著者

水嶋 一憲 Mizushima Kazunori

出版者

名古屋大学大学院文学研究科附属日本近現代文化研究センター

雑誌

JunCture : 超域的日本文化研究 (ISSN:18844766)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2, pp.24-35, 2011-03-01

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This essay, focusing on the dynamic intersection between "affective turn" and the concept of "Empire," attempts to explore the important role that affect plays in today's "communicative capitalism." "The Affective turn" that the humanities and social sciences have undergone in recent decades expresses a new configuration of bodies, technology and matter. This turn also incorporates Spinozian definition of affect: an ability to affect and to be affected in a felt passage to a varied power of existence, pre-individual bodily capacities to act, engage, and connect. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's theory of "Empire" shares this Spinozian definition of affect. Further, according to Hardt&Negri, a passage from imperialism to Empire corresponds to a passage from "disciplinary societies" to "societies of control," and they define Empire as a global society of control which seems to operate through "Affective Imperial Apparatuses (AIAs)." The paradigmatic example of an AIA is the brand. Brands are machines for organizing, controlling, monitoring, and modulating flows of affect. So we can grasp brands as a kind of de-territorialized factory where the productive mass intellectuality and the new forms of appropriation enabled by contemporary communication media come together. Contemporary information and communication networks are essentially affective networks. Therefore, communication media seeks to capture and control their users' affects in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and control. Jodi Dean terms this formation "communicative capitalism." In this formation of capitalism, politics is reduced to communication or circulation of drives which forms an endless loop. How can we constitute a politics that can overturn such a communicative capitalism and flee from capture and control by AIAs? I provisionally conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze and Hardt&Negri's concepts of event, singularity and common, as a platform to constitute an alternative politics of affect.