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Theory & EventVolume 14, Issue 4, 2011E-ISSN: 1092-311X
Hope, Fear, and the Politics of Affective AgencySusan
McManus
And then spoke Joy most grievously'Abandon hope and follow
me'Responded Grief so joyfully'Abandon hope and follow me'.
Alasdair Roberts, The Flyting of Grief and Joy (Eternal
Return).
1. Abandon Hope?
The problematic of political and ethical resistance, of
technologies and modes of transformative political agency, is vital
to theterrain of radical politics and critical political theory.1
This is, to say the least, a vexed, stymied and troubled endeavor,
to which,nevertheless, the cultivation of various modes of
affirmative affect - what I will call, as shorthand, the
'hope-project' - has beencentral.2 Activists and scholars alike
gesture to a difficult alchemy at the heart of the hope-project:
the endeavor to cultivate or'courage,' (Badiou, 2008: 73)
transformative agency (another world is possible!) from the
encounter with the dark horizons ofcontemporary political
experience. As Lisa Duggan recognizes, 'most calls to progressive
left organizing stress the importance offinding and sustaining
hope,' (Duggan and Muoz, 2009: 275). While the principle of hope,
to echo Ernst Bloch's magnum opus, issomething more complicated
than Mary Zournazi's description (hope is a 'basic human condition
that involves belief and trust in theworld,' (2002: 12)), as an
exemplary, utopian mode of affirmative affect, hope has nourished
oppositional consciousness and politicalpraxis. Against hope's
heteroclite keynotes, both low and negative affect are deemed
apolitical or reactive: 'dispassion stands in for ...a whole
cluster of defensive emotions ... easily misrecognized as apathy
but running the whole gamut in registers of politicaldepression
...: hopelessness, helplessness, dread, anxiety, stress, worry,
lack of interest, and so on...' (Berlant, 2005: 8; cf. Ngai,2005).
As a more-or-less affirmative, anticipatory orientation toward the
future, hope has been conceptualized as that which countersa range
of dispositions, including averse anticipatory orientations (such
as anxiety and fear) and pathological orientations of
despair(hopelessness) that cede or relinquish the horizon of the
future.
Contemporary politics, however, is shaped by the amplification
of fearful affects, and the multiplication of sites at which
fearfulagential orientations and futures are produced. The
political landscape is scarred by the cultivation, intensification,
mobilization andcalibration of fear, in response to risks and
threats from the economic and ecological, to the amorphous and
relentlessly virological,to the persistent and ever more insidious
'security' measures core to the strange war of
terror/counterterror, measures that tend towardthe erasure of
spaces without or beyond fear. This is not to say the demands of
hope are wholly silenced or defeated: witness, forinstance, the
calls for 'A New Hope' by Compass: Direction for a Democratic Left
in the UK, or Barack Obama's appeals to'audacious' and 'unyielding'
hope in the US. Such appeals nevertheless appear as something of an
ignes fatui, a potentially chimerical,certainly anomalous keynote.3
As the 'currency' (Brown, 2005: 10) of global politics, fear is
virtual, porous, contagious, excessive,outstripping its ostensible
causes to shape the 'tone' of the age (Ngai, 2005:76).
While the affective allure of the likes of Obama suggested that
the tone of the age was not wholly disinclined to a
countervailingpolitics of hope, affective formations of fear, more
readily elicited and exploited, continue to predominate in
contemporary politics.4What, then, does this imply for the
political and agential possibilities of hope's disruptive forward
glance? Is fear, as Corey Robin(2004) has argued, a fundamentally
anti-political passion or affect, and should critical theorists
seek to counterpoise a politics ofhope against the pervasiveness of
fear? Is hope, as Negri has proposed, 'something like a
methodological principle, an antidote to thefear that surrounds
us,' (Brown et al, 2002: 200, my emphasis)? In this essay, I argue
that an oppositional understanding of thepolitics of fear and hope
is misconstrued and unhelpful, especially in the present moment. In
a fearful and skeptical age, hope (andthe hope-project) cannot be
unequivocally privileged. On the other hand, it is not enough to
reject fear, for while fearful affects arecomplicitous in a
politics of security, securitization and hegemony, the circulation
of fears must be mined and harnessed for critical
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ends such as the enhancement of potentially transformative
agency.
Given the pervasiveness of the ways in which contemporary
politics mobilizes, assembles (and dissembles) affective states
intoanticipatory and agential formations, critical understanding of
the dynamics of affective politics generally, and of hope and fear
inparticular, is a timely endeavor. I argue that the last best hope
of the hope-project in a fearful age might just be in
identifyingmaneuvers of affective ambivalence; that is to say, in
critical exploration of the political polyvalence of the affective
register,identifying the ways affects can orient or dispose very
different agential possibilities.5 To that end, I explore, first,
the contemporaryturn on the part of the poststructuralist left to
affect theory as a way of responding to the question core to
radical agency: 'where hasthe potential for change gone?' (Massumi,
2002a: 3). Theories of affect offer a materialist account of the
constitution of subjectivityand agency (affect is 'something
occurring beyond, around, and alongside the formation of
subjectivity,' (Anderson, 2009: 77)) thatnevertheless precludes
determinism, as that is conventionally understood.6 In this
section, I read Baruch de Spinoza alongsidecontemporary affect
theory. A Spinozist theorization of affect suggests that it is
generically ambivalent. Affects exceed subjectivecapture and
control, are non-intentional, asignifying, transversal, and
relational: there is an ontological multidirectionality to
affectsthat can resonate in predictable or unexpected or even
merely capricious or barely felt ways. Developing this, I argue
that affect, andaffective agency, is ambivalent along two
vectors.
First, affect is ambivalent insofar as it orients what I might
call, echoing Lauren Berlant (2009: 266), non- or
other-than-sovereignmodalities of agency. And second, affect is
ambivalent with regard to the emotional or subjective spectrum with
which it isnevertheless variously linked as something of a 'degree
zero,' (Virno, 1996: 13) or 'intensity' that traverses and can only
be'imperfectly housed in the proper names we give to emotions
(hope, fear, and so on),' (Anderson, 2009: 77). These aspects of
affect,although non-synonymous, constitute what I call the
ambivalence-project: the critical identification of spaces of
disjunct withinaffective series between affective encounters, the
emotions, passions or feelings that affective encounters elicit, as
well as the modesof agency such dispositions orient. The
ambivalence-project, following Brian Massumi (2002a), invokes the
'autonomy' of theaffective with regard to the subjective and
emotional register, and also stresses variability in the ways in
which affect can inflect orresonate as it traverses the subjective.
While ambivalence is often characterized as paralyzing, I want,
instead, to foreground its latentproductivity so as to interrupt an
affective politics in which hope is presumed to shape subversive
agency while fear renders subjectscomplicit and governable.
Affective ambivalence emphasizes room for agential maneuver, the
possibility of 'depathologiz[ing]negative affects so that they can
be seen as a possible resource for political action rather than as
its antithesis,' (Cvetkovich, 2007:460).7
I then critically deploy the concept of affective ambivalence in
order to track the affective sensorium of fear. I propose that
apolitics of fear that attempts to directly orchestrate the
emotional register is an intentional effort to demand and command a
subject.When fear is conceptualized through the perspective of
affect, however, its maneuvers are significantly 'de-subjectified,'
(cf. Protevi,2009). Affective fear is more viscerally gripping, but
might just also be more volatile, and here lies room for agential
re-orientationand restructuring, or the possibility of
'depathologizing' negative affect. As well as attending to the
potentially productive capacitiesof negative affects such as fear,
it is, conversely, politically important to unpack the potentially
complicitous capacities of affirmativeaffects, such as hope. I
finally turn the perspective of affective ambivalence to utopian
hope. While hope is often conceptualized asaffectively affirmative
and agentially progressive, I argue, drawing upon utopian
philosopher Bloch and contemporary hope theoristssuch as Jos
Esteban Muoz, that this is conceptually misconstrued and
politically misguided. Utopian-affect, I argue, puts
bothhope-affects and fear-affects to work, and therefore cannot be
understood as somehow opposing fear. This has politically
usefulconsequences in the contemporary moment: instead of
conceptualizing the contemporary affective and political
predicament by wayof the competing politics of fear and hope, I
propose to unpack their polyvalence, suggesting that both political
affects can bedeployed, oriented, structured and restructured so as
to diminish, for sure, but also to enhance critical agency.
The core problematic that underlies this agenda is: what is the
relation between affirmative and negative affects and thoseemotions
that can go by the same names (hope, fear, and so on); and, on the
political register, what is the difference between apolitics that
explicitly orchestrates emotion and a politics that elicits the
affective energies that shape agency?8 As Ben Andersonsuggests,
this is more than a choice between different vocabularies:
'invoking one or the other term has come to signal a
basicorientation to the self, world, and their interrelation (as
well as in some cases a particular politics and ethics),' (2009:
80). Myposition on this, following Lauren Berlant, is that affect,
a 'structure of responsivity' is 'quite a different thing than
emotion with allits conventionality and its authenticating
centrality in Modern Western cultures,' (2009: 262). It does not
follow, however, that thetwo are unrelated, or that I unequivocally
dismiss the emotional and privilege the affective.
