THE INVISIBLE GLAND: AFFECT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

[...] the works of canonical philosophers who have more traditional homes in the humanities, such as Descartes, Aristotle, and Spinoza - thinkers who wrote before the drawing of disciplinary lines and who created theories that Affect Effect contributor Michael A. Neblo calls "psychologies with political intent" (27) - have enjoyed a renaissance within the social sciences and become for many a crucial adjunct to unpacking empirical research on au tonomic responses.Muchresearch in both of these exchanges has revolved around the complex parsing of cultural and subjective "triggers" for affective experience in relation to the material functions and response mechanisms of the endocrine and nervous systems. [...] Massumi ends "The Autonomy of Affect" by mentioning that in North America members of "the far right" rather than the "established left" have been more attuned to the political potential of affect (105-06); Lauren Berlant has somewhat gloomily argued that one of the lessons of Kerry's failed presidential bid is the difficulty of translating Bush's "shamelessness" about his record and decisions to leftist political strat- egies that would seem to necessarily have to focus more on the ambiguity and complexity of political decision making.10 What's often unspoken in such calls, even as it seems to be foregrounded in treatments of the affectivity and "automaticity" of contemporary politics, is that the appropriation of affectively attuned strategies from the right and for the left may require the adoption of practices often taken to be manipulative, deceitful, or contradictory to the values behind political objectives - that the call for " post-criticality" in passing beyond traditional concerns of how practices may "enforce" or "resist" the dominant order may require the sacrifice of a certain ethical clarity for us to move from descriptive accounts of affect to rhetorical strategies for manipulating these forces.