Pathologies of Affect

Cultural Studies
ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20
Pathologies of Affect
Grant David Bollmer
To cite this article: Grant David Bollmer (2014) Pathologies of Affect, Cultural Studies, 28:2,
298-326, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2013.826264
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Date: 13 October 2016, At: 20:25
Grant David Bollmer

PATHOLOGIES OF AFFECT
The new wounded and the politics of
ontology
This essay juxtaposes the ontological variant of affect theorized by cultural theory
with what Catherine Malabou terms the new wounded bodies defined by their
inability to produce and experience specific neurological affects. Ontological affect
theory positions the capacity of a body to affect and be affected as the foundation
for relation both beyond and between individuals, often drawing on
neuropsychology for the legitimation of its claims. The new wounded, however,
exist as a form of life that cannot be acknowledged by these theories. The varied
pathologies that comprise the new wounded are identified specifically by the
inability to produce the affects that supposedly ground the ontology of relation.
The first part of this essay examines how neuropsychology constructs and identifies
the pathological other of the new wounded through discursive, medical and
technological means. A bodys capacity to experience affect is not something
biologically given, but is instead produced through techniques that sort proper and
improper bodies, defining the new wounded as less than fully human. The second
part discusses the mobilization of neuropsychological norms in ontological affect
theory. The turn to the biological in affect theory, often made in order to theorize
a non-representational sphere of existence beyond the symbolic, relies on but
cannot acknowledge the discursive and technological production of affective and
affectless bodies in neuropsychology. The ontology of affect, consequentially,
should be thought of as a normative political construct defined by the absent and
erased other of the affectless body. I conclude by claiming that a politics of
ontology must acknowledge how materialist and realist constructs of the
ontological such as affect are inherently produced within and mobilized by
historical contingencies, contexts and conjunctures.
Keywords affect theory; the body; social relation; neuropsychology;
autism; psychopathy
During the 2012 American presidential campaign, political pundits diagnosed

both major candidates with autism. For Mitt Romney this happened after he
Cultural Studies, 2014
Vol. 28, No. 2, 298326, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2013.826264
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
PAT H O L O G I E S O F A F F E C T
described a glass of lemonade as lemon . . . wet . . . good. According to

television presenter David Schuster, this incident was one of many examples
leading to the conclusion that perhaps Mitt Romney has some sort of form of
Aspergers because hes so socially inept in terms of being able to connect with
people. On the other side of partisan political critique, Dennis Stillings, a
columnist for Bismarcks Dakota Beacon, noted that Barack Obama, with his
legendary clumsiness and verbal glitches, may be manifesting a typical
feature of autism (quoted in Wallace 2012). These diagnoses are only a few
examples of the widespread popular mobilization of autism in marking
individuals other, often through the high-functioning (and clinically questionable) variation known as Aspergers syndrome.1 Autism, as defined by the
psychiatrists Simon Baron-Cohen and Patrick Bolton:
is a condition that affects some children from either birth or infancy, and
leaves them unable to form normal social relationships, or to develop
normal communication. As a result, the child may become isolated from
human contact and absorbed in a world of repetitive, obsessional activities
(1993, p. 1)
and interests.
The basic attributes of autism have entered into popular discourse to identify
those who do not seem to possess the correct mechanisms to relate to or
connect with other people, drawing on clinical definitions to identify vaguely
antisocial behaviours, experiences of anomie, closed-mindedness or awkwardness. Autism has become a generic synonym for emotional isolation and
conceptual solipsism (Silverman 2012, p. 12). With recent increases in autism
diagnoses, those without autism can claim they are on the spectrum as a way
of excusing bad behaviour (Wallace 2012) or inferring a hidden form of genius
veiled by seemingly anti-social conduct (cf. Hacking 2009a, 2010; Cook
2012). In the case of American politics, pundits can diagnose political foes with
autism to mark their inability to identify with regular members of the polity.
Along with psychopathy, narcissism and borderline-personality disorder,
the aetiology of autism is currently understood through a brains material
inability to produce and experience the affect of empathy (Baron-Cohen 2011;
cf. Rose and Abi-Rached 2013, pp. 141198). Baron-Cohen hesitates to
conflate all of these affect disorders; to do so would lump people with autism
together with psychopaths who lack conscience and appear to be evil. Yet
empathy, for Baron-Cohen, is something of a master affect. It is not an
emotion insofar as emotions are consciously interpreted feelings. Empathy is,
instead, the ability to neurologically perform relation as expressed in the brain
prior to conscious experience. Empathy produces the bonds that bring people
together. It forms the foundations of sociability as the material thing that unites
members of a collective body. Consequentially, diagnosing autism through the
absence of empathy can mean, in practical terms, that an individual is less
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C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
tightly bound into the network of relationships that sustain most of us

(Silverman 2012, p. 8). As Baron-Cohen sees it:
empathy is one of the most valuable resources in our world. Erosion of empathy
is an important global issue related to the health of our communities, be
they small (like families) or big (like nations) . . . Without empathy we risk
the breakdown of relationships, we become capable of hurting others, and
we can cause conflict. With empathy we have a resource to resolve
conflict, increase community cohesion, and dissolve another persons
pain.
(2011, pp. 124 125)
Both popular and medical diagnoses identify a lack of affective connection as a
sign of a social deviant, a troublemaker for collaboration and social harmony.
That people voluntarily suggest they cannot experience what neuropsychology understands as the embodied, biological foundation for human relation
challenges how cultural theory has regarded affect in the past several decades.
This self-diagnosis suggests a willingness to remove oneself (or remove others)
from what theory increasingly sees as an intertwining of nature and culture that
privileges the biological facticity of bodies and brains in the production of
cultural, social and political relation. Affect, with its many competing and
contrasting definitions, tends to be invoked to persuade cultural theorists of
the value of the untrammeled ontological (Hemmings 2006, p. 559). While
there are countless permutations defining what, specifically, affect is in cultural
theory, the ontological version of affect theory I am discussing in this essay
tends to define it as an embodied force that serves to simultaneously
constitute individuals, collectives and their relation in a constantly changing
process of individuation (Manning 2013, pp. 2627). The turn to affect
responds to a specific, contextually defined problem in contemporary culture
neglected in cultural theory, where the non-representative was overlooked
given the overwhelming biases towards textuality in cultural studies (see Thrift
2007). Stressing affect exemplifies something of a dialectical inversion in
cultural theory, a move from the ideal to the material seemingly made to
demonstrate the exhaustion of a politics founded on the construction and
contestation of meaning. This is often with implicit or explicit reference to
neuropsychological theories of cognition, sensation and embodiment the
same ones used to identify and pathologize autism and other affect disorders
that describe not bodies as such, but brain-body-world entanglements
(Blackman 2012, p. 1). As an analytic tool, affect is often mobilized by a divide
between the (vitally) affective and the (mentally) interpretive. This split, in
privileging the vitally affective, makes conscious interpretation little more than
a secondary effect of nonconscious cognitive, embodied processes that exist
prior to thought, following neurocognitive theories that with weak scientific
support argue conscious will is a mere side-effect of brain materiality (i.e.
Wegner 2002; cf. Leys 2011b).2 In turning to an ontology derived from the
biological, affect theory and affect theorists make disagreement about

