Introduction: Affect and the Anthropology of the State

The aim of this special issue is to bring a critical discussion of affect into debate with the anthropology of the state as a way of working toward a more coherent, ethnographically grounded exploration of affect in political life. We consider how the state becomes a ‘social subject’ in daily life, attending both to the subjective experience of state power and to the affective intensities through which the state is reproduced in the everyday. We argue that the state should be understood not as a ‘fiction’ to be deconstructed, but as constituted and sustained relationally through the claims, avoidances, and appeals that are made toward it and the emotional registers that these invoke. This article situates these arguments theoretically and introduces the subsequent ethnographic essays.

2021

This seminar is an introduction to the subject of affective politics on everyday, national and global level. We tend to talk about politics in terms of power struggle, strategies and tactics, global capitalist system, etc. However, ethnographically, politics is less a rational struggle than an affective situation. Although anthropology has always been attentive to sentiments, systematic and conceptual study of public emotions and affect intensified after the late 1980s and especially in the last two decades. In this course, we will discuss relatively recent anthropological works on emotions, empathy, hospitality, cultural intimacy and affect with a particular focus on mass politics.

Welcome to this second of two roundtables at this year's Annual Meeting of the AAA that we have organized in order to shed light on what anthropology and ethnography may contribute to our understanding of the rise of the far-right and right-wing populism in Europe and the USA. We first start planning this at last year's Annual Meeting of the AAA in Minneapolis, having been struck by the inevitable corridor and panel talk in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential election victory merely a week prior to this. One year on, there has of course been a virtual torrent of analysis, but it is still very much the case that public and academic debates on this have featured political scientists and sociologists in the most prominent roles, rather than anthropologists. Yet we are as anthropologists of course predisposed to think that anthropology and anthropologists do have something unique to contribute to these debates, not the least in the form of the detailed knowledge and insight into ordinary people's lives, ideas and behaviors that other disciplines may not always provide us with. Whatever the reasons for this may be -and anthropology's generally liberal left-of-center orientation and predisposition to study people we 'like' (Bangstad 2017) comes to mind as possible vectors here -we did find a paucity of relevant anthropological research on these matters. Hochschild (2016) may be right to speak of this as a proverbial 'empathy wall' which prevents us from engaging in

The visceral register of social life has been a perennial, albeit undertheorized, concern of social theory and anthropology. The " affective turn " in humanities and social sciences has recently brought this concern to the foreground of contemporary debates on sociability, politics, and the psyche. This seminar-style class explores affect theory from an anthropological perspective. We will start by scrutinizing the different understandings and genealogies of affect in Marxism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, feminism, queer studies, and critical race theory. Then, we will read ethnographies that deploy different versions of affect theory. We will place our central focus on the question of how to ethnographically research and write about affect. To this end, we will engage with different forms of experimental writing to capture what eludes.

2019

The series EmotionCultures is a collection of works centered around current questions raised in interdisciplinary and innovative research on emotions. At the core are empirical studies from Social and Cultural Anthropology that analyze processes of social and cultural modeling of emotions-always in close theoretical as well as methodological connection to various other disciplines. Key topics concern the generation of emotional codes in interaction with socio-cultural, historical, and political structures. Thus, this series ranges from the socialization of emotions in childhood to their transformation with increasing age. It incorporates reconfigurations of emotions against the backdrop of changing life conditions. Furthermore, a particular focus rests upon the emotional dynamics inherent to processes of migration, globalization, and transnationalization. The series is edited by Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and Anita von Poser.

