Collaboratory in Critical Security Methods
The International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies is an ESRC funded project (RES-810-21-0072)
Discussion of Patricia Clough's "Affect and Sociological Method"
Hi all,
Although there are obviously many weak points in Clough’s text, in my subsequent comments, I want to provide a rather generous reading – a reading in favour of the author that tries to move beyond the author. I’ve chosen our three criteria as a kind of structuring grid. Therefore, the general question might be phrased as follows: Which aspects of Clough’s text further our understanding of critical methodology (1) with regard to the temporal dimension (2) of security practices (3)?
1. Methodology
Clough reminds us of an important methodological premise: in analysing the social, we are part of the social. The social phenomena are not objects scrutinized from an outside. Quite the contrary, our methodologies are co-constituted by the historical state of the social at which they are “applied” to.
For the current topic this means that the turn to affect corresponds with a specific social situation. Think of Zizek’s little story about the yuppie reading Deleuze: Zizek’s point is that people are well equipped for contemporary flexible capitalism if they know how to invent concepts, navigate minor projects through rizomorphous organizations or, simply, live as nomads. In a way, Clough has learnt Zizek’s lesson: For her, affect is not per se something resistant or something escaping the sovereign capture (as it seems to be for Deleuze). Quite the opposite, the turn to affect is homologous to a specific formation of the social: if governmentality “has become a matter of modulating the affective background of a way of life, rather than a matter of governance regulating economy and bringing culture and personality in line with it, then sociological method … has become part of that affective background as a formulator modulating the affect of populations.” (p. 48)
So, how does Clough prevent from stepping into the trap of positivist sociology that became complicit with social management and social planning after WWII? How does she maintain a critical stance? As it is already indicated in the quotation above, she draws on Foucault: The dominant rationality of governing has shifted, which means that power/knowledge regimes have shifted, which means that the human (social) sciences have shifted. In a way, Clough seems to historicize Deleuze: the ontology of affect is the ground on which a historical mode of governing operates. If Clough's diagnosis holds true, a methodological imperative follows from it: today we would have to analyse how governmental projects deploy affective technologies.
However, at this point she directs our attention to an important rupture between the project of a positivist sociology that purports to be able to objectivize its object, on the one hand, and a post-positivist sociology of affect. A methodological difficulty arises out of this rupture: How can one grasp “something” that is beyond signification and beyond narration? “Something” that is prior to meaning and pre-indivual? In my opinion, such a reconfiguration brings the human (social) sciences necessarily to their epistemological limit. The positive human sciences have to become post-human and post-positive at the same instance. The must become able to register “unfeelings” and “unexperiences” (p. 50), i.e. non-phenomenal "entities". For Clough, this seems to be possible: „the quantum ontology of affect calls forth a new technology or understanding of techniques or method, just as much as this technology makes the new ontology of affect possible.“ (51)
Coming from sociology, this Deleuzian view is of utmost interest, since it introduces a register of the social that neither amounts to the realm signification (Saussure-Derrida-Laclau-Luhmann-…) nor to the psyche (psychology as sociology’s other since Durkheim). The affective is presented as a mode of connectivity that is not communicative but, at the same time, transcends the consciousness. However, given the conundrum of post-positivist and post-humanist methodology in the human (social) sciences, I wonder if the sociology of affect won’t necessarily remain a supplementary “para-science” – a science with a rather dubious scientific reputation. I think, Clough implicitly confirms this speculation by saying that constructivism (and not "quantum ontology") became the successful latest version of positivism (p. 48). In this respect, I had to think of the “securitization theory” of the Copenhagen School. Clough’s diagnosis explains the success of the approach: it is simply state-of-the-art positivism. (Whereas her own usage of the term “securitization” necessarily goes beyond a theory of speech acts.)
2. Temporality
Affectivity holds the promise of a “new materialism” – again a link to the materialities cluster. However, affectivity is also an inherently temporal concept, therefore highly relevant for research on social time. There is a temporality of affect, a temporality ontologically immanent to affect. This temporality is described as the temporality of the virtual: affect harbours the future possibilities immanent to a certain situation, it is incorporated potential. „That is to say, affect draws the future into the present” (p. 50); it draws together the dimensions of present and future. In this sense, affect provides not only an “infra-empirical” but also an “infra-temporal” sociality (p. 51).
