MacManus1

Project MUSE - Theory & Event - Hope, Fear, and the Politics of Affective Agency
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Theory & Event

Volume 14, Issue 4, 2011
E-ISSN: 1092-311X
Hope, Fear, and the Politics of Affective Agency
Susan McManus
And then spoke Joy most grievously

'Abandon hope and follow me'
Responded Grief so joyfully
'Abandon hope and follow me'.
Alasdair Roberts, The Flyting of Grief and Joy (Eternal Return).
1. Abandon Hope?
The problematic of political and ethical resistance, of technologies and modes of transformative political agency, is vital to the
terrain of radical politics and critical political theory.1 This is, to say the least, a vexed, stymied and troubled endeavor, to which,
nevertheless, the cultivation of various modes of affirmative affect - what I will call, as shorthand, the 'hope-project' - has been
central.2 Activists and scholars alike gesture to a difficult alchemy at the heart of the hope-project: the endeavor to cultivate or
'courage,' (Badiou, 2008: 73) transformative agency (another world is possible!) from the encounter with the dark horizons of
contemporary political experience. As Lisa Duggan recognizes, 'most calls to progressive left organizing stress the importance of
finding and sustaining hope,' (Duggan and Muoz, 2009: 275). While the principle of hope, to echo Ernst Bloch's magnum opus, is
something more complicated than Mary Zournazi's description (hope is a 'basic human condition that involves belief and trust in the
world,' (2002: 12)), as an exemplary, utopian mode of affirmative affect, hope has nourished oppositional consciousness and political
praxis. Against hope's heteroclite keynotes, both low and negative affect are deemed apolitical or reactive: 'dispassion stands in for ...
a whole cluster of defensive emotions ... easily misrecognized as apathy but running the whole gamut in registers of political
depression ...: hopelessness, helplessness, dread, anxiety, stress, worry, lack of interest, and so on...' (Berlant, 2005: 8; cf. Ngai,
2005). As a more-or-less affirmative, anticipatory orientation toward the future, hope has been conceptualized as that which counters
a range of dispositions, including averse anticipatory orientations (such as anxiety and fear) and pathological orientations of despair
(hopelessness) that cede or relinquish the horizon of the future.
Contemporary politics, however, is shaped by the amplification of fearful affects, and the multiplication of sites at which fearful
agential orientations and futures are produced. The political landscape is scarred by the cultivation, intensification, mobilization and
calibration of fear, in response to risks and threats from the economic and ecological, to the amorphous and relentlessly virological,
to the persistent and ever more insidious 'security' measures core to the strange war of terror/counterterror, measures that tend toward
the erasure of spaces without or beyond fear. This is not to say the demands of hope are wholly silenced or defeated: witness, for
instance, the calls for 'A New Hope' by Compass: Direction for a Democratic Left in the UK, or Barack Obama's appeals to
'audacious' and 'unyielding' hope in the US. Such appeals nevertheless appear as something of an ignes fatui, a potentially chimerical,
certainly anomalous keynote.3 As the 'currency' (Brown, 2005: 10) of global politics, fear is virtual, porous, contagious, excessive,
outstripping its ostensible causes to shape the 'tone' of the age (Ngai, 2005:76).
While the affective allure of the likes of Obama suggested that the tone of the age was not wholly disinclined to a countervailing
politics of hope, affective formations of fear, more readily elicited and exploited, continue to predominate in contemporary politics.4
What, then, does this imply for the political and agential possibilities of hope's disruptive forward glance? Is fear, as Corey Robin
(2004) has argued, a fundamentally anti-political passion or affect, and should critical theorists seek to counterpoise a politics of
hope against the pervasiveness of fear? Is hope, as Negri has proposed, 'something like a methodological principle, an antidote to the
fear that surrounds us,' (Brown et al, 2002: 200, my emphasis)? In this essay, I argue that an oppositional understanding of the
politics of fear and hope is misconstrued and unhelpful, especially in the present moment. In a fearful and skeptical age, hope (and
the hope-project) cannot be unequivocally privileged. On the other hand, it is not enough to reject fear, for while fearful affects are
complicitous in a politics of security, securitization and hegemony, the circulation of fears must be mined and harnessed for critical
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ends such as the enhancement of potentially transformative agency.

Given the pervasiveness of the ways in which contemporary politics mobilizes, assembles (and dissembles) affective states into
anticipatory and agential formations, critical understanding of the dynamics of affective politics generally, and of hope and fear in
particular, is a timely endeavor. I argue that the last best hope of the hope-project in a fearful age might just be in identifying
maneuvers of affective ambivalence; that is to say, in critical exploration of the political polyvalence of the affective register,
identifying the ways affects can orient or dispose very different agential possibilities.5 To that end, I explore, first, the contemporary
turn on the part of the poststructuralist left to affect theory as a way of responding to the question core to radical agency: 'where has
the potential for change gone?' (Massumi, 2002a: 3). Theories of affect offer a materialist account of the constitution of subjectivity
and agency (affect is 'something occurring beyond, around, and alongside the formation of subjectivity,' (Anderson, 2009: 77)) that
nevertheless precludes determinism, as that is conventionally understood.6 In this section, I read Baruch de Spinoza alongside
contemporary affect theory. A Spinozist theorization of affect suggests that it is generically ambivalent. Affects exceed subjective
capture and control, are non-intentional, asignifying, transversal, and relational: there is an ontological multidirectionality to affects
that can resonate in predictable or unexpected or even merely capricious or barely felt ways. Developing this, I argue that affect, and
affective agency, is ambivalent along two vectors.
First, affect is ambivalent insofar as it orients what I might call, echoing Lauren Berlant (2009: 266), non- or other-than-sovereign
modalities of agency. And second, affect is ambivalent with regard to the emotional or subjective spectrum with which it is
nevertheless variously linked as something of a 'degree zero,' (Virno, 1996: 13) or 'intensity' that traverses and can only be
'imperfectly housed in the proper names we give to emotions (hope, fear, and so on),' (Anderson, 2009: 77). These aspects of affect,
although non-synonymous, constitute what I call the ambivalence-project: the critical identification of spaces of disjunct within
affective series between affective encounters, the emotions, passions or feelings that affective encounters elicit, as well as the modes
of agency such dispositions orient. The ambivalence-project, following Brian Massumi (2002a), invokes the 'autonomy' of the
affective with regard to the subjective and emotional register, and also stresses variability in the ways in which affect can inflect or
resonate as it traverses the subjective. While ambivalence is often characterized as paralyzing, I want, instead, to foreground its latent
productivity so as to interrupt an affective politics in which hope is presumed to shape subversive agency while fear renders subjects
complicit and governable. Affective ambivalence emphasizes room for agential maneuver, the possibility of 'depathologiz[ing]
negative affects so that they can be seen as a possible resource for political action rather than as its antithesis,' (Cvetkovich, 2007:
460).7
I then critically deploy the concept of affective ambivalence in order to track the affective sensorium of fear. I propose that a
politics of fear that attempts to directly orchestrate the emotional register is an intentional effort to demand and command a subject.
When fear is conceptualized through the perspective of affect, however, its maneuvers are significantly 'de-subjectified,' (cf. Protevi,
2009). Affective fear is more viscerally gripping, but might just also be more volatile, and here lies room for agential re-orientation
and restructuring, or the possibility of 'depathologizing' negative affect. As well as attending to the potentially productive capacities
of negative affects such as fear, it is, conversely, politically important to unpack the potentially complicitous capacities of affirmative
affects, such as hope. I finally turn the perspective of affective ambivalence to utopian hope. While hope is often conceptualized as
affectively affirmative and agentially progressive, I argue, drawing upon utopian philosopher Bloch and contemporary hope theorists
such as Jos Esteban Muoz, that this is conceptually misconstrued and politically misguided. Utopian-affect, I argue, puts both
hope-affects and fear-affects to work, and therefore cannot be understood as somehow opposing fear. This has politically useful
consequences in the contemporary moment: instead of conceptualizing the contemporary affective and political predicament by way
of the competing politics of fear and hope, I propose to unpack their polyvalence, suggesting that both political affects can be
deployed, oriented, structured and restructured so as to diminish, for sure, but also to enhance critical agency.
The core problematic that underlies this agenda is: what is the relation between affirmative and negative affects and those
emotions that can go by the same names (hope, fear, and so on); and, on the political register, what is the difference between a
politics that explicitly orchestrates emotion and a politics that elicits the affective energies that shape agency?8 As Ben Anderson
suggests, this is more than a choice between different vocabularies: 'invoking one or the other term has come to signal a basic
orientation to the self, world, and their interrelation (as well as in some cases a particular politics and ethics),' (2009: 80). My
position on this, following Lauren Berlant, is that affect, a 'structure of responsivity' is 'quite a different thing than emotion with all
its conventionality and its authenticating centrality in Modern Western cultures,' (2009: 262). It does not follow, however, that the
two are unrelated, or that I unequivocally dismiss the emotional and privilege the affective. Emotion-discourses can entail politicophilosophical assumptions about the agential capacity of the modern subject that I contest, but affect is also problematic, although in
different ways. Indeed, for Massumi, affect is both 'the word I use for "hope",' (2002b: 212) as well as a central structure that enables
power to function 'directly into each individual's nervous system,' (2006: 1). A critical and diagnostic perspective on affective
ambivalence has, I argue, the capacity to track the diverse political work of affect, revealing other, potentially subversive, ways of
negotiating the affective sensorium of the contemporary political, affective predicament.
2. Affect - Agency - Ambivalence
Agency can be strange, twisted, caught up in things, passive or exhausted. Not the way we like to think about it ... but
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rather something much more complicated and much more rooted in things
(Stewart, 2007: 86).
