The Affective Constitution and Reduction of the Political

 The following is the text from a presentation at the Radical Philosophy Hour. It also takes up a question that I posted about years ago. 

Let us begin with a statement that will function as something of an axiom for what follows: politics, political conflict, political communities, and political identity, have as much to do with affects as they do with ideas, principles, and values. However, it is equally necessary to follow this axiom with a problem, and that is that such a claim for the affective constitution of the political, is more or less doubled now by a sort of affective reduction of the political. What I mean by this is the tendency to speak about politics, to frame politics, as if it is entirely a matter of affects of love and hate. This is not new, but I would argue that it has been intensifying in political discourse. I remember in 2015, Rudy Giuliani declaring that his fundamental worry about Obama, now well into his second term, was that he was not sure that he loved America. Moving closer to the present, Donald Trump regularly characterizes his various enemies, from the Democratic Party to Stephen Colbert, as simply those who hate him and hate America, reducing all politics to a matter of emotions. At his speech to the Claremont Institute in July, JD Vance offered the strongest statement of this sort of affective reduction when he gave the following argument about what unifies the left. As Vance States,

"What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and big pharma lobbyists, it isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx. It’s hatred. They hate the people in this room. They hate the President of the United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that President of the United States in the last election in November. This is the animating principle of the American far left."

Vance’s formulation reads as a kind of twist on Spinoza’s formulation of a group united by a common affect. It is in some sense a reduction of politics to affects. Vance argues that this common hatred is the only way to make sense of the contradictory tendencies of the left, as a group which advocates for religious liberty, even when the religions in question, especially Islam are supposed to be intolerant; supposedly hates capitalism while being made up of billionaires, and is opposed to racism, but is mostly white. Vance’s list of contradictions in some sense represents an unwillingness to understand some of the basic problems of liberalism, which has constantly struggled with the question of tolerance and its limits. His other contradictions, that of billionaires against capitalism and white people against racism, can be understood as either symptoms of the paradoxical decline of progressivism to an elite position, or, more generously, as symptoms to the way in which political ideals stand out as strange exceptions in a political terrain dominated by interest rather than ideals. I am less interested in other explanations for this formulation, however, than the way in Vance’s articulation of a politics of hatred has becomes something of a talking point of the Trump administration. Just a few weeks ago Mike Johnson labelled the “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration on October Eighteenth as the “Hate America” rally. What could be discussed in terms of principles, and ideals, the limitations to government, the power of the presidency, is reduced to a simple affect, to hate.

Taken together the abstract formulation and the current situation constitutes something of a problem, if not a provocation. How is it possible to not only distinguish the affective constitution of politics from its reduction to affects, to emotions, but to use the former to make sense of the latter, to understand how politics is reduced to emotions, in other words, to understand the politics of the reduction of politics to affect we have to understand more about the politics of affect. If one wanted a textual source which functions as something of the beginning, or at least a starting point, we could start with Spinoza’s Political Treatise. In that text Spinoza writes the following: 

Since men, as we have said, are led more by passion than by reason, it naturally follows that a people will unite and consent to be guided as if by one mind not at reason’s prompting but through some common emotion, such as a common hope, or common fear, or desire to avenge some common injury.

 For Spinoza emotion, or more properly, affect is the common basis for the multitude because the capacity to be affected is the general condition of humanity. It is thus more immediately and readily available as the basis for commonallity than a common idea or representation. Spinoza’s claim has been developed by such thinkers as Frédéric Lordon, Chantal Jaquet, and Yves Citton, who, in different ways, have all claimed for the affective organization of politics. As Lordon argues, picking up from Spinoza, “it is through self-affecting, which produces a common affect, that the multitude constitutes itself into a coherent unity, which is to say into a political formation rather than a disparate collection of individuals.” The emphasis on self-affecting is central to Lordon’s claim. Spinoza’s geometry of the affects demonstrate how an affect can become stronger the more that is reinforced by others, we feel things more intensely if we perceive others feel them as well. It is easier to love what others love, to hate what others hate, this is the imitation of affect. This imitation of affect becomes even more intense as we begin to feel that it is not just specific others that feel the same way, but others in general, when a particular affective valorization is seen as something universally shared. It is at this point that an affect takes on added dimension, it no longer seems to be self-affection or even based on relations with others but appears to come from above, it is a command. This is what Lordon (along with Citton) term “immanent transcendence,” the way in which every individual, and every social relation, produces its own sense of transcendence in the feeling that certain loves and hatreds, certain desires and fears, are not just its desires, alone, but constitute a common world. What Spinoza defined as a common affect, a common way of feeling, necessarily comes with a hierarchy, a hierarchy that is all the more effective in that it is concealed. As Lordon writes, “what in fact comes from the bottom is perceived and imagined as having all of the attributes of coming from the top: vertical authority, affective community, and incommensurable power.” Spinoza argued that the polis, the political body, is necessarily defined by a common affect, to which Lordon adds that such a common affect is paradoxically produced by the immanent relations of imitation but perceived as a transcendent command. Understood this way, the affective constitution of politics begins long before a political leader starts talking about “hate” or even “love.” 