Emotion-discourses can entail politico-philosophical assumptions
about the agential capacity of the modern subject that I contest,
but affect is also problematic, although indifferent ways. Indeed,
for Massumi, affect is both 'the word I use for "hope",' (2002b:
212) as well as a central structure that enablespower to function
'directly into each individual's nervous system,' (2006: 1). A
critical and diagnostic perspective on affectiveambivalence has, I
argue, the capacity to track the diverse political work of affect,
revealing other, potentially subversive, ways ofnegotiating the
affective sensorium of the contemporary political, affective
predicament.
2. Affect - Agency - Ambivalence
Agency can be strange, twisted, caught up in things, passive or
exhausted. Not the way we like to think about it ... but
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rather something much more complicated and much more rooted in
things(Stewart, 2007: 86).
In this section, I explore the contemporary turn to affect on
the part of the poststructuralist left.9 In figuring out ways
ofrevitalizing the theorization (and practices) of radical agency,
contemporary theorists have raided modernity's canon and
alter-canon,finding vital inspiration, in particular, in
seventeenth century philosopher Spinoza, who has become something
of an animating figurefor the 'affective turn', (cf. Clough, 2007).
The full complexity and density of the affective can be discerned
in the materialistpolitical philosophy of the seventeenth century.
Those great early modern cartographies of the passions (Book One of
Hobbes'sLeviathan and, of course, Spinoza's Ethics are exemplary)
were no less than the audacious attempt to map the human subject by
wayof affect, understood as the senses, perception and sensations,
the passions, imagination, memory and sentiment. This endeavor
tomake sense of the senses drew upon a layered understanding in
which sense denoted: first, 'sensibility,' or 'receptivity to
stimuli';second, 'signification,' or, 'the capacity to evaluate the
significance (good or bad)' of such stimuli; and third,
'direction,' or, the abilityto 'orient' oneself in the right
direction, depending upon whether that evaluation evoked
inclination or aversion (Protevi, 2009: 16-17). Affect, in this
register, is at once bodily, passionate, cognitive and agential.
Before turning to contemporary debates, I begin byway of Spinoza.
For Spinoza, affect is central to the constitution of the human
subject as thinking-body: conceptualizing subjectivityby way of
affect roots the human subject, and its agential and emotional
capacities, firmly within worldly things.10 Attending to theways in
which the worldliness of affect shapes agency and emotions
nevertheless should not efface the ways in which affects
exceedsubjective capture, control, and comprehension. The contours
of the ambivalence project can thus also be gleaned by way of
Spinoza,as an ontological multidirectionality of the ways in which
affects resonate into emotions, and shape agential orientations
that can, Iwill suggest, be politically elicited, if not quite
mobilized.
While there are other ways of analyzing the distinctiveness of
affect, such as psychoanalytical, physiological or
neurobiologicalapproaches, I find a historicized approach
productive.11 Returning to Spinoza, crucially, means
short-circuiting or displacing some ofthe ways in which we have
become accustomed to think about agency. Through philosophers such
as Descartes and Kant, agencycame to be conceptualized as
intentional, purposive action, presided over by rationality and
consciousness, belonging to theautonomous, sovereign subject, and
construed in oppositional ways: agency belonged to reason rather
than passions; to mind, ratherthan body; and externality, whether
one's own body, or other bodies and other worldly matter and stuff,
was construed as obstructingthe agency of the autonomous rational
self.12 The passions or emotions certainly had a role in this
framework, but it was a radicallydepoliticized role: at once
aestheticized and privatized, emotion became available for
expressive projects of artistic authenticity, theinterior life of
the subject, or, when considered disordered, therapeutic
interventions.13 My initial sidestep from
contemporarypsychoanalytic or neurobiological approaches (the human
sciences) stems from a desire to stress the ways that affect
undoesanthropocentrically humanist accounts of agency. Although my
concern in this essay is ultimately with human, and humanly
hopeful,agency, I concur with thinkers such as Spinoza and Jane
Bennett that human agency does not exist 'outside the order of
materialnature,' (Bennett, 2010: 36-7).14 Rather than considering
human agency, as Diana Coole critically identifies, as, 'already
implicitlyopposed to the external world, where bodies and material
structures are seen as limits or threats to freedom,' (2005: 126),
earlymodern materialists comprehended the agency of the
thinking-body as made possible by, and impossible without, the
encounter withthe jags and crags of the world. Something vital has
been lost by the predominance of even implicitly humanist
(Cartesian orKantian) approaches to agency: the palpable sense that
agency is composed by way of affect, by way of the materiality of
the worldlyencounters of bodies, both human and non-human (cf.
Bennett, 2007; 2010). The return to the seventeenth century is
pivotal in thecontemporary radical theorization of affective agency
precisely insofar as a dispassionate and agentially enervating
series ofdistinctions are displaced and challenged by critical
attention to materiality in all its variousness and
convolution.
Contemporary theory, that is, discerns in Spinoza's exploration
of the affects a materialist, relational, non-subjective, and
non-sovereign conceptualization of agency.15The Ethics is, in part,
concerned with overcoming confusions about how the power of acting-
agency - is possible. Mystification arises when the locus of agency
is misrecognized, identified as the outcome of
other-than-bodilydeterminations of will or soul, or even God
(Spinoza insists, 'no one has yet determined ... what the body can
do from the laws ofNature alone,' (1996: 71)).16 For Spinoza, on
the contrary, will, soul, consciousness, and so on cannot be so
privileged: 'the decisionsof the mind are nothing but the appetites
themselves, which therefore vary as the disposition of the body
varies,' (Spinoza, 1996: 73).Agency is very much 'a thing of this
world,'17 and affect is something of a vitalizing and mobilizing
index of agential capacity: 'byaffect,' writes Spinoza, 'I
understand affections of the body by which the body's power of
acting is increased or diminished, aided orrestrained,' (1996: 70).
Affect, then, is a core part of Spinoza's political-physics (cf.
Protevi, 2009: vii) that conceives of existence interms of physical
matter, comprehending all manner of stuff in the world as
'extensions' or 'modes' of matter, 'a turbulent, immanentfield in
which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph,
evolve, and disintegrate,' (Bennett, 2010: xi).18 Unlike
the'mechanical materialism' of his English contemporary, Thomas
Hobbes, which assumes the encounter of already constituted
bodies,Spinoza's materialism is infused with a dynamism of forces
('lines, planes, and bodies,' (Spinoza, 1996: 69)), in which
affecting andaffected bodies both mix and are co-constitutive of
the singularity of each. As Warren Montag, channeling Negri, puts
it, his is 'amaterialism of surfaces and singularities without
transcendence or mediation,' (Montag, 2008: xiv).
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Affects relating to humans are not outside this ontological
muddle and collision of things;19 indeed, affect is immediately
mappedto, and constitutive of, the agential thinking-body. Spinoza
considers all sorts of bodies (including humans) as
always-alreadyrelational, and affects are those forces, that
material grammar of the encounter of bodies, that traverse and
transform those bodies,and galvanize and energize (or 'diminish')
the subject's capacity for acting within its world. Humans are the
ensemble of bodilydrives, sensations, appetites, perceptions,
emotions, passions, that register and orient our worldly
encounters, and by which we, inturn, are disposed, in complexly
open, non-linear and overlapping affective series of
encounter-feeling-response-agency-encounter.Affective encounters
are both constitutive and orienting (we are 'made-up' as we move
and act) insofar as they disclose possibilitiesin the world and
force our world to matter, immediately, viscerally, both sensually
and cognitively, to us: affective encountersdisclose body, form,
and enable movement. Human consciousness is also manifested, but
never transparently so, through theseencounters: 'the human mind
does not know itself, except insofar as it perceives the ideas of
the affections of the body,' (Spinoza1996: 49). Knowledge of self
and world is, as Susan James explains, gained simultaneously:
... we only have an idea of the body in so far as it affects and
is affected by other things. ... We get ideas of our bodiesand
external things simultaneously ... the resulting idea that
constitutes the mind is not, therefore, of an isolated
entity;rather it is an idea of the human body as part of a net of
causal interactions
(1997: 142).
Humans are, from the outset, 'rooted in things,' (Stewart, 2007:
86), always-already in the midst of affective series that
extendbefore and after the subject, within which the subject
discerns itself, but that subjectivity and consciousness cannot
capture andmaster.
The agency of thinking-bodies is constituted by way of such
rootedness. Clare Hemmings describes the affective as 'an
ongoing,incrementally altering chain --
body-affect-emotion-affect-body -- doubling back on the body and
influencing the individual'scapacity to act,' (2005: 564). At its
simplest, approaching the problematic of agency by way of affect
suggests a way of thinkingabout agency as relationality, whether
between people, between people and things, or between things. If
affect denotes 'a structure ofresponsivity,' (Berlant, 2009: 262),
then affective agency is not a property of human consciousness or
privilege of the sovereignsubject, but is located in an encounter
or relation, registering the constitutive co-implication of the
many bodies that make worlds.20Such relational encounters define a
non- or other-than-sovereign modality of affective agency: as
Bennett puts it, agency is 'a forcedistributed across multiple,
overlapping bodies, disseminated in degrees -- rather than the
capacity of a unitary subject ofconsciousness,' (Bennett 2007:
134). This means that those privileged markers of agency --
autonomy, intentionality, rationality, andso on -- are off the
mark. Kathleen Stewart puts it like this: 'like a live wire, the
subject channels what's going on around it in theprocess of its own
self-composition. Formed by the coagulation of intensities,
surfaces, sensations, perceptions, and expressions, it'sa thing
composed of encounters and the spaces and events it traverses or
inhabits,' (2007: 79). If agency is 'determined' by affect, it
isambivalently determined in necessarily complex, open, contingent,
multiple - indeterminate - ways. Affective intensities arechanneled
and patterned, but remain fundamentally pre-propositional. Before
turning to affective ambivalence, however, I turnattention to the
passionate or emotional inflection of affect.
