Art, Power, and Strange Economies

Yet another delay on getting to Week's "Refusal of Work," but I'm going to blame this one on current affairs and the drinking-from-the-fire-hose that is the Trump news cycle. Following the massive No Kings protests, I thought it best to address the outpouring of frustration, righteous indignation, anger, outrage, and fear (not to mention the stark juxtaposition sad-Trump's big boy parade), and talk about the stranger economics of affects. 

We’re going to be discussing some authors that haven’t come up yet, namely Teresa Brennan, an Australian feminist philosopher, and Sara Ahmed, a British-Australian philosopher working in intersectionality – feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, discrimination, oppression, racism, sexism, etc.). We’ll also be leaning on some authors we’ve addressed before, like Deleuze and Guattari, Benjamin, Bataille, and, yes, even Marx (a little).

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Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out (man, it's a list this time!):

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. "Affective Economies". Social Text. 22, no. 2: 117-139. 

Ahmed, Sara. 2006. "ORIENTATIONS: Toward a Queer Phenomenology". GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 12, no. 4: 543-574. 

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2015. 

Bataille, Georges, and Robert Hurley. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. 1. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2007

Benjamin, Walter, Harry Zohn, Hannah Arendt, and Leon Wieseltier. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations: [Essays and Reflections]. New York: Schocken Books, 2013.

Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell University Press, 2014.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2009.

Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, Hugh Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell. What Is Philosophy? 2015. 

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. London, UK: Penguin, 1992.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Thomas Common. The Gay Science. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2006. 

Rajchman, John. The Deleuze Connections. Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.]: MIT Press, 2009.

Surin, Kenneth. Revised Edition Edited by Adrian Parr. "Socius." 

Recommended:

"Ouch! That Feels Great" Hidden Brain 6/9/25. 

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 24: Art, Power, and Strange Economics

Hey all, given the massive, recent “No Kings” protests and Trump’s, I mean the Army’s, sad ‘birthday’ parade, I think this is a good time to take a bit of a break from Weeks and work and anti-work to talk about affect and emotion. We’re going to be discussing some authors that haven’t come up yet, namely Teresa Brennan, an Australian feminist philosopher, and Sara Ahmed, a British-Australian philosopher working in intersectionality – feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, affect theory, etc. together, and, specifically, where these theories and their social critiques intersect (discrimination, oppression, racism, sexism, etc.). We’ll also be leaning on some authors we’ve addressed before, like Deleuze and Guattari, Benjamin, Bataille, and, big surprise, yes, even Marx (a little). I’m revisiting an old grad paper here, but I’ve updated it to make it more conversational, and interject here and there with some current relevancies; the original paper was from December 2017.

Also, quick sidenote/apology; if my voice sounds janky to you, it’s ‘cause I’m getting over a really bad allergy attack, and my sinuses are a little… stuffy. 

A quick review of some jargon terms, ‘cause there’s a bit of psychology in this episode. First, psychical, not solely meaning mental but defined as distinct from physical (including neurological) phenomena, and specifically referring to those psychological phenomena that cannot be completely explained by science; from seeing ghosts or experiencing the divine to feeling love, hate, sadness, joy... Put another way, if love were something that was objective, then we ought to be able to point to what love is and everyone would experience the same affect. Second, cathexis. You’re probably familiar with catharsis, the release of emotion, typically strong emotions. Cathexis is the investment of strong mental, emotional, psychical, and/or libidinal energies in something – a belief, a person, a family heirloom, and so on. On a related note, libido – here we’re not merely talking about “sex drive” but, in the Freudian sense, that which generates all desire for life’s pursuits – when thinking about Brennan though, it might be helpful to also think of it in the Lacanian sense of a desire, not just to be or to do, but to fill a lack. And, finally, metapsychology. This is another Freudian term, following from philosophical metaphysics – the concepts of first principles like, time, life, being, meaning, etc. from an overarching and structural perspective – as a theoretical psychological framework, the theory that explains all relevant psychological phenomena. Okay, I think we’re good for now.  Let’s open with a good old-fashioned epigraph, shall we? Roll the quotations!

