is, they are powered by automatisms: the body is the medium for the transmission
of force but without any conscious volition. Unconscious ‘thoughts’ cause the
bulk of actions. Described in this way, the study of such auto-feelings has a long
history which goes back until at least the eighteenth century. But what I think is
different now is that these feelings are increasingly available to be worked on and
cultivated through a kind of performance management, as I will show below in
the case of business and politics (Ross 2006).^32
Now it is, of course, perfectly possible to ramp up affects like anxiety, obsession,
and compulsion in dangerous ways. They can be related, for example through
psychoanalytic analyses, to the death instinct and the fear of annihilation, to various
splits in the subject involving the externalization of what are internal situations
(the projection of the self), and so on, producing in turn a general diagnosis of
Western civilization as most especially based on ‘firework’ affects like fear (Robin
2004 ) or anger, and on their overt results such as the kinds of inflamed imaginaries
that produce conspiracy theories, millenarianism, and the like. Equally, it is possible
to start linking these affects to all kinds of other affects – like melancholy or guilt
or shame – in the process producing a never-ending compendium of misery
which has the same cumulative effect of producing a glacier of all too capable
incapability. And finally, it is possible to paint these affects as purely negative when
they can have positive aspects. Take the case of anxiety and political judgement.
Marcus, Neuman and Mackuen (2000) show how anxiety can be a means of
sensing political dangers, informing people who rely on routine responses that
these routines need re-assessment. In other words, it can act as an automatism
that, in making people feel uncomfortable, spurs them to re-assess a situation. No
wonder that in political terms, anxiety is often portrayed positively as a condition
of the vigilance that so many years ago Thomas Paine argued was the burden of
a free people (Brader 2006).
So, bearing these caveats in mind, I want to link these three affects more closely
in to everyday life. In doing so, I am certainly not trying to deny that the stronger
‘firework’ affects like anger and fear do not have their say in the interstices of the
everyday – consider only the play of domestic violence or the massive incidence of
self-harm as a counter to that kind of argument, yet alone other violent incidents
of various kinds (see Chapter 9).^33 Rather, I want to signal anxiety, obsession,
and compulsion as outcomes of a different condition, one that is shackled to the
subject’s often unconscious sense of corporeal vulnerability in time which is in
part the atmosphere of a particular habitat and thus cannot be undone by simple
behavioural changes. In other words, I want to see these affects as a part of ‘the
very condition through which people relate to the world’ (Salecl 200 4 : 15), affirmed
by their own presence and not bracketed by meaning (Gumbrecht 200 4 ).
But how do people relate to the world? Of late, it has become almost a standard
account that human life is based on a creative corporeality which displays an almost
continuous intentionality; a constant release of energy, if you like. Writers as
different in theoretical background as hard-line phenomenologists, for whom
consciousness is the measure of the world, and hard-line postructuralists, who
abjure any mention of the subject, are united by their emphasis on the ‘bliss of
Turbulent passions 241