There is a micro-politics of affects. This micropolitics begins in the way in which various objects, various activities, have an affective dimension as objects of common love and hatred. To live in a community is to live within its values, which form the vectors of desire. As Lordon writes with Sandra Lucbert,

 “From where do we get our orientations of desire if not from the objects themselves? From other human desires. Either we imitate (or counter-imitate) them directly, or we submit to the social verdicts of desirability (but this is another, mediated form of imitation), says Spinoza. Or again, under the guidance of our imagination, we are busy finding what will satisfy our Other (our Others), says Lacan—and the two paths, here, are much more complementary than contradictory.” 

In some sense these vectors are the basis of how a community constitutes itself, and identifies itself, it is made not just by common affects, which is another way of saying a common set of objects considered to be desirable as well as those considered to be undesirable. Here we are reminded of the consideration that Spinoza gave to traditions, include traditions of diet and even hairstyle in the constitution of a people in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. A constitution of affects is also a symbolic order. Lordon and Lucbert refer to this order as a hegemony. 

How are we to understand the relationship between this micro-politics of affect, the structuring and orientation of affect that makes up a hegemony, and this reduction of every political position to one of affects? In some sense we could say that the political rhetoric merely grounds itself on the existing organization of affects. Reproducing in rhetoric what already exists in practice. Invocations of mom and apple pie in political speeches repeat and reinforce what already is produced at the level of affects. However, that they need to be reinforced already suggests that they are not given. Spinoza argued that in some sense a political order founded only on the common affects and common desires is fundamentally unstable. Common affects, common loves and hatreds, come up against the limit of individual differences of inclination and orientation. Invocations of the love of mom and apple pie as the basis for a social order means something very different to someone who had a difficult relationship with their mother or just does not care for apple pie. These deviations are irreducible, and unavoidable, but they are also fairly inconsequential. The real threat is that they cease to be individual deviations from the norm, and take on their own collective power, constituting a new body within the body politic. As Lordon and Lucbert write, “That the symbolic has a politics has for its immediate corollary that it has a history: history of its contestations—and their displacements of the frontier lines.” The symbolic is both historical and political because it is not natural. As Lordon argues, there is a fundamental anarchy underlying any system of social values. Everything that exists affects everything that exists in multiple ways. There is thus no reason that why this or that object or thing could or should be valued in such a way. A society could just as easily pick another pie, or even cake, for its image of a common image of desire, or, another organization of the family for its object of love. Perhaps more to the point, the institutions that make up society, this or that organization of the family, this or that religion, and this or that economic order, have no basis other than their constant reinforcement. Things could always be otherwise. On this point Lordon and Lucbert come close to an earlier generations turn to Spinoza, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, despite their opposition with respect to other points: Deleuze and Guattari argued that all societies are in some sense haunted by the prospect of the anarchy of desire, the possibility that the existing values and norms, what they call codes, could be undone. The historical and contingent nature of any existing affective hegemony perpetually haunts it, especially as these deviations risk becoming more than the localized deviations of this or that individual and become the organization of collective revaluations. 