For Spinoza, affects also resonate in the passionate or
emotional spectrum. In both philosophical and neurobiological
discourses,passions and emotions register the impact of the world
on the self: etymologically, 'passion' is associated with
'passivity' as the worldimpresses upon the subjects' receptive
sensory organs.21 Passions or emotions can be thought of simply, as
attesting to thesignificance of our rooted experiences and
encounters.22 Spinoza describes the passionate or emotional
inflection of affect by way ofconatus, the endeavor of all beings
to 'persevere in ... being,' (1996: 75). Affects manifest
subjectively in humans as a register of theextent to which conatus
is flourishing and thriving, or otherwise, and this is indexed by
the primary affects of joy and sorrow. ForSpinoza, when affective
encounters increase or enhance the body's power of acting, joy
attends; conversely, when such encountersdiminish or restrain the
body's power, sadness attends. Joy and sorrow, as primary affects,
are something of an index of the variablecapacity of this power of
acting: 'joy is the experience of growth from one state of being to
a more efficient one as it is happening,'(Hage, 2002: 152). Joy and
sorrow are not absolute, but transitive, and other affects, such as
hope and fear (love or disdain,inclination or aversion, confidence
or despair -- emotional dispositions that coalesce around affective
encounters) can be thought ofas lesser or mixed aspects of joy or
sorrow, and the relative increase or decrease of the body's power
of acting, or, indeed, as a'vacillation' between contrary
orientations (Spinoza, 1996: 80). If affect is central to agency,
affects, or passions, emotions, reflected'inwardly,' are central in
the comprehension of the extent to which thinking-bodies, and the
compositions entered into throughaffective encounters, are thriving
or otherwise.23 It is worth noting that for Spinoza, reason is not
qualitatively distinct fromnegotiating affective circuits ('reason
demands nothing contrary to Nature,' (1996: 125)); there is no
non-affective corrective to thepotentially troublesome effects of
affects (fear, anger, hysteria, for example).24
Of significance here is the way that Spinoza links up the
'objective' and 'subjective' aspects of affect in his discussion of
agentialcapacity and psychic life. Contemporary affect theory
registers this movement as a 'doubling' of affect. For Protevi, for
example,affect is, first, 'affection,' or 'being affected, that is,
undergoing the somatic change caused by an encounter,' (2009: 49).
I havedescribed the 'political physiology or objective aspect of
affect,' (2009: 49) above in terms of those impersonal,
transversalencounters that enable and energize movement and agency.
Second, 'affect is the felt change in the power of the body,' or
its capacity
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to act, 'felt as sadness or joy (roughly speaking, political
feeling or the subjective aspect of political affect),' (Protevi,
2009: 49),which refers to the ways bodies register the changes that
affective encounters bring into being. Similarly, for Massumi,
affect is a'passage,' in which 'every transition is accompanied by
a feeling of the change in capacity ... every affect is a
doubling,' (Massumi,2002b: 213). Again, then, affects are
interpreted as registering both an impersonal encounter and a
personal experience: 'emotion isthe way that depth of ongoing
experience registers personally at any given moment,' (Massumi,
2002b: 213).
At stake here is the analytical and eminently political problem
of the distinction between, and relation of, the 'impersonal'
and'personal' aspects of affect, or of affect to emotion, around
which important contemporary interventions revolve. Affects
andemotions certainly have different trajectories, or, as Massumi
argues, 'follow different logics and pertain to different orders,'
(2002a:27). This is often taken to mean that affect is im- or
transpersonal, non-human, and subjectless, and emotion is personal,
human, andsubjective. Concomitantly, affect is comprehended as
unintended, nonnarrative or asignifying, while emotion is
associated with theexperiential, articulated through narrative
formulations that can be directed toward intentional action (cf.
Gilbert, 2004; Ngai, 2005;Anderson, 2009). Ngai suggests that this
way of framing the affect/emotion distinction emerged in
psychoanalytic practice to solvethe 'fundamentally descriptive
problem' of 'distinguishing first-person from third-person feeling,
and, by extension, feeling that iscontained by an identity from
feeling that is not,' (2005: 27). This makes sense. But there are
problems with limiting the distinctionbetween affect and emotion to
the psychoanalytical: it is a historically limited account that
works to efface the weighty worldliness ofthe affective whether it
traverses subjectivity or not. Inscribing too rigid a distinction
between affect and emotion has the paradoxicaleffect of uprooting
human psychic life and agency from the multiple affective forces
that constitute it. Indeed, Massumi insertssomething of a caveat in
his description of affect's autonomy from the subjective and
emotional: 'affect is autonomous to the degreewhich it escapes
confinement in the particular body whose vitality or potential for
interaction it is,' (2002a: 35, my emphasis). I wantto keep my eye
on what happens on both sides of that 'degree' as affect both
vitalizes (agentially, passionately, emotionally) andexceeds
bodies. Rather than inscribing an oppositional structure, I want to
consider affect as (ambivalently) relational between itsimpersonal
and personal aspects. Impersonal affect does not 'need' a human
subject; but humans are necessarily constituted as (non-sovereign
but agential) subjects through affective encounters that can
resonate, in non-intentional, sometimes unpredictable andcapricious
ways, into agential orientations and sensibilities, and it is the
nature of that transition or passage of affect that is crucial
tomapping ambivalence.
From a broadly Spinozist perspective, the affective can be
theorized as an extensive series, or field of forces and
intensities that the'I,' the subject, finds itself manifest within
and negotiates. Affective encounters activate the discerning
activity of the nervous systemin contact with the world, in the
process of which subjects come to be constituted. Encounters
concomitantly entail emotionalappraisals. We need not be
subjectively conscious of emotional appraisals: they are simply
part of affective series that contributetoward movements of
aversion and inclination, motion and rest (we are moved by emotions
in a quite literal sense). Such appraisalscan be registered
subjectively as feelings, mapping to changes in bodily capacity
(are we strengthened or enervated by the food weincorporate,
transform and are transformed by, the books we read, the
encounters, and compositions entered into, with stuff andpeople
that combine to constitute the singular 'I'?). Again concomitantly,
all of these events orient the subject agentially to move inspace
and time. As it stands, this is too neat, decidedly unambivalent.
Ambivalence points to spaces of disjunct and indeterminacy
inaffective series between encounters that traverse bodies, and the
appraisals of, and agential responses to, those encounters.
One way of thinking about this is simply as the phenomenological
opacity of affective intensities that inflect as emotions.
Ifsubjectivity is manifest through affective series that exceed it,
conscious emotional appraisals of those encounters and the changes
inbodily capacity brought about will not be transparent. Affect
remains abstruse, obscure to conscious comprehension.
Shakespeare'sAntonio knows not why he is so wearingly sad; but he
knows that sadness is only 'imperfectly housed,' to echo Anderson
(2009: 77),in his subjectivity: 'how I caught it, found it, or came
by it,/ What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,/ I am to
learn,' (1994: 245).Antonio's feelings of sadness, experienced as
debilitating his subjective capacity, are only one aspect of an
affective series thattraverses and exceeds his languid
demeanor.
Concomitantly, the ways in which affects inflect into the
subjective and emotional is marked by sheer variability.
Spinozadescribes the ways in which 'the various affects can be
compounded with one another in so many ways, and ... so many
variationscan arise from this composition that they cannot be
defined by any number,' (Spinoza, 1996: 103). Again, then, affects
aredetermining, but not determinist; their determinations are
multiplicitous, varying in degree, intensity, direction.25 Even joy
andsorrow are singular in this respect: 'the joy or sadness of each
also differs from the joy or sadness of another ... consequently,
eachaffect of each individual differs from the affect of another,'
(1996: 101). Affective series inflect or 'double' into
sensibilities anddispositions in multiple and unpredictable ways in
different bodies (or in the same body at different times - which
could anyhow bethought of as a different body). Simply put, two
bodies affected by the same object will respond differently, one
attracted, anotherrepelled, one nourished, another sickened, one
incited to action, another exhausted, and so on. Affective
ambivalence describes thispotential multidirectionality of affects,
and these spaces of indeterminacy in determining affective series
between encounter,composition, feeling, and agency. Affective
ambivalence can, I suggest, be elicited (if not quite mobilized) in
politically productiveways.
My point is this: political analysis of agency demands critical
attention to the ways that affect inflects into emotion, that
theimpersonal is manifest in the personal, the objective in the
subjective. Work of this kind is happening in a range of
contemporary
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(cross-disciplinary) interventions. In aesthetics and cultural
studies, for instance, Ngai has privileged the critical analysis of
tone,precisely insofar as it is 'a concept dependent upon and even
constructed around the very problematic that the
affect/emotiondistinction was intended to dissolve,' (2005: 28).
