changes, as in a whiff of the room’s atmosphere, some longer lasting. In other
words, the transmission of affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry
of the subject. The ‘atmosphere’ or the environment literally gets into the
individual. Physically or biologically, something is present that was not there
before, but it did not originate sui generis: it was not generated solely or
sometimes even in part by the individual organism or its genes.
(Brennan 200 4 : 1)Notice here how Brennan does not assume that the transmission of affect is from
individual to individual, contained within one skin and being moved to another.
Rather, that transmission is a property of particular spaces soaked with one or a
combination of affects to the point where space and affect are often coincident.
Thus, as I hope is clear, I will be following a broadly posthumanist agenda. I
am not, on the whole, interested in individuals but rather in how particular hybrid
compositions attain and keep coherence, become bodies of influence, so to speak.
Thus, my interest is in trying to answer questions like ‘What would the study of
affect look like if it did not focus on the subject and subjectivity?’ ‘How do political
formations generate affect?’ and ‘To what extent is affect a political form in itself?’
However, as I have made clear in Chapter 6, I would not want to take this agenda
to its limits. I believe that singular bodies can make an inventive difference which
is sometimes of a different order from other hybrids. In certain situations, these
bodies can stand out of the crowd as monad-like nodes of performativity con-
structed by the mass before falling back into the mass,^3 as certain individuals seem
capable of achieving for longer or shorter periods (see Elliott and Lemert 2006).
But, equally, all kinds of other bodies are possible. There are, in other words, no
stable ways to be a human being because ‘“human” is not the name of a substance,
in the Aristotelian sense of the term, but the name of a relation, of a certain position
in relation to other possible positions’ (Viveiros de Castro 2005: 155).
And why the emphasis on affect? Because there is a political diagnosis to be
made. Most obviously, this is a time of great political passions on both right and
left (Nelson 2006). But more importantly, it seems to me that we are living in a
time of greater and greater authoritarianism. But this is an authoritarian capitalism
which relies on sentiment, media, and lack of attention and/or engagement to
most political issues to hold sway, a capitalist socialism or, at least, a neo-authori-
tarian new deal whose main interest is in accelerating innovation. At this moment
in time, or so it seems to me, the left has very little purchase on how to combat
this post-liberal form which privileges media (news) time and election time over
historical time (Runciman 2006), not least because it has so little purchase on how
this form is able to use alternative modes of affective intelligence to produce
compelling political impressions. Too often it falls back on the orthodox politics
of resentment of left radicalism which has become an increasingly sterile political
repertoire whose appeals to unity simply repeat the old terms of succession within
a foreclosed ‘radical’ community intent on the pleasures of victimization (Amin
and Thrift 2005a). The only alternative to left moralism often seems to be a
mystique of protest which can call forth ‘a community of angry saints in which the
222 Part III