (2012): 99–117; Peter Adey, Air (Reaktion Books, 2013); Peter Adey,
“Air/Atmosphere of the Megacity,” Theory, Culture and Society 30, nos. 7–8 (2013): 291–308;
Peter Adey, “Protecting the Population: Bureaucracy, Affectivity and Governing the Liver-
pool Blitz,’” in Ordnance: War, Architecture, Space, ed. G. Boyd and D. Linehan (Farnham,
U.K.: Ashgate, 2012), 51–66.
9. Peter Adey, Aerial Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010).
10. For an overview, see Nigel Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect,”
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86, no. 1 (2004): 57–78.
11. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Techno-
logical Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001); Stephen Graham, Dis-
rupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fails (London and New York: Routledge, 2010); Stephen
Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2011).
12. Frederik Tygstrup, “Affective Spaces,” in Panic and Mourning: The Cultural Work of Trauma,
ed. Daniela Agostinho (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 21.
 Feeling Motion • 67

The study of feeling historically, though, is broader than affect theory. During
the last ten years, the history of emotions has been growing rapidly as a trend
in cultural historical studies. As mentioned, centers of emotional history are ris-
ing, among them the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
A number of participants from the institute participated in the Feeling Space
workshop, bringing in new perspectives on emotions and new focuses on mod-
ern, semipublic spaces such as laboratories and asylums. Monique Sheer, the sec-
ond keynote speaker at the workshop, though now at Tübingen University, was
trained at the Max Planck Institute. Scheer is a historical anthropologist working
with popular religious practices in the eighteenth century, and in her lecture she
elaborated on her notion of emotion as practice. Inspired by sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu, Scheer investigates how feelings are “done” in social relations.13 In this
approach to emotions as a form of action, emotional space becomes the sum of
these actions, conceptualized by Scheer as “ambience” or “atmosphere.” This idea
of emotions, as something that is done, with or without intention, and contrib-
utes to a spatial atmosphere, I will argue, has much to add to mobility history.
One example is coerced movement. When people are forced to move, how are
the social patterns and boundaries on the move influenced—affected—by feel-
ing? Migration studies and research in translocal relations opens up a range of
such questions. Connected to this are questions about how emotions are formed
by social convention. How are you supposed to feel about moving, and what
happens if you “feel different”? Questions like these could be emphasized when
analyzing transport systems or cultures in a historical perspective.
In urban mobility, emotion is often tied to questions of control. In his paper
on the entertainment quarters of modern Berlin and Cairo, historian Joseph Ben
Prestel from the Max Planck Institute emphasized exactly this, talking about the
ways in which loss of control was interpreted in the two cities around 1900 from a
pedestrians’ point of view. Danish historian Dorthe Gert Simonsen also indicated
this in her analysis of how gravity became strongly embodied in the presence of
airplanes in the interwar period.14 Drawing on notions of affect, she showed how
new bodily postures such as the “aviation neck” by terrestrial spectators, looking
up at the flying, prosthetic bodies, can be seen as an affect. This affective experi-
ence of flight “from below” poses a new field for mobility studies, but the affect,
inarticulate as it is, also poses interesting questions of historical methodology.15
Other perspectives for emotional history are the analysis of intersections be-
tween private and public spaces. Historian Karen Vallgårda presented part of her

13. Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have
a History?): A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51
(2012): 193–220.
14. Dorthe Gert Simonsen, “Accelerating Modernity: Time-Space Compression in the Wake of
the Aeroplane,” Journal of Transport History 26, no. 2 (2005): 98–117.
15. For other positions on space and “emotional styles,” see Benno Gammerl, “Emotional Styles:
Concepts and Challenges,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 16, no. 2
(2012): 161–175.
68 • Mikkel Thelle

work on the history of divorce in Denmark, where conflicts at home become

objects of public attention and negotiation. She was connecting Annemarie Mol’s
praxiological thinking to emotional history, and notably to the work of Scheer
and Sara Ahmed.16 A professor of race and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, Uni-
versity of London, Ahmed is an interesting figure who investigates how feelings
such as hatred produce social relations and delineate borders of subjects and
collectives. Ahmed develops the idea of “surfacing,” that is, how emotions (such
as pain or attraction) shape the borders we use to differ and define ourselves in
the social environment.
Ahmed’s concept of hatred as a historically practiced emotion was also at
the center of attention in a paper at the workshop given by associate professor
Birgitte Scheppelern Johansen from the University of Copenhagen. She entered
the discussion through a critique of the way Zygmunt Baumann analyzed the
Holocaust. In Baumann’s view, the eradication of the Jews was only possible
because Nazi practices of modernity—such as impersonal bureaucracy and in-
dustrial organization of work—constructed “unconcern” within the German pop-
ulation to groups such as the Jews. Feelings, Baumann claims, could not play a
part in an atrocity of such dimensions. But, Johansen argued in her paper that
feelings must have played a part. If we approach hate as an assemblage of hetero-
geneous components such as material objects, political discourses, and practices
of annihilation, for example, we will be able to know more about how emotion is
mobilized and practiced through what she terms “material delegation.” As with
other forms of enforced mobility, such as trafficking and the slave trade, the
eradication of whole ethnic groups during World War II required an elaborate
mobility infrastructure as well as thoughts pertaining to the mobility issues of ex-
ploiting, killing, and removing bodies. As disturbing and uncomfortable as these
issues are, they are still important topics for the study of mobility and its relation
to power, genocide, crime, violence—and not least of all emotions such as hatred.
Jane Hamlett from Royal Holloway, London, is working on questions of pri-
vate and public space comparable to Vallgårdas. She presented preliminary re-
sults from her wider study of dormitories and asylums, in which she tries to
unravel the emotional regulations and affordances present in these spaces and
views them as sites of domestication in a public setting. Transgressions or negoti-
ations of the public and private is a recurring theme in the historical research of
emotions, as it is, I would argue, in transport issues such as commuting, tourism,
or refuge.17

16. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004); Sara Ahmed, “Col-
lective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others,” Theory, Culture and Society 21, no. 2
(2004): 25–42; Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2002).
17. The last T2M conference, Transport and Borders, revealed this as perhaps an emergent
agenda for transport and mobility history.
 Feeling Motion • 69

In the beginning of this article it was noted that figures like Schivelbusch
and Certeau have provided a way for emotion and motion to meet in historical
perspectives. This article invites further reflection on the relation between feel-
ing and mobility history. In 2011, T2M hosted a summer school where speaker
after speaker touched upon motion and emotion. The title of the summer school
was The Passenger: Mobility in Modernity, and it gathered scholars of mobility,
transport, and tourism. The theme of feeling motion was very present, albeit not
explicitly conceptualized. In Stephanie Ponsavady’s analysis of attraction, sexu-
ality, and mobility in the 1992 film Indochine, for example, the relation became
distinct. The summer school and the Copenhagen workshop show how mobility
historians have addressed questions of emotion and affect, and how the devel-
opment of these research fields can continue to contribute important theoretical
and methodological questions to mobility history in the future.

Mikkel Thelle is an assistant professor at the Institute for Culture and Society,
Aarhus University, and received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Co-
penhagen. He is director of the Danish Centre for Urban History, a collaboration
of the university and the Old Town, Denmark’s open-air museum for urban his-
tory. Thelle has previously worked with industrial cultural history at the National
Museum of Denmark and is currently doing research on mobility, space, and
modern urban history.