“Affect” is an important theoretical concept in the contemporary social sciences. Some affect theorists define “affect” in opposition to “emotion”. According to them, the former differs from the latter, because it exists outside of language, discourse and signification. These theorists invoke “affect” in order to emphasise the potentiality, indeterminacy and relationality of social being, in contrast to the assumed fixity and closure of sociocultural experience, as a result of its structuration by linguistic, discursive, and more generally, semiotic forms. It follows that “affect” is valorised by affect theorists as unmediated experience, and as a virtual realm of existence untainted by sociocultural mediation. The present thesis, however, rejects this dualistic approach to “affect” and, instead, argues that affective experience is mediated in and through semiotic processes in sociocultural life. It develops a semiotic approach to affect, underpinned by existing linguistic- and semiotic-anthropological theories and insights. Through a re-reading of recent treatments of “affect” in the anthropological literature, such as Navaro-Yashin’s The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (2012) and Mazzarella’s Censorium: The Open Edge of Mass Publicity (2013), this thesis describes and explicates, in greater detail, how “affect” is modulated through semiotic and metasemiotic mediation in each of these ethnographic accounts. All in all, the present thesis argues that “affect”, although commonly perceived as unmediated sociocultural experience, may paradoxically be produced through the workings of semiotic mediation. At the same time, it will demonstrate that a semiotic approach to affect can adequately account for the political, historical and public dimensions of “affect”, as well as its relationship with material objects and social subjectivities.

This collection of articles best represents recent attempts in the social sciences to demarcate and define the scope and objects of the "affective turn" in (cultural) theory, and more broadly, to carve out a distinctively interdisciplinary space for the understanding of affect, emotions, bodies as well as the processual dynamism of sociocultural "matter". While Hemmings (2005) and Papoulias and Callard (2010) provide useful and relatively broad overviews of the uptake of affect across the human sciences, Kristyn (2007) focuses on an in-depth review of how the affective turn has had implications for feminist theory, critically examining authors such as Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Lauren Berlant and others (through a reading of their popular works). Indeed, the turn to the concept of affect in cultural analysis needs to be traced against the intellectual contours of certain key social/cultural theorists. Brian Massumi is certainly among these figures of influence. The publication of his paper, "The Autonomy of Affect" (Massumi 1995), represents a "watershed moment" in the development and intensification of research agendas oriented towards theories of affect, as well as with regards to the "displacement of the centrality of cognition" and of "structuralism and poststructuralism" in the social sciences (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 5). This seminal paper, as well as his more recent work on the affective dimensions of fear (and threat) in a post 9/11 context (Massumi 2005), should be viewed together as an overall (and ongoing) effort to elaborate and/or operationalize the paradigm of affect in cultural critique. In this critical summary, I will attempt to identify and explain a number of common themes which run through this body of "affect theory" and which are central to the "affective turn" in the social sciences. At the same time, I hope to establish certain critical concerns which coincide with this body of work and trace out the intellectual indebtedness of "affect theory" to particular ideas in neuroscience and developmental psychology, while keeping in mind specific and significant trajectories of resistance against these theorizations of affect.

Duke University Press , 2023

Building on the foundational The Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect's resonances with today's most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future potentials of affect theory.

Political Geography, 2014

This paper introduces the notion of ‘state affects’ to describe the errancies that often characterize everyday statist relations. Where structured conditions and intelligibilities, such as the government of populations, engender state effects that veil the state’s non-existence, state affects, I argue, enroll bodies and differentiate masses through what Secor has called ‘unrecognizable conditions.’ Particularly where such conditions are bungled and baffling, they constitute a field of problems that enable the formulation of an affective ‘politics of confusion.’ Several models of affect and emotion provide a glimpse at the possible biological-methodological and epistemological-ontological stakes of such negotiations of affective uncertainty in state errancies. I anchor these to Spinoza’s notion of ‘inadequate ideas,’ a mode of embodied not-knowing that has important political consequences for describing the opacity of affect in everyday encounters. Finally, New York City Police Department’s bungled management of protest during the 2004 Republican National Convention offers multiple lenses for reading the spectrum of ways in which deployments

A growing interest in affect holds much promise for anthropology by providing a new frame to examine and articulate subjective and intersubjective states, which are key parts of human consciousness and behavior. Affect has its roots in the social, an observation that did not go unnoticed by Durkheim and since then has been kept in view by those social scientists interested in the emotions, feelings, and subjectivity. However, the challenge for ethnographers has always been to articulate in words and conceptualize theoretically what is only felt and sensed. What we are calling “evocative ethnography” is an ethnography that meets this challenge to make room for, and hold onto, feelings and affect in its description and explanation. The papers in this special issue accomplish that, as well as provide some anthropological insights into affect theory.