Now, if:
(a) the contemporary form of governmentality operates primarily on an affective plane, and
(b) affect is an inherently temporal figure, then
(c) the temporal orientations of governmental power must have fundamentally changed: a new regime of temporality must have emerged.
3. Security
In other words: the methodological turn to affect – that marks, at the same time, a shift in the formation of the social – corresponds with a specific security dispositif (let’s keep in mind that Foucault used the terms “security” and “governmentality” interchangeably). Since affect is an inherently temporal figure, it comes as no surprise that this security dispositif rests on a particular temporality.
This shift is summarized by Clough as a shift to the rationality of preemption. This concept seems to be all-too-familiar in security studies, but I have the feeling that Clough uses it in a particular way that is more general and more particular at the same time:
On a very general level, preemption indicates a shifting relationship “from a past-future axis to future-present axis“ (54). This shift does not only concern military warfare, but financial speculation and health policy alike. However, Clough fails to account for the particularity of this shift. Exaggerating a bit, one could say that since the religious prophets and the oracle of Delphi humans have always been occupied with the future in their strategic practice. Therefore one has to specify Cloughs account of preemption, and one can specify it by referring to the temporality of affect. The increased relevance of affect points to the increased relevance of “micro temporalities” (Parisi/Goodman). In the last paragraph of the text this notion of micro temporalities is explained: “affect is a recognition that the infrastructural activity of our world today to a large extent takes place at time-space scales far finer than those of human perception” (p. 55).
This new temporal quality seems to be more than a mere acceleration of temporal rhythms. Rather, its main feature is non-linearity. The course and progression of time can no longer be predicted by forecasts based on the extrapolation of probabilities. Due to this shift in the temporal regime, one has to step into an affective relation to future events. They become a matter of sensation. Consequently, governmental policies would have to structure this relation to the future: enabling it, fostering it, modifying it. The project of contemporary governmentality would be about apprehending future developments, it would be a management of potentiality.
Of course, Clough’s implicit references to Foucault raise many critical questions. What she describes as a “new” security dispositif turns out more often than not to be the classical security dispositif of governmentality (population, milieu, probability, indirect security measures) – and, as Foucault taught us, this dispositif already emerged at the threshold of modernity. Is it the temporal structure of affect that causes a re-articulation of the governmental security dispositif? But would this re-articulation not go along with a re-conceptualization of governmentality? These questions remain far from being answered.
I’ll stop at this point. Probably, there is much more to say about the link between affect-security/governmentality-temporality…
All the best,
Sven
Chris Zebrowski says
Firstly, thank-you Sven for bringing our attention to a very interesting article—one that certainly takes a very different tack to questions of time, history and security to the readings we’ve examined thus far. A discussion of the temporalities of security technologies certainly opens an interesting avenue for future exploration by our group. But I also think that extending our focus will also assist us in reflecting on the work done thus far. In my own reading of this article, I found myself asking questions regarding the limits of a genealogical method (which we have focused on primarily up until now). At the risk of not sufficiently responding to a number of points brought up by Sven in his last post, I’d like to address my response to these concerns in the hopes that they might assist us in bridging the gap between the work we’ve done thus far and the work we may now be embarking on.
I agree with Sven that the situating of Deleuze’s notion of affect within a Foucaultian framework concerned with highlighting the historical particularity of technologies of governance, while not necessarily novel, provides an interesting slant to this article. While falling well short of a genealogy, this article focused on drawing out the historical contingency of technologies designed to govern through affect by situating their emergence within a wider social context—in this case, by drawing attention to correlative shifts in sociological methodology. However, and perhaps like Sven, what I found to be more interesting was the discussion of temporalities of security technologies (even if this discussion appeared both secondary, and somewhat underdeveloped).
The discursive enframing of the contemporary security environment as ‘radically uncertain’ is well documented in contemporary critical security literatures—especially amongst those which have analyzed technologies of pre-emption. From the radical contingency of terrorist threats, to the indiscriminate eruptions of natural disasters, to the rapid proliferation of disease, there is a sense that the contemporary threat environment is particularly dangerous due to the rapid emergence, and thus unpredictability, of threat itself. Technologies such as insurance, which rely on actuarial data of past probabilities to guard against contingencies, have, in response, been supplemented or replaced with speculative technologies which rely on multiple imaginaries of possible futures, not for the purposes of prediction but to assist in preparing oneself in the present for a future which is expected to be radically uncertain. This shift in the temporality embedded within security technologies, which the author argues corresponds to shift in emphasis from a ‘past-future’ axis to a ‘future-present’ axis, re-centres the focus of security technologies from the past (as repository of information upon which actuarial tables can be constructed) to the future (as something which if it can be imagined can be prepared for).
