anderson, ben - becoming and being hopeful - towards a theory of affect

7/16/2019 Anderson, Ben - Becoming and Being Hopeful - Towards a Theory of Affect

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/anderson-ben-becoming-and-being-hopeful-towards-a-theory-of-affect 1/21

` [H]ope ... dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place where entrance and, above all,final content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy.''

Bloch (1998, page 341)

` [T]he uncertainty of the outcome remains ... danger and faith are the truth of hope,

in such a way that both are gathered in it.'' Bloch (1986, page 112)

1 Introduction: thinking hope through affect

In this paper I describe how hope takes place, in order to outline a vocabulary thatattunes to the multiple processes, and modalities, that make up the geographies of affectual and emotional life. Hope, and hoping, are taken-for-granted parts of theaffective fabric of contemporary Western everyday life. The circulation, and distribu-tion, of hope animates and dampens social ^ cultural life across numerous scales: fromthe minutiae of hopes that pleat together everyday life to the larger scale flows of hope

that enact various collectivities. Yet, thinking through hope touches something thatremains elusive to an act of explanation or description. The social sciences and human-ities have struggled when they have tried to bring hope to thought. Hope is easilyidentified and its quantitative presence or absence highlighted, but the taking-placeof hope, its mode of operation, remains an aporia. Frequently likened to the immate-rial-matter of air, or sensed in the prophetic figure of the horizon, hope anticipatesthat something indeterminate has not-yet become. Bloch (1986, page 188), describing thecontent of a range of hopes, attends to the relation between absence and presence thatis folded within a space ^ time of hope when he writes that, ` since all their contacts are

not-yet as such, even the glance at them is still merely preview, even the feeling thatthey arouse, merely presentiment.'' There is, therefore, an intuitive understandingthat hope matters because it discloses the creation of potentiality or possibility and

Becoming and being hopeful: towards a theory of affect

Ben Anderson

Department of Geography, University of Durham, Science Laboratories, South Road, DurhamDH1 3LE, England; e-mail: [email protected] 13 October 2004; in revised form 1 March 2005

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2006, volume 24, pages 733 ^ 752

Abstract. In this paper I describe how hope takes place, in order to outline an explicit theory of themore-than-rational or less-than rational in the context of the recent attunement to issues of the affectual and emotional in social and cultural geography. In the first part of the paper I outlinean expansion of the more-than-rational or less-than-rational into three modalities: affect, feeling, and emotion. From this basis I question an assumption in the literature on affect that the emergenceand movement of affect enable the multiplication of forms of life because they takes place `in excess'.In the second part of the paper I exemplify an alternative, more melancholy account through a description of the emergence of hope and hopefulness in two cases in which recorded music is used by individuals to `feel better'. Emergent from disruptions in various forms of diminishment, hopeful-ness moves bodies into contact with an `outside'. Becoming and being hopeful raise a set of issues for

a theory of affect because of, rather than despite, the sense of tragedy that is intimate with how hopeheralds the affective and emotive as always `not-yet become'. The conclusion, therefore, draws the twoparts of the paper together by reflecting on the implications of thinking from hope for both a theory of affect and an affective cultural politics.

DOI:10.1068/d393t



thus involves, in Marcel's (1965, page 86) words, `à postulate that reality overflows allpossible reckonings''. Witness, for example, recent work that has argued that alternative

economic practices, such as credit unions or types of second hand exchange, enactspaces of hope within the context of actually existing capitalism (Lee et al, 2003; seealso Harvey, 2000). The taking place of hope enacts the future as open to differencebut also reminds us that the here and now is `ùncentered, dispersed, plural and partial''(Gibson-Graham, 1996, page 259).

In order to develop this intuition that hope matters, and thus open up an explicitresearch focus on hope, I describe vignettes from two case studies drawn from researchon music consumption and the affective geographies of everyday life (see Anderson,2004a; 2004b; 2005). My description of the geographies of hope revolves around an

attunement to how hope, and hopefulness, take place that supplements recent work onother classes of emotion [see on fear Capital and Class (2003), on love Thien (2004),on boredom Anderson (2004b), on confidence Koskela (2000), and on anxiety Davidson(2003)]. This begins from a set of simple questions: what can a body do when it becomeshopeful? What capacities, and capabilities, are enabled? The ethological frame in whichthese questions are posed calls us to think through hope via the attunement to affect thathas recently emerged from the revaluation of Spinozist thought in the literatures gatheredunder the name `nonrepresentational theory' (see explicitly on affect Anderson, 2004a;Dewsbury, 2000; 2003; McCormack, 2002; 2003; Thrift, 2000; 2003a; 2004a; 2004b).