In this section, I explore the contemporary turn to affect on the part of the poststructuralist left.9 In figuring out ways of
revitalizing the theorization (and practices) of radical agency, contemporary theorists have raided modernity's canon and alter-canon,
finding vital inspiration, in particular, in seventeenth century philosopher Spinoza, who has become something of an animating figure
for the 'affective turn', (cf. Clough, 2007). The full complexity and density of the affective can be discerned in the materialist
political philosophy of the seventeenth century. Those great early modern cartographies of the passions (Book One of Hobbes's
Leviathan and, of course, Spinoza's Ethics are exemplary) were no less than the audacious attempt to map the human subject by way
of affect, understood as the senses, perception and sensations, the passions, imagination, memory and sentiment. This endeavor to
make sense of the senses drew upon a layered understanding in which sense denoted: first, 'sensibility,' or 'receptivity to stimuli';
second, 'signification,' or, 'the capacity to evaluate the significance (good or bad)' of such stimuli; and third, 'direction,' or, the ability
to 'orient' oneself in the right direction, depending upon whether that evaluation evoked inclination or aversion (Protevi, 2009: 1617). Affect, in this register, is at once bodily, passionate, cognitive and agential. Before turning to contemporary debates, I begin by
way of Spinoza. For Spinoza, affect is central to the constitution of the human subject as thinking-body: conceptualizing subjectivity
by way of affect roots the human subject, and its agential and emotional capacities, firmly within worldly things.10 Attending to the
ways in which the worldliness of affect shapes agency and emotions nevertheless should not efface the ways in which affects exceed
subjective capture, control, and comprehension. The contours of the ambivalence project can thus also be gleaned by way of Spinoza,
as an ontological multidirectionality of the ways in which affects resonate into emotions, and shape agential orientations that can, I
will suggest, be politically elicited, if not quite mobilized.
While there are other ways of analyzing the distinctiveness of affect, such as psychoanalytical, physiological or neurobiological
approaches, I find a historicized approach productive.11 Returning to Spinoza, crucially, means short-circuiting or displacing some of
the ways in which we have become accustomed to think about agency. Through philosophers such as Descartes and Kant, agency
came to be conceptualized as intentional, purposive action, presided over by rationality and consciousness, belonging to the
autonomous, sovereign subject, and construed in oppositional ways: agency belonged to reason rather than passions; to mind, rather
than body; and externality, whether one's own body, or other bodies and other worldly matter and stuff, was construed as obstructing
the agency of the autonomous rational self.12 The passions or emotions certainly had a role in this framework, but it was a radically
depoliticized role: at once aestheticized and privatized, emotion became available for expressive projects of artistic authenticity, the
interior life of the subject, or, when considered disordered, therapeutic interventions.13 My initial sidestep from contemporary
psychoanalytic or neurobiological approaches (the human sciences) stems from a desire to stress the ways that affect undoes
anthropocentrically humanist accounts of agency. Although my concern in this essay is ultimately with human, and humanly hopeful,
agency, I concur with thinkers such as Spinoza and Jane Bennett that human agency does not exist 'outside the order of material
nature,' (Bennett, 2010: 36-7).14 Rather than considering human agency, as Diana Coole critically identifies, as, 'already implicitly
opposed to the external world, where bodies and material structures are seen as limits or threats to freedom,' (2005: 126), early
modern materialists comprehended the agency of the thinking-body as made possible by, and impossible without, the encounter with
the jags and crags of the world. Something vital has been lost by the predominance of even implicitly humanist (Cartesian or
Kantian) approaches to agency: the palpable sense that agency is composed by way of affect, by way of the materiality of the worldly
encounters of bodies, both human and non-human (cf. Bennett, 2007; 2010). The return to the seventeenth century is pivotal in the
contemporary radical theorization of affective agency precisely insofar as a dispassionate and agentially enervating series of
distinctions are displaced and challenged by critical attention to materiality in all its variousness and convolution.
Contemporary theory, that is, discerns in Spinoza's exploration of the affects a materialist, relational, non-subjective, and nonsovereign conceptualization of agency.15The Ethics is, in part, concerned with overcoming confusions about how the power of acting
- agency - is possible. Mystification arises when the locus of agency is misrecognized, identified as the outcome of other-than-bodily
determinations of will or soul, or even God (Spinoza insists, 'no one has yet determined ... what the body can do from the laws of
Nature alone,' (1996: 71)).16 For Spinoza, on the contrary, will, soul, consciousness, and so on cannot be so privileged: 'the decisions
of the mind are nothing but the appetites themselves, which therefore vary as the disposition of the body varies,' (Spinoza, 1996: 73).
Agency is very much 'a thing of this world,'17 and affect is something of a vitalizing and mobilizing index of agential capacity: 'by
affect,' writes Spinoza, 'I understand affections of the body by which the body's power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or
restrained,' (1996: 70). Affect, then, is a core part of Spinoza's political-physics (cf. Protevi, 2009: vii) that conceives of existence in
terms of physical matter, comprehending all manner of stuff in the world as 'extensions' or 'modes' of matter, 'a turbulent, immanent
field in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve, and disintegrate,' (Bennett, 2010: xi).18 Unlike the
'mechanical materialism' of his English contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, which assumes the encounter of already constituted bodies,
Spinoza's materialism is infused with a dynamism of forces ('lines, planes, and bodies,' (Spinoza, 1996: 69)), in which affecting and
affected bodies both mix and are co-constitutive of the singularity of each. As Warren Montag, channeling Negri, puts it, his is 'a
materialism of surfaces and singularities without transcendence or mediation,' (Montag, 2008: xiv).
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Affects relating to humans are not outside this ontological muddle and collision of things;19 indeed, affect is immediately mapped
to, and constitutive of, the agential thinking-body. Spinoza considers all sorts of bodies (including humans) as always-already
relational, and affects are those forces, that material grammar of the encounter of bodies, that traverse and transform those bodies,
and galvanize and energize (or 'diminish') the subject's capacity for acting within its world. Humans are the ensemble of bodily
drives, sensations, appetites, perceptions, emotions, passions, that register and orient our worldly encounters, and by which we, in
turn, are disposed, in complexly open, non-linear and overlapping affective series of encounter-feeling-response-agency-encounter.
Affective encounters are both constitutive and orienting (we are 'made-up' as we move and act) insofar as they disclose possibilities
in the world and force our world to matter, immediately, viscerally, both sensually and cognitively, to us: affective encounters
disclose body, form, and enable movement. Human consciousness is also manifested, but never transparently so, through these
encounters: 'the human mind does not know itself, except insofar as it perceives the ideas of the affections of the body,' (Spinoza
1996: 49). Knowledge of self and world is, as Susan James explains, gained simultaneously:
... we only have an idea of the body in so far as it affects and is affected by other things. ... We get ideas of our bodies
and external things simultaneously ... the resulting idea that constitutes the mind is not, therefore, of an isolated entity;
rather it is an idea of the human body as part of a net of causal interactions
(1997: 142).
Humans are, from the outset, 'rooted in things,' (Stewart, 2007: 86), always-already in the midst of affective series that extend
before and after the subject, within which the subject discerns itself, but that subjectivity and consciousness cannot capture and
master.
The agency of thinking-bodies is constituted by way of such rootedness. Clare Hemmings describes the affective as 'an ongoing,
incrementally altering chain -- body-affect-emotion-affect-body -- doubling back on the body and influencing the individual's
capacity to act,' (2005: 564). At its simplest, approaching the problematic of agency by way of affect suggests a way of thinking
about agency as relationality, whether between people, between people and things, or between things. If affect denotes 'a structure of
responsivity,' (Berlant, 2009: 262), then affective agency is not a property of human consciousness or privilege of the sovereign
subject, but is located in an encounter or relation, registering the constitutive co-implication of the many bodies that make worlds.20
Such relational encounters define a non- or other-than-sovereign modality of affective agency: as Bennett puts it, agency is 'a force
distributed across multiple, overlapping bodies, disseminated in degrees -- rather than the capacity of a unitary subject of
consciousness,' (Bennett 2007: 134). This means that those privileged markers of agency -- autonomy, intentionality, rationality, and
so on -- are off the mark. Kathleen Stewart puts it like this: 'like a live wire, the subject channels what's going on around it in the
process of its own self-composition. Formed by the coagulation of intensities, surfaces, sensations, perceptions, and expressions, it's
a thing composed of encounters and the spaces and events it traverses or inhabits,' (2007: 79). If agency is 'determined' by affect, it is
ambivalently determined in necessarily complex, open, contingent, multiple - indeterminate - ways. Affective intensities are
channeled and patterned, but remain fundamentally pre-propositional. Before turning to affective ambivalence, however, I turn
attention to the passionate or emotional inflection of affect.
For Spinoza, affects also resonate in the passionate or emotional spectrum. In both philosophical and neurobiological discourses,
passions and emotions register the impact of the world on the self: etymologically, 'passion' is associated with 'passivity' as the world
impresses upon the subjects' receptive sensory organs.21 Passions or emotions can be thought of simply, as attesting to the
significance of our rooted experiences and encounters.22 Spinoza describes the passionate or emotional inflection of affect by way of
conatus, the endeavor of all beings to 'persevere in ... being,' (1996: 75). Affects manifest subjectively in humans as a register of the
extent to which conatus is flourishing and thriving, or otherwise, and this is indexed by the primary affects of joy and sorrow. For
Spinoza, when affective encounters increase or enhance the body's power of acting, joy attends; conversely, when such encounters
diminish or restrain the body's power, sadness attends. Joy and sorrow, as primary affects, are something of an index of the variable
capacity of this power of acting: 'joy is the experience of growth from one state of being to a more efficient one as it is happening,'
(Hage, 2002: 152). Joy and sorrow are not absolute, but transitive, and other affects, such as hope and fear (love or disdain,
inclination or aversion, confidence or despair -- emotional dispositions that coalesce around affective encounters) can be thought of
as lesser or mixed aspects of joy or sorrow, and the relative increase or decrease of the body's power of acting, or, indeed, as a
'vacillation' between contrary orientations (Spinoza, 1996: 80). If affect is central to agency, affects, or passions, emotions, reflected
'inwardly,' are central in the comprehension of the extent to which thinking-bodies, and the compositions entered into through
affective encounters, are thriving or otherwise.23 It is worth noting that for Spinoza, reason is not qualitatively distinct from
negotiating affective circuits ('reason demands nothing contrary to Nature,' (1996: 125)); there is no non-affective corrective to the
potentially troublesome effects of affects (fear, anger, hysteria, for example).24
Of significance here is the way that Spinoza links up the 'objective' and 'subjective' aspects of affect in his discussion of agential
capacity and psychic life. Contemporary affect theory registers this movement as a 'doubling' of affect. For Protevi, for example,
affect is, first, 'affection,' or 'being affected, that is, undergoing the somatic change caused by an encounter,' (2009: 49). I have
described the 'political physiology or objective aspect of affect,' (2009: 49) above in terms of those impersonal, transversal
encounters that enable and energize movement and agency. Second, 'affect is the felt change in the power of the body,' or its capacity
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to act, 'felt as sadness or joy (roughly speaking, political feeling or the subjective aspect of political affect),' (Protevi, 2009: 49),
which refers to the ways bodies register the changes that affective encounters bring into being. Similarly, for Massumi, affect is a
'passage,' in which 'every transition is accompanied by a feeling of the change in capacity ... every affect is a doubling,' (Massumi,
2002b: 213). Again, then, affects are interpreted as registering both an impersonal encounter and a personal experience: 'emotion is
the way that depth of ongoing experience registers personally at any given moment,' (Massumi, 2002b: 213).
