Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions

203 Pages·2014·1.03 MB·English

by  Ben Anderson

EncountEring AffEct
To Edith, Stanley and Rach
Encountering Affect
capacities, Apparatuses, conditions
BEn AndErson
Durham University, UK
© Ben Anderson 2014
All rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Ben Anderson has asserted his right under the copyright, designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Anderson, Ben, 1972-
Encountering affect : capacities, apparatuses, conditions / by Ben Anderson.
pages cm
includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-7024-7 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-3777-8 (ebook) --
ISBN 978-1-4724-3778-5 (epub) 1. Affect (Psychology) 2. Emotions. I. Title.
Bf175.5.A35A53 2014
152.4--dc23
2013049438
ISBN 978-0-7546-7024-7 (hbk)
ISBN 978-1-4724-3777-8 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN 978-1-4724-3778-5 (ebk – ePUB)
II
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Affective Life 1
1.1 Hope and Other Affects 1
1.2 Promises, Imperatives 5
1.3 What is Affect? 8
1.4 Organising and Mediating Affective Life 14
1.5 Problematics: Object-Target, Bodily Capacity,
Collective Condition 18
2 Apparatuses 23
2.1 Object-Targets 23
2.2 Manipulation and the Politics of ‘Affect Itself’ 25
2.3 Apparatuses 31
2.4 Morale in a State of Total War 37
2.5 The Excess of Power 48
3 Versions 51
3.1 Debility, Dependency, Dread 51
3.2 Keep Hope Alive 54
3.3 Materialisations 58
3.4 ‘I Love You. You Love Me’ 62
3.5 Creating Unliveable Life 66
3.6  The Necessity but Insufficiency of Critique      71
3.7 Afterword: A Dream 76
4 The Imbrication of Affect 77
4.1 Everything is Affective 77
4.2 ‘Capacities to Affect and be Affected’ and Emotions 79
4.3 How is Affect Non-Representational? 84
4.4 Hope and the Contingency of Affective Life 93
4.5 The Imbrication of Affect 101
5 Structures of Feeling 105
5.1 Affective Conditions 105
5.2 Mediation and Collective Moods 106
vi Encountering Affect
5.3 Structures of Feeling 115
5.4 Precarity, Catastrophe and Other Structures of Feeling 124
5.5 Structuring Feeling 134
6 Affective Atmospheres 137
6.1 Atmospheres 137
6.2 The Strange Materiality of Atmospheres 138
6.3 Affective Qualities 141
6.4 Atmos-spheres 146
6.5 Atmospheres and Causality 149
6.6 Affective Conditions 160
7 Mediating Affective Life 163
7.1 An Analytics of Affect 163
7.2 Mediating Affective Life 165
Bibliography 171
Index 189
Acknowledgements
My first thanks must go to friends who, as well as a lot more, kept reminding me
that I should be writing this book rather than doing something else, especially
Peter Adey, Stuart Elden and Colin McFarlane. I was usually doing something
else, but I appreciated that they asked where the book was. The book owes much
to conversations over the years with Paul Harrison, Angharad Closs-Stephens,
Adam Holden and other friends at Durham who have helped make the geography
department such an inspiring and supportive place to work over the last 10 years,
in particular Ash Amin, Louise Amoore, Andrew Baldwin, David Bissell, Mike
Crang, Jonny Darling, Bethan Evans, Nicky Gregson, Jenny Laws, Patrick
Murphy, Joe Painter, Gordon Macleod, Ruth Raynor, Rob Shaw, Dan Swanton
and Helen Wilson. The interest in hope, boredom and affect started life in doctoral
work over 10 years ago. I still owe a debt to Gill Valentine and Peter Jackson,
who supervised my PhD in a way that allowed me to follow my interests, even if
they weren’t ones that they necessarily shared. I was also lucky to be doing a PhD
around the same time as Louisa Cadman, who was one of the people responsible
for introducing me to a different Foucault. He probably has no idea about this,
but many of my interests here were first sparked by seminars at Sheffield by
Nick Bingham on actor-network theory. I have been lucky enough to supervise
a great bunch of PhD students, some of whom share an interest in affect, and
are developing work on affect and emotion far beyond this book; Simon Beer,
Ladan Cockshut, Matt Finn, Peter Forman, Rachel Gordon, Emily Jackson,
Charlotte Lee, Patrick Murphy, Eduardo Neve and Nathaniel O’Grady. The book
has also benefited hugely from conversations with a large number of people who
have passed through Durham over the years, have commented on one or more