I find this argument to be compelling, but also think it raises some significant questions with regards to the efficacy of genealogy in the study of these technologies. As we have discussed in previous posts, genealogy operates on history: through a strategic logic aimed at problematising a particular understanding, or actualization, of a series of events. Operating on history, genealogy looks to destabilize its hold on the present: by drawing attention to the contingency and historical constitution of what was thought to be universal genealogy, to generate a force upon our comportment in the present by calling things normally taken for granted to thought. For genealogy to operate effectively, it is therefore important that the past exert some considerable influence on the present and that ‘lessons learned’ from the past are used to structure and inform choices in the present.
The question then arises: does genealogy, as a historical method, lose some of its critical purchase when the past no longer exerts as influential a hold on the present as it did formerly. Moreover it raises questions regarding the criticality of a method which operates on the complexity of time, for the critique of technologies whose appreciation for time’s non-linearity is an operational assumption.
While this of course this doesn’t mean that the method needs to be scrapped entirely, perhaps following the impetus of this article we should be encouraged to think more reflexively about genealogy as a critical methodology which is itself historically situated. It may also direct us to thinking of the cultural limits to genealogy (recalling not only Foucault’s insistence that genealogy be directed at Europeans in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, but the very fact that Nietzsche’s construction of the genealogical method followed from an earlier criticism that of the excessive concern Europeans have with history). For example, would genealogy be less effective a tool on us North Americans, whose national identity is based so fundamentally on possibility and progress (the American dream), than to Europeans? Perhaps also we should be encouraged to think about how genealogy might be re-tooled in order to operate more effectively within the contemporary security environment. Indeed these are not simple questions to answer, but perhaps considerations to bear in mind as we progress in our future investigations.
19 October 2010, 20:34
Andrew Neal says
Dear Sven and Chris,
Thank you for your very thoughtful comments. You both have raised some quite profound questions about method, temporality and security that go beyond the content of the article and have implications for our collective project.
Before I continue, I must make a few rather negative comments. I found the article intensely irritating to read! I don't understand why it's necessary to write in such an obfuscatory, circular and 'affected' manner. It seems to be something of a disease in this particular genre. Perhaps somebody can explain the sociology of this kind of affected and obfuscatory writing to me.
Secondly, I'm still not entirely sure what affect means. It seems to be a noun, a verb and an adjective all at once. If as Clough puts it, Massumi defines affect as 'the capacity to affect or be affected - not an action but a capacity for activation', then it seems to be not a verb (a doing), but a capacity to do something or to have something done to you. But when the word affect is used in this literature it seems to imply something else that is more akin to a noun, some kind of thing, and not just a capacity to do or to be done by. As far as I can tell that noun is not an actual thing, but a virtual thing. It is something pre-conscious and in some way emotional or at least visceral. I assume the question 'does affect exist?' is rather redundant in this case. What about the question: 'is affect phenomenal or noumenal?', to use Kantian terminology. Again, this seems to be redundant.
From here I appreciate Sven's comments that affect seems to belong to something of a 'para-science' or perhaps 'pseudo-science'. I imagine this is much like the status of psychoanalysis, which many consider has no scientific basis. Perhaps to continue this comparison, affect is something like 'ego' or 'id'. In other words it is an assumed concept that forms the basis for a theory, and is what enables that theory to work. If one questions those terms then the theoretical endeavour based on them is not possible. It is perhaps as Foucault called it, 'a positive unconscious of knowledge' that makes a science possible but can't be questioned.
Now I'm not saying: 'if it can't be measured it's not science'. Science often proceeds on the basis of theoretical assumptions before the fact. Einstein theorised the splitting of the atom long before it was seen, and there are numerous efforts currently underway to detect both the 'graviton' and 'Higgs boson' particle, which have never been observed but must be assumed to exist for current models of physics to work. I guess 'dark matter' is the same.