From these, and related poststructuralist literatures, a theoretical vocabulary specificto affect is emerging that resonates with `à growing feeling within media, literary, andart theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information-and-image-based late capitalist culture'' (Massumi, 2002a, page 27; compare Connolly, 1999; 2002;Grossberg, 1992; 1997; Marks, 2000; O'Sullivan, 2001). The term àffect' is now,however, a contested one that is used in divergent ways across different literatures.Thrift (2004a, pages 60 ^ 64) has recently identified different articulations that emergefrom work animated by ideas of performance, the psychology of Tomkins, Deleuze'sethological reworking of Spinoza, and neo-Darwinism. We could think of other tradi-

tions of thought that develop vocabularies of affect, post-Lacanian psychoanalysismost notably (Brennon, 2004), but this is nevertheless a useful definitional exercisethat avoids the conceptual underdetermination that has marked work on emotionalgeographies more broadly (Anderson and Smith, 2001). It does, however, leave thedifferences between vocabularies intact rather than reworking them in relation to oneanother. This is problematic as terms used to describe the more-than or less-thanrational ö including affect but also mood, passion, emotion, intensity, and feeling ö

have frequently morphed into one another during the multiple engagements that thesocial sciences and humanities have had with the topic (see Pugmire, 1998; Solomon,

1992).In this paper I therefore aim to both outline an explicit theory of affect and openup a research focus on the geographies of hope and hopefulness. In the next section(section 2) I distinguish between affect, feeling, and emotion as three different modal-ities enacted from heterogeneous processes of circulation, expression, and qualification.Outlining a language of or for affect does, however, inevitably invite contestation.In section 3 I open up a set of issues about the idea of the excess of affect. I arguethat work on affect has been animated by an understanding of excess as akin to a puregift, and stress the necessity of supplementing this equation with other figures of

excess. I then fold the theory of affect outlined in these two sections into a descriptionof how hope takes place, in order to exemplify an account that incorporates the multipletypes of excess built into the concept of the `not-yet'. I move through a narrative of how bodies become hopeful when formed through both diminishing encounters and

734 B Anderson



disjunctures in broader flows of affect (section 4) and of how hope is enacted by a bodythat senses and discloses an òutside' on the horizon of `what has become' (section 5).

Implicit throughout this paper, and the key to how the theoretical and empirical worktouch one another, is an argument for a postrationalist technique of thought based onhope that ``meets affective modulation with affective modulation'' (Massumi, 2002b,page 234). In the conclusion I turn to think the concept of affect through hope. Hopetherefore becomes both the object of the paper and exemplary for a theory of affect.

2 Affect, feeling, and emotion

The development of an explicit vocabulary of affect and emotion begins from theassertion that the more-than or less-than rational cannot be reduced to a range of

discreet, internally coherent, emotions which are self-identical with the mind of anindividual. Empirical sociologies, and both mainstream and constructionist socialpsychology, have oscillated between conceptualizing emotions as either ìnherent' or`socially constructed' (see Lupton, 1998; Williams, 2001). By enacting the modernistsettlement of a subjective ìn here' and an objective òut there' different modalities arereduced to `èither biological systems (aspects of extension) or cognitive, linguistic, andsocial processes (aspects of thought)'' (Brown and Stenner, 2001, page 78). Thinkingthrough an expansion of the affectual and emotional begins from an alternativeattunement to affect as a transpersonal capacity which a body has to be affected

(through an affection) and to affect (as the result of modifications). These two capacitiesgo ``beyond the strength of those who undergo them ... affects are beings whose validitylies in themselves and exceeds any lived'' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, page 164,emphasis in original). `Being affected ^ affecting' are therefore two sides of the samedynamic shift, or change, in the body as, ``when you affect something, you are at thesame time opening yourself up to being affected in turn'' (Massumi, 2002b, page 212).

The capacities to affect and to be affected that enact the life of everyday life do not,however, simply emerge from the properties of the humans or nonhumans that existìn' Euclidean space or ìn' linear time öthat is, affect does not reside in a subject,

body, or sign as if it were an object possessed by a subject (Ahmed, 2001). Instead,when taken together, they constitute what Deleuze (1978) named as `à kind of melodicline of continuous variation'' bound to ``durations through which we pass to a greaterto lesser perfection'' (1988a, page 49). `Being affected ^ affecting' emerge from a pro-cessual logic of transitions that take place during spatially and temporally distributedencounters in which ` each transition is accompanied by a variation in capacity: achange in which powers to affect and be affected are addressable by a next event andhow readily addressable they are'' (Masumi, 2002a, page 15). Hence the ethologicalattunement to combinations, and connections, which follows Spinoza's declaration of

ignorance: ``we still do not know what a body can do'' [and the linked assumption thata body is not limited to the form of the human (Thrift, 2003a)]. What is at stake is thecomposition of harmonious or disharmonious relations amongst diverse collectivitiesof humans and nonhumans that produce ``rises and falls, continuous variations of power ... signs of increase and decrease, signs that are vectorial (of the joy ^ sadnesstype) and no longer scalar like the affections, sensations or perceptions'' (Deleuze,1998, page 139). The affectivities of different types of relation can be witnessed in thequalitative differences that energetically enhance or deplete the living of space ^ times.In spaces of sexual and romantic love, for example, ``you become energised when you

are with some loves or some friends. With others you are bored or drained, tired ordepressed'' (Brennon, 2004, page 6). Intimate spaces of care, to give another example,are enacted from shared attunements by parents and children to ` those dynamic,kinetic, qualities of feeling that distinguish animate from inanimate and that correspond

Becoming and being hopeful: towards a theory of affect 735



to momentary changes in feeling states involved in the organic process of being alive''(Stern, 1983, page 156).