My hypothesis is that the psyche’s sense of its self-containment is indeed structured, but that therefore the state of experiencing both “living attention” and the affects of others is both the originary and in some way the natural state: the transmission of energy and affects is the norm rather than an aberration at the beginning of psychical life. 

– Teresa Brennan, from The Transmission of Affect

The beings that we are are not given once and for all; they appear designed for an increase of their energy resources. They generally make this increase, beyond mere subsistence, their goal and their reason for being. 

– Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share

We exercise our power over others by doing them good or by doing them ill – that is all we care for! 

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Teresa Brennan, in her introduction to The Transmission of Affect, 2014, states that she uses “… the term ‘transmission of affect’ to capture a process that is social in origin, but biological and physical in effect.”  Brennan’s work on affect in this text seeks to provide an “… alternative to [Freud’s] psychoanalytic theory or metapsychology [by postulating] an origin for affects that is independent of the individual experiencing them.”  In contrast, Sara Ahmed, in her essay “Affective Economies,” notes that, quote

Indeed, insofar as psychoanalysis is a theory of the subject as lacking in the present, then it offers a theory of emotion as economy, as involving relationships of difference and displacement without positive value. That is, emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced only as an effect of its circulation. I am using “the economic” to suggest that emotions circulate and are distributed across a social as well as psychic field.

So, I’m going to be working with both of these concepts, the transmission and circulation, of affects in terms of economics, and in terms of power.  My understanding of affect here is largely informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.  By positioning all of these authors in regards to specific functions of affects and their movements, my aim is to highlight their transmission and circulation, specifically in terms of cathexis and catharsis – investment and divestment (expenditure) – by the individual, upon and within the social field, in terms of their being situated in relationships of power. 

First, a clarification of terms should be made.  Brennan defines an affect as “… the physiological shift accompanying a judgment…” or, citing Lynn Smith-Lovin (Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Duke), “any evaluative (positive or negative) orientation toward an object.”  However, as noted earlier, Ahmed defines affect in the circulation of objects and signs (think Barthes and semiotics, I told you this stuff was just going to keep coming up).  For Brennan, it’s psychical, internal, and subjective; for Ahmed, it’s what happens psychically in relation to a stimulus and circulated out as additional stimulus. For our purposes, my thinking is that it’s both.

Now, the concept of affect is, itself, kinda difficult to pin down, so I propose instead to keep it intentionally malleable, diffuse.  In the chapter on “Percept, Affect, Concept” in their book What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari define affect as “precisely [the] nonhuman becomings of man, just as percepts… are nonhuman landscapes of nature.” Okay, that’s a bit to unpack, so, first, let’s start with what a percept is, as I think their conception here is easier to grasp and informs what they’re thinking in terms of affect. They note, in reference to reading novels (they specifically reference the descriptive in Hardy, Melville, Virginia Woolf, and Chekov), “The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man.” Think the old adage, ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?’ Well, yes, of course it does, and that sound, as well as everything else about that occurrence happening are all percepts; but someone needs to perceive them for those percepts to become what’s been perceived – what’s really interesting from Deleuze here, is that that act of perception of change changes the perceiver as well. 

The affect goes beyond [affectations] no less than the percept goes beyond perceptions. … The affect is not the passage from one lived state to another but man’s nonhuman becoming… this is not the transformation of one into the other… but something passing from one to the other. This something can be specified only as sensation. It is a zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility, as if things, beasts, and persons… endlessly reach that point that immediately precedes their natural differentiation. This is what is called an affect.

