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This is a paper about the architecture of a concept: the concept of the political. Through the built environment, we come to re-imagine the concept of the political not as a set of institutions, or as an array of governmental forms, or even a series of rational choices, but in terms of affective energy flows. It is in interrogating this that I will turn to the built environment and analyse two ways of regulating the cadence of affective flows in relation to the political, through two machines: Britain's nineteenth century Crystal Palace and the Landlord Manor House Museum of Liu Wencai. If Liu Wencai's Manor House Museum turned affective energy flows into political intensities that could drive the Maoist revolution, the Crystal Palace dissipated these same energy flows by turning them into commodity desires that would drive market growth. With the Crystal Palace, our attention is focused on how the channelling of energy into dissipated market desires produced a dispersal that, in turn, contributed to a political quietism. Such political quietism appeared as, at best, a 'side-effect' of an economic relation but, in placing this machine next to the Maoist Manor House Museum, we realise the centrality of this 'side-effect' in the formation of the political. The built environment, therefore, offers a set of heuristic devices that, read alongside each other, reveal two quite distinct modes of being political. Despite their radical differences, these two machines share a 'family resem-blance' insofar as they exemplify how the built environment contributes to political discourse through the disciplining of social subjects. What these two sets of machinery open onto is a new understanding of the discursive field of modernity and the treatment of affective elements within any modern concept of the political.

AbstractThis paper treats the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a means by which to open on to a more affective approach to the question of the political. It examines one piece of art-technology of that period and shows the way it intuitively worked within the fluidity of power to produce political intensity. This one technology is a microcosm of the Cultural Revolution notion of the political that was built around an attempt to channel and harness affective power towards revolutionary ends. Both because it attempts to direct the political through the affective dimension and because its methods of doing so resembled contemporary art practices, this paper opens on to the possibilities of a method based on an art rather than a science of the political.

One can indeed say that political reform has been visited upon China. It came, however, not in the form of an institutional transformation of the state-based political system … but in a far subtler yet profoundly life-transforming manner. No longer are people enthralled by the political, or even intimidated by it.

Michael Dutton is a reader in the Department of Political Science,University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Policing and Punishment in China (1992), Streetlife China (1998), andPolicing the Chinese Political (forthcoming). He is also coeditor of the journal Postcolonial Studies.

Dutton reviews CHINAS UNLIMITED: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness by Gregory B. Lee.