The emergence of affect from the relations between bodies, and from the encoun-ters that those relations are entangled within, make the materialities of space ^ timealways-already affective. There is not, first, an èvent' and then, second, an affectiveèffect' of such an èvent'. Instead, affect takes place before and after the distinctions of subject ^ world or inside ^ outside as ` a ceaselessly oscillating foreground/backgroundor, better, an immanent `plane' (i.e. this is an in-between with a consistency all of itsown)'' (Seigworth, 2000, page 232). The biggest difficulty in witnessing how affectenacts space ^ time is, therefore, the tendency to reduce the movement of capacitiesto affect and be affected back into a subject ^ object ontology. We commonly apportion

a share of affect to an attribute, or property, of an object and the remainder to a subject.In Massumi's (2002a, page 219) words `àffective èxaggeration' is now contained. Oneshare has been functionalized, the remainder relegated to the tawdry status of aprivate.'' To think through affect we must untie it from a subject or object and insteadattune to how affects inhabit the passage between contexts through various processes of translocal movement. Massumi (2002a, page 217) stresses that `àffect is situational:eventfully ingressive to context. Serially so: affect is trans-situational. As processionalas it is precessional, affect inhabits the passage. It is pre- and postcontextual, pre- andpostpersonal, an excess of continuity invested only in the ongoing its own.'' The

excessive movement of affect, which we could think through processes such as circula-tion, flow, transmission, or contagion, is an event autonomous of specific determinations:` a trajectory or line in continual variation with itself '' (Seigworth, 2000, page 230). There isno a priori assumption here as to the scale effects of either the emergence or movementof affect (despite the common assumption of the intimate, small-scale, geographies of emotion). Witness, for example, how the transmission of excitement constitutes crowdsas defined entities that inhabit space with their own logic (Brennon, 2004). Or how thecirculation of fear has enacted the boundaries of the American nation after the eventof September 11 (O è Tuathail, 2003).

The key point is rather to recognize the difference between affect and other modal-ities that speak to how the emergence and movement of affect is expressed andqualified as it performs, and disrupts, space ^ times of experience öthat is, the bifurca-tion of an event into multiple registers. Movements of affect are expressed throughthose proprioceptive and visceral shifts in the background habits, and postures, of abody that are commonly described as `feelings': ``putting it simply, when I feel angry,I feel the passage of anger through me'' (Brennon, 2004, page 5). Examples includethe blush of a body shamed (Probyn, 2000a), the heat of a body angered (Katz, 1999),or the restless visceral tension of a body bored (Anderson, 2004b). Such background

bodily feelings correspond ``to the body state prevailing between emotions ... the back-ground feeling is our image of the body landscape when it is not shaken by emotion''(Damasio, 1994, pages 150 ^ 151). Forming a second-order ìmage' of a state of `thebody' feelings are expressions of ``that which happens to the mode, the modification of the mode, the effects of modes on it. These affections are therefore images or corporealtraces first of all'' (Deleuze, 1988a, page 48). Feelings always imply the presence of anaffecting body: an affection is therefore a literal impingement of the emergence andmovement of affect on the body (when the body can be anything). But the movement of affect is not simply received by a blank body ìn' space or ìn' time. Feelings act as an

instantaneous assessment of affect that are dependent upon the affected body's existingcondition to be affected.The emergence and movement of affect, and its corporeal expression in bodily

feelings, create the transpersonal sense of life that animates or dampens space ^ times

736 B Anderson



of experience. This is spatially and temporally distributed and stretched out intovarious presences and absences. The affectual does, however, also come to be experi-

enced through those intimate, distinctly personal, ways of being that are retrospectivelynamed as emotions.Various processes of qualification multiply the movement of affect,and the expression of feeling, to enact space ^ times that are enabling and constrainingof distinct subjectivities and identities (see Lupton, 1998). Therefore `àn emotion is asubjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which fromthat point onward is defined as personal'' (Massumi, 2002a, page 28). Emotions areformed through the qualification of affect into ``semantically and semiotically formedprogressions, into narrativizable action ^ reaction circuits, into function and meaning.It is intensity owned and recognized'' (page 28). There is, though, a danger that in

postulating the qualification of affect in emotions as only ever a frictional process öacapture or blockage to use the language of Massumi öthe role of emotions in makingspace ^ time is passed over [see, in contrast, recent work on emotional geographies(Social and Cultural Geography 2004)]. Emotions, as qualifications that fold into a set of more extensive relations, can instead be described as artful types of corporeal intelligence-in-action enacted from within a subtle choreography of rhetorical ^ responsive joint action(see Katz, 1999).

