“I’ll be there for you”: affective production of a “hyper-real” cultural-consumption space — The Association Specialists

“I’ll be there for you”: affective production of a “hyper-real” cultural-consumption space (20372)

Yang Song 1
  1. Fudan University, Shanghai, SHANGHAI, China

Recent Linguistic Landscape Studies (LLS) demonstrate a growing interest in affect, especially in research on consumption spaces (Wee 2016; Wee and Goh 2019). These consumption spaces, which require delicately designed LLS, provide opportunities for consumers to enact their desired, appreciated dis- positions in spatial interactions and commercial transaction processes. While significant attention has been devoted to affective appraisals of LLS, the affective dynamics involved in the material–semiotic production of space as designed, perceived, and experienced by the customers remain under-explored. Taking Lefebvre’s ([1958]1991, 1991) triadic model of space as the anchorage, this study proposes an analytical framework to examine the affective production of space. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in the Central Perk café in Shanghai, a “hyper-real” replica of the Central Perk coffeehouse in Friends, the American Sit-Com, via photo documentation, on-site and social-media observations, and interviews with the shop owner and consumers. This case serves as an exemplar of local entrepreneurship afforded by global fandom, which provides an abundance of material–semiotic resources for affective branding. The analysis reveals that resemiotization, recontextualization, and the spatial arrangements of the interior café enabled fan-customers to orchestrate individual-specific affective assemblages based on their varied familiarity with the sitcom and alignment with its affective values and characterization. It is found that these affective assemblages afforded fan-customers socio-atmospherics featuring a cozy, relaxed state of being and a home-like sense of belonging. The affective practices of the human-nonhuman participants turned this themed café into a lived space of affinities that helped the café owner and fan-customers cope with atomization and precarity in cosmopol- itan life. It is argued that the proposed analytical framework can reveal the role of affect as a critical social force that enables individuals to fulfill their sociocultural needs and desires by appropriating transnational popular cultural resources and co-producing a cultural consumption space.

  1. Wee, Lionel. 2016. Situating affect in linguistic landscapes. Linguistic Landscape 2(2). 105–126.
  2. Wee, Lionel & Robbie B. H. Goh. 2019. Language, space, and cultural play: Theorizing affect in the semiotic landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  3. Lefebvre, Henri. [1958] 1991. Critique of everyday life. London and New York: Version.
  4. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The production of space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.