So, if affect is not a thing, but a theoretical assumption that is needed to make sense of some aspect of social or psychological life, then what is helpful about this concept for our purposes?
Affect seems quite helpful as a way of giving a name to something pre-cognitive, pre-rational or even pre-emotional. To me this seems quite a bit like what Bourdieu is trying to convey in the notion of 'dispositions' and 'practical reason'.
Fear does seem to be a good example, in that it can shape thought and action unconsciously. Fear is also a good example because it captures something else about 'affect' that seems interesting: uncertain notions of the future. Because they are uncertain and do not necessarily follow in a linear or causal way from the present or the past (and our assumption about it), they could take many forms that we are not yet aware of. But nevertheless we anticipate them, and this has an effect (an 'affect'?) on us. In this sense they are 'virtual'.
Again, to put it in the context of something I know and understand, it is a bit like what Schmitt does in Political Theology with the idea of the exception: something that we don't know, that is nevertheless possible and should have a profound effect on the present as we prepare for it and anticipate it (although of course Schmitt's version is massively overdetermined by his sovereign politics).
What I potentially like about the concept of 'affect', if I understand it at all, is that it conveys what Bourdieu tries to do with 'disposition' but with reference to anticipated futures rather than the historical and social constitution of the subject and his mentality in the past. It seems to relate to what Bourdieu is trying to say here in 'Structures, habitus, practices' (p.53), but perhaps in a less extreme sense:
‘But these responses are first defined, without any calculation, in relation to objective personalities, immediately inscribed in the present, things to do or not to do, things to say or not to say, in relation to a probable, ‘upcoming’ future, which - in contrast to the future seen as ‘absolute possibility’ in Hegel’s (or Satre’s) sense, projected by the pure project of a ‘negative freedom’ – puts itself forward with an urgency and a claim to existence that excludes all deliberation’
Affect could then be quite a useful way of understanding the relationship of present mentalities with the potential/possible/virtual futures of security threats/risks. And these virtualities can affect the present without ever actually taking place. In this sense I like the idea that future and present are part of the same event.
I once had an idea of reading particular anti-terrorist laws as temporal snapshots. A law is made at a particular point in time, but it represents the feared/imagined virtual future that was active when the law was made. Laws in response to 9/11 for example, not only responded to what had already happened, but more importantly to the fear of what might happen. Even if that anticipated future didn't come to pass, that virtual future still shapes our current present (which is an actual future that is different from the virtual one previously anticipated). Perhaps this is something like what Massumi means with the idea of 'remainder' left over from this 'affective' circuit of futures and presents.
To respond to Sven and Chris's points:
1. What does this mean for methodology? Well first of all it is extremely difficult to study dispositions towards virtual futures, especially if they are pre-conscious and never become actual. As Sven puts it, 'How can one grasp “something” that is beyond signification and beyond narration?'.
And also, we as researchers cannot stand outside this march of virtual/actual futures. Although I assume we already know this, not least from our discussion of the difference between 'genealogy' and 'archaeology' in Dreyfus and Rabinow, the one being situated and the other being more concerned with some kind of 'objective laws' of discourse.
At least though, as Chris suggests, history leaves us with traces to unearth, map and interpret. What traces do virtual futures leave? They do leave some (i.e. the anti-terrorism law example) that we can study, but they don't necessarily leave traces of the pre-conscious 'feeling' or effect (for want of a better word) that 'affect' describes.
2. Temporality. Sven writes this: 'There is a temporality of affect, a temporality ontologically immanent to affect. This temporality is described as the temporality of the virtual: affect harbours the future possibilities immanent to a certain situation, it is incorporated potential.' This is very helpful. We have a problem not just of 'the future', and not just of 'possibilities', but of how those possibilities become incorporated into the present. Bourdieu calls this 'embodiment' but only really thinks about it as the cumulative, constitutive effect of the past in individuals.
3. Security. I'm rather sceptical of Clough's notion of governing affect. Government for her seems to veer towards a homogenous force rather than something dispersed, local and/or specific. And as Sven suggests, her notion of security government does not seem very new if it is only the population management, risk analysis etc. that we find in Foucault's historical 'Security, territory, population'. For something that is meant to be unconscious, there seems too much of a conscious governmental manipulation implied in these governmentalities.
