Changing the political
What might these four developments and others like them mean for the practice
of the political (and by implication the definition of the political itself)? In what I
hope is a recognizable echo of the papers by Ash Amin and Doreen Massey,
I would want to point to a number of shifts, each of which points to new intensities
and speeds which have heretofore not so much been neglected as rather been kept
firmly in the realm of either the utterly practical or heavily theoretical realms. But
now all kinds of corporate and state institutions are trying to formulate bodies of
knowledge of these realms which are both systematic and portable, knowledges
of complex affective states of becoming, ‘regimes of feeling’ which are bound
to be constitutive of new political practices. It therefore becomes incumbent on
those forces which regard these developments as rather worrying – and indeed as
likely to produce a new kind of velvet dictatorship – to produce their own analyses
and political agendas. As part of the general move towards thinking democracy
as a processof ‘community without unity’ (Castronovo and Nelson 2003), I want
to try to address this task.
However, how to frame such an agenda? In a general sense, one might argue
that the goal is a kind of ‘emotional liberty’. But this goal must be tempered by
the familiar realization, going back to Plato and before, that the untrammelled
expression of emotions is not necessarily a good thing at all. In other words, what
is being aimed for is a navigation of feeling which goes beyond the simple roman-
ticism of somehow maximizing individual emotions. That navigation must involve
at least three moments. First of all, it needs to be placed within a set of disciplinary
exercises if it is to be an effective force, taking in the various forms of agonistic
and ethical reflexivity that Foucault grouped under ‘care of the self ’, forms of
reflexivity that were intended to produce ‘an athlete of the event’ (cited in Rabinow
2003: 9). It will therefore de factoinvolve various forms of channelling and
‘repression’. Second, it requires a more general expressive exploration of existential
territories of the kind that Guattari gives at least a flavour of when he writes:
there is an ethical choice in favour of the richness of the possible, an ethics
and politics of the virtual that decorporealizes and deterritorializes contin-
gency, linear causality and the pressure of circumstances and significations
which besiege us. It is a choice for processuality, irreversibility and resingular-
ization. On a small scale, this redeployment can turn itself into the mode
of entrapment, of impoverishment, indeed of catastrophe in neurosis. It can
take up reactive religious references. It can annihilate itself in alcohol, drugs,
television, an endless daily grind. But it can also make use of other procedures
that are more collective, more social, more political.
(Guattari 1992: 9 4 )Third, the more specific means of framing this agenda might be as a politics of
hope (Bloch 1986).
Whatever the case, it is quite clear that there are enormous emotional costs and
benefits for individuals in being shaped by particular institutions in particular ways
188 Part III