‘But malice aforethought’ considers the affective life that is to be found in modern
cities, concentrating on the idea that sociality does not have to mean that citizens
automatically like each other. Indeed, modern cities are drenched in dislike and
even hatred, and I argue that this misanthropic fact needs to be taken fully into
account in any narrative and politics of affect. Finally, ‘Turbulent passions’
considers how we might better understand the realm of political feeling by
concentrating on the affective technologies through which masses of people
become primed to act. I argue that this is a pressing political task, given that the
systematic manipulation of ‘motivational propensity’ has become a key political
technology. But in order to arrive at a diagnosis of the affective swash of the
present, I argue that social science needs to draw on approaches that are willing
to countenance a formative role for the biological. I therefore turn to two strands
of work, one that directly revalues the biological, the other that calls on ethological
models and analogies. Using these different but connected strands of work, I
am able to move to such a diagnosis. My argument is that a series of affective tech-
nologies that were previously used mainly in the corporate sphere to work on
consumer anxiety, obsession and compulsion are now being moved over into
the political sphere with mainly deleterious consequences. However, this process
of transmission also suggests some interesting counter-politics based on the cultiva-
tion of contrary affective motion, not what Appadurai (2006) calls the ‘runaway
acts of mutual stimulation’ which are so prevalent in a media-saturated age but
something much more interesting.
26 Life, but not as we know it