Affect and biopower: towards a politics of life

Abstract

In this paper I stage an encounter between two concepts that have become popular placeholders for a broad concern with a politics of life: affect and biopower. Through engagement with Antonio Negri’s writings on the ‘real subsumption of life’ in contemporary capitalism and Michel Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism, I show that understanding how forms of biopower work through affect requires attending to three relations: affective relations and capacities are object‐targets for discipline, biopolitics, security and environmentality; affective life is the outside through which new ways of living may emerge; and specific collective affects (including ‘state‐phobia’) are part of the conditions for the birth of forms of biopower. In what is simultaneously a departure from, and an affirmation of, recent work on affect, I argue that attending to the dynamics of affective life may become political as a counter to forms of biopower that work through processes of normalisation. The consequence is that understanding how biopower works on and through affect becomes a precondition for developing affirmative relations with affective life.

Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children's emotional geographies

“…In the rest of this section, I focus on some of the implications of the hybridity argument for studying children's emotions -something that Lee and Motzkau do not directly address and which, in my mind, represent some of the vast 'uncharted' territories to which they refer.I offer what I term 'more-than-social' emotions as a 'navigational aid' for traversing and making some sense of the infinite range of hybrid childhoods.I prefer the term 'more-than-social' for four reasons. First, to avoid the term 'biological', in a way that accounts not only for the multiple ways in which what are called 'biological processes' become socialised, but that recognises that (especially) contemporary forms of sociality are constituted by technologies and knowledges wherein it is impossible to discern where the 'social' starts or ends (Anderson 2012). Second, then, the term encapsulates a going-beyond the usual terms of social relations (for instance, of intergenerational relations), but by no means an attempt to dispense with or deny their importance.…”

Differentiated Circuits: The Ecologies of Knowing and Securing Life

“…As Foucault reminded us, "it is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them" (Foucault 1981: 143; see also Anderson 2011). It is this ability to take flight that a geography of knowledge, attendant to the heterogeneous materials, practices and sites of knowing, can foster.…”

“…Finally, a security characterised by the regulation of flows and movement rather than barriers or prophylaxis, requires forms of knowledge that are responsive to a changing world. Within a continuously evolving realm both that which circulates and the knowledge necessary for regulation are open to transformation (Anderson 2011). These knowledge practices form the focus in this paper.…”

Embodied experiences in international volunteering: power-body relations and performative ontologies

“…Power relations within this broad area of research differ quite markedly: from objects of manipulation to autonomous intensities, the body's faculties are understood and addressed in manifold ways. On the one hand, the body's faculties are understood as an 'object-target' of interested parties (Anderson, 2012). From this perspective, powerful actors circulate emotions and affects to 'make things happen', and work in this area recognises and explores the concepts of "neuroliberalism" (Isin, 2004), "affective governance" (Hook, 2007), "affective politics" (Ahmed, 2004;Barnett et al, 2008) and "affective capitalism" (Illouz, 2007).…”