Tone, that is, elicits the proximity and encounter of object,
world, or artwork andfeeling subject; it is 'the dialectic of
objective and subjective feeling that our aesthetic encounters
inevitably produce,' that 'slips inand out of subjective
boundaries,' (2005: 30, 31). In geography, Anderson has turned his
attention to 'affective atmospheres' thatsimilarly have an
'in-between status with regard to the subject/object distinction'
and its corollaries such as emotion/affect in order tothink through
the question of 'how to attend to collective affects that are not
reducible to ... individual bodies?' (2009: 80). This
in-betweenness is precisely where the political significance of the
affective resides. From a Spinozist perspective, affects are
thoseforces that traverse and unsettle the impersonal and the
personal, subject and object, self and world. Affects are
irreducible, in alltheir variousness, to either individual or
collective experience. For while, as Berlant argues, 'the structure
of an affect has noinevitable relation to the penumbra of emotions
that may cluster in the wake of its activity, nor should it,'
(2008a: 4, my emphasis),she is also alert to the ways in which
'affect, the body's active presence to the intensities of the
present, embeds the subject in anhistorical field,' (2008b: 846).
So while affect is 'autonomous,' it is also 'infrastructural as a
factory,' (Massumi, 2002a: 45). Affects,that is, 'act in the
nervous systems of worlds,' (Berlant, 2008b: 845); but the nervous
systems of persons are ambivalently receptiveto, and constituted as
agential thinking-bodies within, that larger affective field. The
ambivalence-project, then, can be thought of assimply eliciting and
attending to the multiplicity of possibilities that take shape in
affective series, in sites of proximity and in-betweeness, torsion
and inflection of object/subject, affect/agency,
affect/emotion.
This means that critical attention to either the 'impersonal' or
the 'personal' aspects of affect in isolation is insufficient.
Humanagency is by no means a property of an individual body or
consciousness; the capacity for acting, rather, emerges from
compositionsor 'assemblages' that are coextensive, however
disjunctively, with affective series. The agency of the individual
subject is a partialexpression of the affects and compositions that
make agency possible; similarly, feelings are 'a very partial
expression of affect,'(Massumi, 2002b: 213), by no means reducible
to any privileged space of subjective interiority. This suggests
that the political andethical analysis of affect does not
necessarily or wholly inhere in the range of sensibilities which
coalesce in affective encounters. Itdepends upon what forms of
composition affective encounters make possible, and whether those
compositions enhance the capacitiesof the bodies involved for
acting: 'does it enable them to form new and mutually empowering
encounters outside the originalencounter?' (Protevi, 2009: 51). It
is not that the feeling of fear, for example (necessarily a passion
insofar as fear attests to beingacted upon in adverse ways by
objects known or unknown) will necessarily result in compositions
that further diminish or enervateagential capacity; indeed, it is
part of the burden of the following sections of this essay to show
that affects of fear can beproductively oriented to critically
interrupt an affective determinism that associates fear with
malignly defensive agentialdispositions. Agency that is given shape
as part of an affective series that includes the negative affect
(feeling) of fear need not bepassive or sad, and need not tend
toward exhaustion or enervation. The hope-project's endeavor to
'courage' transformative agency isthen similarly complicated.
Feelings certainly matter, and the affirmative endeavors of the
hope-project remain crucial; butambivalence is significant because
its identification helps pick apart feelings of joy or sorrow or
hope or fear from affective seriesthat shape joyful (or hopeful) or
sorrowful (or fearful) compositions. Attending to ambivalence
stresses the possibility ofrestructuring both feelings and
agency.
I remain less sanguine than, say, Montag, for whom there is
something almost immediately incendiary, unruly and
subversive,about affect that can 'overflow ... and exceed ... the
confines imposed by the rituals and apparatuses that govern us,'
(2005: 670). Ifaffect constitutes the very conditions of
possibility of agency, then affect, like ideology, always-already
yokes the subject withinthose very 'rituals and apparatuses' of
power, binding subjects 'to seemingly inescapable patterns of
domination,' (Dean, 2009: 50; cf.Hemmings, 2005: 551). Attending to
the affective might well be attending to a historical 'record of
ideology,' (Berlant, 2008b: 846).Analysis of affective ambivalence
nevertheless makes palpable what Massumi neatly refers to as
'wriggle room': 'the present's"boundary condition" ... is never a
closed one. It is an open threshold. ... I use the concept of
"affect" as a way of talking about thatmargin of maneuverability,'
(2002b: 214, 212). Such 'wriggle room' can be elicited to
critically interrupt an affective determinism inwhich hope is
presumed to shape subversive agency while fear renders subjects
complicit and governable. The ambivalence project,then, is a modest
attempt to elicit the ways in which capacities for change are
rooted in our everyday sensorium; but it is alsosomething of a
call, following Berlant, to make new 'demands on [that] sensorium
for adjudication, adaptation, improvisation, andnew visceral
imaginaries for what the present might be,' (Berlant, 2008b: 847).
A final caution, however: the politics of thisendeavor will not
necessarily be predictably patterned in radical or subversive ways.
As Berlant recognizes, 'the idiom affect theoryprovides focuses ...
on ... what's not trainable about people, who are always creating
folds of being-otherwise in a way that stretchesout and gives
unpredicted dimensions to historical and subjective experience,'
(Berlant, 2009: 263). Affective ambivalence mightwell be elicited;
but it remains untrainable.
3. The Politics of Fear.
The Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear(Hobbes, 1968: 200).
We cannot ... separate ourselves from fear, thus ... it is
necessary to reinvent resistance(Massumi, 1993: ix).
In the story Hobbes tells, fear delivers subjects into the
body-politic, creates and maintains political stability and
security, obliges
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allegiance to authority, quells dissent, and compels
acquiescence and obedience. This is only one, compelling yet deeply
troubling,way of telling the story of the politics of fear, but it
is an instructive cautionary tale. I revisit Hobbes here in order
to draw into reliefthe difference between a subjective and an
affective perspective in the political analysis of fear. I then
turn my attention to the claimthat the contemporary politics of
fear, as an affective politics, is at once more 'directly
compelling' but also 'more fractious,multiplicitous, and
unpredictable' than a politics of emotion (Stewart, 2007: 4).
Fear-affects are, I will argue, built into thearchitecture of
everyday experience, and are so in ways that are often
phenomenologically opaque, by-passing explicit
subjectivecomprehension. How, then, can negative affects such as
fear be 'depathologized' (Cvetkovich, 2007: 460)? This is
difficult, insofaras fear orients defensive subjectivities both
emotionally and agentially, but I suggest that affective
determinism can be interrupted orrestructured. In the final
section, I supplement this analysis through critical exploration of
the phenomenological and affectivecomplexity of hope. Nevertheless,
the attempt to elicit humanly hopeful agency from the affective
analysis of fear remains delicatelypoised, for 'how,' David
Campbell asks, 'can we think about taking conscious steps when we
are dealing with the subliminal register?'(Schoolman and Campbell,
2008: 330). The response to this predicament inheres in the
extensiveness of affective circuits: affectsare not reducible to
either the (de-subjectified) subliminal, or to (subjective)
individual experience, or to the impersonal or objective.Affects
always circulate in a wider agential field, and that field demands
consideration.
Published in 1651, the violence, chaos, and tumult of the
English Civil Wars resonates throughout Leviathan, and is
givensublimated expression in Hobbes's depiction of the state of
nature -- the state without legitimate political authority. With no
'commonPower to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition
which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man,
against everyman', (Hobbes, 1968: 185). This condition is sustained
by multiple unpredictable and unregulated fears (and here Hobbes
may be abetter adviser to Machiavelli's Prince: not all fear tends
toward obedience).26 But the materialist Hobbes is not a rational
choicetheorist or a Kantian: the political problem is not to
replace affect with a rational contract or moral order. Neither is
he a Hume or aRousseau: the problem is not to replace fear with a
different, more sociable or pliable affective formation (say,
trust, compassion,solidarity, or respect). Rather, it is to manage
fear by galvanizing and reorienting its affective and agential
force. Hobbes's solution isthe exchange of liberty for security by
way of a political contract that creates the Leviathan, or
sovereign (literally a deal with ademon), in which subjects
exchange the freedom to fear potentially everybody for the security
of fearing only the sovereign.Sovereign power -- the common and
legitimate authority to 'awe' the unruly -- is thus underpinned by
the 'passion to be reckonedupon'. Politics, for Hobbes, involved
the shift from unpredictable modes of fear that disrupt, to
dependable modes of fear that sustainpolitical stability, in which
the sovereign capture of fear is the crucial maneuver.
An instrumentalization of fear is at the core of the sovereign
promise that resonates throughout modern politics.
FromMachiavelli's advice to the Prince (it is better to be feared
than loved) to the Truman Doctrine ('scare the hell out of the
Americanpeople') to 'shock and awe,' the experience of fear
(anxiety, dread, terror) has been pivotal to the formation of
political subjectivityand political order wherein fear is deployed
in such a way as to render the subject governable, and political
order is figured as a'refuge' from fear, (Virno, 2004: 31-35). Even
when sovereignty disavows the utility or efficacy of recourse to
fear (FranklinDelaney Roosevelt: 'the only thing we have to fear is
fear itself'), the promise remains in the form of a pledge to free
subjects fromthe 'evil of fear' (Jack Straw, UK Home Secretary from
1997 to 2001, cited in Minton, 2009: 143).27 Either or both: the
sovereignbecomes the foremost object of fear, and/or the sovereign
vows protection from fearsome others. The 'recourse to fear and
terror' is'the ultimate recourse for the sovereign power of the
state ... even when it is contractual and protective,' (Derrida,
2005: 156-7).