meaning, or ideological dispute, irrelevant to cultural analysis (Leys 2011b,
p. 472), positioning science as that which reveals reality while criticizing the
contestation of meaning as a failed political project. Like other discourses of
the post-human, the turn to affect celebrates the innate potential of bodies in
(both physical and cognitive) motion while rendering consciousness little more
than an accident of evolution that does not or cannot define the specificity of
living or embodied experience (see Hayles 1999).
If the theorization of affect is tautologically defined, as it often is, through
the bodys biological capacity to affect and be affected (Blackman 2012, p. 1;
Stewart 2007, p. 2), then cultural theory must address how the same biological
claims that ground the ontological turn are also foundational for the
identification of pathologies of affect in neuropsychology along with the
wider popular embrace of these pathologies as everyday diagnoses for those
who do not seem to connect or relate properly. As Lisa Blackman has pointed
out, ontological definitions for affect often rely on invoking the nervous
system, endocrine system, or a particular neuropsychological concept, such as
the mirror neuron, in order to animate the bodys lively processuality (2012,
p. 134). Consequentially, this perpetuates cultural theorys use of psychopathology to describe the potentials and limits of subject formation,
disregarding the historical and medical contexts within which those subjects
are produced (p. 104). We should not simply accept as coincidence that the
affective turn in cultural theory has occurred at precisely the same time as
neuropsychology has increasingly pathologized bodies that seem to lack a full
capacity for biological affect, a pathology reflected in the unfortunately
widespread cultural use of autism as an excuse for generalized awkward or
antisocial behaviour. While cultural theory looks to neuropsychology to
formulate an ontological politics of affecting and being affected, neuropsychology looks to human bodies and discursively orders them in accordance
with a gradated hierarchy of material, neurobiological capacities for affect.
According to Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached, claims about the
body and its ontology are directly linked to other beliefs about ideal bodies
and proper human conduct (2013, p. 160). These links are especially visible
when placed within medical, pharmaceutical and criminal contexts, where the
neurological capacity for affect is invoked to identify individuals deemed
threatening to the maintenance of social or economic structures. This medical
and governmental mobilization of affect leads to a paradox central to this essay.
Affect in cultural theory, in drawing on neuropsychology, points to a space of
political agency beyond consciousness, intention and symbolic interpretation,
defined by the transformative capacities of (relatively undefined) bodies in
motion and interaction. Neuropsychology, using technological and discursive
means, produces bodies as capable or incapable of the generation of affect
likewise positioned before the symbolic or linguistic (in spite of any
interpretation or mediation that may actually happen) to define the
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biological nature of the body upon which the ontological definition of affect
relies. Yet by making discourse and ideology, as Leys claims, irrelevant to
cultural analysis, the turn to affect in cultural theory cannot acknowledge the
use of neuropsychological affect to define ideal bodies and ideal conduct,
calling into question the possibilities of a politics based entirely on ontological
claims about reality. At best, the same science upon which much affect theory
relies is then disavowed, criticized as reducing the political power of affect
through discourse and language as if the neuropsychology of affect is simply a
form of false consciousness. Neuropsychology, in spite of being invoked as
scientific support for affect theory, becomes little more than a distortion of
reality rather than a complex formation in its own right that participates in the
multiple registers and processes of mediation through which reality constitutes
itself.
Those identified with contemporary pathologies of affect, which Catherine
Malabou terms the new wounded, suffer, no matter their disparate clinical
profiles, from emotional disturbances that essentially consist in the malfunctioning of affective signals necessary to make decisions. To differing
degrees, they all display permanent or temporary behaviors of indifference or
disaffection (2012, p. 10). The category of the new wounded identifies a
massively diverse group of individuals. It includes those with brain damage,
degenerative neurological disorders and personality disorders such as psychopathy or autism. Each of these varied conditions shares the inability to produce
specific affects within the materiality of the brain. Bodies that cannot
experience a full range of affects are marked as reduced or incomplete in
the vital foundations of life itself. In the most extreme, as in the case of those
with severe brain damage, the new wounded exhibit almost no embodied,
biological capacity to affect or be affected. In other cases, such as the diagnosis
of psychopathy or autism, neuropsychological pathologies are defined by the
brains material inability to experience specific affects and emotions.
Psychopathy, in particular, is often characterized by the external performance
or simulation of false affects that do not correspond to the material, neuronal
function of the brain (Babiak and Hare 2006, Baron-Cohen 2011). Other
pathologies of affect are constructed in similar ways, in which the materiality of
the brain cannot produce affects correctly. Consequentially, a politics based in
a normative capacity to affect and be affected, in this case, means that the new
wounded do not have whole bodies and are constructed as something less
than human, if not completely inhuman (cf. Keller 2007, p. 353, Silverman
2012, p. 7). When confronted with the actual use of affect in neuropsychology, the innate potential of bodies to affect and be affected is used to
marginalize and confine individuals as abnormal and pathological others,
undesirable for inclusion in the social. The cultural theorization of affect that
draws on these biological theories is intertwined with a discourse that limits
the capacity of the body, pathologizing many possibilities of embodiment.
Instead of acknowledging the institutional formations that produce and

define affect in neuropsychology, affect in cultural theory tends to be either
treated as a singular event or plane, or rendered the universal ontological
substance of the real (Grossberg 2010, p. 192). For the former, the
theorization of affect as an ontological ground becomes a substitute for
engagement with the multiple layers of mediation that historically and
contextually shape the possibilities for the present. For the latter, affect
seems to propel . . . a flight to science and biology, as if affect were simply a
material relation between bodies (p. 192). Both positions are highly reductive.
Both misrecognize conjuncturally specific mobilizations of affect by funnelling
it through universalizing knowledge processes from philosophy and science,
leading to a politics that appears to emerge automatically (and autonomically)
from a theoretical plane of reality that exists outside of lived experience.
Affect theory consequentially projects a so-called ontology onto material
reality while ignoring discursive and material processes that arrange, order and
marginalize those produced as pathological and abnormal subjects in part
because affect theorys flight to the biological also entails a flight away from
discourse to order and make sensible. In universalizing the bodys capacity to
affect and be affected, the pathologies identified by the neuropsychology of
affect are likewise pathologized in cultural theory, producing bodies that
cannot exist as a normative part of the social because of their inability to
properly modulate or experience the affective flows that somehow naturally
ground sociality through their material transmission and contagion (cf.
Brennan 2004; Sampson 2012). These assumptions about sociality reflect the
current belief that those diagnosed with psychopathy do not and cannot
conform to the natural order of the social and should be identified for their
(often permanent) exclusion or incarceration (see Babiak and Hare 2006,
Ronson 2011). Autism support groups attempt to cure people with autism
because they seem to be inhuman aliens or walled fortresses rather than full
humans with complete bodies (Hacking 2009b). In making affect little more
than an ontological, material relation between bodies, pathologies of affect
reveal how specific bodies are marked as ontological impossibilities to be
corrected, confined or, in the most extreme examples of the new wounded,
let die. Turning to an ontology defined entirely by pre-discursive affect
empties cultural theory of any way of acknowledging the construction of
mental pathology, simply standing by as a complicit observer when the capacity
to modulate affect and produce relation defines the limits and possibilities for
the human.
I neither mean to suggest that all theories of affect do this nor do I think
the use of affect in cultural theory is without importance. Popular political
movements are often organized around affects that cannot be explained
through symbolic interpretation and rationality (Grossberg 1992, Berlant
1997). Collective politics are regularly formed through emotional appeals that
have less to do with meaning than with how a specific political formation
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304
feels (Ahmed 2004). But this should not disguise the fact that affective
engagement is still reliant on the production of the normal and the pathological
in both biological and civic definitions of person and citizen. It produces
some bodies as worthy of political engagement while it produces others,
through reference to biology and nature, as dangerous, inhuman or alien. If we
are to take seriously cultural studies injunction to think about politics in terms
of the specificity of contexts and conjunctures (Grossberg 2010), then this
demands for us to think about the ontological terms we invoke not as
expressions of nature but as specific theorizations of the normative conditions
of political agency in specific places at specific times. Since affect theory, in its
ontological guise, seems to desire a (post)human subject with universal
capacities of movement and affection (and little else), this specificity is ignored
in favour of claims that appear to be about biology rather than normative
preconditions for political belonging.
According to Georges Canguilhem, the abnormal, while logically second,
is existentially first (1989, p. 243). Instead of beginning with the ontology of
affect, I am going to first look at those subjects who are existentially first in
the foundations for a possible politics of affect those constructed by
neuropsychological discourse as abnormal subjects who do not have a full
capacity for cognitive, biological affect. This first part argues that neuropsychology constructs and identifies a pathological other to be managed and
excluded through medical, technological and neurocognitive means of
identifying an absence of affectivity and, consequentially, a lack of vitality
that makes an affectless body less than human. The second part moves to the
ontological variety of affect theory and how neuropsychological norms are
mobilized in this body of work. Ontology in this variant of cultural theory is
a normative political construct that relies on the absent and erased other of the
affectless body. I conclude by claiming that a politics of affect must repudiate
the argument that affect is somehow completely beyond other systems of
meaning and mediation. To suggest that affect is outside or before any kind of
symbolic order means that any discursive critique of affect theory is foreclosed
from the outset because affect is inevitably outside of discourse. The return to
signification in the theorization of affect has been stressed by recent work by
psychologists (Wetherell 2012) and historians of psychology (Leys 2011a,
2011b). Yet it seems that cultural theorists are unwilling to engage with affect
on the very grounds upon which much of their field was built. I do not mean to
suggest that reality can completely be reduced to discourse or signification.
But, at least within a conjuncture defined in part by Western neuropsychological truth claims about bodies, affect cannot be separated from this discourse
as if its possibilities are not shaped by medical processes of mediation that
include discursive means of producing the normal and the pathological. If we
disregard the discursive aspect of affect then we also ignore the very real
construction of differences and margins that remove specific bodies from
recognition as citizens and humans.
Affectless bodies and the new wounded