And yeah, that’s still a bit dense, so we’re going to turn to John Rajchman, philosopher and art historian at Columbia, whose writing on Deleuze clarifies this idea from What is Philosophy? We’ll come back to this later as well, because Deleuze has some interesting things to say here about the role of art. Rajchman notes that Deleuze, in his analysis of art as a monument, composite, ‘block of sensations’ that “he [Deleuze] is trying to capture an idea that runs through his work; and the term ‘sensation’ is to be understood in terms of the resulting idiom… Sensations are… not to be confused with subjective states or with ‘sensibilia’ or ‘sensationalism’… Affects and percepts are the two basic types of sensation…”  Sadness, anger, fear, guilt, etc. do not themselves describe or determine what an affect is; rather, they are the names for their relevant affective states at the moment of their sensation.  The affect ‘fear’ is not, in itself, a substance (though, it does also have a physiological component and means of transmission), it is that which immediately precedes the moment of one becoming-fear – yet it is also that which immediately precedes the moment of one becoming-sadness, becoming-joy, etc.   Taken in this way, affect, as monumentalized in a work of art, can be understood in regards to why different individuals have differing affective responses to the same works of art.  The affective response doesn’t change the work of art, yet the same work of art produces different affective responses originating from an experience of the same material object. I’ll also note, this is where I hang my hat in terms of what defines “good” art from “bad” art, whether it’s beautiful or abject is irrelevant – an object fails to rise to the level of art-object when it fails, entirely, to elicit an affective response. 

Conceptually, Deleuze marks a particular distinction from Brennan in terms of how affect is transmitted in that in this case affect is not purely physiological.  The physiological aspect of affect and its transmissibility should be considered no less seriously, but here it is considered one aspect in the broader concept of affect.  I believe that, rather than refuting it, this comports with Brennan’s conception that physiological substances, such as tears and pheromones, transmit affect; though it does so in that tears and pheromones, like art and music, occur within a larger multiplicity of forms of human communication, both verbal and nonverbal.  If anything, I believe it makes Brennan’s analysis all the more valid, especially in comparison to purely verbal communication – yelling at someone and making them feel bad, for example – in that art and music are symptomatic of an underlying truth: that verbal communication is lacking as a full range of human expression. Art and music are just some of the ways we try to fill that gap. 

Affect as such is transmitted and circulates amongst individuals, yet also amongst groups; socio-economic groups, nations, generations, cultures, etc.  Whereas purely verbal communication is transmitted and translated, via language and text, across cultures, which themselves carry (affective) histories, affect is transmitted sensationally and translated contextually. 

Ahmed notes that her text, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, is an exploration of “… how emotions work to shape the ‘surfaces’ of individual and collective bodies.” 

Now, I think we need to bring in a pretty wonky term here because, despite its wonkiness, it’s a really clever concept and carries, I think, greater explanatory potential than “surfaces.” So, let’s take a look at Deleuze’s term socius as signifying the ground upon which this shaping takes place.

Deleuze and Guattari describe the concept of the socius in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia as such; that by drawing a “merely phenomenological” parallel between desiring-production (hyphenated) and social production (labor, in the Marxist sense), “… drawing no conclusions whatsoever as to the nature and the relationship of the two productions…”  they can, quote

point out the fact that the forms of social production, like those of desiring-production, involve an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of antiproduction coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius. This socius may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital... Forces and agents come to represent a miraculous form of its own power: they appear to be "miraculated" by it (Translator’s note, in French, miraculés). In a word, the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface.

End-quote. 

Socius is understood here to contain both the physical being of other individuals as well as their temporal, socio-economic, political, geographic, and linguistic context as a subject within the social/cultural context.  Kenneth Surin, Professor of Literature, Religion, and Critical Theory at Duke, defines the socius thus; quote

In Anti-Oedipus, the socius is said to be necessary because desiringproduction [sic] is coterminous [having the same temporal, geographic, cultural, etc. borders] with social production and reproduction, and for the latter to take place desire has to be coded and recoded, so that subjects can be prepared for their social roles and functions.

The socius is the terrain of this coding and recoding. 

Affect is, here, one of these codes.  Affect, like language, is inseparable from an individual’s navigation of the world, as one is necessarily within an always-already social organization.  The coding/recoding of desire upon the socius parallels what Ahmed means by ‘shaping.’  Beyond that, affect’s being-as-code within the encoding of desire upon the social terrain, or substrate, or surface, of/for the individual’s social existence, is connected to the cultural centrality of economics within the socius. 

