Sloterdijk suggests, on the basis of this analysis, that what is needed is an ‘air-
conditioning project’ that can sweep through the gentle, all-absorbing hum of
the totally managed and domesticated spatial environments of current social entities,
entities which are entangled in a paradox of heightened isolation and heightened
connection (Latour 2006). The challenge is how to achieve the ventilationof the
atmospheres of modern life (Sloterdijk 2006). Is it possible to change the socio-
spatial terms of trade by providing new environments in which novel doctrines
of living can thrive, environments which will provide the breathing space with which
democracy can be re-invented, just as the original Athenian democracy was criti-
cally dependent upon the city and ‘the pre-logical or pre-discursive premises of
the art of urban co-existence’ that were able to be constructed from it, premises
that were the result of ‘the skilful application of anti-misanthropic procedures’
(Sloterdijk 2005c: 9 47 ) that included, most especially, explicit affective engineering.
Significantly, for Sloterdijk, one of the ways of constructing such new ‘aired’
environments (Latour 2006) may be by reviving metaphors of contagion and
infection which once circulated as ways of understanding relationships of together-
ness and intermingling, metaphors which can also function as means of capturing
attentiveness (Ten Bos and Kaulingfreks 2002).
In what follows, I want to combine these different but related bodies of work
by focusing on the vexed topic of affect, understood especially as a function of the
workings of capitalism. In particular, I want to consider how disposition itself
is being changed by more and more explicit engineering of affect. Then, in turn,
I want to look at how the lessons learnt are being transferred to the political sphere.
Understanding affective contagion
What is particularly hard to cope with in writing about affect is not so much its
insubstantial nature as finding a model that can encompass its powers. As I have
pointed out, that model must be, in part, biological, which adds to the challenge.
What seems clear now is that such a task must mean attempting to understand
affective contagion, for affect spreads, sometimes like wildfire. This was a central
concern of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century social science in the form of the study
of imitation and suggestibility. Imitation and suggestibility took shape as par-
ticular kinds of object through a hypnotic paradigm which worked themselves
out through an interest in particular forms of psychopathology (such as halluci-
nations and delusions), and an interest in spiritualist forms of communication.
Imitation and suggestibility were sites for exploring all manner of issues, such
as consciousness, memory, personality, and communication. In particular they
signified a ‘taking over’ of the subject that defied normal economies of subject-
object relations. However, subsequently, a move to psychoanalytic models
of desire, or to more discursive approaches to subjectivity, ruled imitation and
suggestibility out of court and they fell into disrepair as a way of approaching social
structuring.
But, of late, imitation and suggestibility have been making a return. Within
cultural theory, viral models of contagion have been posited as explaining the
Turbulent passions 235