We the Affectariat: Activism and Boredom In Anxious Capitalism

On a political, economic, and social terrain of increasing xenophobia, inequality, and apathy, the project of radical social transformation— collective attempts to shift the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which operate as a coalescing force within society towards a more egalitarian future—is largely in disarray. This essay probes this decline of transformative politics by locating its disarray in the emergent disconnection between the central focuses and tactics of left politics and the current structures of oppression in late capitalism. As a response to this disarray, it argues for a repositioning of affect—a pre-personal intensity of existential orientation—if radical politics are to begin to close this emerging disconnect. It bolsters such claims by: 1) introducing a framework of affect and its relationship with activism; 2) linking the advent of reactive forms of affect management to the rise of the 'affectariat' in the 20 century, 3) exploring the phenomena of anxiety in conjunction with accelerated capitalism, technology, and a return to moral panic, 4) probing the failure of contemporary activism to respond to anxiety and theorizing some alternative tactics for politicizing affect in a time of increasing democratic malaise. “Activism has to confront real obstacles: war, poverty, class and racial oppression, creeping fascism, venomous neoliberalism. But what we face is not just soldiers with guns but an affective capital: the reactive society, an excruciatingly complex order. The striking thing from an affective point of view is the zombie-like character of this society, its fallback to automatic pilot, its cybernetic governance. Neoliberal society is densely regulated, heavily over-coded. Since the control systems are all made by disciplines with strictly calibrated access to other disciplines, the origin of any struggle in the fields of knowledge and power have to be extra-disciplinary.” — Brian Holmes, The Affectivist Manifesto>, 2004 “Neoliberalism has exalted the multiplicity of the social actors; it has brought the all-social back to plurality: and now the State, in all its sovereignty and with the anxiety of the general equilibrium, intervenes in every little struggle, in every fragment of movement. Oh, how beautiful this neoliberalism is, allowing us to see the Government as the counterpart of every singularity in the process of struggle!” — Antonio Negri, The Winter is Over>, 2013 Introduction The 2016 presidential victory of Donald Trump brought more emotion to a US election than that of any previous candidate. There is a startling euphoria among supporters during his rallies—not to mention a unique feeling of fear and anxiety he sparks in liberals, and even in many conservatives. When, at the end of 2016, Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times analyzed 95,000 words from Trump’s speeches, interviews and rallies, they observed a “pattern of elevating emotional appeals over rational ones,” a tactic also practiced by populist politicians like Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. The reason why Trump’s victory—due, as Michael Kazin (2016) points out, to the slow, drawn-out collapse of a popularised left and subsequent rise of a populist right—should be considered an emotional phenomenon is not merely because of the anxious reactions he inspired, but because Trump’s campaign successfully deployed affect to convince Republican (and Democrat) voters that he is an anti-establishment candidate offering an alternative to the status quo—something that (what we will, for the purposes of this article refer to as) ‘the left’ has failed to do for decades. The ‘left’ has failed to do so because there is an emergent disconnection between the central focuses and tactics of left politics and the current structures of oppression in late capitalism. From the 2011 dismantling of the Occupy encampments in Zuccotti Park to the perpetual dispersion of Black Lives Matter protests in Dallas, the seeming inability of left-leaning social movements to develop viable, populist, long-term alternatives to the destabilizing processes of capitalism is directly related to the left’s failure to respond to the increasing gap between older strategies of action and updated flows of repression. If the left wants to close this emerging disconnect we argue that a return to affect—that pre-personal intensity of an utmost existential orientation—is crucial. The vital relationship between affect and activism is not a particularly new one. For decades autonomous social and political movements have cohered around communities of action that provide emotional ‘highs’ of excitement and conflict. Pauline Bradley (1997) describes a social struggle as ‘better than Prozac,’ ‘emotionally momentous’ and able to bring about life-changes which drugs, labels, and hospitalisation could not. However, various forms of power seem to have undermined these emotionally reinforcing effects of activism by making the experience of protest feel increasingly disempowering and traumatic. To probe this disconnect further, we will embark on a series of augmentations that briefly trace the advent of different reactive forms of affect (misery and boredom) which underpin the twentieth century rise of what we call ‘the affectariat’ before exploring the phenomena of anxiety in conjunction with late capitalism, technology, and the present return to a state of socio-moral panic. Finally, we will probe the failure of contemporary activism to respond to such anxieties and theorise alternative tactics for addressing affect management. We take up these lines of flight to highlight the ways contemporary left politics lacks a praxis that will help us undertake the revolutionary task of gradually releasing our repressed visceral and affective desires from the current static realities of neoliberal capitalism—realities such as the NSA, CCTV, performance management reviews, unemployment, th