Ahmed points out one of the consequences of such coding later in “Affective Economies” (an essay she wrote for the journal Social Text in 2004) where she refutes the claim by the white supremacist website Aryan Nations that white nationalism is centered in love, rather than hate. Now, I’m not going to give any breathing room here for the passage Ahmed is refuting, it’s a load of white supremacist horseshit, bigotry, and classic spin-marketing; the whole ‘It’s not that white supremacists irrationally hate anyone, they claim, it’s just that they love each other and their country and Christianity so much they’re compelled to rage in their defense, and so their hate is purely rational.’ Especially with Trump now trying to pivot at least some of the discourse to Christianizing the government and public schools, on top of having spent his entire political life aligned with white nationalism, I highly recommend giving Ahmed’s essay a read. I’ll leave a link in the show notes; it’s about 20 pages, and super relevant today. 

Ahmed describes this narrative of the ordinary white subject (as according to white Christian nationalists) and the conflation of affects in love and hate.  

This narrative [that ‘Together we hate, and this hate is what makes us together’] is far from extraordinary. Indeed, what it shows us is the production of the ordinary. The ordinary is here fantastic. The ordinary white subject is a fantasy that comes into being through the mobilization of hate, as a passionate attachment tied closely to love.

This narrative points out two distinct problems. First, that affect, in being realized in its transmission and circulation, yet before the moment of its cognition as a sensation, can be mistranslated due to the social context the individual is within.  Second, that this narrative and its mistranslation of affect (by conflating the love of one with the hate of an other) is possible because of the coding effect affect has on the desiring-production of the individual. I’ll unpack this more in a minute, but first let's look at the issue of transmission and circulation – and the emotional weight invested in the socius by affect’s coding as narratives. 

Ahmed, following partly from Marx, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in her conception of circulation, argues that “… emotions accumulate over time, as a form of affective value;” She parts from Marx where Marx would insist “objects only seem to have such value, by an erasure of these histories, as histories of production and labor.”  Okay, now we get to bring in another of my favorite thinkers and we get to talk about art again. Ahmed’s further elaboration of accumulation through the ‘stickiness’ of affect to certain objects recalls Walter Benjamin’s conception of aura, in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction,” in that the history of the art object, including affective relationships to/with/through it, is carried with it through time and place and affects how we respond to the object contemporaneously.  The ‘aura’ of the work of art is central to what gives it its meaning, as opposed to art made after reproducibility (like photography), which is inseparable from its function as communication (and is therefore inherently political), leaving meaning implied, rather than inferred – okay, so, what does that mean? Because that sounds suspiciously semantic. Implied meaning comes from the object (the argument, the work of art, etc.), inferred meaning comes from the subject (the subject comes to a conclusion from the evidence they’ve been presented). Picasso’s Guernica implies meaning, I infer meaning. 

For Ahmed, it is through the circulation of objects and texts (to which I would include music, understanding works of art as both objects and texts) by which affects are circulated, in terms of named emotions “… precisely because they involve specific orientations toward objects that are identified as their cause.”

 In “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” 2006, Ahmed asks, quote

What does it mean to be oriented? … If we know where we are, when we turn this way or that, then we are oriented. We have our bearings. ... To be oriented is also to be oriented toward certain objects, those that help us find our way. These are the objects we recognize, such that when we face them, we know which way we are facing. They gather on the ground and also create a ground on which we can gather. Yet objects gather quite differently, creating different grounds. What difference does it make what we are oriented toward? 

What does it mean to be oriented toward objects and texts in regards to their circulation and the affects they carry with them, and what difference does it make?  Specifically, when we are examining the object’s affective ‘stickiness’ (or aura), how does orientation – that which gives us our bearings in relation to the object – shape the ground, the socius, when we are referring not simply to mere objects but affects? For example, our orientation toward the American flag, a Trump flag, a Confederate flag, or a Pride flag? 

Ahmed’s analysis of Fear provides an interesting example.  Fear, she notes, citing an encounter described by Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, “does something; it re-establishes distance between bodies whose difference is read off the surface, as a reading which produces the surface…”  Fear, especially fear of others, not only gives us an orientation towards the object of fear, the fear shapes the object as well in their response to our fear.  In part, this fear response is due to the socius, that which grounds our experience in the world, which regulates our behavior and informs our social interactions.  