3 Excess and affect

The assumption that the spacing and timing of affect takes place in the in-between of the relation, and that the movement of affect happens alongside processes of expres-sion and qualification that construct space ^ times of experience, avoids expanding thecategory of emotion so it becomes only an unspecified index of everything that is notrational. Two linked caveats are, however, vital at this point. First, the relation between thethree modalities is not one of a movement from affect through feelings to emotions öthatis, it has no a priori direction or causality. Through the processes of enactment hinted atabove (movement, expression, and qualification) the three modalities slide into and out of one another to disrupt their neat analytic distinction. Diverse feedforward and feedback

loops take place to create such hybrids as àffectively imbued thoughts' and `thoughtimbued intensities' (Connolly, 2002). Second, and following from the presumption thatthese processes are nonlinear, the distinctions do not correspond to a nature ^ culturedivision between the indeterminate, unmediated, natural and the determinate, mediatedsocial. Talk of affect is frequently read as `àn appeal to a prereflexive, romantically rawdomain of primitive experiential richness'' (Massumi, 2002a, page 29). Ahmed (2004a,page 39), for example, argues that distinguishing between modalities can risk equatingaffect with immediate corporeal sensations and can thus create `à distinction betweenconscious recognition and `direct' feeling, which negates how what is not consciously

experienced may still be mediated by past experiences.'' Unlike social-constructionistaccounts, which are implicitly based on an undifferentiated realm of visceral arousalthat is then discursively constructed (see Sedgwick and Frank, 1995), a Spinozistaccount of multiple processes, and modalities, is not distinguishable on the basis of a continuum of immediate ^ mediated. Each modality is radically relational : a passingdetermination of different types of relation that is never self-contained, or fully self-presentin an individual body existing ìn' space or ìn' time.

It is the specific conceptualization that affect exceeds its expression or qualificationin feelings or emotions that has, however, enabled the production of a theoretical ^

conceptual hope for a different figure of èveryday life'. Beginning from specificencounters in which complex bodies take form öa process that is bound up with theindeterminate movement of spacing and timing öties affect to the presence of virtualitiesthat are folded into what has become actual: in which the virtual as the Being of beings




``creates its own lines of actualization in positive acts'' (Deleuze, 1991, page 97). The keydistinction between the three modalities is therefore not one of mediation ^ nonmediation

but that emotions and feelings are produced through actualizations and can never coincidewith the totality of potential affective expression. Movements of affect are always accom-panied by a real but virtual knot of tendencies and latencies that generate differencesand divergences in what becomes actual. This equation, affect = virtualities = excess,has recently folded into an experimentation with postcritical techniques that follow theSpinozist point that an affect can be changed only through the energetic creation of another affect: specifically the ethical cultivation of capacities that change visible conduct(Brennon, 2004; McCormack, 2003; Thrift, 2003b) and a practice of tending to belonging-as-such that creates new potentialities by enacting `good encounters' (Massumi, 2002a;

Thrift, 2004a). Both styles of affective modulation, which fold into ethical techniques thataim to produce generosity (Diprose, 2002) or enchantment (Bennett, 2001), are drawntogether by the assumption that through affect we are able to open onto the diversepresences within èveryday life' of something akin to a ``qualitative excess of livelinessoverspilling every determinate expression'' (Massumi, 2002a, page 253). The expansionof the political, and the practice of politics, is therefore underpinned by an understandingthat affect takes place as ``something more, a more to come'' (Massumi, 2002b, page 215),which enables a point of view on ``the edge of the virtual, where it leaks into the actual''(2002a, page 43).

The link between excess and change that animates the emergence of a vocabularyof affect is, however, far from unique and has frequently reoccurred as a demand toattune to the `life' of everyday life. Indeed, it has been integral to a range of otherpolitical practices that engage with everyday life as a realm in which the extraordinaryemerges from the banal. The Surrealists and the Situationalists, for example, bothenacted practices of engaging with the city that found `ìn the minutiae of everydaylife ... a polysemy of gestures and symbols the very banality of which is worth savour-ing'' (Gardiner, 2000, pages 15 ^ 16). There has also been a series of changes in theequation of the category of èveryday life' with the idea of an ìrreducible remainder'

(see Roberts, 1999). Seigworth (2000, page 257), drawing on de Certeau and Lefebvre,has most explicitly developed this trajectory by describing how the `living' of èverydaylife' always exceeds closure and thus creates a constant transversal `more': an excess of pure process that begins from the assumption that ``living exceeds, always exceeds'' (seeAmin and Thrift, 2002). If intimate with the different articulations of the politics of everyday life the idea of excess also has a long and complex genealogy that foldsinto both contemporary thought around the more-than-human (Whatmore, 2002)and the negative valuation of emotion in the gendered figure of the hysterical womenor the classed image of the irrational crowd (Brennon, 2004). It is, therefore, important

to specify precisely how the idea of excess folds out of the equation between affect andthe virtual in order to think through the effects of remembering, and reinventing, thedemand to think the affective as a realm of `processual excess'.

