Protest and the City: On Object, Affect and Vulnerability

A lathi has a flesh of its own. Gandhi carried one, the police carries its own. Fashioned of wood thinned out and stemmed long, lathis being sold in shops are as unnerving as when clutched in hands, building authority. In one, it refuses to be simply ornamental, in the other, it marks bodies with legality. Authority emanates from this marking, the blood that spills and the deaths of which accountability is in its invisibility of documentation. Lathis are charged on the suspecting/unsuspecting who force an appearance in spaces distanced from actual belonging. In this article, there is a narrative of such a breakdown of the conflict itself, the space and the appearances. Reading through affect is a lot about undoing; grand concepts, strict functioning, identities addressed. Affect also has a lot to do with attachments. And attachments flow in and out of a network wherever bodies gather, in assemblies, demonstrations, in strikes and in riots. In these attachments, decisions are felt which later empiricist read as fixity of ideas and ideologies, only later, but affect is in the now.