ABSTRACT. This paper attempts to take the politics of affect as not just incidental but central to the life of cities, given that cities are thought of as inhuman or transhuman entities and that politics is understood as a process of community without unity. It is in three main parts. The first part sets out the main approaches to affect that conform with this approach. The second part considers the ways in which the systematic engineering of affect has become central to the political life of Euro-American cities, and why. The third part then sets out the different kinds of progressive politics that might become possible once affect is taken into account. There are some brief conclusions.

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Introductioǹ`On the horizon, then, at the further edge of the possible, it is a matter of producing the space of the human species ö the collective (generic) work of the species ö on the model of what used to be called`art'; indeed, it is still so called, but art no longer has any meaning at the level of an`object' isolated by and for the individual. '' Lefebvre (1991, page 401) The set of papers in this special issue are all concerned in one way or another with the notion of performance, a notion whose hold is becoming general across much of the social sciences and humanitiesöfrom anthropology (for example, Farnell, 1999) to architecture (Davidson, 1998) and from history (Green, 1997) to the history of science (Gouk, 1996). In the past, performance tended to be associated with the theatre and theatricality. Yet, though theatre and theatricality still play a part in the study of performance, modern performance studies are founded in two developments. Theoretically, they arise from the meeting between those working in the performing arts and in the social sciences, especially anthropology and sociology, in the 1960s and 1970s. Practically, they can be found in the diaspora of performance out of the theatre in the same period, leading to the formation of many new artistic genres (many of which, significantly, move away from the traditional authority of the text). (1) In turn, these theoretical and practical pushes have now made performance into a central motif in the social sciences and humanities. In this introductory paper, we will argue that what we can see as a result is not one single motif but rather four different apprehensions of performance, apprehensions which clearly need to be explicated separately. This is not to say that these different apprehensions do not have elements in common. They do. They share, for example, a general and generalised discontent with the per-forms that went before, an interest in embodiment, and an attempt to unlock and animate new (human and nonhuman) potentialities. Above all, we argue, they want Abstract. In this introductory paper ö which follows the course of the papers included in this special issue ö we argue that there are currently four main apprehensions of performance. The first of those apprehensions is provided by the work of Judith Butler on performativity. We then move to a second apprehension ö the rather more general notion of performance found in nonrepresentational theory, using as an example the work of Gilles Deleuze. The third apprehension of performance is that taken from work found in the discipline of performance itself. Then, the fourth apprehension concerns the reworking of academic practices as performative.(1) Of course, there are many precursors to performance from before the 1960s and 1970s, many of which have been drawn into the tradition.

This paper is concerned with the changing nature of space. More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear. This paper is an attempt to map out this background. The paper begins by considering the nature of software. Subsequently, a simple audit is undertaken of where software is chiefly to be found in the spaces of everyday life. The next part of the paper notes the way in which more and more of this software is written to mimic corporeal intelligence, so as to produce a better and more unobtrusive fit with habitation. The paper then sets out three different geographies of software and the way in which they are implicated in the reproduction of everyday life before concluding with a consideration of the degree to which we might consider the rise of software as an epochal event or something much more modest.

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