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Douglas Spencer, Pickard Chilton Professor and director of graduate education in the Department of Architecture, has authored a chapter in Architectural Affects after Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2021), edited by Marko Jobst and Hélène Frichot.

Chapter 2: “Affect, Architecture and the Apparatus of Capture” challenges both the promise of affect supposed to reside in its “autonomy” and the distinction between concept and affect on which this promise rests. Drawing on José Antonio Maravall’s Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (1986), Spencer argues that the uses of affect, especially within art and architecture, have a long history in being conceived and captured as means of social control and manipulation, and that such uses extend up to our present moment and its neoliberal architecture.