Thinking the virtuality of affect stands in a family resemblance to a potentiallyinfinite set of terms which attune to an excess that grounds a radical affirmationof difference: including ``will to power, differance, Lack, (non-)being or ?-being, thebody without organs, the ùnsayable something', the differend, the feminine'' (Widder,2000, page 117). The literature that follows Deleuze is, however, now internally differ-entiated around the link between the virtual and affect [compare DeLanda (2002)

with Ansell Pearson (1999)]. Work on affect in geography has drawn most explicitlyon Massumi's (2002a; 2002b; 2002c) account of the emergence of affect from thegroundless ground of the virtual (see McCormack, 2003; Thrift, 2004a). The excessof affect is, for Massumi, the pure tendency of an unconditional escape that at the

738 B Anderson



moment of movement between contexts is without either origin or destination. Thiseruptive movement becomes vital to the definition of `life':

`

If there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universewould be without potential, pure entropy, death. Actually existing, structured thingslive in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect'' (Massumi, 2002a, page 35).Massumi stresses that the `more' of affect constitutes a line that always èscapes' as

it `goes on'. The terms `surplus' and òverspill' are also used in addition to èscape' todisclose the presence of the movement out of context of a continued `more'. Thinkingof the escape, or overflowing, of affect is faithful to the Deleuzian stress on eruptionsthat come about through an outward movement as the virtual actualizes ``disjoined

singularities'' (Widder, 2000, page 127). This then folds into an assumption that theexpression and qualification of affect are frictional processes of `capture' and `closure':` affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular

body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situatedperceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage arethe capture and closure of affect'' (Massumi, 2002a, page 35).The overspill, and remainder, of affect constitute an opening to an affirmation of

pure difference that is present in the affective background ^ foreground of any situation.Massumi (2002a, page 217) stresses the transversal qualities of affect that mean it

`ìs situational: eventfully ingressive to context. Serially so: affect is trans-situational.''Folded into what becomes actual is always a qualitative remainder of newness thatexists outside of specific determinations: ``the remainder of ingressive potential tooongoing to be exhausted by any particular expression of it'' (page 248). The eruptiveoverspill of affect therefore enables an ingression that `ruptures' or `disturbs' that whichis àctually existing'.

The double escape and ingression of affect (or eruption and disruption) take place,as outlined by Massumi, according to an implicit model of a pure gift: an anonymous,impersonal donation of potential that animates because the expression and qualifica-

tion of affect (in feelings or emotion) never coincide with the totality of affect andtherefore neither the recipient nor the donor are aware of giving or receiving. Instead,because affect provides a point of view on the explosiveness of those virtualities thathave been held in check but are carried within what has become actual, life is given``the unseen possibility of other strange possibilities'' (Rajchman, 1988 cited in O'Sullivan,2001, page 133). The movement of affect gives life through what Caille ¨ (2001), commentingon the idea of the pure gift, terms àn inconceivability': a nonreciprocal sense of `freedom'to a body ènlivened'. So, writing of the qualification of the excess of affect, Massumi(2002a, page 36) argues that, ` when the continuity of affective escape is put into words,

it tends to take on positive connotations. For it is nothing less than the perception of one's own vitality, one's sense of aliveness, of changeability (often signified as `free-dom')''. He goes on to stress that it is confidence, rather than shame, hate, or any othernamed emotion, that is the effect of the gift of the excess of affect: ``the emotionaltranslation of affect as capturable life potential; it is a particular emotional expressionand becoming conscious of one's side-perceived sense of vitality''(page 41).

Thinking of the excess of being as a pure gift enables an attunement to the move-ment of affect as a translocal process that potentializes difference within space^timeby making real but not actual ` a population or swarm of potential ways of affecting or

being affected that follows along as we move through life'' (Massumi, 2002b, page 214).The ontological equation between affect and excess around the idea of the virtual âctual has subsequently functioned as the a priori foundation, or ground, that guaranteesthe postrationalist political practices mentioned above (see, for example, Spinks, 2001).




Emergent work on affect has, by drawing on this equation between affect and the gift of ingression ^ eruption, developed a series of careful attunements to how the movement, and

qualification, of affect is intimate with the multiplication of life: an animation of space ^time that follows the vitalist demand to be sensitive to the indeterminacy, and complexity,of life (see Dewsbury, 2000; 2003; Latham, 2003; McCormack, 2003; Thrift, 2003a). Thishas been worked up into a broader articulation of space ^ time as a sphere of plentitudeanimated by the presence of a continued `more' (see Thrift, 2004b). Latham (2003,page 1902), in the introduction to a special issue on performance and drawing on Massumiin the context of a discussion of event-ness, summarizes this act of faith: ``we inhabit aworld where the actual is always haunted by possibility, by the virtualities folded within itsemergence.''

