fire of pure opposition burns’, as Sloterdijk (in Funcke 2005: 5) aptly puts it, which
then provides, simply through its existence, an apparent revolutionary justification.
Interestingly, a good part of this community finds its practices confirmed through
a kind of affective charge. However, this alternative seems close to the prevailing
regime too in that it relies on an appeal which is too often simply an appeal to
affective force as if that somehow validated the political analysis. In other words,
we need to find other keys to organizing and enduring which can combat the
motivational propensities now being diffused. So, I am searching for another way
of going on, a different kind of politicalness which has its roots in new intellectual-
practical formations which have cried ‘enough’ to the usual knee-jerk left analyses
and are attempting to re-materialize democracy. Such formations do not rely either
on a politics of resentment or on the kind of ‘spiritualism’ that too often emerges
in its stead, and in their search for a political reanimation they take biology seri-
ously as a key to thinking about the political as a part of a more general search for
political forms that are adequate to current modes of being: forms of multi-
naturalism rather than multiculturalism, if you like (Viveiros de Castro 2005). This
search must be both an experimental and a vigilant activity. After all ‘a subversive
political theory must reveal an empty place that can be filled by practical action.
Any political theory worthy of the name must await the unexpected’ (Virno
2006: 4 2).
This chapter is therefore in five main parts. In the first part, I simply outline the
main ways in which affect has been defined before going on to address the kinds
of thinking about biology that are currently to be found in the social sciences,
broadly defined. These means of thinking about biology provide a platform for
the next part of the chapter which is concerned with understanding affective
contagion: how it is that affect spreads and multiplies, most especially through
imitation. The subsequent part of the chapter then looks at how affect has become
increasingly engineered by concentrating on the corporate sector and especially
the ways in which knowledge of the commodity increasingly includes affective
technologies which are important inventions in their own right. This section acts
as a prolegomenon to the next which deals with the political engineering of affect
by concentrating on those same practices as they are found within the corporate
sector. The chapter ends with a short discussion of the counter-politics of affect.
Scenes of effusion
Broadly speaking, there are five schools of thought about affect that populate
modern social thought (Thrift 200 4 b). The first and most visible of these is the
‘affect program’ theory, derived from a Darwinian interpretation of emotions
(Darwin 1998 [18 7 2]; Ekman 19 7 2; Griffiths 199 7 ) which concentrates on short-
term bodily responses which it is clamed are pan-cultural (that is, present in most
human populations).^4
In its modern form, the affect program theory deals with a range of emotions
corresponding very roughly to the occurrent instances of the English termsTurbulent passions 223