At stake here is the analytical and eminently political problem of the distinction between, and relation of, the 'impersonal' and
'personal' aspects of affect, or of affect to emotion, around which important contemporary interventions revolve. Affects and
emotions certainly have different trajectories, or, as Massumi argues, 'follow different logics and pertain to different orders,' (2002a:
27). This is often taken to mean that affect is im- or transpersonal, non-human, and subjectless, and emotion is personal, human, and
subjective. Concomitantly, affect is comprehended as unintended, nonnarrative or asignifying, while emotion is associated with the
experiential, articulated through narrative formulations that can be directed toward intentional action (cf. Gilbert, 2004; Ngai, 2005;
Anderson, 2009). Ngai suggests that this way of framing the affect/emotion distinction emerged in psychoanalytic practice to solve
the 'fundamentally descriptive problem' of 'distinguishing first-person from third-person feeling, and, by extension, feeling that is
contained by an identity from feeling that is not,' (2005: 27). This makes sense. But there are problems with limiting the distinction
between affect and emotion to the psychoanalytical: it is a historically limited account that works to efface the weighty worldliness of
the affective whether it traverses subjectivity or not. Inscribing too rigid a distinction between affect and emotion has the paradoxical
effect of uprooting human psychic life and agency from the multiple affective forces that constitute it. Indeed, Massumi inserts
something of a caveat in his description of affect's autonomy from the subjective and emotional: 'affect is autonomous to the degree
which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality or potential for interaction it is,' (2002a: 35, my emphasis). I want
to keep my eye on what happens on both sides of that 'degree' as affect both vitalizes (agentially, passionately, emotionally) and
exceeds bodies. Rather than inscribing an oppositional structure, I want to consider affect as (ambivalently) relational between its
impersonal and personal aspects. Impersonal affect does not 'need' a human subject; but humans are necessarily constituted as (nonsovereign but agential) subjects through affective encounters that can resonate, in non-intentional, sometimes unpredictable and
capricious ways, into agential orientations and sensibilities, and it is the nature of that transition or passage of affect that is crucial to
mapping ambivalence.
From a broadly Spinozist perspective, the affective can be theorized as an extensive series, or field of forces and intensities that the
'I,' the subject, finds itself manifest within and negotiates. Affective encounters activate the discerning activity of the nervous system
in contact with the world, in the process of which subjects come to be constituted. Encounters concomitantly entail emotional
appraisals. We need not be subjectively conscious of emotional appraisals: they are simply part of affective series that contribute
toward movements of aversion and inclination, motion and rest (we are moved by emotions in a quite literal sense). Such appraisals
can be registered subjectively as feelings, mapping to changes in bodily capacity (are we strengthened or enervated by the food we
incorporate, transform and are transformed by, the books we read, the encounters, and compositions entered into, with stuff and
people that combine to constitute the singular 'I'?). Again concomitantly, all of these events orient the subject agentially to move in
space and time. As it stands, this is too neat, decidedly unambivalent. Ambivalence points to spaces of disjunct and indeterminacy in
affective series between encounters that traverse bodies, and the appraisals of, and agential responses to, those encounters.
One way of thinking about this is simply as the phenomenological opacity of affective intensities that inflect as emotions. If
subjectivity is manifest through affective series that exceed it, conscious emotional appraisals of those encounters and the changes in
bodily capacity brought about will not be transparent. Affect remains abstruse, obscure to conscious comprehension. Shakespeare's
Antonio knows not why he is so wearingly sad; but he knows that sadness is only 'imperfectly housed,' to echo Anderson (2009: 77),
in his subjectivity: 'how I caught it, found it, or came by it,/ What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,/ I am to learn,' (1994: 245).
Antonio's feelings of sadness, experienced as debilitating his subjective capacity, are only one aspect of an affective series that
traverses and exceeds his languid demeanor.
Concomitantly, the ways in which affects inflect into the subjective and emotional is marked by sheer variability. Spinoza
describes the ways in which 'the various affects can be compounded with one another in so many ways, and ... so many variations
can arise from this composition that they cannot be defined by any number,' (Spinoza, 1996: 103). Again, then, affects are
determining, but not determinist; their determinations are multiplicitous, varying in degree, intensity, direction.25 Even joy and
sorrow are singular in this respect: 'the joy or sadness of each also differs from the joy or sadness of another ... consequently, each
affect of each individual differs from the affect of another,' (1996: 101). Affective series inflect or 'double' into sensibilities and
dispositions in multiple and unpredictable ways in different bodies (or in the same body at different times - which could anyhow be
thought of as a different body). Simply put, two bodies affected by the same object will respond differently, one attracted, another
repelled, one nourished, another sickened, one incited to action, another exhausted, and so on. Affective ambivalence describes this
potential multidirectionality of affects, and these spaces of indeterminacy in determining affective series between encounter,
composition, feeling, and agency. Affective ambivalence can, I suggest, be elicited (if not quite mobilized) in politically productive
ways.
My point is this: political analysis of agency demands critical attention to the ways that affect inflects into emotion, that the
impersonal is manifest in the personal, the objective in the subjective. Work of this kind is happening in a range of contemporary
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(cross-disciplinary) interventions. In aesthetics and cultural studies, for instance, Ngai has privileged the critical analysis of tone,
precisely insofar as it is 'a concept dependent upon and even constructed around the very problematic that the affect/emotion
distinction was intended to dissolve,' (2005: 28). Tone, that is, elicits the proximity and encounter of object, world, or artwork and
feeling subject; it is 'the dialectic of objective and subjective feeling that our aesthetic encounters inevitably produce,' that 'slips in
and out of subjective boundaries,' (2005: 30, 31). In geography, Anderson has turned his attention to 'affective atmospheres' that
similarly have an 'in-between status with regard to the subject/object distinction' and its corollaries such as emotion/affect in order to
think through the question of 'how to attend to collective affects that are not reducible to ... individual bodies?' (2009: 80). This inbetweenness is precisely where the political significance of the affective resides. From a Spinozist perspective, affects are those
forces that traverse and unsettle the impersonal and the personal, subject and object, self and world. Affects are irreducible, in all
their variousness, to either individual or collective experience. For while, as Berlant argues, 'the structure of an affect has no
inevitable relation to the penumbra of emotions that may cluster in the wake of its activity, nor should it,' (2008a: 4, my emphasis),
she is also alert to the ways in which 'affect, the body's active presence to the intensities of the present, embeds the subject in an
historical field,' (2008b: 846). So while affect is 'autonomous,' it is also 'infrastructural as a factory,' (Massumi, 2002a: 45). Affects,
that is, 'act in the nervous systems of worlds,' (Berlant, 2008b: 845); but the nervous systems of persons are ambivalently receptive
to, and constituted as agential thinking-bodies within, that larger affective field. The ambivalence-project, then, can be thought of as
simply eliciting and attending to the multiplicity of possibilities that take shape in affective series, in sites of proximity and inbetweeness, torsion and inflection of object/subject, affect/agency, affect/emotion.
This means that critical attention to either the 'impersonal' or the 'personal' aspects of affect in isolation is insufficient. Human
agency is by no means a property of an individual body or consciousness; the capacity for acting, rather, emerges from compositions
or 'assemblages' that are coextensive, however disjunctively, with affective series. The agency of the individual subject is a partial
expression of the affects and compositions that make agency possible; similarly, feelings are 'a very partial expression of affect,'
(Massumi, 2002b: 213), by no means reducible to any privileged space of subjective interiority. This suggests that the political and
ethical analysis of affect does not necessarily or wholly inhere in the range of sensibilities which coalesce in affective encounters. It
depends upon what forms of composition affective encounters make possible, and whether those compositions enhance the capacities
of the bodies involved for acting: 'does it enable them to form new and mutually empowering encounters outside the original
encounter?' (Protevi, 2009: 51). It is not that the feeling of fear, for example (necessarily a passion insofar as fear attests to being
acted upon in adverse ways by objects known or unknown) will necessarily result in compositions that further diminish or enervate
agential capacity; indeed, it is part of the burden of the following sections of this essay to show that affects of fear can be
productively oriented to critically interrupt an affective determinism that associates fear with malignly defensive agential
dispositions. Agency that is given shape as part of an affective series that includes the negative affect (feeling) of fear need not be
passive or sad, and need not tend toward exhaustion or enervation. The hope-project's endeavor to 'courage' transformative agency is
then similarly complicated. Feelings certainly matter, and the affirmative endeavors of the hope-project remain crucial; but
ambivalence is significant because its identification helps pick apart feelings of joy or sorrow or hope or fear from affective series
that shape joyful (or hopeful) or sorrowful (or fearful) compositions. Attending to ambivalence stresses the possibility of
restructuring both feelings and agency.