If the pathological and the abnormal produce the normal, then we need to
define some terms and give some historical context before we can look at how
the absence of affect is used to identify specific bodies as other. Normal,
states Canguilhem, has no properly absolute or essential meaning (2008, p.
127). We use the term normal to refer to bodies we assume healthy, though a
better way of defining normality would be unmarked. Normal is not a natural
state of bodily perfection. There is no singular ideal body to which all humans
conform that is normal. Instead, the normal is produced in relation to the
identification of another, different norm that has regular, identifiable features
that mark an individual as other. Abnormal, consequentially, does not refer to
the absence of norms but to a regular, normative state identified as disordered
or different. The pathological is a specific kind of abnormality, one that:
is not the loss of a norm but the aspect of a life regulated by norms that
are vitally inferior or depreciated, insofar as they prevent the living being
from an active and comfortable participation, generative of confidence and
assurance, in the kind of life previously belonging to it and still permitted
to others.
(pp. 131 132)
The norms of pathology produce the norms of health, even though a healthy
body is not defined by stable, normative conditions. Healthy indicates a
flexible, fluid state defined by multiple norms a healthy body may or may not
conform to at any specific moment in time. Normal describes a body that
cannot be identified as abnormal or conforming to a pathological norm.
Normal, then, would actually seem to indicate an absence or lack though the
abnormal and the pathological are constructed as lacking.
Yet, claims Canguilhem, Nothing can be lacking [manque] to a living being
once we accept that there are a thousand and one different ways of living (p.
126). There is no singular thing called the body, and there is no single form
of being that can be defined as living or life. These are historically
determined categories that produce and divide bodies according to normative
beliefs about vitality. Nonetheless, the relational construction of the
pathological identifies specific kinds of bodies and specific forms of life as
lesser, incomplete or degraded. As Eugene Thacker has argued, every
ontology of life thinks of life in terms of something-other-than-life (2010,
p. x). The sense of a full vitality upon which the ideal of health depends is
constructed through the production and identification of that which is lessthan-full, if not completely other to life itself. This degraded otherness is not
based in some intrinsic vital capacity of the body itself but is constructed
through discourse that orders bodies. The identification of abnormalities and
pathologies defines the range of possibilities for a vitally complete life out of
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the potentialities of bodies in relation with other bodies, their capacities and
how they are described.
Michel Foucault, in his seminar Abnormal (2003), extends Canguilhems
writings on medicine and health to the political, legal and social function of
identifying abnormal behaviours in modern European society, culminating in
the development of psychology as a science separate from medicine. For
Foucault, this requires the removal of pathology from the study of the human
mind, producing abnormal individuals who cannot be cured medically but
must be separated out and isolated for the safety of society. The pathological
construction of madness initially happens within medicine, as identified
through the analysis of symptoms, the classification of forms, and the search
for etiologies (p. 308). This specific medicine of madness positions mental
pathologies as illnesses to be cured through physical, medical means. The
psychology of the nineteenth century reframes medical explanations for mental
pathology through psychical and behavioural abnormalities that result from
developmental, genealogical and environmental traumas. Defining madness in
this way removes the vital grounds for mental phenomena. Traumas are not
embodied in the material realm of medicine to be cured by the physician but
placed in the mental space of memory and the psyche, governed by the science
of psychology. As a result, psychiatry no longer seeks to cure. It can offer
merely to protect society from being the victim of the definitive dangers
represented by people in an abnormal condition (p. 316).
Foucault argues that psychology uses three historical figures of abnormality, the monster, the incorrigible and the onanist, to remove the
element of pathology from the abnormal, differentiating psychology from
medicine by separating out the vital from the mental. Human monsters violate
the laws of both society and nature, simultaneously legible as an identifiable
other and illegible as something that exists beyond the limits of social
explanation. The incorrigible is an individual to be corrected that emerges
in the play of relations of conflict and support that exist between the family and
the school, workshop, street, quarter, parish, church, police, and so on (pp.
5758). The onanist is a masturbator and sexual deviant, which, in
conjunction with the other two figures of abnormality, locates all three as
expressions of sexuality. Following from these three abnormal figures,
madness is either used to confine individuals as incurable monsters (cf.
Foucault 2006, pp. 4477) or, eventually, filtered through sexual sciences and
psychoanalysis, correcting individuals through the speaking of sexual trauma.
This treatment, in the case of psychoanalysis at least, is ultimately
interminable. Madness is not the result of biological or vital pathologies. It
emerges through social, cultural and psychical abnormalities that must be
managed through the partition and separation of individuals and populations.
Techniques of vision and identification are used to locate, mark and isolate the
abnormal. No longer curable through medicine, abnormalities are isolated and
monitored to (at least supposedly) maintain the well-being of the social.
The identification of an abnormal or pathological state is not simply

performed by the institutions of power concretized, here at least, in the
practice of medicine and psychology. Canguilhem stresses how the pathological
norm is felt and experienced by an individual who comes to recognize herself
as abnormal or pathological, who approaches the doctor because of the desire
to either achieve or return to normality. The sick individual seeks a cure
because she understands herself to be sick. Canguilhem notes the experiential
problem of diagnosis with the following:
It is impossible for the physician, starting from the accounts of sick men,
to understand the experience of the sick man, for what sick men express
in ordinary concepts is not directly their experience but their interpretation of an experience for which they have been deprived of adequate
(1989, p. 115)
concepts.
The sick individual is, effectively, one who cannot speak. She must use the
language of medicine to express her illness or the language of psychoanalysis to
explain her madness. One comes to understand and feel ones own body
through discourses of the normal, abnormal and pathological, submitting to
institutions of power in the construction of a phenomenal, felt sense of self.
Psychology and medicine function, at least in part, because the patient
voluntarily submits to the physician or analyst in interpreting and categorizing
these embodied experiences.
The internalization of abnormality and pathology that enables this
relationship, however, is explicitly called into question with what Catherine
Malabou (2012) terms the new wounded. The new wounded are
characterized by brain lesions and brain damage. Psychic abnormality returns
to the body itself by locating the aetiology of mental disorder within the
materiality of the brain. With the new wounded, the historical separation of
the vital and the mental is recombined through reference to the material
function of affect in the body. Instead of psychological abnormalities, the new
wounded are characterized by neurological affective pathologies lacking in
vitality. The new wounded include the victims of various cerebral lesions or
attacks, head trauma, tumors, encephalitis, or meningoencephalitis, those
with degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinsons or Alzheimers, and the
patients whom psychoanalysis has attempted to cure without success:
schizophrenics, autistics, epileptics, victims of Tourettes syndrome. Malabou
claims that the uniting feature of all of these conditions is an absence of affect,
an emotional deficit, that emerges from the neurocognitive materiality of the
brain (p. 10).
There are three characteristics that define the construction of the new
wounded I want to discuss here. First, the new wounded are believed to not
experience the self as a self and are incapable of speaking their abnormality or
pathology through the narration of identity and trauma. This is because they
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308
do not have the capacity for affective relations to others or auto-affective