There is a risk here that if we assume that an attunement to affect necessarilydiscloses a constant `more to life' then those types of relation that enact forms of suffering, or misery, are erased in favour of an affirmative account of the social andcultural that forgets how forms of nonlife traverse life. Think, for example, of themultiple types of suffering that course through everyday life: to suffer, in Connolly's(1999, page 47, emphasis in original) terms, `ìs to bear, endure, or undergo; to submitto something injurious; to become disorganized. Suffering resides on the undersideof agency, mastery, wholeness, joy, and comfort.'' The ubiquity of suffering does not,I want to stress, detract from an expansion of the definition of the political and of the

sphere of being political into affect. It is, rather, what makes a positive metaphysicsthat moves, and inspires, a necessity in order to cultivate a politics of becoming thatcan `òpen up a new line of flight from culturally induced suffering'' (Connolly, 1999,page 51); Because, as Connolly (1999, page 57) goes on to argue, acceptance of anobligation to respond to suffering does not simply happen, instead it ``grows out of aprotean care for the world that precedes it''. Expressions and qualifications of affectthat diminish and destroy are, therefore, beginning to be attuned to in the literature onaffect [see Thrift (2004a) on violence and the city]. But it does mean that the literatureon affect can be supplemented with other figures of excess that enable us to disclose the

multiplicity of affective and emotive life. Indeed, there is an implicit sense of alternativesto the equation between affect and the pure gift in the uncertain, but hopeful, ethic thathas animated recent in-depth empirical work around affect. McCormack (2003), to giveone notable example, describes how creative interventions in the embodied practices of dance movement therapy foster diverse capacities to affect and be affected. Through hisexemplary practice of observant participation, and via an affirmative ethos of generositytowards the world, he hints at the uncertainty of an event-full world by describing howthe creation of something better is a provisional, hesitant process.

This sense of hesitancy, the lack of guarantee thinking which affect demands,

contrasts with more programmatic theoretical statements that the actual is necessaryhaunted by possibility or potentiality. To develop this ethos, and supplement an equa-tion between excess and the pure gift, other accounts of the excess of affect can bedrawn out of recent feminist-inspired and Marxist-inspired work on the affectivities of everyday life. Probyn (2000a, pages 139 ^ 141) describes how the transmission of shamein pride movements produces a ` back-and-forth movement of distancing'' betweenbodies that translates into `à heightened awareness of what one's body is and does''.The body that is shamed is marked by an awareness that one has trespassed proximityand so ``loses any pristine sense of its boundaries: it is bespattered and besmirched by

its own actions'' (page 140). One specific movement of affect here emerges fromdisruptive relations of antagonism and contestation that distribute bodies into hierar-chies of interest and obligation. In this movement an affect exceeds, and gives bodiesdifferent capacities to affect and be affected, but it is both that which is marginalized

740 B Anderson



as outside the measure of the proper and that which is redundant in the context of the functional [see also Ahmed (2004b) on disgust and types of disconnection]. The

emergence and movement of shame, in this example, call us to think multiple types of excess that move beyond the surplus ^ remainder couplet in order to remember thatdifferences in intensity are formed from different types of relations. If we supplementthis work with an emerging Marxist literature on the affectivities of different types of labour then we can see that not only does the movement of affect take place throughdifferent types of excess but the expression and qualification of excess-as-surplus varyas affect folds into types of relations that diminish and destroy. In the performance of different types of bodily labour, such as certain types of emotional labour in the familyor certain types of manual labour, a surplus does not automatically open up a virtual

``vague sense of potential'' (Massumi, 2002b, page 214). Instead, the creation of excess-as-surplus is qualified in exploitative and/or oppressive relations that enact variousforms of ill-being (see Fraad, 2000).

4 Becoming hopeful

These two examples of the movement, and qualification ^ expression, of affect eachquestion in different ways Massumi's conceptualization of excess as eruption ^ ingres-sion and the frictional, but enlivening, expression ^ qualification of the pure gift of affect. Taken together they highlight the need to experiment with other articulations

of excess that think of the gift of affect as always-already tied to networks of obligationbetween bodies and which thus bring into question an assumption of abundance. Evenas we retain the assumption that affect is an open system emergent from relations, andthat the expression and qualification of affect in space ^ times of experience do notexhaust the totality of affective expression, there is also a need to remain open aboutthe exact relation between the movement of affect and an `in excess' of being. Theproblem is not, however, invoking excess per se but that the idea of excess itself cannotfunction as a stable signifier because it overflows any qualification in an affirmationof the world. Witness, for example, the plentitude of Bataille's (1985) focus on types of

excess that both supplement and diminish life (eroticism, war, sacrifice, waste, festivities,and destruction).In order to exemplify one trajectory towards an alternative account that remains

open about the excess of affect I want to turn to engage with hope as a type of relationemergent from particular encounters. How hope takes place, and therefore enactsspace ^ time, will be discussed through vignettes from two case studies of music use:Steve listening to music in the context of despair and Emma listening to music in thecontext of grief. Both cases are drawn from wider research on music and everyday lifewith seventeen households, which used a series of methods, including observant par-

ticipation, repeat individual and group interviews, periods of `listening with' and diarywork, to attune to how music functioned in relation to the domestic geographies of affect, feeling, and emotion (Anderson, 2004a; 2004b). My focus throughout the dis-cussion of the two cases is on how the materialities of music are bound to the routineand rhythms of everyday life through changes in capacities to affect and be affected. Inorder to open up simultaneously a broader research focus on hope the empiricalmaterial from the research on music is supplemented by other examples of the takingplace of hope. Underpinning my attunement to the geographies of hope are three setsof interconnected research foci that follow the distinctions outlined in section 2: first,

flows of hope that take place as transindividual affectivities which move betweenbodies; second, hopefulness as a constellation of specific bodily background feelingsemergent from the expression of affect; third, actual hopes that emerge throughprocesses of qualification and are distinguished by possessing a determinate object.