The affective efforts of this politics, however, are focused on
capturing a specific affect, fear, and galvanizing that fear so as
todemand and command a subject. What happens in the sovereign
endeavor is that affective circuits have been limited and
captured,subjectified, and rendered trainable. The sovereign and
subjective appropriation of affects of fear, on this account, is
fundamentallynormative and normalizing; the politics of fear
contains a moral and subjective imperative toward order, as
fear-affects becomethoroughly folded into the subjective. The
sovereign politics of fear short-circuits its unpredictable
extensiveness as fear is put towork by the sovereign (who threatens
punishment and defends against other others); and by the subject
who recognizes sovereigntyor political order generally as
simultaneously an object of fear and loyalty. Subjective feelings
of fear take shape within whatSpinoza might term a 'sad' affective
series and thus agential field, that is, a field that individuates,
disempowers, diminishes agentialcapacity and concomitantly entails
the kinds of negative affects indicative of weakened conatus.
But what happens if this story about fear is extended, peered at
from the perspective of affective encounters up, rather than
fromthe sovereign capture of fear down? What happens, that is, if
the frame of analysis shifts to affect? Recall Massumi's claim that
affectis 'autonomous' insofar as it vitalizes (or diminishes) and
exceeds the bodies it traverses, ordering or disordering, composing
ordecomposing. He suggests that 'the emotional organization of a
given fear-riven self is a particular limited and
divergentactualization of the subject-form: the socially meaningful
expression of the "individuality" of the specific identity attached
by powermechanisms to a found body,' (1993: 25). This suggests that
as fear-affects 'slip in and out of subjective boundaries,' (Ngai,
2005:31) an affective sensorium is traceable in the architecture of
everyday life, or in what Anna Minton neatly terms the 'psyche
ofplaces,' (2009: 139), within which particular subjectivities,
thinking-feeling-acting subjects are manifest. How, then, does fear
work?
Consider the etymology of terror, an extreme manifestation of
fear. As Adriana Cavarero reminds us, the root of terror lies
in'trembling'; not, that is, in the conscious subject's
comprehension of a fearful object, but in a somatic apprehension
evinced by body
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physics. The 'sudden start of fear called "fright" ... acts
immediately on the body, making it tremble and compelling it to
take flight,'(2009: 4). The agential-affect of fear is, as Protevi
puts it, 'de-subjectified,' (2009: 50) or subliminal. Fear-affects
by-passconsciousness and intentionality, and while quivering
capitulation or adrenalin-fuelled resistance or escape are equally
possible,intensities of fear demand the body do something, and now!
This is certainly more 'directly compelling' than fear put to work
ininstrumental or normative ways. Let's hypothesize that fear can
be incredibly useful in certain circumstances (escaping or
confrontingthreat) but debilitating and unproductive in others. And
let's assume, along broadly Spinozist lines, that we don't
generally 'choose' tofeel fear, and that while we are determined by
affect, we are determined in multiple and indeterminate ways
(affects can't 'intend' theactions of any subject) in part through
the phenomenological opacity of the subjective content of affects,
and in part because of thetremendous variability of the ways
affects impact the readiness of the subject to act. This should all
suggest that while fear mightgrasp the subject corporeally and
viscerally, it should, nevertheless, be less predictable. But is it
less predictable?
It is important to note the ways in which such subliminal or
de-subjectified affects of fear are patterned and put to work in
thewider agential field. In her study of urban planning in the UK
in the 1990s, Minton (2009) tracks the ways in which
developmentssuch as gated communities, increased surveillance
technologies, security measures, and enclosures of public, shared
spaces, have notled to increased feelings of security, but instead
have led to increased feelings of fear: fear of crime, increased
levels of personalinsecurity, increased suspicion and fear of
others. Minton diagnoses a paradoxical situation in which 'fear of
crime doesn't correlatewith actual crime,' (2009: 142); rather, the
technologies that ostensibly assuage fear, instead, produce it.28 I
want to approach thisproblem less as a sort of psychic
misrecognition of the source of subjective discomfiture and more as
an opportunity to track themateriality of affect as it traverses
impersonal and personal life, working through encounters with
technologies, nonhuman andhuman stuff and matter.
In part, the urban encounter with architectures of enclosure,
and technologies of visibility and surveillance act as
constantcorporeal suggestions (we are not safe) that slip in and
out of consciousness, and that can cultivate a (low-level,
pervasive) mood ofguardedness. Subjects are shaped divisively by
such dispositions: fear, suspicion, and caginess shape an affective
and agential fieldthat individuates, impedes new agential
compositions, and disempowers. The increasing prevalence of such
technologies freezesspaces of ambivalence by patterning fearful
affects into subjective feelings and agential orientations. This is
an ambivalent seriesonly insofar as certain technologies produce an
'affect' (fear) that is decidedly at odds with an 'intention'
(security). Of significancehere is the way that fear is not
assuaged but amplified through security technologies which create
feedback loops entrenching andpatterning affective intensities,
reinforcing their subjective resonance and comportment. It is only
in patterned spaces of proximityand encounter of impersonal and
personal that fear can be 'reckoned on.'
This patterning of fear-affects is also palpable in the
continuing maneuvers of the 'war on terror.' Initially, this 'war'
can be mappedin ways that are analogous to the sovereign capture of
fear, in which fear is intentionally deployed so as to move citizen
bodies. Andas war becomes indeterminate (a permanent state of
emergency and exception that cannot be ended by social contract or
peacetreaty), so too, the politics of fear must be continually
elicited and calibrated, to persuade populaces at 'home' of the
need forhomeland security inside, and police action outside. Again,
however, the wider agential field demands critical attention.
Subjectsencounter the war on terror in a variety of ways,
more-or-less mediated: presidential announcements, news reports,
television andother media; in surveillance and security mechanisms
and technologies in airports, and other public buildings from banks
touniversities; and in media campaigns exhorting a strange kind of
vigilance detached from action. This politics of fear,
however,works through a curious interplay between indeterminate
fear (that amplifies the intensity of fear-affects) and determinate
fear (thatconstructs particular fear-objects in order to orient
subjects agentially).
To pick just a few examples: Trevor Boddy named the construction
of the 'Jersey barriers,' (temporary cement roadblocks)
aroundfederal and financial buildings in New York and Washington DC
in the aftermath of 9/11, 'fear-theming,' creating an 'architecture
ofdisassurance,' (cited in Brown, 2010: 77). The barriers were not
a response to any of the specific ways that American security
wasbreached, and their subsequent removal in 2004 was concomitantly
not a response to changes in security threats. Wendy Brownsuggests
that 'the barriers worked performatively' producing 'the visual
scenography of a state of emergency,' (2010: 77). The barriersacted
as an affect-conductor, mobilizing a 'tone' or 'atmosphere' of
anxiety that was effective precisely because it was
less-than-determinate, traversing objective and subjective
space.
In the UK in 2008, the Metropolitan Police announced a five-week
counter-terror advertising campaign targeted within the
UK'smetropolitan and multicultural centres (London, Greater
Manchester, West Yorkshire, and the West Midlands). This
campaignexhorted citizen vigilance, in which everyday activities
such as taking photos, using a mobile phone, and putting out
garbage wereframed as potentially suspect.29 Again, there is a
performative indeterminacy at work here in the affects cultivated:
objects of fearwere rendered indeterminate, vague, amorphous,
emptied of content and specificity but embedded in the routines
and, literally, thedetritus of everyday life ('You see hundreds of
houses every day. What if one has unusual activity and seems
suspicious?'). As withthe color-coded security alert system adopted
in many western states, fear is in this way elicited, calibrated,
and normalized.Massumi suggested that the affective import of the
color-coded alert system in the US was 'introduced to calibrate
anxiety' as fearitself threatened to become habitual and so less
effective at orienting attenuated bodies. This is only half the
story; and the other halfconcerns the complementary strategy of the
routinization and banalization of fear, that aims toward the
erasure of spaces without or
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beyond fear. Both are complimentary tactics that enable central
government to function 'directly into each individual's
nervoussystem,' (Massumi, 2006: 1).
In each of these examples, a temporal play of indeterminacy
('what if...?') and determinacy ('there!') is at work. The kinds
ofaffective intensities of fear generated by the tactics common to
the war on terror are indeterminate (the barriers do not respond to
anyspecific threat; the MET ad campaign could refer to any house,
phone, or bin, and so on). But the politics of fear also works in
adeterminate mode. As an anticipatory orientation, fear
nevertheless demands specificity in order to act; Massumi suggests
that 'fear isthe palpable action in the present of a threatening
future cause ... whether the threat is determinate or not. ... You
trigger a productionof what you fear. You turn the objectively
indeterminate cause into an actual effect so that you can actually
deal with it', (Massumi,2007: 18). Fear is compelling insofar as it
corporeally grips the subject; but it is capricious insofar as its
affective indeterminacyneeds to be made determinate. Fear's
intensities, that is, turn into specific agential orientations
through patterning fear-affects, raisingintensity (indeterminate)
to comport subjects (determinate). Such maneuvers are discernible
in the designation of specific objects ofdeterminate fear (Iraq as
a 'breeding ground for terrorists,' for instance) that facilitates
specific targets of local and global policing,and more-or-less
discreet forms of social control.