So my questions/points to you my friends are:
1. Have I understood affect and can you help me out here?! Please can you answer the question: 'what is affect?'
2. It does seem to capture something important about futures and their effect on the present that is not captured by the historically-oriented notions of Foucault and Bourdieu, challenging 'genealogy' as Chris suggests.
3. I'm reluctant to sweep this up into a grand historical narrative about a new age. This seems very un-Foucaultian to me, in the sense that it risks becoming totalising. We can't and should not describe the grand sweep of history, but rather focus on empirical detail, even if this is much more complicated than some kind of positivism or objectivism. I'm a bit worried that this is what Chris means with his concern that 'the past is not what it used to be' (I'm paraphrasing).
best wishes,
Andrew
21 October 2010, 11:42
Philippe Bonditti says
Dear all,
It is just great reading you having such a fruitful discussion. First, I want to stress the fact that I much more enjoyed reading your comments than Clough’s paper. To make it clear from the beginning and answer Chris’ questions: I think Clough remains fully trapped in positivist sociology and I don’t think she has any sense of critic, neither Kantian nor Marxist critic.
Like Andrew, I am especially sceptical regarding Clough’s paper, which in my view ends up with a series of deep naturalization - the naturalization of “affect” (as Andrew points out) being only one among others – even though she pretends trying to move away from any naturalizing-type academic research. Not only Clough seems to naturalize affect but she also seems to treat affect as “something” relatively homogeneous when she talks about “the affect of a population” (p. 50)… Waoua! I am afraid I have no answer to your question, Andrew: I have no idea what affect is. Clough mainly uses it as a noun and seems to believe that it is “something like a capacity on which we could (should?, waoua again!) act upon” (“manipulation of the affect”, p. 51). And I do have the same feeling that she uses the term to deal with “someting pre-cognitive, pre-rational or even pre-emotional” (Andrew) which do actually makes me think about some kind of weird para-sciences (Sven)
Clough’s pretends to have a twofold argument. On the one hand she wants to argue that “the relationship between governance and economy has become a matter of modulating the affective background” (p. 48), understanding this shift as being part of a broader one toward more pre-emptive politics. On the other hand she argues that, for this same reason, sociological method needs to address the affective dimensions of life.
First, it should be noticed that Clough does not deal at all with the relationship between governance and economy and does not show at all why and how this governance-economy diptych turned out to be oriented in such a way that pre-emptive logics became so important/ predominant in (contemporary) politics, and affective dimensions of life so crucial in (contemporary) politics. Clough mentions digitization, but does not tell us how it is to be correlated to the reconfiguration of the governance-economy diptych while I think it is a crucial aspect of the contemporary reconfigurations of governmentality which primarily affect ;-)/ impact the relationship between governance and economy. She basically takes all this for granted although arguing that she is aiming at showing it. This is not my main concern in this paper, but I thought it was worth to be mentioned as I think that Clough raises something (relation between governance and economy and the relation to pre-emption) which in my view is really interesting, but does not address it in a satisfying way.
Second, Clough’s paper is kind of annoying when it comes to the argument – if I understood it well – that for the reason contemporary security politics target “affects”, then sociological method has to engage with affect, just as if sociology was ill-equipped to do that already. From Bourdieu to more historical sociology by Elias, sociology is in fact relatively well equipped if we want to stick with sociology to engage with those aspects – as she seems to be willing to. Whatever she argues deriving from Massumi (who, by the way, is much more interesting), it is not so clear in my view that Clough manages to consider those “affects” as being fully social. She strongly argues that they are, claiming that “the turn to affect is no return to a pre-social body” (p. 48) and that “affect is open-endedly social” (quoting Massumi here). But after reading the paper, my overall sensation was that, for the purpose of substantiating her argument, she tends to extract what she calls affect from what she calls the social, naturalizing both affect and the social and depoliticizing the all thing by the same token (where is politics in all this???).
Clough seems to have the same sensation and leaves aside quickly – too quickly – the question of the “social” to claim, deriving from Simondon (who we should also read by the way) that affect is a pre-individual background which needs to be apprehended as something fully potential. She thus brings time into the picture, raising then crucial issues which make me think that a lot is going on behind this paper anyway: equipping (sociological) method with the capacity to engage not only with the non-human (cf. Latour) but also with the non-material and non-effective or non-actual dimensions of life. This is in my view the very interesting question at the heart of her paper. But her again, I really feel like Clough’s suggestions are not worth the crucial questions she asks.