relations that define the individual, autonomous self. There is no internalization of abnormality or pathology and it is impossible to cure or correct the
new wounded with the techniques associated with the history of psychology or
psychoanalysis. Second, the construction of the new wounded combines the
medical treatment of pathology and the psychological confinement of
abnormality. However, the medical norms of pathology return with the new
wounded because the absence of affect is assumed to indicate a reduced
capacity of the body to experience a natural, vital force essential for the lived
embodiment of the biological organism. The new wounded are assumed
incurable by medical means, but diagnosed through vital, material pathologies
of the body rather than the immateriality of the psyche. Third, and finally,
while different pathologies of affect are mobilized in different ways, in each
and every instance the absence of affect is something that marks an individual
as an abnormal or inhuman other, to be confined, potentially (but
unsuccessfully) corrected, or even left to die. In every case, those marked
with pathologies of affect are beyond the limits of the social bond because they
do not possess the material capacity to experience or perform relation.
Bodies deprived of affection

For Malabou, the most striking feature of the new wounded is their inability to
speak or identify the self through the narration of a unique, continuous sense of
identity. In removing the ability to affectively relate to others and affectively
relate to self, the sense of having and speaking an identity disappears. The
speech of the patient or the phenomenological experience of illness is
completely eliminated with the pathologies that comprise the varied clinical
permutations of the new wounded, even when the patient is physically capable
of speaking. The continuity of self seems to evaporate, in which the cognitive
transformation of the brain effectively produces a completely new and different
person that has no relation to a relatively stable identity that can self-narrate a
personal history of experiential trauma:
Changes caused by brain lesions, however, frequently manifest themselves
as an unprecedented metamorphosis of the patients identity. Unprecedented, in such cases, signifies without any relation to the subjects
past: the wound gives rise to a new person, precisely, to one of the new
wounded. A person with Alzheimers disease, for example, is not*or not
only*someone who has changed or been modified, but rather a
subject who has become someone else.
(p. 15)
In the case of brain injury and degenerative brain disorders, the person before
and after the experience of trauma, while they seemingly share the same body,
are fundamentally different in terms of both personality and self-identity. This
transformation is neither recognized nor felt by the individual. Trauma remains

outside any personal expression and is fundamentally beyond interpretation.
In the most extreme cases of brain injury, the patient is completely unable
to speak or otherwise communicate with the doctor or analyst. Not only
has she been deprived of concepts, as Canguilhem states of sick men in
general, but also she has been deprived of any relation, any ability to communicate, affect or be affected. Malabou frames this as a challenge to psychoanalysis,
since the capability to speak traumas that unconsciously found identity,
interpreted through the various techniques of psychoanalysis, are completely
eliminated with these neuropsychological disorders of the brain. The psyche of
the new wounded, claims Malabou, cannot, or can no longer, encounter
itself, even by missing itself. Its history has been annihilated. Its trace has
finally been effaced along with its becoming-signifier (p. 140). There is no
developmental history foundational for the psychic experience, repressed or
not. There is nothing for the hermeneutics of psychoanalysis to interpret other
than the materiality of the brain. There is no speech for the new wounded,
the cure cannot talk, the symptom never signifies linguistically, and there can
never or will never be any transference or other relationship between analyst
and analysand. Mirroring the terms of the ontological turn in cultural theory,
practices that interpret are rendered speechless, while reality (here, of mental
illness and personality disorders) is found in the organization of matter itself.
The movement of affect is reduced to a static, affectless state that resists
interpretation (p. 53). The inability to speak or identify the self as a self is a
result of the negation of any neurological capacity for affect, an absence that is
seen not as a different way of inhabiting and living a body but as an inability to
affect and be affected by the world at large.
The return of pathology

With the new wounded, the interpretive techniques that characterize
psychology give way to the materiality of the brain. This seems to synthesize
Canguilhems pathological medicine with Foucaults psychology of the
abnormal. Mental abnormalities become expressions of a reduced capacity of
a body to experience essential vital functions. But the identification of this
reduced vitality is not to correct or cure, as was the case with medical
pathology. Instead, the separation and confinement of the abnormal persists in
the identification of pathologies of affect. The reduced vitality of specific
bodies is used to mark those bodies as inhuman monsters or subhuman others,
specifically through the absence or malfunction of particular neurological
components in the brain as revealed through medical imaging technologies.
Admittedly, the neurological explanation for mental illness was never fully
eclipsed by psychology or psychoanalysis (Cartwright 1995, pp. 4748). But
where these were more or less material explanations for mental disorders
expressive of a residual, yet persistent cultural order throughout most of the
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twentieth century, they have now returned as an increasingly dominant way of

diagnosing, treating and pathologizing issues of mental health.
As just one example, we can look at the difference between sociopathy
and psychopathy. These terms are often used interchangeably both popularly
and by mental health professionals, or are thought to refer to functionally
similar, if not identical mental disorders. Journalist Jon Ronson, in his account
of the diagnosis and treatment of psychopathy in mental health, completely
conflates the two categories, as Psychologists and psychiatrists around the
world tend to use the two terms interchangeably (2011, p. 113). From an
observational perspective this may appear to be correct, as the symptoms of
the two conditions often appear interchangeable. But there is a difference
between the two disorders that depends explicitly on the neurological ability of
a brain to experience specific affects. According to Robert D. Hare, a Canadian
psychologist considered to be one of the foremost experts in the identification
of psychopathy, the people with this disorder are without conscience and
incapable of empathy, guilt, or loyalty to anyone but themselves (Babiak and
Hare 2006, p. 19). Psychopathy is a personality disorder that is fundamentally
the result of a neurological malfunction in the affective capacity of the brain.
Those with psychopathy are materially incapable of specific relational affects
because, quite simply, their brains cannot produce those affects. Sociopathy,
on the other hand:
is not a formal psychiatric condition. It refers to patterns of attitudes and
behaviors that are considered antisocial and criminal by society at large . . .
Sociopaths may have a well-developed conscience and a normal capacity
for empathy, guilt, and loyalty, but their sense of right and wrong is based
(p. 19)
on the norms and expectations of their subculture or group.
Sociopathy is, as the name indicates, socially constructed, while psychopathy is
hardwired in the brain. The sociopathic brain is fully capable of a full range of
affects while a psychopathic one is not.
Hare and his coauthor, psychologist Paul Babiak, are explicit in defining
psychopathy as a personality disorder rather than a mental illness (p. 40). The
divide between the two reflects the split between the pathological and the
abnormal in the development of psychology identified by Foucault. A mental
illness is temporary, curable and does not define the individuals identity or
self. A personality disorder is permanent, located within the brain, unchangeable through the techniques of psychology today regardless of any neurological
plasticity (see Malabou 2008). One cannot correct a personality disorder;
they can only be treated with pharmaceuticals that temporarily modify the
brains chemistry. Something like psychopathy that arises from the fundamental operation of the brain defines the identity of the individual through
neurological determinants (Baron-Cohen 2011, pp. 1928) while remaining
inexpressible through the language that, in psychoanalysis at least, was

