Resilience, Emergencies and the Internet: Security In-Formation by Mareile Kaufmann

Author:Mareile Kaufmann [Kaufmann, Mareile]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Privacy & Surveillance, Political Science, Political Freedom, General
ISBN: 9781351968096
Google: if8nDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35465572
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

From affect to action

Resilience is a governmental program that affectively modulates populations’ relationship to emergencies. The aim of such programs is to open up populations to the unexpected, envisaging that affects of urgency and emergency eventually translate into action. At the same time, does affect provide a framework through which self-organization and the interplay of action and re-action can be theorized?

Affect itself is a contested term and notoriously difficult to define. It is deployed “in divergent ways across different literatures” (Anderson 2006: 734), where it is often used interchangeably with concepts such as mood, the intense, feelings, or emotion (ibid.). Massumi, one of the most prominent figures in the affect discourse, states that “Affect is the whole world” (2002b: 43) and Deleuze, who provided an early reading of Spinoza’s writings on affect, resists a clear conceptualization, using affect instead to proliferate theory (cf. Cole 2009). Yet there are recurring elements in the different writings on affect, which allow us to theorize body knowledge, the logics of becoming, as well as the relationship between action and re-action, all of which take a central role in the politics and governmental practices of resilience. In particular, this chapter follows Spinozist writings on affect, drawing largely on Massumi’s work (1995, 2002a, 2002b) in describing how affect comes into being, what it is and what it sets into motion. Broadly speaking, affect is understood as the capacity of the body to effectuate change: it is a pre-personal and pre-conscious incitement, a capacity of being stimulated to act; it is emergent and constitutive of the body. In order to appreciate this coarse definition in full, some of affect’s core characteristics need to be presented in more detail.

Affect emerges at the moment of the encounter (Deleuze and Deleuze 1978). It may be the encounter between different individuals, as well as between individuals and a situation or material environment (Seyfert 2012). Massumi characterizes this encounter as “a state of suspense, potentially of disruption. It’s like a temporal sink, a hole in time […] it is filled with motion, vibratory motion, resonation” (1995: 86). At this moment of the encounter subjects are in a receiving state. They receive new information. At the same time, they are in motion, but they have not yet begun to re-act. For now, they are affected. But what is affect exactly? And how do affect and action relate to each other?

Affect is a capacity, not property of the body. It is what a body may be able to do (Massumi 1995; Deleuze 1988), and describes a potentiality for “self-organization in being in-formational” (Clough 2008: 1). As such, affect is the pre-text for action and autonomic bodily response (ibid.). Clough continues to describe affect as anticipation and disposition (2008: 5) that propels and compels activation (2009: 49). Baruch Spinoza, whose writings on human and non-human bodies are invoked as the origins of affect studies, relates this affective capability directly to the power of acting, which also sits at the core of resilience: “By affect [affectum]

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