who would be most likely to win. But it is still a halting process to join prospects
to actual political allegiances. For example, the construction of integrated databases
has proved a challenge. A key variable is age and this is usually inferred simply from
first names. Additionally, all parties are experimenting with internet-related
techniques. As one instance, the Conservative Party has become interested in
building or tapping into internet communities, though with the difficulty that
there are no easy correlates for the affective issues that arouse the passions of so
many US citizens (such as gun-owning, gay marriage, and the like). Finally, all
parties are using party conferences as explicit machines for manipulating public
mood by importing various US means of presenting affective messages that convey
a ‘mass intimacy’ (Faucher-King 2005).
Conclusions: towards new ecologies of belonging
I have tried to begin to show that the challenge of affect is, at least in part, a
challenge to what we regard as the social because it involves thinking about waves
of influence which depend upon biology to an extent that is rarely recognized or
theorized in the social sciences. Whether that means that we need to discard the
notion of the social, moving into a world of constantly multiplying collectives, as
in actor-network theory – which is now claimed as Tarde’s direct descendant –
or whether it means reversing the usual direction of causality and claiming that
biology can have dominion over the social or whether it means that the social
is seen as determining the biological seems less important at this point than the
simple move to acknowledge that the biological cannot be set to one side as
though it somehow inhabited another background realm rather than being a key
moment of the invention of performance and the performance of invention. Of
course, it could be argued that such a move has already been discovered in certain
areas of theory and practice, and most notably in parts of performance studies and
environmental discourse. If that is true, it is a point that still seems to be doggedly
resisted in many parts of the social sciences and humanities where the biological
is rarely pulled through into the frame.
But, as I have tried to show, the political stakes are too high to continue on
such a course of neglect. In particular, understanding affect as imitation-suggestion
cannot be laid to one side. Of course, politics has always involved deploying affect.
But I think it can be argued – as I certainly have – that the suite of practically
formulated political technologies developed recently for deploying affect have
never been so powerful, never so likely to bite, because in a highly mediated world
imitation-suggestion is so much easier to trigger and diffuse, and is so much more
likely to have grip at a distance. If that is indeed so, we need to start formulating
new kinds of counter-politics that can combat the increasingly toxic post-liberal
forms that are proliferating around the world. The elements of that counter-politics
are becoming clearer over time – an emphasis on a politics of small things which
is neither apologetic nor cramped (Goldfarb 2006), on hope and also on a certain
kind of aggression (Anderson 2006; Elliott and Lemert 2006), on the forms of
struggle and organization as important in their own right (and especially new forms
252 Part III