I remain less sanguine than, say, Montag, for whom there is something almost immediately incendiary, unruly and subversive,
about affect that can 'overflow ... and exceed ... the confines imposed by the rituals and apparatuses that govern us,' (2005: 670). If
affect constitutes the very conditions of possibility of agency, then affect, like ideology, always-already yokes the subject within
those very 'rituals and apparatuses' of power, binding subjects 'to seemingly inescapable patterns of domination,' (Dean, 2009: 50; cf.
Hemmings, 2005: 551). Attending to the affective might well be attending to a historical 'record of ideology,' (Berlant, 2008b: 846).
Analysis of affective ambivalence nevertheless makes palpable what Massumi neatly refers to as 'wriggle room': 'the present's
"boundary condition" ... is never a closed one. It is an open threshold. ... I use the concept of "affect" as a way of talking about that
margin of maneuverability,' (2002b: 214, 212). Such 'wriggle room' can be elicited to critically interrupt an affective determinism in
which hope is presumed to shape subversive agency while fear renders subjects complicit and governable. The ambivalence project,
then, is a modest attempt to elicit the ways in which capacities for change are rooted in our everyday sensorium; but it is also
something of a call, following Berlant, to make new 'demands on [that] sensorium for adjudication, adaptation, improvisation, and
new visceral imaginaries for what the present might be,' (Berlant, 2008b: 847). A final caution, however: the politics of this
endeavor will not necessarily be predictably patterned in radical or subversive ways. As Berlant recognizes, 'the idiom affect theory
provides focuses ... on ... what's not trainable about people, who are always creating folds of being-otherwise in a way that stretches
out and gives unpredicted dimensions to historical and subjective experience,' (Berlant, 2009: 263). Affective ambivalence might
well be elicited; but it remains untrainable.
3. The Politics of Fear.
The Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear

(Hobbes, 1968: 200).
We cannot ... separate ourselves from fear, thus ... it is necessary to reinvent resistance
(Massumi, 1993: ix).
In the story Hobbes tells, fear delivers subjects into the body-politic, creates and maintains political stability and security, obliges
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allegiance to authority, quells dissent, and compels acquiescence and obedience. This is only one, compelling yet deeply troubling,
way of telling the story of the politics of fear, but it is an instructive cautionary tale. I revisit Hobbes here in order to draw into relief
the difference between a subjective and an affective perspective in the political analysis of fear. I then turn my attention to the claim
that the contemporary politics of fear, as an affective politics, is at once more 'directly compelling' but also 'more fractious,
multiplicitous, and unpredictable' than a politics of emotion (Stewart, 2007: 4). Fear-affects are, I will argue, built into the
architecture of everyday experience, and are so in ways that are often phenomenologically opaque, by-passing explicit subjective
comprehension. How, then, can negative affects such as fear be 'depathologized' (Cvetkovich, 2007: 460)? This is difficult, insofar
as fear orients defensive subjectivities both emotionally and agentially, but I suggest that affective determinism can be interrupted or
restructured. In the final section, I supplement this analysis through critical exploration of the phenomenological and affective
complexity of hope. Nevertheless, the attempt to elicit humanly hopeful agency from the affective analysis of fear remains delicately
poised, for 'how,' David Campbell asks, 'can we think about taking conscious steps when we are dealing with the subliminal register?'
(Schoolman and Campbell, 2008: 330). The response to this predicament inheres in the extensiveness of affective circuits: affects
are not reducible to either the (de-subjectified) subliminal, or to (subjective) individual experience, or to the impersonal or objective.
Affects always circulate in a wider agential field, and that field demands consideration.
Published in 1651, the violence, chaos, and tumult of the English Civil Wars resonates throughout Leviathan, and is given
sublimated expression in Hobbes's depiction of the state of nature -- the state without legitimate political authority. With no 'common
Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every
man', (Hobbes, 1968: 185). This condition is sustained by multiple unpredictable and unregulated fears (and here Hobbes may be a
better adviser to Machiavelli's Prince: not all fear tends toward obedience).26 But the materialist Hobbes is not a rational choice
theorist or a Kantian: the political problem is not to replace affect with a rational contract or moral order. Neither is he a Hume or a
Rousseau: the problem is not to replace fear with a different, more sociable or pliable affective formation (say, trust, compassion,
solidarity, or respect). Rather, it is to manage fear by galvanizing and reorienting its affective and agential force. Hobbes's solution is
the exchange of liberty for security by way of a political contract that creates the Leviathan, or sovereign (literally a deal with a
demon), in which subjects exchange the freedom to fear potentially everybody for the security of fearing only the sovereign.
Sovereign power -- the common and legitimate authority to 'awe' the unruly -- is thus underpinned by the 'passion to be reckoned
upon'. Politics, for Hobbes, involved the shift from unpredictable modes of fear that disrupt, to dependable modes of fear that sustain
political stability, in which the sovereign capture of fear is the crucial maneuver.
An instrumentalization of fear is at the core of the sovereign promise that resonates throughout modern politics. From
Machiavelli's advice to the Prince (it is better to be feared than loved) to the Truman Doctrine ('scare the hell out of the American
people') to 'shock and awe,' the experience of fear (anxiety, dread, terror) has been pivotal to the formation of political subjectivity
and political order wherein fear is deployed in such a way as to render the subject governable, and political order is figured as a
'refuge' from fear, (Virno, 2004: 31-35). Even when sovereignty disavows the utility or efficacy of recourse to fear (Franklin
Delaney Roosevelt: 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'), the promise remains in the form of a pledge to free subjects from
the 'evil of fear' (Jack Straw, UK Home Secretary from 1997 to 2001, cited in Minton, 2009: 143).27 Either or both: the sovereign
becomes the foremost object of fear, and/or the sovereign vows protection from fearsome others. The 'recourse to fear and terror' is
'the ultimate recourse for the sovereign power of the state ... even when it is contractual and protective,' (Derrida, 2005: 156-7).
The affective efforts of this politics, however, are focused on capturing a specific affect, fear, and galvanizing that fear so as to
demand and command a subject. What happens in the sovereign endeavor is that affective circuits have been limited and captured,
subjectified, and rendered trainable. The sovereign and subjective appropriation of affects of fear, on this account, is fundamentally
normative and normalizing; the politics of fear contains a moral and subjective imperative toward order, as fear-affects become
thoroughly folded into the subjective. The sovereign politics of fear short-circuits its unpredictable extensiveness as fear is put to
work by the sovereign (who threatens punishment and defends against other others); and by the subject who recognizes sovereignty
or political order generally as simultaneously an object of fear and loyalty. Subjective feelings of fear take shape within what
Spinoza might term a 'sad' affective series and thus agential field, that is, a field that individuates, disempowers, diminishes agential
capacity and concomitantly entails the kinds of negative affects indicative of weakened conatus.
But what happens if this story about fear is extended, peered at from the perspective of affective encounters up, rather than from
the sovereign capture of fear down? What happens, that is, if the frame of analysis shifts to affect? Recall Massumi's claim that affect
is 'autonomous' insofar as it vitalizes (or diminishes) and exceeds the bodies it traverses, ordering or disordering, composing or
decomposing. He suggests that 'the emotional organization of a given fear-riven self is a particular limited and divergent
actualization of the subject-form: the socially meaningful expression of the "individuality" of the specific identity attached by power
mechanisms to a found body,' (1993: 25). This suggests that as fear-affects 'slip in and out of subjective boundaries,' (Ngai, 2005:
31) an affective sensorium is traceable in the architecture of everyday life, or in what Anna Minton neatly terms the 'psyche of
places,' (2009: 139), within which particular subjectivities, thinking-feeling-acting subjects are manifest. How, then, does fear work?
Consider the etymology of terror, an extreme manifestation of fear. As Adriana Cavarero reminds us, the root of terror lies in
'trembling'; not, that is, in the conscious subject's comprehension of a fearful object, but in a somatic apprehension evinced by body
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physics. The 'sudden start of fear called "fright" ... acts immediately on the body, making it tremble and compelling it to take flight,'
(2009: 4). The agential-affect of fear is, as Protevi puts it, 'de-subjectified,' (2009: 50) or subliminal. Fear-affects by-pass
consciousness and intentionality, and while quivering capitulation or adrenalin-fuelled resistance or escape are equally possible,
intensities of fear demand the body do something, and now! This is certainly more 'directly compelling' than fear put to work in
instrumental or normative ways. Let's hypothesize that fear can be incredibly useful in certain circumstances (escaping or confronting
threat) but debilitating and unproductive in others. And let's assume, along broadly Spinozist lines, that we don't generally 'choose' to
feel fear, and that while we are determined by affect, we are determined in multiple and indeterminate ways (affects can't 'intend' the
actions of any subject) in part through the phenomenological opacity of the subjective content of affects, and in part because of the
tremendous variability of the ways affects impact the readiness of the subject to act. This should all suggest that while fear might
grasp the subject corporeally and viscerally, it should, nevertheless, be less predictable. But is it less predictable?
It is important to note the ways in which such subliminal or de-subjectified affects of fear are patterned and put to work in the
wider agential field. In her study of urban planning in the UK in the 1990s, Minton (2009) tracks the ways in which developments
such as gated communities, increased surveillance technologies, security measures, and enclosures of public, shared spaces, have not
led to increased feelings of security, but instead have led to increased feelings of fear: fear of crime, increased levels of personal
insecurity, increased suspicion and fear of others. Minton diagnoses a paradoxical situation in which 'fear of crime doesn't correlate
with actual crime,' (2009: 142); rather, the technologies that ostensibly assuage fear, instead, produce it.28 I want to approach this
problem less as a sort of psychic misrecognition of the source of subjective discomfiture and more as an opportunity to track the
materiality of affect as it traverses impersonal and personal life, working through encounters with technologies, nonhuman and
human stuff and matter.
