Taking the bare bodies that starred in the recent Air New Zealand in-flight safety demonstration and advertising campaign as its starting point, this paper stages an encounter between bareness and security in order to think about how affective atmospheres might be engineered and manipulated within spaces of aeromobility. From a representational perspective the bare bodies appeal to a particular economy of truth through the unveiling of the corporation, parodying the bareness that is a central technique associated with airport securitisation. But the bareness in the in-flight safety demonstration generates a different kind of intimacy between the corporation and the passenger that facilitates the emergence of affective atmospheres which hinge around fun and lightness. In light of theorisations that invoke the corporation as a model of the control society we finish by drawing out some of the tensions that hinge around figures of veiling and unveiling to demonstrate how affect necessarily exceeds its capture and engineering.

No abstract

This paper examines new forms of urban movement from the perspective of embodiment and habit. Utilising Felix Ravaisson's recently revived work, Of Habit, the paper explores the role of grace and embodiment in establishing alternate forms of mobile activity. I argue that it is the mixture of fear and mastery that has the potential to perpetuate certain habits of mobility, leading to an aestheticised relationship to the urban environment, which to some extent overcomes the anaesthesia and blasé attitude that we have come to associate with urban life. My aim is to understand forms like urban cycling, skateboarding, and parkour from the point of view of the micropolitical relations of body, space, and habit. What is at stake here is to rethink the relationship between habit and resistance, in such a way that resistance can be seen in its materiality, rather than in merely reactive or ideological terms.

No abstract