As Brown avers, 'state legitimacy often turns on addressing
social desires that do not comport with state interests,' (Brown,
2010:78). Affect, in this instance, is analogous to what Althusser
termed ideological state apparatuses, material practices that
by-passrational reflection, grip and generate the subject
corporeally, encouraging certain dispositions.30 In the continuing
age of the war onterror, fear has become directly productive of
forms of social life. But fear (again like ideology) only seemingly
works 'by itself.'Fear-affects resonate and are patterned through
practices, architectures, the visual; its affective circuits invoke
a whole range ofperceptual stimuli and feedback loops whereby it
becomes patterned and less volatile. The play of
determinacy/indeterminacy is alsocrucial: indeterminate fear
heightens affective intensity while determinate fear shapes
specific orientations, whereby such feedbackloops become
subjectively entrenched or habitual. It is only in such spaces of
proximity and encounter of a whole series of affectiveapparatuses
traversing objective and subjective space that fear is rendered
determinate in the emotional and agential orientation ofsubjects;
fear is fabricated in the ways that human and technological bodies
affect and are affected by other bodies.
As fear-affects traverse the impersonal and personal, space and
time, there remains room for maneuver (or 'wriggle-room',(Massumi,
2002b: 214)). Affective determinism (fear's malignly defensive
orientation) 'works' only insofar as it is patterned througha
variety of mechanisms. At any of these points, the affective
determinations of fear might be interrupted, restructured, put to
work indifferent ways. If fear is patterned, given form and
direction, across all these encounters, then affective ambivalence
can bepolitically elicited, if never quite mobilized, in ways that
might at least disorder prevailing affective compositions. The aim
of suchan affective politics might simply be to 'expand the range
of affective potential,' (Massumi, 2002b: 235, my emphasis). That
way,the potential mutidirectionality of affect can become a
different sort of thing, an ideological incoherence that becomes
available formobilization. Affective analysis, then, encourages
alertness to the ways in which affects are patterned in certain
ways, so as to elicitroom for agential maneuver. This is by no
means a solely subjective endeavor, for while affect resonates into
subjective emotionsand readiness to act, it remains autonomous from
the subjective. Restructuring or depathologizing fear-affects
involves work on thesensory organization of all the different kinds
of matter that affect agential capacity -- not just the subjective
or objective. Fear can beaffectively reconfigured if re-perceived,
not as normal or habitual, but as a site of crisis (Gayatri Spivak
analogously discusses apolitics of hope in terms of 'bringing to
crisis' in which crisis becomes a 'site of hope,' (2002: 173)).
'Bad sentiments,' as Muoz,drawing on Paolo Virno, suggests,
'associated with despondence contain the potentiality for new modes
of collectivity,' (Duggan andMuoz, 2009: 277). The relation between
the politics of fear and political agency can be worked on; but
that there is no other-than-affective way out suggests a Hobbesian
strategy for other-than-Hobbesian ends is demanded. Recall that
Hobbes reorientedpolitically volatile fears toward order; fear can
also be reoriented, away from cagey divisiveness (forms of agential
de-composition)toward at least 'crisis,' in Spivak's sense, and at
best, fear itself might not only be reoriented, but also
restructured toward incipientsolidarities (compositions that
enhance the capacities of the bodies involved). One way of doing
this is by considering its role inhope, and it is to this I finally
turn.
4. Utopian-Affect
... hope is like music because its quality is not really
confined to one thing...(Papastergiadas, 2002: 82).
... I guess "affect" is the word I use for "hope"...(Massumi,
2002b: 212).
My aim in this section is to orient fear and hope together as
part of an affective endeavor to restructure fear and disorder
itsprevailing political organization. In order to do so, I explore,
first, the phenomenological complexity and agential variability of
hopeas a first step toward unsettling upbeat
(affirmative/progressive) understandings. I briefly consider
political polyvalence in hope'saffective parabola: hope does not
entail a political orientation, and competing visions of the future
invoke 'hope' to compel allegianceand direct political agency. The
demand to hope can be thoroughly problematic, containing a moral
injunction to optimism(emotionally affirmative but by no means
politically critical) that is decidedly at odds with the whole
range of affects that animatecritical political agency (including
negative affect: anger, antagonism, resentment, and alienation, for
instance). Nevertheless,optimism, and associated affects of
confidence, sanguinity, and complacency, do not feature in utopian
modes of hope, or utopian-
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affect. Problematic modes of hope (such as the appeal to
hope-as-optimism) make demands upon the subject's
rationality,intentionality, emotions, and even normative register,
in which pessimism is construed as a form of moral lack -- or, in
what might bethe same thing differently phrased, as contributive to
social maladaption, depression, ill-health, and early death.31 Such
demands, justas much as fear, can sustain forms of normativity and
order, or can tend toward agential docility, vexing the progressive
or radicaldeployment of hope. How, then, is hope produced,
sustained, and circulated? What is the content, and what are the
effects, ofdifferent modalities of hope, and do such different
modalities of hope circulate differently?
To respond to these questions, I turn to utopian-affect.
Critical analysis of utopian hope demands analysis, not (or not
only) of thesubject, but of the wider affective-agential field.
Even so, utopian hope is ambivalently situated in that wider field.
For Bloch, it isfrom within the 'darkness of the lived moment'
(1986a: 290) that hope is most vital. In an agential field that
could equally dispose adespairing subject, Bloch glimpses hope, as
Spivak discerns the activity of 'bringing to a crisis' (2002: 173).
However, contrary tothe injunction ('You must be optimistic!'),
neither is utopian-affect a form of 'voluntarism' in the face of
difficult circumstances.32Rather, utopian hope always depends upon
forms of affective restructuring (in which fear is put to work in
hopeful ways). Theintrinsic ambivalence of all affects can thus be
elicited in utopian hope in a manner parallel to Virno's strategy,
as he 'mobilizes fearand anguish ... as the grounds for political
vision and potential solidarity among the many,' identifying
'radical political possibility informs of dread and anguish
typically thought to render human beings unfit for freedom,'
(Marasco, 2006: 9, 18). Hope, that is to say,needs to be made out
of the same matter as fear, not considered fear's other. It is not
a matter of demanding optimism in the face offear, against fear,
nor of voluntarism; it is a matter of affecting and affected bodies
'resonating' in slightly different ways thanhitherto.33 First,
then, some ground-clearing. Hope has been conceptualized as that
which counters a range of dispositions, includingaverse
anticipatory orientations toward the future (such as anxiety and
fear), pathological orientations of despair (hopelessness)
thatrelinquish the horizon of the future, and satisfied or
complacent orientations.34 But against too-easy assumptions of
optimism, cheerand expectation, to hope is something complicated,
with many shades and turns ('Fair Hope, with smiling face but
ling'ring foot/ Haslong deceived me').35 That fear or despair
indicate hopelessness and thus 'oppose' hope makes a certain
logical sense; hope's forwardinclination counters fearful aversion;
hopeful faith precludes despairing misery. But it is far less
compelling passionately orphenomenologically. From the perspective
of affect, it is worth recalling that, however significant the
subjective is, hope isirreducible to individuated emotional
experience insofar as all affects, formed through encounters with
other bodies and matter,traverse and exceed subjectivity.
Hope-affects, too, are 'autonomous' insofar as subjective feeling
is only a 'partial' manifestation ofaffect (cf. Massumi, 2002b:
213); and are variable, insofar as the determinations of affect are
multiplicitous, varying in degree,intensity, and direction.
Consider, for instance, George Eliot's Dorothea: 'in girls of
sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjureup wonder, hope,
belief, vast as a sky, and coloured by a diffused thimbleful of
matter in the shape of knowledge,' (1994: 22).
Bodies are also more-or-less receptive to certain affective
encounters through pre-existing or layered dispositions and
moods,which can be thought of as the subterranean stickiness or
persistence of affect that no longer immediately vitalizes bodies.
Hope-affects 'double' or resonate subjectively in varied --
precisely ambivalent - ways. Affective ambivalence, those spaces of
disjunct inaffective series between affects, feelings, and agential
dispositions, helps explain the complicatedness of hope-affects: we
arecertainly not all ardent Dorothea's, and hope can and does exist
within and alongside fear, despair, even desperation. Those
negativestates are still anticipatory, portending the threat of
loss, whether of an object of desire or of a future horizon. It is
in this sharedorientation toward an uncertain future that hope,
fear, desire, despair, and so on, are interwoven. That one hopes,
desires, mightevoke feelings of aspiration, belief, faith, promise,
power; but to hope is also to long, to yearn, and to hunger; to
hope is to admit thesheer uncertainty of the desired horizon.36 One
can often do no more than endure the intensity of hope's keen
poignancy and itsanguish. To hope, then, is an affectively complex
state and process, dreadful as well as delicious, that could as
easily hurt or heal.Hope's passionate parabola overlaps, absorbs,
and subsumes its ostensible others in sometimes unexpected ways:
while giving solace(the object or future longed for is still
possible, not yet extinguished) hope disturbs; while beguiling,
hope vexes (its wearyingpersistence!); its enticing forward
orientation promises sublimity, and yet is simply inextricable from
uncertainty, anxiety, torment.Hope, as anticipatory orientation, is
not necessarily linked up with promise or fulfillment or
optimism.