of its chapters or the manuscript/original proposal, or have just been part of a
supportive milieu, including Jane Bennett, William E. Connolly, Joyce Davidson,
J-D Dewsbury, Mick Dillon, Jason Lim, Derek McCormack, Greg Seigworth,
Nigel Thrift, Keith Woodward and John Wylie. Thanks should also go to Valerie
Rose for her support for the initial idea at a time when affect was very much a
marginal interest and, most of all, for the gracious way she accepted my frequent
apologies at various conferences for the book’s lateness. Finally, thanks to Rach,
Edith and now Stanley for the life we live together. Part of the reason why writing
this book has taken a while is that being with them has been so much more
enjoyable, important and fun.
Section 1.1 includes edited excerpts from Anderson, B. (2013) Affect and
Emotion. In: Johnson, N., Schein, R. and Winders, J. (eds) The Wiley-Blackwell
viii Encountering Affect
Companion to Cultural Geography. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 452–64,
reproduced with permission of Wiley-Blackwell.
Section 2.4 includes an edited version of part of Anderson, B. (2010)
Modulating the Excess of Affect: Morale in a State of Total War. In: Gregg,
M. and Seigworth, G. The Affect and Cultural Theory Reader. Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press. ©2010, Duke University Press. All rights
reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. www.dukeupress.edu. The first
three pages of Section 2.3 include edited excerpts from Anderson, B. and Adey,
P. (2011) Affect and security: Exercising emergency in ‘UK civil contingencies’.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, 1092–1109, reproduced with
permission of Pion Ltd, London (www.pion.co.uk and www.envplan.com)
Section 4.4 includes an edited version of part of Anderson, B. (2006) Becoming
and being hopeful: towards a theory of affect. Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space 24: 733–52, reproduced with permission of Pion Ltd, London
(www.pion.co.uk and www.envplan.com)
Section 6.1, 6.2 and 6.4 include brief edited excerpts from Anderson, B. (2009)
Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society 2: 77–81, reproduced with
permission of Elsevier.
Chapter 1
Affective Life
1.1 Hope and Other Affects
This book is about precarity, optimism, emergency, pressure, debility-dependency-
dread, morale, boredom, urgency and greed. It is about the sensibilities, concepts
and theories needed to understand how these and other affects relate to and become
part of social-spatial relations. And it is about the connections between affective
life and processes of mediation. It is also about hope.
1.1.1 Events of Hope
For 17 days families, friends and then a global media audience waited. Trapped
in the emergency shelter of a collapsed mine 2,300 ft into the earth, 33 Chilean
miners waited to be rescued. During this period, hope was kept alive and lost,
given and received. The first images of the men gave hope to the families who
waited in the self-titled Camp Hope as the ordeal went on. Hope was described by
NASA experts in human confinement as a resource that would enable the miners
to cope deep in the earth. Here is how Carola Narvaez, the wife of Raul Bustos one
of the trapped miners, expresses her hope in the context of a previous disaster, an
earthquake, they had survived together:
In the earthquake we just had to keep on living, we had our lives … this is the
same. It is producing much anguish, isolation, fear. But we’re alive. My husband
is alive down in that mine and we will have another happy ending.1
In his inaugural address to the University of Tübingen in 1961 the Marxist process
philosopher Ernst Bloch, speaking in the shadow of Nazi Germany, asked a simple
question about the event of hope: can hope be disappointed? His answer was
yes, to be hope it must be disappointable. Hopes and hoping open up a point of
contingency in the here and now. Indeed:
[h]ope must be unconditionally disappointable … because it is open in a forward
direction, in a future-orientated direction; it does not address itself to that which
already exists. For this reason, hope – while actually in a state of suspension – is
1 Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/chile/
7969012/Wife-of-Chilean-miner-tells-how-she-survive-earthquake-six-months-ago.html
(last accessed 10 July 2012).