In part, the urban encounter with architectures of enclosure, and technologies of visibility and surveillance act as constant
corporeal suggestions (we are not safe) that slip in and out of consciousness, and that can cultivate a (low-level, pervasive) mood of
guardedness. Subjects are shaped divisively by such dispositions: fear, suspicion, and caginess shape an affective and agential field
that individuates, impedes new agential compositions, and disempowers. The increasing prevalence of such technologies freezes
spaces of ambivalence by patterning fearful affects into subjective feelings and agential orientations. This is an ambivalent series
only insofar as certain technologies produce an 'affect' (fear) that is decidedly at odds with an 'intention' (security). Of significance
here is the way that fear is not assuaged but amplified through security technologies which create feedback loops entrenching and
patterning affective intensities, reinforcing their subjective resonance and comportment. It is only in patterned spaces of proximity
and encounter of impersonal and personal that fear can be 'reckoned on.'
This patterning of fear-affects is also palpable in the continuing maneuvers of the 'war on terror.' Initially, this 'war' can be mapped
in ways that are analogous to the sovereign capture of fear, in which fear is intentionally deployed so as to move citizen bodies. And
as war becomes indeterminate (a permanent state of emergency and exception that cannot be ended by social contract or peace
treaty), so too, the politics of fear must be continually elicited and calibrated, to persuade populaces at 'home' of the need for
homeland security inside, and police action outside. Again, however, the wider agential field demands critical attention. Subjects
encounter the war on terror in a variety of ways, more-or-less mediated: presidential announcements, news reports, television and
other media; in surveillance and security mechanisms and technologies in airports, and other public buildings from banks to
universities; and in media campaigns exhorting a strange kind of vigilance detached from action. This politics of fear, however,
works through a curious interplay between indeterminate fear (that amplifies the intensity of fear-affects) and determinate fear (that
constructs particular fear-objects in order to orient subjects agentially).
To pick just a few examples: Trevor Boddy named the construction of the 'Jersey barriers,' (temporary cement roadblocks) around
federal and financial buildings in New York and Washington DC in the aftermath of 9/11, 'fear-theming,' creating an 'architecture of
disassurance,' (cited in Brown, 2010: 77). The barriers were not a response to any of the specific ways that American security was
breached, and their subsequent removal in 2004 was concomitantly not a response to changes in security threats. Wendy Brown
suggests that 'the barriers worked performatively' producing 'the visual scenography of a state of emergency,' (2010: 77). The barriers
acted as an affect-conductor, mobilizing a 'tone' or 'atmosphere' of anxiety that was effective precisely because it was less-thandeterminate, traversing objective and subjective space.
In the UK in 2008, the Metropolitan Police announced a five-week counter-terror advertising campaign targeted within the UK's
metropolitan and multicultural centres (London, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and the West Midlands). This campaign
exhorted citizen vigilance, in which everyday activities such as taking photos, using a mobile phone, and putting out garbage were
framed as potentially suspect.29 Again, there is a performative indeterminacy at work here in the affects cultivated: objects of fear
were rendered indeterminate, vague, amorphous, emptied of content and specificity but embedded in the routines and, literally, the
detritus of everyday life ('You see hundreds of houses every day. What if one has unusual activity and seems suspicious?'). As with
the color-coded security alert system adopted in many western states, fear is in this way elicited, calibrated, and normalized.
Massumi suggested that the affective import of the color-coded alert system in the US was 'introduced to calibrate anxiety' as fear
itself threatened to become habitual and so less effective at orienting attenuated bodies. This is only half the story; and the other half
concerns the complementary strategy of the routinization and banalization of fear, that aims toward the erasure of spaces without or
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beyond fear. Both are complimentary tactics that enable central government to function 'directly into each individual's nervous
system,' (Massumi, 2006: 1).
In each of these examples, a temporal play of indeterminacy ('what if...?') and determinacy ('there!') is at work. The kinds of
affective intensities of fear generated by the tactics common to the war on terror are indeterminate (the barriers do not respond to any
specific threat; the MET ad campaign could refer to any house, phone, or bin, and so on). But the politics of fear also works in a
determinate mode. As an anticipatory orientation, fear nevertheless demands specificity in order to act; Massumi suggests that 'fear is
the palpable action in the present of a threatening future cause ... whether the threat is determinate or not. ... You trigger a production
of what you fear. You turn the objectively indeterminate cause into an actual effect so that you can actually deal with it', (Massumi,
2007: 18). Fear is compelling insofar as it corporeally grips the subject; but it is capricious insofar as its affective indeterminacy
needs to be made determinate. Fear's intensities, that is, turn into specific agential orientations through patterning fear-affects, raising
intensity (indeterminate) to comport subjects (determinate). Such maneuvers are discernible in the designation of specific objects of
determinate fear (Iraq as a 'breeding ground for terrorists,' for instance) that facilitates specific targets of local and global policing,
and more-or-less discreet forms of social control.
As Brown avers, 'state legitimacy often turns on addressing social desires that do not comport with state interests,' (Brown, 2010:
78). Affect, in this instance, is analogous to what Althusser termed ideological state apparatuses, material practices that by-pass
rational reflection, grip and generate the subject corporeally, encouraging certain dispositions.30 In the continuing age of the war on
terror, fear has become directly productive of forms of social life. But fear (again like ideology) only seemingly works 'by itself.'
Fear-affects resonate and are patterned through practices, architectures, the visual; its affective circuits invoke a whole range of
perceptual stimuli and feedback loops whereby it becomes patterned and less volatile. The play of determinacy/indeterminacy is also
crucial: indeterminate fear heightens affective intensity while determinate fear shapes specific orientations, whereby such feedback
loops become subjectively entrenched or habitual. It is only in such spaces of proximity and encounter of a whole series of affective
apparatuses traversing objective and subjective space that fear is rendered determinate in the emotional and agential orientation of
subjects; fear is fabricated in the ways that human and technological bodies affect and are affected by other bodies.
As fear-affects traverse the impersonal and personal, space and time, there remains room for maneuver (or 'wriggle-room',
(Massumi, 2002b: 214)). Affective determinism (fear's malignly defensive orientation) 'works' only insofar as it is patterned through
a variety of mechanisms. At any of these points, the affective determinations of fear might be interrupted, restructured, put to work in
different ways. If fear is patterned, given form and direction, across all these encounters, then affective ambivalence can be
politically elicited, if never quite mobilized, in ways that might at least disorder prevailing affective compositions. The aim of such
an affective politics might simply be to 'expand the range of affective potential,' (Massumi, 2002b: 235, my emphasis). That way,
the potential mutidirectionality of affect can become a different sort of thing, an ideological incoherence that becomes available for
mobilization. Affective analysis, then, encourages alertness to the ways in which affects are patterned in certain ways, so as to elicit
room for agential maneuver. This is by no means a solely subjective endeavor, for while affect resonates into subjective emotions
and readiness to act, it remains autonomous from the subjective. Restructuring or depathologizing fear-affects involves work on the
sensory organization of all the different kinds of matter that affect agential capacity -- not just the subjective or objective. Fear can be
affectively reconfigured if re-perceived, not as normal or habitual, but as a site of crisis (Gayatri Spivak analogously discusses a
politics of hope in terms of 'bringing to crisis' in which crisis becomes a 'site of hope,' (2002: 173)). 'Bad sentiments,' as Muoz,
drawing on Paolo Virno, suggests, 'associated with despondence contain the potentiality for new modes of collectivity,' (Duggan and
Muoz, 2009: 277). The relation between the politics of fear and political agency can be worked on; but that there is no other-thanaffective way out suggests a Hobbesian strategy for other-than-Hobbesian ends is demanded. Recall that Hobbes reoriented
politically volatile fears toward order; fear can also be reoriented, away from cagey divisiveness (forms of agential de-composition)
toward at least 'crisis,' in Spivak's sense, and at best, fear itself might not only be reoriented, but also restructured toward incipient
solidarities (compositions that enhance the capacities of the bodies involved). One way of doing this is by considering its role in
hope, and it is to this I finally turn.
4. Utopian-Affect
... hope is like music because its quality is not really confined to one thing...
(Papastergiadas, 2002: 82).
... I guess "affect" is the word I use for "hope"...

(Massumi, 2002b: 212).
My aim in this section is to orient fear and hope together as part of an affective endeavor to restructure fear and disorder its
prevailing political organization. In order to do so, I explore, first, the phenomenological complexity and agential variability of hope
as a first step toward unsettling upbeat (affirmative/progressive) understandings. I briefly consider political polyvalence in hope's
affective parabola: hope does not entail a political orientation, and competing visions of the future invoke 'hope' to compel allegiance
and direct political agency. The demand to hope can be thoroughly problematic, containing a moral injunction to optimism
(emotionally affirmative but by no means politically critical) that is decidedly at odds with the whole range of affects that animate
critical political agency (including negative affect: anger, antagonism, resentment, and alienation, for instance). Nevertheless,
optimism, and associated affects of confidence, sanguinity, and complacency, do not feature in utopian modes of hope, or utopianhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v014/14.4.mcmanus.html
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affect. Problematic modes of hope (such as the appeal to hope-as-optimism) make demands upon the subject's rationality,
intentionality, emotions, and even normative register, in which pessimism is construed as a form of moral lack -- or, in what might be
the same thing differently phrased, as contributive to social maladaption, depression, ill-health, and early death.31 Such demands, just
as much as fear, can sustain forms of normativity and order, or can tend toward agential docility, vexing the progressive or radical
deployment of hope. How, then, is hope produced, sustained, and circulated? What is the content, and what are the effects, of
different modalities of hope, and do such different modalities of hope circulate differently?