Now, this also ties in with Brennan’s analysis.  She notes in her introduction to The Transmission of Affect that, as regards “the repression of consciousness based on [discernment]… Such knowledge is a chain of communication and association in the flesh… But such knowledge… does not always, or even habitually, penetrate the modern consciousness.  The subject/object categories that order the world of visual perception override it.”  These ‘subject/object categories’ are part of the previously mentioned ‘encoding.’

Alright, if I could just interrupt myself for a minute here – Um, sure, I guess, go ahead. I’ll just sit here and hold that thought while you do whatever you need to do – Thanks! I’ll try to be quick. 

Real talk, Philosophy vs Work is a bit of a passion project, but it’s primarily a format for me to hash out the ideas and the organization for an eventual book on critical theory of work and meaningful work as an ethical basis for political action. In order to do that, I need two things: first, time. I need time to do the research, writing, and production of the podcast, and that means the podcast eventually needs to generate enough revenue to enable me to take time away from simply chasing money, whether it’s corporate work, voiceover, bartending, or what have you. If you value the content and you’re in a position to do so, please consider supporting the channel. Subscriptions can be made on the Philosophy vs Work Patreon for as little as $2 US per month, or on podcast webpage philosophyvswork.buzzsprout.com ranging 3-10 dollars per month. Alternatively, one of the best ways to support the project is to comment, like, follow, etc. on whatever platform you’re listening on. Engaging with the podcast on the platform is totally free and, most importantly, it’s the metric that tells the platform people are actively engaging with the content, which raises the content in the platform’s algorithm. More engagement means more people getting to see the content while they’re scrolling through other options, and that’s how we grow the audience. 

Okay me, I’m done, you can return to the philosophy stuff now.

Okay, there are two further, central concepts to Brennan’s analysis that link to Ahmed’s ‘orientation’ and the shaping of bodies/ground (viz. Deleuze and Guattari’s socius).  The first is the function of what Brennan terms ‘the Foundational Fantasy.’

The foundational fantasy, following from the psychoanalytic tradition, is the illusion that “… the mother, especially, is seen as the natural origin of, rather than the repository for, unwanted affects… we project onto her our… lack of agency… [thus] it is the foundation of the fantasy of self-containment…”  It is the psychoanalytic beginning of the myth of the autonomous individual, free from the socius, Adam in the Garden of blissful ignorance. 

The second parallel of Brennan’s account to Ahmed’s orientation and Deleuze’s socius is the impact of the physiological on intentionality.  Brennan claims that, given the fact that recent research on hormones and pheromones indicates olfaction can impact intentionality (which problematizes the comprehension of brain function, in that we lack a complete understanding of olfaction), “… the intentionality of a given subject can be influenced or shaped by factors originating outside the subject.”  This indicates that it is not solely the linguistic, socio-political, cultural factors which contribute to the socius, which forms the orientation toward the object of fear (that Ahmed is referring to when referencing Fanon), but that there also exists the transmission of the affect of fear by physiological means between subjects.  It is not just that fear sets up an orientation by which the experience is grounded, but also that an economic circulation of affect occurs. This can be construed in terms of a general formula of affect transmission/circulation, not in a dissimilar way to what Marx describes in Capital as the ‘general formula for capital.’  Marx describes the ‘general formula’ thus; that, “in the case of interest-bearing capital, the circulation M-C-M’ [money-commodity-money prime] presents itself in abridged form, in its final result and without any intermediary stage, in a concise style, so to speak, as M-M’, specifically, money that is worth more money, value which is greater than itself.”

Let’s stick with the affect “Fear;” I have an orientation toward fear of the other, and as the other draws near I become afraid, that fear passes from me and the other picks up on it by olfactory sense, and so they become afraid – this fear continues to pass between us, growing stronger as it takes on physical expression ( I tense, they shiver, I seek to protect what I deem valuable, as do they, etc.). The fear which grounds experience becomes a vicious cycle of fear, fear becomes Fear-prime.     

