Post-phenomenology, consumption and warfare on the urban leisure path, USA

Abstract The paper builds on recent literature on post-phenomenology to understand how politics suffuse the everyday experience of walking on an urban leisure path in Tucson, Arizona (USA). Beginning with non-representational accounts of affect, this paper then shifts to post-phenomenology to make sense of the findings on how walking the path is impacted by at least two other influences: the retail consumption infrastructure of shopping centres and advertising, and the military infrastructure of Air Force bases. Post-phenomenology helps us advance our understanding of how these power centers emit affective atmospheres while also situating their incompleteness and inability to fully control the production of subjectivity. By way of auto-ethnographic reflections, this paper displays (1) how retail spills into leisure space, and (2) how the materiality of warfare spills into civilian life. Post-phenomenology is a helpful approach for understanding a politics of affect in the absence of clear intentionality.