To respond to these questions, I turn to utopian-affect. Critical analysis of utopian hope demands analysis, not (or not only) of the
subject, but of the wider affective-agential field. Even so, utopian hope is ambivalently situated in that wider field. For Bloch, it is
from within the 'darkness of the lived moment' (1986a: 290) that hope is most vital. In an agential field that could equally dispose a
despairing subject, Bloch glimpses hope, as Spivak discerns the activity of 'bringing to a crisis' (2002: 173). However, contrary to
the injunction ('You must be optimistic!'), neither is utopian-affect a form of 'voluntarism' in the face of difficult circumstances.32
Rather, utopian hope always depends upon forms of affective restructuring (in which fear is put to work in hopeful ways). The
intrinsic ambivalence of all affects can thus be elicited in utopian hope in a manner parallel to Virno's strategy, as he 'mobilizes fear
and anguish ... as the grounds for political vision and potential solidarity among the many,' identifying 'radical political possibility in
forms of dread and anguish typically thought to render human beings unfit for freedom,' (Marasco, 2006: 9, 18). Hope, that is to say,
needs to be made out of the same matter as fear, not considered fear's other. It is not a matter of demanding optimism in the face of
fear, against fear, nor of voluntarism; it is a matter of affecting and affected bodies 'resonating' in slightly different ways than
hitherto.33 First, then, some ground-clearing. Hope has been conceptualized as that which counters a range of dispositions, including
averse anticipatory orientations toward the future (such as anxiety and fear), pathological orientations of despair (hopelessness) that
relinquish the horizon of the future, and satisfied or complacent orientations.34 But against too-easy assumptions of optimism, cheer
and expectation, to hope is something complicated, with many shades and turns ('Fair Hope, with smiling face but ling'ring foot/ Has
long deceived me').35 That fear or despair indicate hopelessness and thus 'oppose' hope makes a certain logical sense; hope's forward
inclination counters fearful aversion; hopeful faith precludes despairing misery. But it is far less compelling passionately or
phenomenologically. From the perspective of affect, it is worth recalling that, however significant the subjective is, hope is
irreducible to individuated emotional experience insofar as all affects, formed through encounters with other bodies and matter,
traverse and exceed subjectivity. Hope-affects, too, are 'autonomous' insofar as subjective feeling is only a 'partial' manifestation of
affect (cf. Massumi, 2002b: 213); and are variable, insofar as the determinations of affect are multiplicitous, varying in degree,
intensity, and direction. Consider, for instance, George Eliot's Dorothea: 'in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure
up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and coloured by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge,' (1994: 22).
Bodies are also more-or-less receptive to certain affective encounters through pre-existing or layered dispositions and moods,
which can be thought of as the subterranean stickiness or persistence of affect that no longer immediately vitalizes bodies. Hopeaffects 'double' or resonate subjectively in varied -- precisely ambivalent - ways. Affective ambivalence, those spaces of disjunct in
affective series between affects, feelings, and agential dispositions, helps explain the complicatedness of hope-affects: we are
certainly not all ardent Dorothea's, and hope can and does exist within and alongside fear, despair, even desperation. Those negative
states are still anticipatory, portending the threat of loss, whether of an object of desire or of a future horizon. It is in this shared
orientation toward an uncertain future that hope, fear, desire, despair, and so on, are interwoven. That one hopes, desires, might
evoke feelings of aspiration, belief, faith, promise, power; but to hope is also to long, to yearn, and to hunger; to hope is to admit the
sheer uncertainty of the desired horizon.36 One can often do no more than endure the intensity of hope's keen poignancy and its
anguish. To hope, then, is an affectively complex state and process, dreadful as well as delicious, that could as easily hurt or heal.
Hope's passionate parabola overlaps, absorbs, and subsumes its ostensible others in sometimes unexpected ways: while giving solace
(the object or future longed for is still possible, not yet extinguished) hope disturbs; while beguiling, hope vexes (its wearying
persistence!); its enticing forward orientation promises sublimity, and yet is simply inextricable from uncertainty, anxiety, torment.
Hope, as anticipatory orientation, is not necessarily linked up with promise or fulfillment or optimism.
This ambivalence is echoed in the ways that hope-affects dispose agency. For Spinoza, whereas hope does not exhaust in the same
way as fear, it is an 'inconstant joy' that can tend toward 'sadness'; hope does not necessarily enhance agency (1996: 106). As passion,
hope may be happy or sad or complexly both; and as an index of agential capacity, hope may be marked by joyful enhancement or
sorrowful diminishment of power.37 This is evident in political register too. Mouffe emphasizes the variability of hope-affects when
she notes that 'hope is something which is ineradicable and is inherent in any kind of political or social mobilization [and] can be
mobilized in many different ways' (Mouffe and Laclau, 2002: 125-6). Such variability can generate suspicion with regard to the
politics of hope: Duggan looks skeptically on some of the political maneuvers in which hope is implicated, noting that 'the political
right manufactures and circulates hope in the most noxious ways,' (Duggan and Muoz, 2009: 275). Likewise, Michael Taussig also
points to a wider field in which hope mobilizes agency: 'market and entrepreneurial activity is dependent upon hope, not revolution ...
we cannot underestimate the role of hope in driving this amazing machine called a capitalist or free market,' (2002: 56).38
Simply put, hope can orient a whole range of agential modes, and the most pervasive forms of hope may very well be, as Muoz
identifies, those that 'simply keep ... one in place within an emotional situation predicated on control,' (Duggan and Muoz, 2009:
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278). Such manifestations of hope on an everyday level can be fruitfully analyzed by way of Berlant's theorization of 'cruel
optimism,' a concept that speaks to the ways in which people 'choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used
to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it,'
(Berlant, 2008c: 36). Everyday hope, that is, can be expressed as a 'reinvestment in the normative promises of capital,' (Berlant,
2007: 281), and is by no means in opposition to the inevitable and lived disappointments and failures of that system. Some kinds of
hope affects, then, might inflect subjectively in agential modes that span from wishful thinking ('Wouldn't it be nice if...?') to
purposive action (If I do this, then...'). In the latter, an 'if ... then' structure of expectation organizes minds and bodies, and comports
behavior. This mode of hope is determinate and determining, dependent for its realization (or not) upon the agential maneuvers of the
intentional and sovereign subject, in which hope functions as a rational or normative emotion that can orchestrate the subject toward
forms of order. But hope affects and emotions can fold into and out of one another, overlap and differentiate again; and hope-affects,
although not normative emotions comporting a subject, need not disturb or disrupt prevailing hegemonies in which personal and
social desires are invested.
While Bloch would unearth a utopian impulse or desire in such 'attachments,' he nevertheless marks a distinction between such
impulses and utopian modalities of hope. So how are utopian-affects produced, sustained, and circulated? Utopian-affect is, first, not
confined to subjective feelings, particularly those of optimism; and neither is it an individual inclination. Utopian-affect can be given
subjective expression through a range of emotional valences, from the bleak to the buoyant, and in tracking utopian-affect what is
significant is less individuated emotional expression, and more the wider agential field within which utopian-affect is fabricated and
circulates. Far from a subjective proclivity, utopian-affect is very much rooted in all the forms of affective relationality (subjective,
social, cultural, political) that make agency possible. Nevertheless, although utopian-affect is immanent to existing forms of
relationality, it is both materially determined and indeterminate: the subject it traverses is obliquely disposed to the world, trying 'to
feel what lurks in the interstices,' (Stengers, 2002: 245). So while utopian-affect is, as Muoz describes, 'relational to historically
situated struggles,' it is so in futural ways, towards forms of actual but also incipient solidarities, of 'a collectivity that is actualized or
potentialized,' (Muoz, 2009: 3). Coded in different theoretical interventions as the virtual (e.g., Deleuze) or potentiality (e.g.,
Agamben), Bloch's docta spes (educated hope) points to ways of thinking, living, and being that interrupt and exceed the dominant
logic of the present while, nevertheless, remaining grounded in the strata of possibilities that animates the political present, so as to
educe something other and better from comprehension of the worst.
Cultivating or eliciting such affects is, then, a tricky affair. For Bloch, utopian hope is immanently and affectively rooted in
worldly possibilities, while simultaneously characterized by the indeterminacy of the Not-Yet. In his 1961 lecture, 'Can Hope Be
Disappointed?' Bloch responds: yes, 'else it would not be hope,' (1986b: 340). A hope that cannot be disappointed, Bloch argues, is
'merely subjective confidence' (1986b: 340) -- again, neither the framework of affect nor the disposition of the utopian:
... hope must be unconditionally disappointable, first, because it is open in a forward direction, in a future-oriented
direction; it does not address itself to what already exists. ... [O]penness is at the same time also kept open. ... Second,
hope must be disappointable because, even when concretely mediated, it can never be mediated by solid facts. ...
Consequently, not only hope's affect (with its pendant, fear) but, even more so, hope's methodology (with its pendant,
memory) dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by an
enduring indeterminacy,
(1986b: 340-1).
Utopian hope is indeterminate because it evokes that which, although in some way immanent, does not yet exist. Utopian-affect,
for Jameson, means 'a kind of ethics' that keeps alive 'the very possibility of imagining a future which might be radically and
constitutionally other,' (1971: 126-7). As utopian affect speaks to the Not-Yet, the possibility of a future transformed, so the content
of utopian hopes cannot be wholly determined in advance.39 This suggests two corollaries. First, the indeterminacy of utopian hope
also inheres in the contingencies of political struggle: 'hope holds eo ipso [by that very act] the condition of defeat precariously in
itself: it is not confidence. It stands too close to the indeterminacy of the historical process, of the world process that, indeed, has not
yet been defeated, but likewise has not yet won,' (1986b: 340-1). Utopian-affect foregrounds the contingency and decisiveness of
political struggles, and in the encounter with the emergent future, fear and anxiety cannot be effaced. I return to this below. Second,
if utopian-affect is indeterminate, Not-Yet, then it cannot be patterned in the same way that fear-affects can. Recall that fear-affects
shaped subjects in divisive ways, marked by wariness, and were heightened and oriented by a play of indeterminacy (the threat could
be anywhere!) and determinacy (it's there!) whereby such affects were stabilized or patterned through constant corporeal feedback
loops (encounters with technologies of surveillance, for instance). Fear-affects traversed a whole range of present perceptual stimuli
to which utopian-affect does not have access.40 If utopian-affect cannot circulate in similar, patterned ways to fear-affects, in part
because it lacks the palpable infrastructure of fear, and in part because utopian-affect is and must remain indeterminate, how, then,
does utopian hope circulate?