Now, affect does more than become circulated or transmitted, affect, like capital, accumulates; but it accumulates in/upon the socius.  Returning to that earlier description of socius; Surin continues, quote

Another rationale for the socius stems from the part it plays in consolidating the capitalist order. Desire is simultaneously enabled and limited by capital, which frees it from its previous embodiments or codings so that it can be placed at the disposal of capitalist expansion; and desire, after this decoding by capital, is reined in or recoded so that it can subserve the novel requirements of capitalist production.

End-quote.

In other words, capital (through marketing) recodes desire into consumption and regulates what is or can be desired to comport with what products capital has chosen to make available. Capital here being used as shorthand for all involved; the capitalist, the owners of the means of production, the money itself and the political power vast sums of money imparts, all that which sits on top of the capitalist political-economic hierarchy. The socius is shaped by power (in the case of a capitalist political economy, capital) intentionally to shape the desires, the desiring-production, of the bodies within that ground, including, within particular collections of bodies, the exclusion of other bodies. 

This brings us back to Sara Ahmed’s point that, “… insofar as psychoanalysis is a theory of the subject as lacking in the present, then it offers a theory of emotion as economy, as involving relationships of difference and displacement without positive [objective, or natural] value. That is, emotions work as a form of capital.”  

In keeping with the parallel to economics (much as the capitalist invests his capital in the market, the ground which makes circulation of stocks possible, for the purpose of increasing his capital) we, as affective beings, make affective investments – cathexes – in/upon the ground of the socius.  Likewise, where the capitalist finds his investments at risk of causing the degradation of his capital, he divests; so too should it be possible for us to divest, via catharsis, from cathexes which place our individual or social well-being at risk. 

Without rehashing Ahmed’s analysis of the circulation of particular emotions, such as fear, hate, and shame, across Cultural Politics, I would just point out that such circulation exemplifies the cathectic investments within affective economies.  In making these investments we’re often merely acting upon the existing coding of our desiring-production.  Part of the problem here is connected to Brennan’s Foundational Fantasy in the myth of the autonomous, self-contained individual.  There is a “bias,” Brennan claims, “[towards] the cognitive individual [that] is entirely in line with the prominence of ideas of unilateral self-containment.”  Coding of this particular type enforces the narrative that the individual is not actually taking part in an affective economy, but rather that they are somehow acting independently of it.  The Foundational Fantasy sets the groundwork by which continued investment (cathexis) in concepts such as masculine/feminine, love/hate, shame/pride, etc. remain the predominant coding the socius grounds.  Thus, the question becomes, how does one not simply reinvest (for example, redefining the hate of one group as being the love of another), but divest from these harmful narratives/encodings all together?

To be clear, when I refer to divestiture I am not referring to the mere dumping of emotion.  Brennan describes the process of ‘dumping’ as the outward projection of affective energies, effectively ‘relieving’ the carrier by forcing another to take up their burden. Now, in a more benign sense, this can be read as ‘I can’t take it anymore, so I break down and cry, an empathetic person comes by and, being empathetic, unable to resist, takes up at least some of my stress, sadness, grief, or what-have-you.’ Dumping is not catharsis, dumping is continued cathexis in a different form.  By dumping one’s ‘affective baggage’ upon another, one pronounces their superiority in a power relationship over the other.  In its malignant form, this is your classic, gaslighting, emotional and/or psychological abuser. The dumper is effectively exploiting the existing affective coding of the socius; much as, in Marxian terms, the capitalist exploits the prevalence of surplus labor in order to maximize his capital gains.  The carrier of the affective burden dumps that burden onto another, by virtue of the socius, thus maximizing their power (whether in terms of actual power over another or merely seeking to improve their own well-being). This is, of course, where intention really matters. Trump’s, and his firebrand allies like Steve Bannon’s and Charlie Kirk’s, use of rhetoric to drive fear, resentment, confusion, and hate, is an intentional and explicit weaponization of affect in order to increase his power over others.  

