ABSTRACT This article draws from the case of the oldest electric tramway of South America, in Rio de Janeiro, in order to study the spatial extent of affective bonds. The current struggle for re-installation of the tram network, I argue, presents a moment in which residents’ desires for mobility and access to the city become distributed across various material elements of the transport infrastructure. I conceptualize these elements as ‘promissory things’, that is, things that come to make their own promises, exceeding human utterances. By this, I propose to locate affect in between speech act and materiality. Through contrasting my findings on the attraction of residents to specific instances of urban matter with a collective repulsion to ‘asphalt’ that surfaced after the tram-comeback, I develop a model for the spatialization of affect that interweaves notions of proximity and distance.

中文翻译：

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约定性的事情：情感纽带如何沿着电车路线延伸

摘要本文以里约热内卢南美最古老的电车轨道为例，以研究情感纽带的空间范围。我认为，当前为重新安装有轨电车网络而进行的斗争呈现出一个时刻，在此时刻，居民对出行和进入城市的渴望分散在交通基础设施的各种物质元素中。我将这些元素概念化为“承诺性的东西”，也就是说，那些要实现自己的诺言的东西，超出了人类的话语。因此，我建议将影响放在言语行为和实质之间。通过将我对居民对特定城市事物吸引力的发现与有轨电车复出后浮出水面的集体排斥“沥青”进行对比，