Utopian affective agency can still be elicited through attending to the organization, and differing 'resonances' of bodies. This
means that utopian-affect is not a moral injunction that makes demands on the rational or normative register of subjectivity,
'determining' the subject to act. Rather, as Montag, in suggestive Spinozist vein proposes, there is 'no criticism of the existing social
order that is not immanent in acts and practices of resistance and revolt,' (1995: 69). This suggests that utopian-affect is alwayshttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v014/14.4.mcmanus.html
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already agential, inhering in how bodies are composed and what they are doing, inhering in the 'resonances' of 'energy made by and
through bodies,' (Gordillo, 2011) --utopian-affect might, but need not, pre-exist agency, might, but need not, motivate or galvanize
the agential endeavors of subjects. Against the subjective injunction to hope, Gaston Gordillo insists that the actual, physical
presence of bodies is absolutely vital: in demonstrations, protests, rallies, 'the multitude is in the streets,' (2011).41 In the absence of
'architecture[s] of disassurance,' (Boddy, cited in Brown, 2010: 77), the proximity of bodies is necessary to the circulation of
utopian-affect. Approaching the question of radical political agency by way of affect means, as Hynes and Sharpe argue, approaching
'bodies and minds from the point of view of their capacities or powers ... oriented not to what the mind and body should do, but to the
always indeterminate question of what they can do,' (Hynes and Sharpe, 2009: 4). Such an affective politics is and remains
untrainable (to echo Berlant, 2009: 263); its aim is not to over-determine utopian hope in particular agential orientations, but to
extend the inherent ambivalence of affects. With Spinoza, I have argued that affects are determining, but not determinist insofar as
their determinations are multiplicitous, varying in degree, intensity and direction. The politics of fear works to limit the
expansiveness of such determinations, and against this, the inherent indeterminacy of the affective is something of a weapon.
Utopian-affect then appears as something of an affective politics par excellence, to the degree that indeterminacy is vital to its
passionate or subjective configuration, its content and its processes. Utopian-affect galvanizes a politics that speaks, precisely, to
freedom, understood as extending 'potentials,' (Massumi, 2002b: 214) or simply expanding affective capacity and capability.42 This
is something of a proto-politics, that draws strength from 'incipient and unstructured mobilizations,' (Laclau and Mouffe, 2002: 144)
as a sort of raw matter that can be rendered available to the political.
Finally, if fear is a predominant affective formation in the political present, how can hope and fear be oriented together? Utopianaffect does not efface fear, but instead, inflects fear differently than hitherto. Restructuring or depathologizing fear-affects involves
work on the sensory organization of all the different kinds of matter that affect agential capacity: affect circulates through various
encounters of worldly matter and stuff through which subject finds itself manifest within. One way of restructuring fear-affect, then,
is by intervening in the feedback loops through which fear is stabilized. This might involve turning the technologies that are central
to the production of fear against themselves: when protesters use surveillance technologies against police, for instance, the feedback
loops that those technologies sustain are interrupted, and the hegemonies they secure are disrupted, rendered capricious, variable, and
open to intervention. Fear need not be ubiquitous, and visceral experimentation with our everyday sensorium can have effects upon
the 'tone' of the age. Negri is, after all, right: hope is an 'an antidote to ... fear,' (Brown et al, 2002: 200); but only insofar as the
antidote (hope) is made out of the same matter as the poison (fear). This illustrates the larger point that the future needs to be made
out of matter that is available in the present, out of the same crises, but with different trajectories: it is from the matter of this world
that the future is made. Utopian-affect, then, is made out of both hope and fear, and while fear might be restructured, it cannot be
effaced, for the fear of utopian-affect also inheres in the encounter with the world itself, in the struggle, and in the uncertainty of the
emergent. As Duggan puts it, 'there is fear attached to hope -- hope understood as a risky reaching out for something else that will
fail,' (Duggan and Muoz, 2009: 279). Fear and anxiety, rather than opposing utopian hope, are vital, necessary to its critical
agency, as that agency works through immanent historical processes that remain open and undetermined.
In this essay, I have argued that agency is rooted in worldly things, in affective encounters that shape or mobilize the capacity to
act. Following Spinoza, I have suggested that agential capacity and psychic life are not unrelated, that impersonal or 'autonomous'
affect resonates and inflects in variable, multiple, and opaque ways, in subjective feelings and agential dispositions. The
ambivalence-project, put simply, elicits spaces of 'wriggle room,' (Massumi, 2002b: 214) against forms of affective determinism, in
ways that renders the affective available for political remobilization or resignification. The affective, however, remains untrainable
(cf. Berlant, 2009: 263), for while affects overlap, fold into and out of the subjective, affect remains autonomous and remains
unpredictable in its subjective emotional and agential valences. I then turned to the politics of fear: if fear works through patterning
affective circuits into habituated responses, then such patterning can be interrupted at any point. Educing the potential
multidirectionality of affects could then become another sort of thing, an ideological incoherence that is available for mobilization.
The political mobilization of utopian-affect remains difficult, tenuous. However, the hope-project can find an ally in the
ambivalence-project, insofar as affective ambivalence stresses the multidirectionality and malleability of the affective register in
ways that can encourage ideological disruption and resignification: just as prevailing affective formations can be disrupted, so too
can the hegemonies that put those formations to work. This gives an affective twist to Moishe Postone's marxist argument, that 'to the
degree that we chose to use "indeterminacy" as a critical social category ... it should be as a goal of social and political action rather
than as an ontological characteristic of social life,' (2006: 95).43 And in this endeavor, negative affects such as fear need not be seen
as something that need to be opposed to be overcome; the human and non-human technologies through which fear-affects circulate
can be restructured, made to resonate differently. Further, however, this need not be an intentional or voluntarist politics that seeks to
directly orchestrate the emotional and even normative registers of subjectivity. Utopian-affect does not need to persuade
'consciousness' to mobilize 'bodies,' and the non-sovereign modality of agency that utopian-affect orients seeks to remain open,
indeterminate, rather than capturing, controlling, and limiting a subject, and its affective capacities. In this ambivalence and
indeterminacy lies both the risk, and the promise, of a politics of affective agency.
Susan McManus
Susan McManus is Lecturer in Political Theory at Queen's University, Belfast. Her current research projects focus on affective
political agency and theorizing global resistance. She is author of Fictive Theories: Toward a Deconstructive and Utopian Political
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Imagination (Palgrave, 2005). Susan may be reached at s.mcmanus@qub.ac.uk

Notes
1. I am grateful to the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy for a period of research leave that facilitated research on this essay. I'd like to thank Vincent Geoghegan and Debbie
Lisle for comments and suggestions on previous drafts, and I'm very grateful to the anonymous reviewer for Theory and Event for forcing me to confront analytical gaps and problems. I'd also like
to thank David Dwan and Tarik Kochi for their unflagging participation in the critical theory reading group on Spinoza's Ethics. And this is for Gareth, whose love and patience has inspired me to
practice that tricky alchemy of turning fear into hope.
2. Contemporary communist and left critical theory remains centrally concerned with the problematic of agency. On the role of hope in encouraging political agency see Zournazi (2002), and for a
more skeptical, but no less engaged, perspective, see Duggan and Muoz (2009).
3. On the Compass initiative, see http://www.compassonline.org.uk/news/item.asp?n=9396. Hope has been central to Obama's political career, Presidential campaign and his acceptance speech
as President-Elect. The more recent affective shift from hope to anger in American politics is unfortunately beyond the bounds of this essay.
4. Even for radical theorists, those invested in the hope-project such as Felix Guattari and Toni Negri, contemporary experience is marked by 'fear and loathing'; they discern 'a transcendental yet
actually manmade fear which seeps into every mind with immobilizing catastrophic dread,' with dire consequences: 'hope itself has fled this hopeless, hapless world,' (1990: 11-12).
5. The role of fear in the conservation of power, security and surveillance is evident; but what about the role of fear in power's disruption (old Hobbes clearly recognized the dangers of unfettered
fears in Leviathan)? The role of hope in the subversion of 'all conditions in which humanity is ... oppressed and long-lost' is equally evident (Bloch, 1986a: 76); but what of, conversely, the role of
hope in the reproduction of hegemonic relations? When should a skeptical eye be cast upon the colluding capacities of affirmative affect? What of the agential capacity of negative or 'disaffected'
affects in subversion? And what else, politically, can be made of the excessive production of fear, other than the violence of securitization, ongoing global war?
6. See Stewart (2004), Bennett (2010) and Coole and Frost (2010).
7. Cf. Paolo Virno:
We need to understand, beyond the ubiquity of their manifestations, the ambivalence of these modes of being and feeling, to discern in them a 'degree zero' or neutral kernel from
which may arise both cheerful resignation, inexhaustible renunciation, and social assimilation on the one hand and new demands for the radical transformation of the status quo
on the other.
(1996: 13)
8. With thanks to the anonymous reviewer for Theory and Event for this formulation, and making this implicit agenda explicit.
9. The affective turn encompasses a range of objects of analysis from a range of disciplines such as psychoanalysis, cultural studies, philosophy and political theory. It is generally informed by one
of two methodological orientations: the physiological and psychological perspectives pioneered by the work of Silvan Tomkins, on the one hand, and poststructuralist perspectives to which the
work of Gilles Deleuze is central on the other. I am interested in the affective turn to the extent that it illuminates possibilities for radical political agency, and to that end, I work within the latter
orientation, as it emphasizes the worldliness of affect, while a subjective orientation is core to the former. On the affective turn see Clough (2007), Ngai (2005), Massumi (2002a, 2002b), Flatley
(2009) and Protevi (2009).
10. See Frost's reading of the non-determinist but materialist Hobbes: 'thinking-bodies are specifically thinking bodies,' (2001: 34).
11. I am mainly concerned to think beyond the psychoanalytic, which is itself part of a vexed history of interiorizing and depoliticizing the affective.
12. Montag argues that 'the projection of a 'consciousness' or a will prior to and master of the disposition of the body' is a liberal 'ruse of servitude' (1999: xx, 56) and traces instead a materialist
trajectory from Spinoza through Foucault and Althusser.
