6 Geographies of Affect Keith Woodward and Jennifer Lea There is a famous opening sequence from Modern Times (1936) that could easily be mistaken for a fragment of light-hearted, capitalist porn. Charlie Chaplin stands at the assembly line, an unnamed worker in an uni- dentified Fordist factory, tightening bolts on the passing pieces of an unrecognizable com- modity that we will see neither completed nor consumed. Instead, we bear witness to an economy of forces – the physical exchange of energies exerted and resisted between objects – enfolding the worker with the bits of the material world he repeatedly affects: those objects he builds. Chaplin’s dramatic variations in workspeed – struggling to keep pace with production – lay bare the conspir- acy between commodity and conveyor belt, work and widget, drawing and directing these affective relations into specific, ori- ented routines, ultimately delimiting and exhausting the labouring body’s capacity to act. As the line speeds up, he is damned to chase after it, exerting more energy more quickly with more intensity on more matter. If he sneezes, he falls behind. If his arms tire or he looks away, his hand may fall under the hammer of the neighbouring worker. The regulated assembly line, with its exacting speeds and the determinate interactions of its objects, channels certain amounts of energy, at a certain orientation, exerted repetitively, by the same muscles enacting the same movements over and over and over again. And even when Chaplin momentarily escapes this tireless belt of frenzied production for a quick run to the toilet, his strained body still reiterates the jerky, diagrammatic move- ments of his specific labour, arms wrenching bolts that are no longer there, gestures build- ing widgets from out of thin air. Chaplin’s factory paints a pared-down por- trait of the dynamic politics of force relations that assemble a materialist study of affect. The production machine, feeding upon the energies of the worker (what Marx (1976: 273) would call realized ‘labour-power’), actualizes a circuit of forces wherein work- ing bodies affect materiality, transforming and assembling it in determinate ways, at precise speeds, imbuing the resulting product with its specific value – all conditioned by exactingly segmented durations, enabling a surplus of value to appear seemingly from nowhere. For geographers working in the wake of their own radicalization and in the midst of that movement’s critical offspring, the exploitative drama of capitalist produc- tion has long been a familiar story. It is a tale frequently told from econocentric and spatio- centric perspectives that, although it would 5316-Smith-06.indd 154 2/2/2010 10:37:27 AM