Four different notions of affect, then. Each of them depends on a sense of push
in the world but the sense of push is subtly different in each case. In the case of
embodied knowledge, that push is provided by the expressive armoury of the
human body. In the case of affect theory it is provided by biologically differen-
tiated positive and negative affects rather than the drives of Freudian theory.
In the world of Spinoza and Deleuze, affect is the capacity of interaction that
is akin to a natural force of emergence. In the neo-Darwinian universe, affect is
a deep-seated physiological change involuntarily written on the face. How
might we think about the politics of affect, given that these different notions
would seem to imply different cues and even ontologies? To begin with, we need
to think about general changes in the affective tone of Euro-American cultures
that are busily redefining the political landscape. That is the function of the next
section.
The politics of affect
Of course, affect has always been a key element of politics and the subject of
numerous powerful political technologies which have knotted thinking, technique
and affect together in various potent combinations. One example is the mar-
shalling of aggression through various forms of military trainings like drill. From
the seventeenth century onwards these kinds of trainings have become more and
more sophisticated, running in lockstep with ‘advances’ in military technology.
These trainings were used to condition soldiers and other combatants to kill, even
though it seems highly unlikely that this would be the normal behaviour of most
people on the battlefield. These trainings involved bodily conditionings which
allowed fear to be controlled. They allowed anger and other aggressive emotions
to be channelled into particular situations. They damped down revenge killings
during bursts of rage. And they resulted in particular effects (e.g. increased firing
rates and higher kill ratios) which the military had not been achieving heretofore
(see Grossman 1996; Bourke 2000; Keegan 19 7 6).
This may appear to many to be an extreme example. But I think it is illustrative
of a tendency towards the greater and greater engineering of affect, notwith-
standing the many covert emotional histories that are only now beginning to
be recovered (cf. Berlant 2000). Similar kinds of thing have been happening in
many other arenas of social life, whether on a domestic or other scale, sufficient
to suggest that the envelope of what we call the political must increasingly expand
to take note of ‘the way that political attitudes and statements are partly con-
ditioned by intense autonomic bodily reactions that do not simply reproduce the
trace of a political intention and cannot be wholly recuperated within an ideological
regime of truth’ (Spinks 2001: 23). In this section I want to illustrate how this
envelope is expanding in cities by reference to four developments. The first of
these developments consists of the general changes in the formof such politics
which are taking place in the current era, changes which make affect a more and
more visible element of the political. In particular, I want to point towards so-
called ‘agencies of choice’ and ‘mixed-action repertoires’ in line with a general
182 Part III