Each exceeds the common assumption that hope is an intentional act directed towardsthe future, in which it is only the content of what is hoped for that is `socially

constructed' (see Nunn, 1996; Waterworth, 2003).Thinking of the different relations that we call hope immediately returns us tothe demand to think of the excess of affect responded to in the previous section. Thepresence of hope has long been thought to herald a more-to-come, an excessive over-spilling of life, that draws bodies into an intensified connection with an absent ^ presenttheistic or non-theistic horizon because being and becoming hopeful embody a ` radicalrefusal to reckon possibilities'' (Marcel, 1965, page 86); (see also Marcel, 1967; Pieper,1994). From the research encounters, however, a gradual attunement to the takingplace of hope emerged from an aporia: a body that became hopeful inevitably held

``the condition of defeat precariously within itself'' (Bloch, 1998, page 341). Hope was avanishing point emergent only from within the presence of various forms of ill-beingthat diminished the ` ephemeral, transient, incorporeal, and inorganic aspects of every-day life'' (Seigworth, 2000, page 257). Through discussion of these two cases I thereforewant to exemplify how the taking place of hope enacts additional figurations of excessbased on the uncertainty, the hazard, embedded in the Blochian (1986) figure of the`not-yet'.

It is a point of hazard in between the vectors of joy and sadness, or enhancementand diminishment, that I want to attend to through the discussion of the two cases. The

first case refers to Steve who is 29, lives alone, and had just been made redundant froma job of two years with a manufacturing firm that has relocated out of the area inwhich he still lives. We talk about his hopelessness in the context of his job loss.

Steve: ` ... just been a bit bored and lonely ... everything's closed around here ... I'mnot doing anything at the moment.''Ben: ``... Yeah.''Steve: ``... Sometimes I don't have the energy to do much else ... just sit here ... sithere too much and watch the world go past and see how shit the neighbourhoodhas become ... too many boarded up houses ... or go out and it's the same.''

We then talk, and listen together, to music as the interview progresses. He plays analbum by Radiohead in the context of a discussion about hope.Steve: ``... I listen to this album ... in the morning and err ... if I'm feeling ... youknow, like if I'm a bit low ... this'll cheer me up ... get me a bit more hopeful again.I don't know, it's quite melancholy ... but it's really beautiful ... and it stirs upemotion ... and I find it quite difficult to cry as well, and you need to at time totime ... so ... I ... this helps, so if I'm a bit low ... or I'm just lying here ... this is thesong to put on

_umm.''

Ben: ``Have you any other songs like this?''Steve:

``Mayonnaise by the Smashing Pumpkins which is a very, very beautiful song... even though it's called Mayonnaise (laughter) ... a sad song called Mayonnaise ...what about you have you got?''Ben: ` I don't know ... Radiohead Creep was always one ... .''Steve: ``Radiohead is just much more, MUCH more ... just self loathing, which is ...I always find it ... a solace ... to know someone else is feeling the same ... whichis great. I listened to this album yesterday morning when I'd been feeling down

_

it helps because I know I'm no way as bad as Thom Yorke but he kind of feels thesame ... it let me get on with it a bit.''

Until the final words hope is a trace here: a fleeting presence that moves in and outof our conversation, occasionally animating the talk. Witnessed instead are a set of diminishments within the present that take place through a series of bodily affections(bored, lonely, no energy). Steve discloses the injustice of unemployment as he is bound

742 B Anderson



to a movement of transnational capital through changes in the capacities to affect andbe affected that inhabit him. Hinted at is one specific set of diminishments that express

the flows of hopelessness, and despair, that are frequently set in motion by unemploy-ment. He enacts, poignantly, the frustration that marks simple practices of looking outof his window or of walking through his neighbourhood after a period of economicchange that mean his body is composed to disclose and express ``feelings of indepen-dently flowing, provocative forces'' (Katz, 1999, page 309). A palpable relation of dysphoria dominates the charge of affect and comes to act as an imperative that ordersSteve's relations with the world around him. We therefore begin with the first point of divergence within different practices of hope: the varieties of diminishment that callforth an imperative to hope but which also, in their differences, indicate that neither

the need to hope nor the capacity to cultivate different types of hopefulness and hopeare evenly distributed (see Hage, 2003). Steve's case resonates with, but is not equiva-lent to, the unequal distributions of hope that mark the affective geographies of suffering more broadly. To give an intensified example, Lasch (1991, page 81) describesthe persistence of hope for emancipation during the period of slavery in the Americansouth despite grave suffering. In the context of the specific affectivities of injusticebound up with slavery, hope existed as a counter ``belief in justice: a conviction thatthe wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right'' [see Kumar (2000) on hopeand the Zapatista's struggle in Mexico].