13. On the politics of emotions, see Ahmed (2005). I roundly disagree with Philip Fisher's interpretation of the passions (that they denote 'a sustained core account of human nature,' (2002: 7).
Sianne Ngai's arguments that 'the nature of the sociopolitical itself has changed in a manner that both calls forth and calls upon a new set of feelings - ones less powerful, ... but still diagnostic in
nature,' (2005: 5) is far more compelling. Contemporary liberal thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum have argued in Aristotelian ways for the normative and cognitive value of the emotions. In this
endeavor, some emotions (such as compassion and wonder, love and grief) provide acceptable or useful guidance for liberal-democratic subjects, while others (such as disgust or shame) have no
normative value. I propose, instead, that all affects, emotions, and passions have multiple effects and ethical or agential orientations (thus I move from the normative to the critical-genealogical).
14. Spinoza punctures the humanist illusions of free will by arguing that 'men are deceived in that they think themselves free ... they say, of course, that human actions depend on the will, but these
are only words for which they have no idea' (1996: 53). Humans do not 'disturb' but rather follow 'the order of nature,' (68).
15. On rethinking affect, agency and 'new materialisms' together, see, in particular, Coole and Frost (2010).
16. This meticulous dispersion of illusory sites of agency (particularly identifiable as dualisms: a creator God with the power to punish; the state, with the power to alienate power; the illusions of
consciousness that entrap the strength and vitality of the body, and so on) is core to the radical project, and also central to Spinoza's task in The Ethics.
17. Echoing Foucault on truth: 'truth is a thing of this world,' (1980: 131). Analogously, I am arguing that agency is 'produced' by affective regimes, composed of 'multiple forms of constraint,' that
is, agency is produced by those encounters of bodies that both constrain and render agency possible.
18. Not physical as opposed to a moral or transcendent order of things: rather than simply privileging the physical (inverting the opposition), Spinoza dissolves and enfolds the latter back into the
former (elliptically expressed as, 'Deus sive natura' - 'God, that is, nature,' and echoed later by Nietzsche, as 'soul is only a word for something about the body,' (1976: 146).
19. I agree with Bennett's interpretation here: 'Spinoza ascribes to bodies a peculiar vitality,' in which 'every nonhuman body shares with every human body a conative nature (and thus a "virtue"
appropriate to its material configuration),' (2010: 2). Conatus, then, demands all bodies, or 'modes' of matter, 'form alliances and enter into assemblages' in which those bodies 'mod(e)ify and [are]
modified by others,' (Bennett, 2010: 22).
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20. As Hynes and Sharpe put it, 'Spinoza conceives of existence as a multitude of encounters ... what defines a body is not its substance but [its] characteristic and dynamic relations,' (2009: 8).
21. Spinoza distinguishes between those affects that are passions, wherein the cause is misconstrued, and those affects that are actions, wherein the subject has comprehended the material causal
interactions that constitute its psychic and agential potential. As Balibar puts it, 'when we know things adequately [by their causes in the natural order of things] we are not thereby cut off from the
affective register; on the contrary, we tend to turn all our affects into joyful passions,' (2008: 108). Judith Butler asks 'have we yet encountered a Spinozistic account of bodily vulnerability or
considered its political implications?' (2009: 30). One way of doing so would be by critical exploration of diminished conatus, whether through negative or affirmative affects.
22. Indeed, in contemporary neurobiological accounts such as Antonio Damasio, for instance, 'emotions provide a natural means for the brain and mind to evaluate the environment within and
around the organism, and respond accordingly and adaptively,' (2004: 54). This holds for human and non- or sub-human organisms (flies, Damasio avers, 'have emotions, although I am not
suggesting that they feel emotions, let alone that they would reflect on such feelings,' (2004: 42)). Emotions, that is, in a further twist, need not be considered a unique property of subjectivity
either, and neither need any creature be conscious of its emotional appraisals
23. As Deleuze puts it, consciousness is consciousness of affects (but not of all affects, by any means), and is 'purely transitive': 'as conscious beings, we ... apprehend ... the effects of compositions
and decompositions: we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threaten our own coherence',
(Deleuze, 1988: 19).
24. Spinoza construed the ethical project in ways that resonate with Melissa Orlie's description of Nietzsche and Freud's reflections on ethics and the possibility of making sense of 'psychic life':
'subjecting to reflection, yet thereby transfiguring, what had heretofore been accidental, partial, and error-ridden in our psychic lives,' (2010: 120).
25. 'Determined' is also etymologically revealing of the embeddedness of Cartesian frameworks in our everyday useage (or of the 'shadows of the dead god' that reside in 'philosophical
mythologies' such as will that Nietzsche was so alert to), insofar as it is commonly understood -- and moralized -- as an act of will ('she was so determined to succeed,' is something praiseworthy;
'her determination failed her' renders her lacking, culpable), whereas within materialist frameworks, there is something much more complex going on with what it is to be 'determined,' something
that owes much more to the combination of forces and intensities that 'she,' the 'I,' finds itself manifest within, and negotiates.
26. The infamous advice given to Lorenzo de' Medici by Niccol Machiavelli: 'fear is held together by a dread of punishment which will never abandon you,' (1979: 131). Love, that is to say, is
overly self-wrought; if, however, the Prince has at his disposal the capacity to directly elicit and galvanize fear (by, say, control of the means of punishment), he can be more readily assured of the
compliance of his subjects.
27. See Franklin D. Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address, 4th March 1933 (http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres49/html, accessed 24 July 2010) and his just as resonant Four Freedoms speech,
Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union, 1st June 1941 (http://www.fdrlibrary/marist.edu/pdfs/fftext.pdf, accessed 24 July 2010).
28. Geographer John Adams argues that 'the message conveyed is that everything that isn't strictly controlled is to be feared. ... But the effect is that all this security is diluting personal
responsibility and our own feelings of control over the environment, making us more scared and paranoid and desiring of more security to protect us,' (cited in Minton, 2009: 183). Adams
implicitly relies upon the vocabulary of rational subjectivity in making this argument, but the point can be made differently by way of affective analysis.
29. http://www.met.police.uk/campaigns/campaign_ct_2008.htm. See also: http://www.met.police.uk/campaigns/counter_terrorism/index.htm -- literally the detritus of everyday life: what
rubbish are 'people' throwing out? Who's looking at what and where? Last accessed November 2010.
30. See in particular Warren Montag's (1995) Spinozist reading of Althusserian ideology and Foucaultian discipline in precisely this manner.
31. Even as the 'science' of well-being and happiness relies upon positive bodily indicators, it remains, nevertheless, deeply normative, making it an exemplary instance of biopolitics. Indeed,
moral lack and ill-health might very well substitute for one another.
32. See Kristeva: 'It isn't necessarily voluntarism to rely on joy ... You don't just decide to be joyous. ... it is only by traversing our grief that there can be any possibility of hope,' (2002: 75).
33. On 'resonance,' see Gordillo, 2011.
34. Bloch distinguishes between expectant and filled emotions rather than particular affects -- hope, e.g., can be either. 'Filled' emotions do not tend to shape transformative agential dispositions, as
Jameson explains: 'filled emotions ... ask for fulfillment in a world at all points identical to that of the present, save for the possession of the particular object desired and presently lacking. ...
[Filled emotions] imply a kind of provincialism of the present, into which we are plunged so utterly that we lose the very possibility of imagining a future which might be radically and
constitutionally other; their analysis also implies a kind of ethics, a keeping faith with the open character of the future,' (1971: 126-7). For Duggan, the other of hope is also not fear, but
complacency -- complacency, then, can certainly be construed as a filled emotion (Duggan and Muoz, 2009: 280).
35. The internal quotation is cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ 50107934, entry 1d, accessed 4 July 2007.
36. The dreadful aspects of hope are sometimes neglected, but not by Vincent Geoghegan, who is alert to the 'deep vein of melancholy in the utopian'. See especially his essay on Olaf Stapledon -'there can seldom have been a more pessimistic utopian' (2005: 347).
37. cf. Bloch on modes of hope that diminish agency, forms that are characterized by day-dreaming or optimism, deferral or quiescence: 'those who hope and wait are often driven to folly. ... The
kind of hope that consists only of dreams always can and will be disappointed,' (Bloch, 1986b: 340).
38. Crucial here is that while hope might be a vital motivation to ethical projects, hope is also central, in however vexed forms, to unethical projects too. Bloch knew this, and devoted Heritage of
Our Times to the critical analysis of the capture of (lived, felt, genuine) hopes by the Nazi regime.
39. Further, however, the 'final content' of utopian hope is also, for Bloch, indeterminate: hopes that can be 'cast in a picture' can be fulfilled by the existent, 'capitulate' to the logic of the times, no
longer challenge or interrupt those logics (Bloch and Adorno, 1988: 16-17).
40. This is why, as Stengers points out, 'the kinds of processes which may induce or create hope are slow ones, while producing hate and despair is quick and rather easy,' (2002: 268).
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41. Gordillo is analyzing the revolutionary resonances of radical political agency in Egypt in Spring, 2011.
42. Cf. Stewart: the significance of utopian-affects also 'lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible [...] where they might go and what potential modes of
knowing, relating, and attending to things are already present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance,' (2007: 3); or, to reiterate Bloch, utopian 'openness is ... kept open,' (1986b: 340-1).
43. He continues, 'positions that ontologize historical indeterminacy emphasize that indeterminacy and freedom are related. However, they overlook the constraints on contingency exerted by
capital as a structuring form of social life,' (2006: 95). The affective twist I suggest means not overlooking affective constraints, modes of patterning, and so on.
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Copyright 2011 Susan McManus and The Johns Hopkins University Press
2011 Project MUSE. Produced by The Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Milton S. Eisenhower Library.
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Project MUSE - Theory & Event - Hope, Fear, and the Politics of Affective Agency

Theory & Event

And then spoke Joy most grievously

ends such as the enhancement of potentially transformative agency.

The Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear

... I guess "affect" is the word I use for "hope"...

Imagination (Palgrave, 2005). Susan may be reached at s.mcmanus@qub.ac.uk

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