Okay, at the top, I mentioned a quote from Nietzsche, “We exercise our power over others by doing them good or by doing them ill – that is all we care for!” Let’s unpack that a bit. Nietzsche goes on in this aphorism to claim that, quote

Doing ill to those on whom we have to make our power felt; for pain is a far more sensitive means for that purpose than pleasure: – pain always asks concerning the cause, while pleasure is inclined to keep within itself and not look backward. Doing good and being kind to those who are in any way dependent on us… we want to increase their power because we thus increase our own…

Harm and benefit are both forms of power; the exercise of either by one individual upon another affects the power of both.  If this is the case, and I believe it is, then the consideration of the power relationship must be taken into account as an underlying principle, a basic code in the socius, in seeking a form of divestiture. 

Sidenote, Shankar Vedantam’s Hidden Brain podcast just recently published an episode featuring psychologist Paul Bloom on pleasure and pain in shared experience, and in one part note that we tend, for psychological reasons, to form closer relationships with people with whom we share painful experiences than pleasurable ones, even at just the level of eating spicy food or watching horror movies. It’s pretty interesting, I recommend checking it out. I think it has some interesting implications for phenomena like ‘why it’s so hard to get out of the cult of MAGA even in the face of Trump’s policies harming his own supporters.’ Not to mention this really supports what Nietzsche projected back in 1882. Okay, back to the economics of affect. 

Rather than circulating harmful affects in terms of cathexis by dumping, i.e. investment of affective/emotional energies in that which encodes/exploits existing narratives of hate, fear, oppression, etc. onto the socius; is it possible rather to circulate harmful affects in terms of catharsis, i.e. divestiture from the same such emotional energies to re-encode the socius such that relief yields joy without passing a burden onto others?  Or, at the very least, to find joy or relief, specifically, a transmission or circulation of one’s affective energies such that it yields an increase in one’s power, which better serves rather than exploits the socius?  If affect is taken in the broad sense; linguistic and non-linguistic, physiological, and, especially, monumental (art, music, and literature), then I believe the answer is yes, and I think Brennan is pointing in this direction where she refers to symbolization. 

“Symbolization,” notes Brennan, “is the means for transformation as the process whereby energy locked up in an alphabet [or code, to continue the Deleuzean parlance] in which it cannot speak (such as traumatic grief) is released back into the flow of life by words, or by the strange chemistry of tears.  Symbolization, as the act whereby information is transferred from one register or alphabet to another, [where it is (re)encoded] is simultaneously an act of transformation.”  Okay, it is in this act of transformation, by which locked-up affective energies are released “back into the flow of life” as opposed to the act of dumping – which merely circulates without release – that catharsis is possible.  These locked up or coded affective energies, just as those affective energies of which we are consciously aware, can be described as a form of accumulated surplus; though this particular kind of surplus is not all wealth – though it is fair to say that a surplus of negative or harmful affective energies could be reasonably compared to the burden of excessive debt, which in and of itself may also cause an accumulation of harmful affect.  

This accumulated surplus of harmful affective energies is a problem, and here Georges Bataille has much to offer the conversation. “The problem posed,” writes Bataille, “is that of the expenditure of the surplus. We need to give away, lose or destroy.”  One possibility of doing so is through the act of gift-giving.  Bataille continues noting that giving “… must become acquiring a power. Gift-giving has the virtue of a surpassing of the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given the subject appropriates the surpassing: He regards his virtue, that which he has the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now possesses.”  Alright, that’s a bit to unpack. The transmission and circulation of the harmful affect energy must be transformed from either its internally locked-up state or its being-dumped state into different state in which it can become expenditure as gift, releasing the harmful effects of the affect back into the flow of life or containing it outside of a lived existence, or, well, destroying it. 