formerly thought to produce identity and the self.
The visualization of pathology has a long and storied relationship with
imaging technologies (see Cartwright 1995). Diagnoses of affective pathologies
today are made perceptible primarily through functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) scanning machines (see Rose and Abi-Rached 2013, pp. 53
81). According to Baron-Cohen (2011), psychopathy, narcissistic personality
disorder, borderline personality disorder and autism all result from a
malfunction in the brains empathy circuit, an interconnected series of at
least 10 distinct regions of the brain. This circuit, as made visible through the
techniques of fMRI scanning, is assumed to be the very foundation of any
affective relationship between humans. The ability of affect to be transmitted
between people (Brennan 2004) is, in the neuropsychological theorization of
affect, often thought of as a visually based response to facial expressions that is
not interpretive but neurologically processed by this circuit through an
inborn biological capacity for understanding the face (Baron-Cohen 2011, p.
26). The reading of faces has nothing to do with the conscious interpretation
of the experience or feelings of other people. It instead resides purely in the
function of specific centres of brain activity, made visible to neuropsychology
using mechanisms such as fMRI scanning. In spite of a massive amount of
historical criticism of this way of formulating affect, it persists in
neuropsychological discourse. According to Ruth Leys, reasons for the
perpetuation of this cognitive materialist paradigm are numerous. Locating
affect and personality in the brain expresses desires for scientific objectivity
that reproduce norms of evolutionary theories of the mind. More
importantly, in identifying the material absence of affect, fMRI technologies
and other neuroimaging machines (namely positron emission tomography, or
PET scanning) hold promise for:
surveillance experts keen to find ways of detecting liars as easily as a blood
test can detect DNA . . . you are likely to conclude that the inner truth
about a person will be detectable by properly trained observers, which is
to say, you will conclude that there is an important sense in which the
(2010, pp. 88 89)
body cannot lie.
Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached term these techniques screen and
intervene, where imaging technologies hold a (perhaps flawed) promise of a
future in which pathologies of affect can be identified and excluded for
purposes of social and economic risk management, or to correct brains through
pharmaceuticals (2013, p. 166).
Affect, in the neuropsychological form appropriated by affect theory, is
mobilized not to celebrate some wild and free potentiality of the body. Affect is
invoked to make the body speak in a way that interpretation and language matter
not and materiality as revealed through medical imaging technologies yields
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truth. This perpetuates long histories of how technologies of visualizing and

producing the truth of the body identify, isolate and marginalize (Foucault 1977,
Robertson 2010, Gates 2011). The fMRI and PET scanning machines are used to
mark bodies that cannot materially experience the affect of empathy, cannot
relate to other humans properly and should consequentially be subject to
institutions of confinement or isolation.3 The speech of an individual may
deceive especially when it comes to bodies of the new wounded that cannot
speak properly or cannot speak at all but the brain reveals ones truth as
defined by a full or diminished capacity for neurological affect that supposedly
exists beyond interpretive frameworks for evaluating subjective emotions.
Confinement (psychopathy), failed cures (autism), death (brain trauma)

The return of pathology through the vital absence of affective capacity in the
brain, combined with the history of psychology in confining or correcting the
abnormal, comes together in contemporary cultural and medical treatment of
the varied forms of the new wounded. While specific solutions to these
pathologies differ, in each and every case those marked with pathologies of
affect are produced as lacking in vitality, lesser than normal humans if not
completely inhuman, closer to an object or an alien than an actual human life.
Psychopathy almost directly mirrors Foucaults human monster, the figure
of abnormality that is not only a violation of the laws of society but also a
violation of the laws of nature (2003, pp. 5556). In Hervey Cleckleys The
Mask of Sanity (1955), one of the original texts to formalize psychopathy as a
personality disorder, people with psychopathy often successfully perform
normality while manipulating and frequently ruining the lives of those they
encounter because of their inability to produce embodied affects. They have a
superficial charm but, among other attributes, have no anxiety or guilt, are
dishonest and undependable, are egocentric, cannot form long-term relationships, do not learn from punishment, have shallow affects or impoverished
emotions, do not think about the impact of their actions and do not plan ahead
(pp. 380420). The psychopath may have an outward appearance of
normality, but inside they lack the cognitive materiality that makes a human
complete. They do not think about the feelings of others, even though they
may recognize that they are, in fact, hurting or causing harm.
One of Robert Hares early studies on psychopathy from the 1960s,
following the work of Cleckley, subjected prisoners to painful electric shocks
while attached to electroencephalogram (EEG), perspiration and blood
pressure monitors. In order to discern a neurocognitive aetiology for
psychopathy, Hare hypothesized that those with the disorder would experience
the threat and administration of pain differently than those without. In his
rather brutal experiment, Hare counted down from ten and administered a
painful shock when he reached zero. The prisoners without psychopathy would
prepare themselves for the experience of pain. Their heartbeat would increase
and they would perspire. The EEG monitor recorded increased activity in the
brains fear centres. Those with psychopathy, on the other hand, did not have
an increase in heartbeat, and did not sweat. While they momentarily shrieked
in pain, their bodies did not seem to register fear in any neuropsychological
sense. When Hare repeated the test, the psychopathic prisoners still did not
register any experience of fear or other affective state on Hares equipment.
They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock even when the pain had
occurred just moments before, Hare concluded, So whats the point in
threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole?
The threat has no meaning for them (quoted in Ronson 2011, p. 94). For
Hare, this means that people with psychopathy neither learn nor benefit from a
prison system designed to eventually integrate criminals into dominant social
norms. Prisoners with psychopathy, who make up approximately 15% of the
prison population, tend to have a much higher recidivism rate than others
incarcerated they are far more likely to commit new crimes after being
released from jail because they neither experience social norms affectively nor
do they have the material mental equipment to relate to other human beings as
human beings (Babiak and Hare 2006, p. 18). Hare concludes that any use of
the prison system to correct and teach new social norms is pointless. Those
with psychopathy do not learn and consequentially will never benefit from
social conditioning designed to instil proper morality or correct uses of liberty.
While not all people with psychopathy are criminals, Hare, along with
other psychologists studying the neurological foundations for psychopathy,
believe that they are responsible for much, if not all of the political conflict and
economic ruin in the world. Baron-Cohen (2011) even attempts to redefine
evil in terms of the specific absence of empathy best exhibited in psychopathy,
extending out (and making scientific) a general moral judgement to a specific
flaw in the function of a brain that cannot be corrected through medical or
psychological means.
Questions about the incarceration of those diagnosed with psychopathy
intersect with other questions about the purpose of psychiatric care and the
prison, especially since not all of those identified as psychopaths either break
the law or cause harm against other people. Hare, however, is convinced that
there is no possible way of correcting psychopathy. His work suggests, as
Leys argues of neuropsychological affect research more broadly, a move to
scientific ways of identifying the absence of affect as a means to confine or
perpetually monitor those assumed to be inevitable bad eggs, who may be
outright evil in a scientifically identifiable way, drawing out the truth of the
brain when speech deceives. With psychopathy, technological means of
identification are not designed to correct or make normal, but to manage,
isolate and monitor so as to correct in advance without any internalization of
behaviours in accordance with some form of morality (cf. Deleuze 1992). The
person with psychopathy is evil because he outwardly simulates affects that
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do not exist internally, a disjuncture that can only be revealed through an

expert gaze or medical imaging technology (or a combination of the two).
This does not mean that attempts to cure pathologies of affect do not exist.
Much money and research are directed towards eliminating autism through
medical and psychological therapies, making people with autism complete
humans. Popular discourse about autism is filled with references to aliens, as
some people with autism are attracted to the metaphor of the alien to describe
their own condition, or to say that they find other people alien. Conversely,
people who are not autistic may in desperation describe a severely autistic
family member as alien (Hacking 2009b, p. 44). This alien-ness of autism is
often described using identical language as Malabou uses when she claims that a
brain lesion gives rise to a new person . . . not or not only someone who has
changed or been modified, but rather a subject who has become someone else
(2012, p. 15). The autism advocacy group CAN: Cure Autism Now has
described autism using the following metaphor: Imagine that aliens were
stealing one in every two hundred children . . . That is what is happening in
America today. It is called autism (cited in Hacking 2009b, p. 44). This way
of describing autism is endemic and is the basis for the founding of numerous
autism support groups. A false child has replaced the child diagnosed with
autism. A cure for autism will return the original child, the one stolen in the
night by aliens.
Again, we have one of Foucaults figures of abnormality repeated with
pathologies of affect. People with autism repeat the category of the
incorrigible, the individual to be corrected though, as was the case for
Foucaults critique of psychology, the correction never comes. There is only
the perpetual attempt to correct that marks the incorrigible individual as other,
as to be potentially but never actually corrected. Once more, this individual is
somehow lacking in vitality or is inhuman attributes directly expressed in the
discourse of the autistic alien. As philosopher Deborah Barnbaum argues, to
try to change the autistic adult into someone who is not autistic is to fail to
respect him as a person in his own right . . . to try to cure them of autism is
to fundamentally change who they are in a way that denies them the respect
they deserve (2008, pp. 1112). In this way of theorizing pathologies of
affect, while psychopathy is evil a person with autism is not even a person.
Autism support groups that lobby for an autism cure fundamentally assume
that a person with autism is degraded and other, to be medically reformed into
the real human being the person with autism once seemed to be as an infant.
Barnbaum suggests that this is related to overwhelmingly common assumptions
about good and full lives. Moral philosophy implicitly suggests, Being
autistic limits your life chances in numerous ways . . . philosophers . . . believe
that having relationships with other persons is a significant part of what makes a
human life go well (p. 162). Being unable to experience normative affective
relations, consequentially, means that ones life is inevitably incomplete or
degraded.
The continued dehumanization of those with pathologies of affect is most

