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Mobile Culture Studies | >mcs_lab> 1 (2020) Johanna Menhard | Entanglements on and with the street 35 affects or changes a given situation is an actor. Of course, these non-human actors don’t “deter- mine” action, but rather “[...] empower, enable, offer, encourage, allow, suggest, influence, pre- vent, authorize, exclude and so on”.45 At the same time, they are not just tools, but also symbols, amplifiers, and mediators. According to Ignacio Farías, ANT is based on the three principles of radical relationality, generalized symmetry and association. Relationality is extended by the relativity of language, culture or communication; things, technologies, laws, institutions, animals, and humans are not regarded as different and incomparable realms, rather as constituting each other; the social is thus a certain kind of relationship and connection between things that are not necessarily social in themselves, but sometimes influence social interactions.46 Inanimate objects thus trig- ger something, have agency, change a situation, serve as points of reference, create references, and are not passive. But there is one problem with ANT, and here the concept of affect becomes important: How is agency attributed to which things? Do all elements of an assemblage have equal influence? Which relationships make a significant difference? Erika Cudworth and Ste- phen Hobden sum up the difficulty with Latour’s ANT as follows, “[...] the difficulty with Latour is that in his broad sweep, all agency is understood as of the same quality. In addition, it is a property of ‘things’ rather than, as complexity think- ing suggests, of systems in relation. [...] The flat, non-hierarchical networks of ANT can- not deal with power because it cannot make distinctions between nature and society, or between humans, other animals, plants, and objects”.47 The concept of affect gives me an opportunity to understand the street, bodies in motion, and mediated connections by way of their capacity to affect. “[I]f you define bodies and thoughts as capacities for affecting and being affected, many things change” writes Gilles Deleuze in his examination of the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza.48 The boundaries between nature and cul- ture, natural and artificial, living and non-living are thus contested by arrangements of motion and affect in which the different components of an assemblage have different capacities to affect one another.49 Brian Massumi writes, in the preface to Deleuze and Guattari s´ A Thousand Plateaus, that l’affect describes the ability to affect and to be affected. L’affection is the state which results from the encounter of (at least) two affecting bodies. Therefore, affect and l’af- fection are not broken down to subjectively felt emotional states of different entities, as they are not bound to a specific body: “It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act”.50 45 Latour: Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft, 2010, pp. 123-124. 46 See Ignacio Farías: Introduction. Decentring the object of urban studies. In: Thomas Bender (ed.), Urban Assem- blages. How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. New York: Routledge 2016, pp. 1-24, here p. 3. 47 Erika Cudworth/Stephen Hobden: Liberation for Straw Dogs? Old Materialism, New Materialism, and the Challenge of an Emancipatory Posthumanism. In: Globalizations 12 (2015) 1, pp. 134-148, here p. 138. 48 Gilles Deleuze: Spinoza. Practical philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books 1988, p. 124. 49 Ibid., p. 124. 50 Brain Massumi: Notes, In: Deleuze/Guattari: A thousand plateaus, p. 17.