This ambivalence is echoed in the ways that hope-affects dispose
agency. For Spinoza, whereas hope does not exhaust in the sameway
as fear, it is an 'inconstant joy' that can tend toward 'sadness';
hope does not necessarily enhance agency (1996: 106). As
passion,hope may be happy or sad or complexly both; and as an index
of agential capacity, hope may be marked by joyful enhancement
orsorrowful diminishment of power.37 This is evident in political
register too. Mouffe emphasizes the variability of hope-affects
whenshe notes that 'hope is something which is ineradicable and is
inherent in any kind of political or social mobilization [and] can
bemobilized in many different ways' (Mouffe and Laclau, 2002:
125-6). Such variability can generate suspicion with regard to
thepolitics of hope: Duggan looks skeptically on some of the
political maneuvers in which hope is implicated, noting that 'the
politicalright manufactures and circulates hope in the most noxious
ways,' (Duggan and Muoz, 2009: 275). Likewise, Michael Taussig
alsopoints to a wider field in which hope mobilizes agency: 'market
and entrepreneurial activity is dependent upon hope, not revolution
...we cannot underestimate the role of hope in driving this amazing
machine called a capitalist or free market,' (2002: 56).38
Simply put, hope can orient a whole range of agential modes, and
the most pervasive forms of hope may very well be, as
Muozidentifies, those that 'simply keep ... one in place within an
emotional situation predicated on control,' (Duggan and Muoz,
2009:
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278). Such manifestations of hope on an everyday level can be
fruitfully analyzed by way of Berlant's theorization of
'crueloptimism,' a concept that speaks to the ways in which people
'choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are
usedto, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of
reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean
defeat by it,'(Berlant, 2008c: 36). Everyday hope, that is, can be
expressed as a 'reinvestment in the normative promises of capital,'
(Berlant,2007: 281), and is by no means in opposition to the
inevitable and lived disappointments and failures of that system.
Some kinds ofhope affects, then, might inflect subjectively in
agential modes that span from wishful thinking ('Wouldn't it be
nice if...?') topurposive action (If I do this, then...'). In the
latter, an 'if ... then' structure of expectation organizes minds
and bodies, and comportsbehavior. This mode of hope is determinate
and determining, dependent for its realization (or not) upon the
agential maneuvers of theintentional and sovereign subject, in
which hope functions as a rational or normative emotion that can
orchestrate the subject towardforms of order. But hope affects and
emotions can fold into and out of one another, overlap and
differentiate again; and hope-affects,although not normative
emotions comporting a subject, need not disturb or disrupt
prevailing hegemonies in which personal andsocial desires are
invested.
While Bloch would unearth a utopian impulse or desire in such
'attachments,' he nevertheless marks a distinction between
suchimpulses and utopian modalities of hope. So how are
utopian-affects produced, sustained, and circulated? Utopian-affect
is, first, notconfined to subjective feelings, particularly those
of optimism; and neither is it an individual inclination.
Utopian-affect can be givensubjective expression through a range of
emotional valences, from the bleak to the buoyant, and in tracking
utopian-affect what issignificant is less individuated emotional
expression, and more the wider agential field within which
utopian-affect is fabricated andcirculates. Far from a subjective
proclivity, utopian-affect is very much rooted in all the forms of
affective relationality (subjective,social, cultural, political)
that make agency possible. Nevertheless, although utopian-affect is
immanent to existing forms ofrelationality, it is both materially
determined and indeterminate: the subject it traverses is obliquely
disposed to the world, trying 'tofeel what lurks in the
interstices,' (Stengers, 2002: 245). So while utopian-affect is, as
Muoz describes, 'relational to historicallysituated struggles,' it
is so in futural ways, towards forms of actual but also incipient
solidarities, of 'a collectivity that is actualized
orpotentialized,' (Muoz, 2009: 3). Coded in different theoretical
interventions as the virtual (e.g., Deleuze) or potentiality
(e.g.,Agamben), Bloch's docta spes (educated hope) points to ways
of thinking, living, and being that interrupt and exceed the
dominantlogic of the present while, nevertheless, remaining
grounded in the strata of possibilities that animates the political
present, so as toeduce something other and better from
comprehension of the worst.
Cultivating or eliciting such affects is, then, a tricky affair.
For Bloch, utopian hope is immanently and affectively rooted
inworldly possibilities, while simultaneously characterized by the
indeterminacy of the Not-Yet. In his 1961 lecture, 'Can Hope
BeDisappointed?' Bloch responds: yes, 'else it would not be hope,'
(1986b: 340). A hope that cannot be disappointed, Bloch argues,
is'merely subjective confidence' (1986b: 340) -- again, neither the
framework of affect nor the disposition of the utopian:
... hope must be unconditionally disappointable, first, because
it is open in a forward direction, in a future-orienteddirection;
it does not address itself to what already exists. ... [O]penness
is at the same time also kept open. ... Second,hope must be
disappointable because, even when concretely mediated, it can never
be mediated by solid facts. ...Consequently, not only hope's affect
(with its pendant, fear) but, even more so, hope's methodology
(with its pendant,memory) dwells in the region of the not-yet, a
place where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by
anenduring indeterminacy,
(1986b: 340-1).
Utopian hope is indeterminate because it evokes that which,
although in some way immanent, does not yet exist.
Utopian-affect,for Jameson, means 'a kind of ethics' that keeps
alive 'the very possibility of imagining a future which might be
radically andconstitutionally other,' (1971: 126-7). As utopian
affect speaks to the Not-Yet, the possibility of a future
transformed, so the contentof utopian hopes cannot be wholly
determined in advance.39 This suggests two corollaries. First, the
indeterminacy of utopian hopealso inheres in the contingencies of
political struggle: 'hope holds eo ipso [by that very act] the
condition of defeat precariously initself: it is not confidence. It
stands too close to the indeterminacy of the historical process, of
the world process that, indeed, has notyet been defeated, but
likewise has not yet won,' (1986b: 340-1). Utopian-affect
foregrounds the contingency and decisiveness ofpolitical struggles,
and in the encounter with the emergent future, fear and anxiety
cannot be effaced. I return to this below. Second,if utopian-affect
is indeterminate, Not-Yet, then it cannot be patterned in the same
way that fear-affects can. Recall that fear-affectsshaped subjects
in divisive ways, marked by wariness, and were heightened and
oriented by a play of indeterminacy (the threat couldbe anywhere!)
and determinacy (it's there!) whereby such affects were stabilized
or patterned through constant corporeal feedbackloops (encounters
with technologies of surveillance, for instance). Fear-affects
traversed a whole range of present perceptual stimulito which
utopian-affect does not have access.40 If utopian-affect cannot
circulate in similar, patterned ways to fear-affects, in
partbecause it lacks the palpable infrastructure of fear, and in
part because utopian-affect is and must remain indeterminate, how,
then,does utopian hope circulate?
Utopian affective agency can still be elicited through attending
to the organization, and differing 'resonances' of bodies.
Thismeans that utopian-affect is not a moral injunction that makes
demands on the rational or normative register of
subjectivity,'determining' the subject to act. Rather, as Montag,
in suggestive Spinozist vein proposes, there is 'no criticism of
the existing socialorder that is not immanent in acts and practices
of resistance and revolt,' (1995: 69). This suggests that
utopian-affect is always-
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already agential, inhering in how bodies are composed and what
they are doing, inhering in the 'resonances' of 'energy made by
andthrough bodies,' (Gordillo, 2011) --utopian-affect might, but
need not, pre-exist agency, might, but need not, motivate or
galvanizethe agential endeavors of subjects. Against the subjective
injunction to hope, Gaston Gordillo insists that the actual,
physicalpresence of bodies is absolutely vital: in demonstrations,
protests, rallies, 'the multitude is in the streets,' (2011).41 In
the absence of'architecture[s] of disassurance,' (Boddy, cited in
Brown, 2010: 77), the proximity of bodies is necessary to the
circulation ofutopian-affect. Approaching the question of radical
political agency by way of affect means, as Hynes and Sharpe argue,
approaching'bodies and minds from the point of view of their
capacities or powers ... oriented not to what the mind and body
should do, but to thealways indeterminate question of what they can
do,' (Hynes and Sharpe, 2009: 4). Such an affective politics is and
remainsuntrainable (to echo Berlant, 2009: 263); its aim is not to
over-determine utopian hope in particular agential orientations,
but toextend the inherent ambivalence of affects. With Spinoza, I
have argued that affects are determining, but not determinist
insofar astheir determinations are multiplicitous, varying in
degree, intensity and direction. The politics of fear works to
limit theexpansiveness of such determinations, and against this,
the inherent indeterminacy of the affective is something of a
weapon.Utopian-affect then appears as something of an affective
politics par excellence, to the degree that indeterminacy is vital
to itspassionate or subjective configuration, its content and its
processes. Utopian-affect galvanizes a politics that speaks,
precisely, tofreedom, understood as extending 'potentials,'
(Massumi, 2002b: 214) or simply expanding affective capacity and
capability.42 Thisis something of a proto-politics, that draws
strength from 'incipient and unstructured mobilizations,' (Laclau
and Mouffe, 2002: 144)as a sort of raw matter that can be rendered
available to the political.
Finally, if fear is a predominant affective formation in the
political present, how can hope and fear be oriented together?