This allows to say two things about the reduction of politics to its affective dimension, the reduction of political orientations to the simple opposition of love and hatred. The accusation or projection of hatred, the claim that one’s opponents have everything that should be loved, is an attempt to do two things at once. It is first of all an attempt to present one’s opponents as not just those who have a different vision of society, different goals, and different ideals, but as someone who desires differently, is fundamentally alien. It is surprising to hear leaders still call their opponents Marxists and communists, decades after the end of the cold war, but there is a fundamental shift in the use of this term: communists are no longer agents of an enemy state but individuals with a fundamentally different sensibility and different affective orientation. It is, as Richard Seymour argues, an anti-communism without communism, in which communism is a floating signifier attached to anything that would contest the existing hegemony of affects. Which is why we often hear the term “communism” combined with “crazy”: communism is no longer the name for a different economic organization of society but the name for a different orientation of the affects, someone who hates “America” first and foremost. Although lately the name of this affective outside has shifted from Marxists to “Antifa,” a term all the more useful in that it is detached from any referent, or known history. It is the affective outside to all that should be loved and venerated. 

It is worth remembering that for Spinoza an affect is in some sense at the lowest order of knowledge. When we are affected by something we perceive something of the body affecting us, and something of our own body, but in a confused way that intermingles both. To relate this back to the current moment, fears, such as a fear of crime, or immigration, are as much reflections of a body which tends to find fear in everything, than they are reflections of the world. It is worth remembering Spinoza's basic anthropological orientation that "we are born conscious of our desires but ignorant of the cause of things." This ignorance includes our own affects, our own most intimate fears, which in their immediacy appear so natural so given, obscuring the conditions of their production. This is particularly true of fear, it is at once so immediate, part of our sense of survival, but mediated. This is particularly true of the fear of crime, which benefits from "if it bleeds it leads" news coverage and police procedurals that have more murders in a season than a year in a city. Affects are an unavoidable dimension of individual and collective life, but this does not mean that they are the only way to make sense or inhabit the world. Transforming our affects is also a matter of transforming our understanding. 

This brings us to the second dimension, the reduction of politics to affective terms is also meant to shore up the existing hegemony of affects, compel allegiance, but it does so negatively. As we have seen such rhetoric speaks more of hate, than of love, or, to be more precise, it posits itself as a kind of counter-hatred. It demands that we hate the haters, hate those who hate America, hate the President. What is positive, or affirmative, is only given in and through a reaction. A negation of a negation is, however, is not the same as an affirmation, it always remains tinged by the sad affect which shapes it. As Spinoza writes, “The joy which arises from our imagining that a thing we hate is destroyed, or affected with some other evil, does not occur without some sadness of mind.” There are limits to a hegemony which is organized around a counter hatred. It cannot separate itself from the sad affects that are at its origin. This is not the most important limitation to a rhetoric aimed against the haters. The affective hegemony of society works all the more effectively when it appears to be automatic, when the associations and values are produced in such a way as to efface the very conditions of their production. The reason that “money occupies the mind of the multitude more than anything else,” according to Spinoza, is that it has been attached to not only every possible thing we desire, as the means of realizing all of our wishes, but also because it is immediately recognized by others as an object of desire. Our entire life has been an education in the desire for money. This organization of desire is all the more effective in the way it is reinforced by various practices. No one says, “you should love money,” or more to the point, “hate those who hate money.” If they do it is only as an afterthought to any constituted affective organization. 

What I have referred to as the affective reduction of politics, the positing of all political distinctions in terms of hatred and love, is not only a reduction of what we used to think of as politics, the defense of positions based on arguments and ideas about the best way to live, to an affective core, it is also in some sense a crisis of the very affective organization of society. The proclamation demanding one hate the haters is itself a symptom of an affective order that is already in crisis. To give one example, to say that one should hate those who hate capitalism, is to already admit that capitalism is no longer holding hegemony over the affects in a way that it perhaps has in the past or should. The affective order works the best when it is given as the common backdrop of life, not when it is called upon and invoked as a cause or demand. This seems to me where we are now caught in these two trajectories, in a moment where affects dominant our sense of politics, displacing ideas, ideals, and programs, but this domination is at the same time a crisis of the affective order. The hegemony of affect as the language of politics obscures the crisis of the affective hegemony. People are not loving the right things, capitalism, the nation, heterosexuality, all those things that were posited as unproblematic and automatic objects of desire for us spiritual automatons, have instead become things that need to be defended from the specter of their haters. The centrality of the language of affect obscures to what extent we are living through a crisis of affect. The final question then is what this means for a politics of transformation. It seems that any such politics would be stuck with the task of contradictory tasks of both expanding the affective dealignment from the existing order while simultaneously expanding our way of making sense of politics beyond the affective dimension.

The entire video of the panel, with my presentation and Delia Popa's, can be found here.