obvious with extreme brain damage the popular colloquial term for those in
a persistent vegetative state is, of course, vegetable. No longer human,
these new wounded are still living but they are not of a same vitality as
human life or of animal life more broadly. What life and death mean for these
individuals is highly contested and crosses other discourses about God and
sovereignty (cf. Hyde and McSpiritt 2007). But the distinction between
human and those excluded from the vital grounds of the social is increasingly
defined through the neurobiology of affect as a material, biological means to
connect and relate between bodies. The new wounded comprise a category of
people who cannot relate properly, if at all. In the neuropsychology of affect,
these people are beyond the social, but impossible to correct. They are those
who are left to die, both socially and biologically, often through active means
of identifying and excluding based on the materiality of the brain.
When we look at these pathologies of affect, it should be obvious that they
comprise something of a variant of what Achille Mbembe terms necropolitics
(2003). Embodied, neurological affect is invoked to identify individuals that
must be excluded for the maintenance of social through the materiality of
affect. The new wounded either are evil, are an alien form of life that must
be eliminated or are bodies that simply lack the relational, vital capacity to be
recognized as human. In her naming of these individuals as the new wounded,
Malabou begs us to think about the very meaning of wound. Mbembe asks
about contemporary biopolitics, What place is given to life, death, and the
human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed
in the order of power? (p. 12). While this is a vastly different context than
that described by Mbembe, we still have a political formation that positions
some bodies as those to be actively controlled and excluded with others simply
deemed disposable. The medical, neurological diagnosis of a pathology of
affect means that an individual has been identified for exclusion, potential (but
never actual) correction or simple social and (eventually) biological death. The
power to identify affect is a power that defines who lives and who dies based
out of norms of full bodies that experience affect and properly perform
relation more broadly.
Neuropsychological affect in cultural theory

One cannot make a leap to suggest that this political formation is directly
repeated in the cultural theorization of affect. Nonetheless, when affect theory
draws on neuropsychology it does so to argue how affect is seen as proceeding
directly from the body and indeed between bodies without the interference or
limitations of consciousness, or representation (Papoulias and Callard 2010, p.
35). Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be
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acted upon (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, p. 1), and references to biology show
how this capacity is foundational for human and animal being if not
foundational for material being in general (i.e. Bennett 2010). It is this inbetween-ness that is supposedly lacking in the body of the new wounded. Call
it empathy or something else, the very reason that pathologies of affect exist
is because specific bodies do not seem to modulate or perform this in-betweenness in a way that successfully maintains social relationality. Consequentially,
affect theory should be thought of less as an ontology than as a normative
theory of relation that is itself a contextually specific description of specific
kinds of bodies in specific kinds of relations. In extending out these normative
claims to the ontological, affect theory can neither acknowledge the existence
of the new wounded nor can it critique the neuropsychological production of
individuals that then seem to violate its ontology.
The ontological variant of affect theory is more or less a cocktail of
scientific theories mixed with others that draw on or repeat specific
philosophies most often that of Baruch Spinoza to suggest a kind of
pure, unmediated relation between bodies. This relation is thought to be
politically productive. The movement of affective intensities between bodies
unleashes a potential that exists outside the boundaries of any one entity,
exposing an individual to an open future of potential change. Nigel Thrift, in
laying out the stakes for affect theory, cites Spinoza:
There is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of
anonymous force. The plane is concerned only with movements and rests,
with dynamic affective charges: the plane will be perceived with whatever
(cited in Thrift 2007, p. 13)
it makes us perceive, and then only bit by bit.
The ontological variant of affect theory presents something called affect as a
possible ground that exists prior to representation, signification, intentionality,
subjectivity and individuality. It is the quantitative and material reality of any
event, line of becoming, or mode of being (Grossberg 2010, p. 193).
In drawing on neuropsychological theories of the body, the biology of
affect is invoked as material proof for the truth of these philosophical
postulates. Brian Massumi (2002), William Connolly (2002) and Teresa
Brennan (2004), among others, all refer to neuropsychology as hard fact to
scientifically verify the humanistic theorization of affect (Papoulias and Callard
2010, p. 37). All that work on understanding the cultural context of science
and the political violence of medicine was, apparently, just a focus on the
wrong kind of science. Science that stresses the creative and vital potential of
bodies and brains in motion is shaped into a canon of scientific names
(Damasio, LeDoux, Varela, Tompkins, Ramachandran) that seems to
legitimate the work of humanistic philosophy with the scientific affects
(Massumi 2002, p. 20) of authority carried over from empirical brain research.
Yet, is it just the case that bad science continues to use otherwise pure
scientific concepts when we look to the new wounded? Is it just that the names
that I have cited in the first part of this essay (Baron-Cohen, Hare) are outside
of this canon because they have the ontology of the living wrong? One response
from affect theorists would be that neuropsychology, in identifying specific
affect circuits in the brain, conflates and confuses affect and emotion. For
Massumi, this is a common error. Affect and emotion, however, follow
different logics and pertain to different orders (p. 27). Affect is a preindividual intensity or force; it is irreducibly bodily and autonomic (p. 28),
existing within the body and brain as a wild, unconstrained energy that arises
from biology. Affect is de-individualized, moving across subjects and the world
as a universal immanent force. Impersonal affect is the connecting thread of
experience. It is the invisible glue that holds the world together (p. 217).
Emotion, in contrast, is qualified intensity (p. 28). Emotion is made sensible,
formed into semiotically coded narratives that define what a body is and what a
body does. Emotion is captured affect, shaping bodies and brains into culturally
coded beings that restrict the play of affective intensity. Yet, affect, in its vital
autonomy, struggles to be released into the world, shaping and remaking it in
accordance with the pre-symbolic and pre-individual intensity of bodies
coming into contact.
Ruth Leys (2011b), in her critique of Massumi and other similar affect
theorists (namely William Connolly), suggests that this criticism of science
within affect theory is more than a little disingenuous. While Massumi, in
particular, claims to distance himself from the mechanisms that science uses to
capture affect and transform it into qualified emotion, he nonetheless
formulates affect in a way analogous to how psychologists have historically
theorized emotion. In contrast to Massumis claims, emotion in the
psychological tradition that grounds both neuropsychology and affect theory
is operationalized as a pre-signifying, non-intentional force that arises from
corporeal materiality. Emotion, in this psychological discourse, is not distinct
from affect but is instead an embodied, material force irreducible to
meaning. Leys major critique of affect theory is that the new affect
theorists are . . . making a mistake when they suggest that emotion or affect can
be defined in nonconceptual or nonintentional terms (2011a, p. 802).
Separating affect from emotion as Massumi does, Leys argues, repeats
Cartesian mindbody dualism by suggesting that language is somehow
divorced from the embodied materiality of the brain, as if language exists as
an immaterial mind yoke projected upon the brain, restricting and reducing
the capacity of the body. Consequentially, with affect theory we end up just as
far away from materiality as we were with Descartes and idealism, since, in
the partition of affect and emotion, the vital power of the body is positioned
against a restrictive (false) agency of discourse. The mindbody split, which
affect theory often claims to overcome, is just as bifurcated as it has ever been.
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As Leys correctly notes (2011b, p. 472), this anti-intentionalist stance is