Utopian-affect does not efface fear, but instead, inflects fear
differently than hitherto. Restructuring or depathologizing
fear-affects involveswork on the sensory organization of all the
different kinds of matter that affect agential capacity: affect
circulates through variousencounters of worldly matter and stuff
through which subject finds itself manifest within. One way of
restructuring fear-affect, then,is by intervening in the feedback
loops through which fear is stabilized. This might involve turning
the technologies that are centralto the production of fear against
themselves: when protesters use surveillance technologies against
police, for instance, the feedbackloops that those technologies
sustain are interrupted, and the hegemonies they secure are
disrupted, rendered capricious, variable, andopen to intervention.
Fear need not be ubiquitous, and visceral experimentation with our
everyday sensorium can have effects uponthe 'tone' of the age.
Negri is, after all, right: hope is an 'an antidote to ... fear,'
(Brown et al, 2002: 200); but only insofar as theantidote (hope) is
made out of the same matter as the poison (fear). This illustrates
the larger point that the future needs to be madeout of matter that
is available in the present, out of the same crises, but with
different trajectories: it is from the matter of this worldthat the
future is made. Utopian-affect, then, is made out of both hope and
fear, and while fear might be restructured, it cannot beeffaced,
for the fear of utopian-affect also inheres in the encounter with
the world itself, in the struggle, and in the uncertainty of
theemergent. As Duggan puts it, 'there is fear attached to hope --
hope understood as a risky reaching out for something else that
willfail,' (Duggan and Muoz, 2009: 279). Fear and anxiety, rather
than opposing utopian hope, are vital, necessary to its
criticalagency, as that agency works through immanent historical
processes that remain open and undetermined.
In this essay, I have argued that agency is rooted in worldly
things, in affective encounters that shape or mobilize the capacity
toact. Following Spinoza, I have suggested that agential capacity
and psychic life are not unrelated, that impersonal or
'autonomous'affect resonates and inflects in variable, multiple,
and opaque ways, in subjective feelings and agential dispositions.
Theambivalence-project, put simply, elicits spaces of 'wriggle
room,' (Massumi, 2002b: 214) against forms of affective
determinism, inways that renders the affective available for
political remobilization or resignification. The affective,
however, remains untrainable(cf. Berlant, 2009: 263), for while
affects overlap, fold into and out of the subjective, affect
remains autonomous and remainsunpredictable in its subjective
emotional and agential valences. I then turned to the politics of
fear: if fear works through patterningaffective circuits into
habituated responses, then such patterning can be interrupted at
any point. Educing the potentialmultidirectionality of affects
could then become another sort of thing, an ideological incoherence
that is available for mobilization.The political mobilization of
utopian-affect remains difficult, tenuous. However, the
hope-project can find an ally in theambivalence-project, insofar as
affective ambivalence stresses the multidirectionality and
malleability of the affective register inways that can encourage
ideological disruption and resignification: just as prevailing
affective formations can be disrupted, so toocan the hegemonies
that put those formations to work. This gives an affective twist to
Moishe Postone's marxist argument, that 'to thedegree that we chose
to use "indeterminacy" as a critical social category ... it should
be as a goal of social and political action ratherthan as an
ontological characteristic of social life,' (2006: 95).43 And in
this endeavor, negative affects such as fear need not be seenas
something that need to be opposed to be overcome; the human and
non-human technologies through which fear-affects circulatecan be
restructured, made to resonate differently. Further, however, this
need not be an intentional or voluntarist politics that seeks
todirectly orchestrate the emotional and even normative registers
of subjectivity. Utopian-affect does not need to
persuade'consciousness' to mobilize 'bodies,' and the non-sovereign
modality of agency that utopian-affect orients seeks to remain
open,indeterminate, rather than capturing, controlling, and
limiting a subject, and its affective capacities. In this
ambivalence andindeterminacy lies both the risk, and the promise,
of a politics of affective agency.
Susan McManus Susan McManus is Lecturer in Political Theory at
Queen's University, Belfast. Her current research projects focus on
affectivepolitical agency and theorizing global resistance. She is
author of Fictive Theories: Toward a Deconstructive and Utopian
Political
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Imagination (Palgrave, 2005). Susan may be reached at
[email protected]
1. I am grateful to the School of Politics, International
Studies and Philosophy for a period of research leave that
facilitated research on this essay. I'd like to thank Vincent
Geoghegan and DebbieLisle for comments and suggestions on previous
drafts, and I'm very grateful to the anonymous reviewer for Theory
and Event for forcing me to confront analytical gaps and problems.
I'd also liketo thank David Dwan and Tarik Kochi for their
unflagging participation in the critical theory reading group on
Spinoza's Ethics. And this is for Gareth, whose love and patience
has inspired me topractice that tricky alchemy of turning fear into
hope.
2. Contemporary communist and left critical theory remains
centrally concerned with the problematic of agency. On the role of
hope in encouraging political agency see Zournazi (2002), and for
amore skeptical, but no less engaged, perspective, see Duggan and
Muoz (2009).
3. On the Compass initiative, see
http://www.compassonline.org.uk/news/item.asp?n=9396. Hope has been
central to Obama's political career, Presidential campaign and his
acceptance speechas President-Elect. The more recent affective
shift from hope to anger in American politics is unfortunately
beyond the bounds of this essay.
4. Even for radical theorists, those invested in the
hope-project such as Felix Guattari and Toni Negri, contemporary
experience is marked by 'fear and loathing'; they discern 'a
transcendental yetactually manmade fear which seeps into every mind
with immobilizing catastrophic dread,' with dire consequences:
'hope itself has fled this hopeless, hapless world,' (1990:
11-12).
5. The role of fear in the conservation of power, security and
surveillance is evident; but what about the role of fear in power's
disruption (old Hobbes clearly recognized the dangers of
unfetteredfears in Leviathan)? The role of hope in the subversion
of 'all conditions in which humanity is ... oppressed and
long-lost' is equally evident (Bloch, 1986a: 76); but what of,
conversely, the role ofhope in the reproduction of hegemonic
relations? When should a skeptical eye be cast upon the colluding
capacities of affirmative affect? What of the agential capacity of
negative or 'disaffected'affects in subversion? And what else,
politically, can be made of the excessive production of fear, other
than the violence of securitization, ongoing global war?
6. See Stewart (2004), Bennett (2010) and Coole and Frost
(2010).
7. Cf. Paolo Virno:
We need to understand, beyond the ubiquity of their
manifestations, the ambivalence of these modes of being and
feeling, to discern in them a 'degree zero' or neutral kernel
fromwhich may arise both cheerful resignation, inexhaustible
renunciation, and social assimilation on the one hand and new
demands for the radical transformation of the status quoon the
other.
(1996: 13)
8. With thanks to the anonymous reviewer for Theory and Event
for this formulation, and making this implicit agenda explicit.
9. The affective turn encompasses a range of objects of analysis
from a range of disciplines such as psychoanalysis, cultural
studies, philosophy and political theory. It is generally informed
by oneof two methodological orientations: the physiological and
psychological perspectives pioneered by the work of Silvan Tomkins,
on the one hand, and poststructuralist perspectives to which
thework of Gilles Deleuze is central on the other. I am interested
in the affective turn to the extent that it illuminates
possibilities for radical political agency, and to that end, I work
within the latterorientation, as it emphasizes the worldliness of
affect, while a subjective orientation is core to the former. On
the affective turn see Clough (2007), Ngai (2005), Massumi (2002a,
2002b), Flatley(2009) and Protevi (2009).
10. See Frost's reading of the non-determinist but materialist
Hobbes: 'thinking-bodies are specifically thinking bodies,' (2001:
34).
11. I am mainly concerned to think beyond the psychoanalytic,
which is itself part of a vexed history of interiorizing and
depoliticizing the affective.
12. Montag argues that 'the projection of a 'consciousness' or a
will prior to and master of the disposition of the body' is a
liberal 'ruse of servitude' (1999: xx, 56) and traces instead a
materialisttrajectory from Spinoza through Foucault and
Althusser.
13. On the politics of emotions, see Ahmed (2005). I roundly
disagree with Philip Fisher's interpretation of the passions (that
they denote 'a sustained core account of human nature,' (2002:
7).Sianne Ngai's arguments that 'the nature of the sociopolitical
itself has changed in a manner that both calls forth and calls upon
a new set of feelings - ones less powerful, ... but still
diagnostic innature,' (2005: 5) is far more compelling.
Contemporary liberal thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum have argued
in Aristotelian ways for the normative and cognitive value of the
emotions. In thisendeavor, some emotions (such as compassion and
wonder, love and grief) provide acceptable or useful guidance for
liberal-democratic subjects, while others (such as disgust or
shame) have nonormative value. I propose, instead, that all
affects, emotions, and passions have multiple effects and ethical
or agential orientations (thus I move from the normative to the
critical-genealogical).
14. Spinoza punctures the humanist illusions of free will by
arguing that 'men are deceived in that they think themselves free
... they say, of course, that human actions depend on the will, but
theseare only words for which they have no idea' (1996: 53). Humans
do not 'disturb' but rather follow 'the order of nature,' (68).
15. On rethinking affect, agency and 'new materialisms'
together, see, in particular, Coole and Frost (2010).
16. This meticulous dispersion of illusory sites of agency
(particularly identifiable as dualisms: a creator God with the
power to punish; the state, with the power to alienate power; the
illusions ofconsciousness that entrap the strength and vitality of
the body, and so on) is core to the radical project, and also
central to Spinoza's task in The Ethics.
17. Echoing Foucault on truth: 'truth is a thing of this
worl