It is obviously a very old question which Aristotle had raised a long time ago, distinguishing the potential from the actual infinite in his discussion about the infinitude. Much closer to us, many have raised the same question from many different perspectives and with many different purposes: Henri Bergson (with his discussion about the vital force?/ élan vital as well as about the division between the possible and the real), and Deleuze being two among so many others.
Unfortunately, when Clough engages with this question, she does it with a rather traditional – though extremely powerful – understanding of three sets of series: past-present-future, possibility-activation-reality, possibility-statistics-probability (making it strange that she derives her arguments for Simondon, Deleuze, Foucault, or Massumi). She is not very at ease with all this and clearly has the sensation that she is working within a linear understanding of time while pursuing something that goes beyond these categories. She thus tries to disguise this such claims as: “affects draws the future in the present” (p. 49) or, even better, “threat in the future causes fear in the present” (p. 49). But “threat” is not in the future but about the possible futures. Threat is something fully potential in the present about the future with strong effects in the present. A narrative about threats is never a narrative about the future but always about contingency, which explains why it fits so well with the risk narrative, the ontology of the worst case scenario and the governmentality by fear... Obviously, the terrorist threat is as radically different from 9/11 than potentiality is different from the event. This is something in which I am especially interested. How can we methodologically assess not jut the event, not just the making of the event (genealogy) but the very potentiality of things which turn out to become real/ actual – or not?
This is where I found Clough’s paper extremely interesting (again more in terms of the questions she asks than the answers she offers). We may find some preliminary answers in Bergson with the idea that we never have the possibility and then the reality but the contrary. The possibility only exist once we get a reality. Deleuze, makes it even more complex by adding a division between the possible and the virtual (both being potential). The first one becoming real, the second becoming actual. 9/11 as the actualization of a virtuality while so many other possibilities the Intelligence agencies warned us about never got real?
Why is it so important in my view that we try to engage more systematically with the potential – or at least, try to equip ourselves to take into account the potential – more than the affect?: it is true that as political scientists, political theorists, sociologists or whatever, our first move is to take into account what is actual and taken for granted as such: a particular narrative, a series of legal disposition, a specific individual or collective “behaviour”, a peculiar architectural disposition, a particular sets of techniques deployed by some agents somewhere for a particular purpose… And we do engage with these effective/ actual realities (maybe phenomal to put it in Kantian terms), certainly with a pre-formated theoretical background (which, by the same token, had shaped those effective/actual realities in a series of very specific ways) but also with our tools, mainly asking the question of how it turned out that these realities came to us in the particular form of the actual being. Here, I think we do not only ask the kantian question of the noumenal but also the question of the potentiality: did these realities exist potentially? And if so, did they exist before they came to us in the actual manner we experience them or are we shaping these potentialities from the present time in which we experience them?
Well, not sure all these comments about Clough’s paper will help us at all... A few additional remarks:
1. Regarding fear – which is definitively something very interesting: we should have a look at the work of Jean Delumeau (French historian who wrote about how fears have been shaped and regulated)
2. More in relation to “affect”, we could also have a look at Norbert Elias work on the modification of aggressiveness and the internalisation of norms
3. This background Clough mentions when she talks about “affects” should convince us to read Searle, Foucault as always (with the regimes of truth), and also Bourdieu to a certain extent (with the question of the mental dispositions for the symbolic power to operate).
4. Like Sven, I do believe that: “Clough fails to account for the particularity of this shift (toward pre-emption). Exaggerating a bit, one could say that since the religious prophets and the oracle of Delphi humans have always been occupied with the future in their strategic practice. Therefore one has to specify Cloughs account of pre-emption”. There is nothing new here. For this reason, like Andrew, I am especially reluctant to any grand narrative about novelty, including about a new empiricism…
5. Finally, I especially liked Chris point: “we should be encouraged to think more reflexively about genealogy as a critical methodology which is itself historically situated.” This in my view is extremely important. And, by the way, I still don’t understand why Clough did not mention anywhere how she articulates the perspective she defends to such technics like reflexivism or self-objectivation...
3 November 2010, 03:28
Sven Opitz says
Hey guys,
Reading your comments, I came to the conclusion that we should always discuss controversial texts. What a fruitful discussion!