perplexing within the historical contexts of cultural theory. The intentional
agency of active audiences in the negotiation of hegemony has long been
central to the political project of cultural studies in a number of vastly different
registers and going back further, some sense of intentionality has been
essential for any sort of phenomenological or hermeneutic politics. But, against
this point, I neither believe that we should return to intention as the grounds
for the political, nor should we simply conflate signification (or meaning, or
interpretation) and intention. Instead, to acknowledge the complexity of affect
we must necessarily understand that it exists within specific contexts,
articulated to and mediated by other processes and materialities be they
discursive, technological or otherwise. Consequentially, the ontology of
affect then should be approached from within the material reality of everyday
life, not as something prior to reality. In making this move, we can then
acknowledge that affect may have intentional or non-intentional aspects; it may
be articulated to systems of signification or it may not. Regardless, what affect
is should be understood explicitly in terms of how affect is employed within
larger formations that serve to unite and divide without assuming a material,
biological force of relation that seems to emerge from nature.
Lawrence Grossberg (2010) makes a similar point, arguing that affect
theory often substitutes an expansive and totalizing ontology for the lived
reality of everyday life. While cultural studies, following the intellectual
traditions of European modernity, has too quickly assumed that the symbolic
construction of meaning is the primary, if not only ground for the construction
of reality, affect cannot be positioned as prior or superior to these other
symbolic and non-symbolic forms of mediation. Instead, affect exists alongside
these other processes, transforming and remaking them through the
articulation of different, intersecting aspects of reality. Grossberg suggests
that there are three dimensions to affect. First, affect defines the ontology of
immanence or virtuality (p. 193) as a universal ground of being and
becoming. Second, affect describes bodies in motion (affection), the materiality
of mediation (p. 193). These two dimensions are what we have seen above in
the cultural theorization of affect as its material ontology. But Grossberg
stresses another, third dimension that transforms the theorization of affect
from what is more or less a philosophical project to one engaged with the
political examination of contexts and conjunctures: affect, often mistakenly
set in opposition to forms of signification, highlights certain modalities of
incorporeal effects, especially the multiplicity of expressive discursive,
cultural mediations. In other words, Grossberg continues:
for both of the last two senses where affect describes something about
the realm of the actual . . . affect is always organized by discursive or
cultural apparatuses, which are in turn sites/agents of the production of
and the struggle over the real.
(p. 194)
The ontological politics of affect theory tends to conflate these three

dimensions in some form or another, leading to a politics that rejects
mediation in favour of theoretical abstraction, autonomic and automatic
reactions, and a hybrid nature-culture in which brain scans seemingly speak
the truth of political agency. In the process, the discursive and material means
for organizing affect that define possibilities for real political struggle are
neglected as sideshows that distract from the ontological power of pure,
unmediated affect.
That there are people whose bodies are constructed as unable to
experience specific affects, and are either actively or passively excluded for
that very reason, demonstrates why ontological politics are problematic.
Without the ability to acknowledge how contemporary institutions produce
these differences, then we do not really have any means for acknowledging that
these pathologies are anything other than ontological errors. In neuropsychology, empathy is not simply an emotion it is an affective state that is
understood as the very ground that unites bodies. Empathy, as employed by
Hare and Baron-Cohen, is simply a synonym for affect as a neurobiological
intensity that materially relates one human to another. The new wounded are
threats to the social because these material connections either do not exist or
are simulations. The ability of this specific affect to shuttle back and forth
between discursive, material and pre-discursive domains, between the
construction of pathology and the supposedly ontological affective vitalism
of bodies, demonstrates how even the meaning and mobilization of supposedly
pre-signifying forms of affect cannot be encountered except through means of
identification that literally serve to produce, sort and order bodies because
they either do or do not reflect the abstract theorization of the so-called
material reality. In other words, when there are people whose bodies are
identified and excluded because they do not and cannot conform to what affect
theory defines as a universal ontology, then we have to conclude that this
affective ontology is, in fact, not one that arises from nature and the biological
facticity of the body. It is produced through various mechanisms and
intersections of mediation, which together conjuncturally serve to define
and identify normal and pathological bodies. Not only are the latter confined
and erased through exclusionary tactics of medicine and psychology, but also
they are eliminated from theory as a conceptual exterior, erased as a
fundamental binary ground from which any metaphysical ontology is called
into being.
The limits of this so-called ontology can be seen in how Erin Manning
(2013) attempts to theoretically reconceptualize autism. Manning argues,
against psychologists like Baron-Cohen, that people with autism are not
asocial or neurologically incapable of relational affects, but are instead
suprasocial, in which autism is something closer to a kind of infantile
experience of extreme relational potential that is defined by the constant
bombardment of hyperrelationality (p. 8). Drawing on Daniel Sterns infant
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psychology, along with the writings of people with autism, Manning claims
that while most humans lose this hyperrelationality as they develop into
individualized adults, people with autism do not. Individualized, normal
adults view the world as a series of discrete, stable, chunked objects. People
with autism approach the world without these chunks. They do not tend to
first and foremost abstract themselves their self from the emergent
environment (p. 10). Manning terms the experience of the world as a kind of
undifferentiated holism of relation autistic perception. According to
Manning, positioning this form of experience as a kind of primal, ontogenic
ground is a political move, as it opens up the possibilities for subjectivity and
the self to a radical potentiality defined not by individual stability, but by a
constantly becoming and transforming body in relational, affective motion.
While Manning draws on psychological writings about child development
and the writings of people with autism in her formulation of this originary
autistic perception, she claims shes neither defining autism in her theory nor
describing what it means to have autism (p. 218). Nonetheless, there are
numerous issues one can take with her treatment of autism, from her model of
development that seems to unintentionally repeat Freud and Lacan, her use of
psychopathology to theorize the ontological (cf. Blackman 2012, p. 104), to
her almost Orientalist positioning of autistic perception as a more
ontologically authentic way of experiencing the relationality of the world
(cf. Hacking 2009a, 2010). But, more significantly for my argument, all
Manning does is reverse which subjects are normal and which are
pathological.4 Manning suggests that the everyday experience of a normal
subject is, in fact, a distortion of the ontogenic ground of becoming
experienced by those with autistic perception. Normals are, in fact,
normopaths: pathological individuals who impose a vitally reduced way of
producing the world onto others as normal. She argues:
many of us neurotypicals feel as though the world is pre-chunked into
species, into bodies and individuals. This is the shortcoming, as autistics
might say, of neurotypical perception . . . Autistic perception warns us
against this approach, however, persistently reminding us not to begin
with the pre-chunked. Begin in the middle! Dont assume to know in
(2013, pp. 219 220)
advance how the chunking will resolve!
This is an admirable conclusion, certainly. Yet I hesitate to say that this is what
Manning is actually doing. I also do not think that simply moving to this
ontogenic theorization of process performs this openness, either. In Mannings
radical empiricism, one begins with the assumption that relation exists, and
one concludes with the assumption that relation exists. And not only that, this
relation is more or less a holism, in which the lines drawn between objects and
things are errors that cause the neuropathological normals to mistake
differences and separations for a relationally connected, constantly fluid reality
in which any boundary is, at best, a temporary solidification of the flux of the
real. The bizarre thing is that, while Manning clearly wants to critique the
ethics of normalization as one that overwrites, that judges and sequesters
into so-called intelligibility the agitation of all ecologies that do not resemble
it (p. 171), she simply embraces the norms of neuropsychology and rewrites
the categories of the normal and the pathological so that the formerly
pathological subjects of the new wounded (and really, only those who seem to
fit into her abstraction of autism) become normal. Those formerly thought
normal now become pathological because they are unable to feel their truly
connected, relational, affective existence. Neither the overall diagram of
relationality nor the assumed norms of nature change the bodies and subjects
who fit into the categories of normal and pathological are simply inverted. The
normal and pathological are still defined out of ones ability to modulate
affective relation.
Conclusion: the politics of ontology

