“everything is affective”

Below is Steven Shaviro riffing on affect and politics – taken from Adrian Ivakhiv's recent post updating us on the symposium exploring Shaviro’s book Post-Cinematic Affect:

“For we do not live in a world in which the forces of affective vitality are battling against the blandness and exhaustion of capitalist commodification. Rather, we live in a world in which everything is affective. What politics is more virulently affective and vital than that of the American Tea Party? Where is intensive metamorphosis more at work than in the “hyper-chaos” (as Elie Ayache characterizes it, following Quentin Meillassoux) of the global financial markets? It is not a question of a fight between affect and its “waning” or exhaustion (whether the latter is conceived as the actual negation of the former, or just as its zero degree). Rather than being on one side of a battle, affect is the terrain itself: the very battlefield on which all conflicts are played out. All economic and aesthetic events today are necessarily aesthetic ones, both for good and for ill." [also see here]

Adrian has also commented extensively on Shaviro’s book in a previous and highly stimulating post entitled, "Post-Cinematic Affect in the Era of Plasticity". Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for Adrian’s book exploring cinema, affect and ecology (Ecologies of the Moving Image). My brain drools just thinking about it.

UPDATE: From a physicist's viewpoint...

“From a physicist's viewpoint, though, biology, history, and economics can be viewed as dynamical systems. Each system consists of many individual parts that interact with each other. In economics there are many agents, such as consumers, producers, governments, thieves, and economists. These agents each make decisions optimizing their own idiosyncratic goals. The actions of one agent affect other agents. In biology, individual organisms - or from a more general perspective, individual species - interact with one another. The actions of one organism affect the survivability, or fitness, of others. If one species changes by mutation to improve its own fitness, other species in the ecology are also affected.”

– Per Bak and Maya Paczuski, 1994