I just wanted to share some passages from an interview with Massumi. I selected these two paragraphs, because they correspond with some of the questions we’ve raised in our discussion (not least Andrew’s friendly appeal for further clarification of affect: What is this?). At least, I can see relations to three main points:
1) As Foucauldians, we all share a certain unease with what some of you have called a tendency towards naturalization in this account of affect. I think the first quote shows that this unease is justified, since coming from Spinoza apparently means: In the realm of bodily existence, affect IS THERE, it is irreducibly there, it animates the formation of entities. Massumi assumes an ontology of affect, and Clough follows him. An ontology of affect is an relational ontology, since matter seems to be only matter in its intensive relation(s) to other matter. There is no being of matter as such.
2) The first quote also shows that Massumi has a very broad notion of affect. Affect signifies the potential of a body. The last sentences of the quote clearly confirm Andrew’s suspicion that there are relations in Deleuze/Massumi to Bourdieu (habit, corporeal memory) – I think, this connection stems from the fact that both are interested in a certain strand of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty in Boudieu’s case; Simondon, as Philippe reminded us, in Massumi’s). (Maybe we should try to “sociollogize” these Deleuzian thinkers by explicating their relations to Bourdieu, Foucault etc., thereby highlighting their methodological potential… – this could be a good idea for a paper…)
3) Last but not least, the second quote also draws on topics of fear and insecurity that are relevant for us. Clough’s main theses obviously stems from Massumi.
Okay, enough talk-talk, here are the quotes by Massumi – I`ll put the whole interview on our webpage:
"By ‘affect’ I don’t mean ‘emotion’ in the everyday sense. The way I use it comes primarily from Spinoza. He talks of the body in terms of its capacity for affecting or being affected. These are not two different capacities — they always go together. When you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment before. You have made a transition, however slight. You have stepped over a threshold. Affect is this passing of a threshold, seen from the point of view of the change in capacity. It’s crucial to remember that Spinoza uses this to talk about the body. What a body is, he says, is what it can do as it goes along. This is a totally pragmatic definition. A body is defined by what capacities it carries from step to step. What these are exactly is changing constantly. A body’s ability to affect or be affected — its charge of affect — isn’t something fixed. So depending on the circumstances, it goes up and down gently like a tide, or maybe storms and crests like a wave, or at times simply bottoms out. It’s because this is all attached to the movements of the body that it can’t be reduced to emotion. It’s not just subjective, which is not to say that there is nothing subjective in it. Spinoza says that every transition is accompanied by a feeling of the change in capacity. The affect and the feeling of the transition are not two different things. They’re two sides of the same coin, just like affecting and being affected. That’s the first sense in which affect is about intensity — every affect is a doubling. The experience of a change, an affecting-being affected, is redoubled by an experience of the experience. This gives the body’s movements a kind of depth that stays with it across all its transitions — accumulating in memory, in habit, in reflex, in desire, in tendency. Emotion is the way the depth of that ongoing experience registers personally at a given moment.”
„At any rate, the hope that might come with the feeling of potentialisation and enablement we discussed is doubled by insecurity and fear. Increasingly power functions by manipulating that affective dimension rather than dictating proper or normal behaviour from on high. So power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms, it’s affective. The mass media have an extremely important role to play in that. The legitimisation of political power, of state power, no longer goes through the reason of state and the correct application of governmental judgment. It goes through affective channels. (…) This has all become painfully apparent after the World Trade Center attacks. You had to wait weeks after the event to hear the slightest analysis in the US media. It was all heart-rending human interest stories of fallen heroes, or scare stories about terrorists lurking around every corner. What the media produced wasn’t information or analysis. It was affect modulation — affective pick-up from the mythical ‘man in the street’, followed by affective amplification through broadcast. Another feedback loop. It changes how people experience what potentials they have to go and to do. The constant security concerns insinuate themselves into our lives at such a basic, habitual level that you’re barely aware how it’s changing the tenor of everyday living. You start ‘instinctively’ to limit your movements and contact with people. It’s affectively limiting. That affective limitation is expressed in emotional terms — remember we were making a distinction between affect and emotion, with emotion being the expression of affect in gesture and language, its conventional or coded expression.”
17 November 2010, 11:06