It may seem as if I am suggesting that affect theory has a body count.5 While
this claim can certainly be made about psychology, especially as it is
transformed through neuropsychological mechanisms for controlling, confining
and correcting unruly subjects, it does not quite describe what happens when
these neuropsychological theories are transformed into cultural theory. But
while affect theory may not have a body count in the same sense as psychology,
it does have a count-as-body. In spite of all of the attempts to transform the
limits of embodiment through neuropsychology, there is still a body in affect
theory, and it is defined by normative definitions of movement and relation
that emerge from a neuropsychological understanding of what a body is and
what a body does. This may not look like the body we typically assume, but it
is still a body, and it still carries normative assumptions about full and
degraded lives. I agree with Manning that we should begin in the middle,
refusing to let our set categories (or chunks) determine our analysis. But
affect and relation can still be these chunks that serve to guide our claims.
In the narrative I have offered above, either affect is an ontological absolute
or it exists as a historical formation that serves different political ends at
different moments in time which consequentially means that the reality of
affect can never be grasped outside of its cultural, political and discursive
mobilization. If we start from the position of history, refusing to accept affect
as an eternal, transcendent guide for cultural politics, we can observe that
there are categories produced by psychology, with reference to the brain,
made visible with medical imaging technologies, which serve to marginalize
and exclude specific bodies from humanity. Through discursive categories that
order and produce material reality, these bodies are constructed as less than
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322
human, as lacking in vitality, parcelled out because of a vital capacity to

experience empathy as a material, neurological relation between bodies.
Through this discourse, specific bodies are placed into apparatuses where they
are confined, corrected or let die. We can see how these categories are, in
fact, contingently produced ways of dividing and shaping possibilities for
bodies and political agency.
If we start from the position that sees affect as a universal ground, then . . .
what? Is some science is good while other science is bad? Does empathy, even
when defined as an asignifying material, biological force that bridges bodies,
reduce affect through signification because it is an emotion rather than a pure
affect? What does this distinction even mean when neuropsychology seems to
define empathy in the identical way that some affect theorists define affect
more broadly? These should be simple questions, yet I do not think that the
ontological variant of affect theory can give them satisfying answers. The
various rhetorical moves made by affect theorists regarding science and
signification seem to defend the productive uses of affect in cultural theory
against its use in neuropsychology while repeating and drawing on those very
same theories. Any time affect seems to be used in ways that may be politically
problematic or regressive, it has been captured by institutions that deny the
unconstrained possibilities of the body. That people are excluded from
humanity because of scientifically normative judgements about the presence
and absence of affect becomes an ontological error. The politics of affect, if this
is even a politics, becomes a sort of ontological correction in which the
material effects of discourse are nothing other than stumbling blocks for the
access to a reality in which all bodies are supposedly eternally equal through
the energies and forces that flow through affective connection. Politics seems
to become the task of advancing a correct version of the real obscured by
various forms of cultural mediation. In clearing away the mediated mess of
culture, politics then emerges autonomously and autonomically from the
interplay of de-subjectified and undefined bodies in motion.
To say that political formations are organized through affect, in that bonds
between people often have more to do with feelings and desires than rational
thought, is a completely different way of thinking of affect than positioning it
as a universal autonomic ground for embodied agency. One position
understands social formations as produced through historical processes that
have no uniform structure, contextually shaping bodies and their abilities. The
other assumes that affect exists, and that politics simply follows from the body
and its neurological capacity for movement and relation. Yet the very thing
called affect can divide and unite bodies based on differential capacities for
feeling and relating. Affect can be mobilized in a way to eliminate specific
people from humanity. Unless affect theory can account for its use in
producing these divides, then it cannot properly account for political struggle,
agency or the reality of everyday life. Fortunately, making this move is easy.
All it requires is the admission that affect does not exist purely as a pre-
symbolic, pre-discursive, pre-cultural ground. Affect is not reducible to an

ontological, neurobiological a priori. It is, we should conclude, produced
within historical and material processes of mediation, in which affect itself is
one of many vectors. In other words, a politics of ontology refuses to let
ontology guide politics, but instead understands ontological concepts as
implicitly normative claims about proper and full ways of living and being a
subject. But, simultaneously, this means that ontology is itself open to political
contestation because it is shaped by the multiple processes of mediation that
serve to produce collectives, conflicts and struggles.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Katherine Guinness for reading and remarking
on multiple drafts of this article, Mark Hayward and Ian Goodwin for
conversations and discussions that informed the writing of this essay and the
anonymous reviewers for their careful attention and helpful comments.
Notes
1
Aspergers syndrome was removed as a disorder separate from autism in the

fifth edition of the American Psychological Associations Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. There are numerous reasons for this, but
the result defines autism as a holistic spectrum. Calling autism a spectrum,
however, is not itself without problems (see Hacking 2009a, 2009b).
I am specifically referring to the snowman experiment and Benjamin Libets
missing half-second experiment, invoked most notably by Brian Massumi
(2002, pp. 23 45). See Leys contextualization (2011b) of these experiments
in the history of psychology for why Massumis argument draws on science in
a problematic way (as do psychologists and other affect theorists who make
hasty, broad generalizations from these studies). See Wetherell (2012, pp.
11, 20) for another version of this critique. For more on Libet, see Rose and
Abi-Rached (2013, pp. 209 213).
This is at least how mental health professionals talk about the promises of
brain imaging technology. In practice, most still rely on interpretive heuristics
in spite of critiques of these clinical methods from those who favour
objective imaging techniques. And this is not to mention that technologies of
visualizing the brain obviously do not produce an unmediated image but
rather one interpreted within specific technological and discursive contexts
(see Rose and Abi-Rached 2013, pp. 110 140).
And this is not to mention how Manning defines normal and pathological is
problematic. She argues that the normal is a false state of stability while the
pathological is a fluid, dynamic state that includes all those who fail to
323
324
conform to the norm (2013, p. 188). This follows neither the medical uses of
pathology Canguilhem, Foucault, Rose and Abi-Rached describe nor the
cultural pathologies associated with the identification and marginalization of
specific identities.
I have borrowed this term from a criticism made by one of the reviewers of
the original manuscript.
Notes on contributor
Grant David Bollmer is a lecturer in the Digital Cultures programme in the
Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney. His
research examines the technological, theoretical, historical and cultural
dimensions of connectivity.
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Pathologies of Affect

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Date: 13 October 2016, At: 20:25

Grant David Bollmer

During the 2012 American presidential campaign, political pundits diagnosed

described a glass of lemonade as lemon . . . wet . . . good. According to

tightly bound into the network of relationships that sustain most of us

biological, affect theory and affect theorists make disagreement about

Instead of acknowledging the institutional formations that produce and

Affectless bodies and the new wounded

The identification of an abnormal or pathological state is not simply

do not have the capacity for affective relations to others or auto-affective

Bodies deprived of affection

transformation is neither recognized nor felt by the individual. Trauma remains

The return of pathology

twentieth century, they have now returned as an increasingly dominant way of

inexpressible through the language that, in psychoanalysis at least, was

truth. This perpetuates long histories of how technologies of visualizing and

Confinement (psychopathy), failed cures (autism), death (brain trauma)

do not exist internally, a disjuncture that can only be revealed through an

The continued dehumanization of those with pathologies of affect is most

Neuropsychological affect in cultural theory

As Leys correctly notes (2011b, p. 472), this anti-intentionalist stance is

The ontological politics of affect theory tends to conflate these three

Conclusion: the politics of ontology

human, as lacking in vitality, parcelled out because of a vital capacity to

symbolic, pre-discursive, pre-cultural ground. Affect is not reducible to an

Aspergers syndrome was removed as a disorder separate from autism in the

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