Transformation, especially of affect into its monumental aspect, is capable of not only releasing the locked-up affective energies one possesses, but of excavating them from others; such as the work of art, music, or literature that, through its nonliving containment of such energies, draws out from another individual their affective energies, whether or not they may have necessarily even consciously known they had been locked-up in the first place.  Catharsis; expenditure of surplus, harmful affective energies by transformation into, or encounter with, affect’s monumental aspect opens the possibility of alternatives to circulation and transmission of affect that may otherwise get ‘stuck’ in the socius in the form of oppressive narratives, or narratives which merely justify oppressions, as coding of desiring-production. This being the case, it ought not be a surprise that authoritarian and fascist movements as well as individuals seeking to exercise and accumulate greater power over others are so at home with the discourses of harmful affects: fear, resentment, hate, uncertainty, etc.; nor that the most adept at this do so by seeking to spin hate into love, or fear, resentment, and uncertainty into nostalgia. They offer no catharsis, no divestiture, but instead aim to justify greater investment. 

Dialogue and education efforts alone are not enough to overcome oppressing cathexes.  The investment must be divested first.  As Bataille notes, using the example of anxiety, “to solve political problems…” and I would certainly refer to emotional investment in narratives that justify oppression to be a political problem, it “becomes difficult for those who allow anxiety alone to pose them.  It is necessary for anxiety to pose them.”  Oppression ought to make us anxious.  “But their solution,” to these political problems, Bataille continues, “demands at a certain point the removal of this anxiety.”  Anything less is to operate within the coded functions of anxiety upon the socius without coping with the anxiety itself.  To paraphrase Nietzsche and Wittgenstein; that which must be said, must be said greatly, and of that which cannot be said we must be silent; but language, saying, is not the limits of communication.  There remains art and music, literature and tears, monuments and physiology through which new affective currencies may form and circulate, and, ultimately, (re)encode the socius to form a ground of experience upon which harmful affective energies lose their value. 

Now, I said we were going to pivot back to Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? and talk about art, so here we go. They note, regarding the artist, quote

In this respect [the ability of the artist to saturate all with an affective Athleticism, to give more to their art than they take in to sustain themselves] artists are like philosophers. What little health they possess is often too fragile, not because of their illness or neuroses, but because they have seen something in life that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves, and that has put them on the quiet mark of death. But this something is also the source or breath that supports them through the illness of the lived (what Nietzsche called health). “Perhaps one day we will know that there wasn’t any art but only medicine.”

The Day After. This 1983 made-for-TV-movie (and, FYI, Trump’s preferred media is TV) aired on ABC and was watched by some 39 million households – including the White House – it depicted the aftermath of a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR; but, as opposed to modern disaster films, it wasn’t about action or conflict, to the extent the decision makers of the exchange are in the movie at all, they live in the background on news clips as people pass a TV or listen to the radio and get on with their lives. The movie focuses on the slow, painful death of those who survived the initial bombs and deteriorated away due to the radiation. The movie is a gut wrenching, realistic depiction of the slow end after the bombs drop. It is so realistic and grimly affective, that it moved President Ronald Reagan, who had run in 1980 on stark opposition to nuclear arms control and wanted instead to increase America’s nuclear weapons stockpile, to radically change his position on nuclear weapons after watching it. From 80 to 83, Reagan spent some $30 billion on expanding America’s nuclear stockpile (over $80 billion today, and managing the released radiation from these warheads still costs the US 6 billion a year). After 1983, Reagan made a hard pivot rhetorically (there’s some question how honest this was, since it conflicts with Presidential military records from the time) focusing instead on the idea that no one can win a nuclear exchange, and pivoted in his budget requests to build the Star Wars program in order to shoot missiles down in from satellites rather than simply having more missiles, and by 84 repositioned himself again as the great ‘peace-maker’ in the Cold War. 

So there’s the mission for all of you artists out there. Who knows, maybe Trump just needs to have a good, hard, ugly-cry, like really let it out. He certainly looked like that was what he wanted to do at his parade. Maybe he can have a cry in front of his most die-hard MAGA loyalists, maybe get them all together and just cry it out. We might all be better for it. 

Okay, next up? I think we’re getting back to Weeks and wrapping up the failures of productivist socialism with Erich Fromm and Socialist Humanism, then touching on Marxist Autonomism before getting into the Refusal of Work. I don’t want to write that in stone though, I guess we’ll see how the next several news cycles go. 

‘til next time. 

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