There is, therefore, a point of danger, or hazard, folded into becoming hopeful thatindicates that a good way of being has `still not become': in the sense that the present ishaunted by the fact that the something good that exceeds it has yet to take place andthat ``the conditions that make it possible to hope are strictly the same as those thatmake it possible to despair'' (Marcel, 1965, page 101). It is always from the context of specific diminishments that becoming hopeful emerges: hence, perhaps, the sense thathoping abandons the existent, and the fact that some types of hope can also feed backto continue relations that diminish even as we are attached to them (see Potamianou,1997). The transitions that Steve describes at the end of our conversation provide an

alternative case in which becoming hopeful momentarily folds into a better way of being (see, for other transitions, Terkel, 2004). It involves the expression of a movementof affect that counters a set of feelings [``cheer(s) me up'', ``get(s) me a bit more hopefulagain''] through the capacities of the materialities of music to smooth over despair andinduce the affective presence of something better (``to know someone else is feelingthe same''). The lyrics and tone of Radiohead offer a hope that thereafter folds into thebeing together of corporealities to disrupt, momentarily, the circulation of despairthrough the ingression of the tragedy of an-other (``it's quite melancholy ... but it'sreally beautiful ... and it stirs up emotion'').

Induced by the transmission of hope between Steve and the music, and thenbetween him and his environment, is a corporeal disposition of hopefulness felt in arenewed animation of the proprioceptive and visceral senses (rather than the determi-nate content of a particular hope). This is a repeated set of background feelings thatenacts a good way of being which forms a hopeful site of experience. Hage (2003)invents the term `conatic hope' to describe the specific constellations of backgroundfeelings that take place in addition to the emotion of hope. Hage argues that certaintypes of hopefulness are akin to a sort of will to live as witnessed in Spinoza's (1910)description of a finite-modes endeavour to persist in being. For Spinoza the `conatus' is

not the property, or essence, of a thing but a characteristic way of connecting anddisconnecting that enables finite bodies to repeat across processes of emergence.Gatens and Lloyd (1999, page 27) draw on the idea of conatus to think through howa body is formed through transindividual lines of force that augment or diminish:




` Bodies and minds, as finite individuals, struggle, of their very nature, to persist inbeing. Our bodies are not just passively moved by external forces. They have their

own momentum ötheir own characteristic force for existing. But this is not some-thing that individuals exert of their own power alone. For an individual to preserveitself in existence, as we have seen, is precisely for it to act and be acted upon in amultitude of ways. The more complex an individual body, the more ways in which itcan affect and be affected by other things.''When thought through this relational account of the bodies' capacities and capa-

bilities, types of hopefulness can be characterized as a continuation of good relationsthat enable an individual to ``act and be acted upon in a multitude of ways'' (page 27).Hopefulness, therefore, exemplifies a disposition that provides a dynamic imperative

to action in that it enables bodies to go on. As a positive change in the passage of affectit opens the space ^ time that it emerges from to a renewed feeling of possibility: this isa translation into the body of the affects that move between people in processes of intersubjective transmission to make a `space of hope'. Feeling hopeful, in this case,is characterized by a yearning to live and to experiment as part of the tendency withoutend that is set in motion as one effect of what Bloch (1986) terms a transpersonal `hopethat hopes'. In Steve's case it facilitates the possibility of him being able to `get on with it

a bit'. It is therefore the effect of hopefulness that is the second point of differentiationthat makes different space ^ times of hope. We can witness the animating effect of

different dispositions of hopefulness when hope takes place to enliven bodies in thecontext of different forms of suffering [see Parse (1999) on illness and hope or Terkel(2004) on activism and hope].

5 Trust and an `outside'

There are, it should be noted, multiple intersecting dispositions of hopefulness thatemerge from different moments of diminishment and produce different space ^ times of experience. This has been hinted at by the traces of additional cases in which hope iscalled forth from, and enacts, very different space ^ times (political struggle, illness,

etc). Hope, therefore, has a contradictory place in relation to everyday life. The dis-illusionment that provides a kind of affective imperative to welcome, and be open to, agood future is itself called forth from how a space ^ time of experience emerges fromthe movement and qualification of affect. The absence, or desperation, that is part of hope is not merely a possession of the individual but is a question of how theemergence, movement, expression, and qualification of despair enact an individual.But the subsequent production of a disposition of hopefulness begins from a disconti-nuity that paradoxically enables the enactment of good tendencies and latencies whichfold into those relations that diminish. Becoming hopeful is marked, therefore, not by a

simple act of transcendence in favour of a good elsewhere or elsewhen but by an actof establishing new relations that disclose a point of contingency within a presentspace ^ time.

I want to discuss the second case to consider this point of contingency. Emma is 33and married with two children. In the period during which we met and talked Emmahad traced her biological father. Two days before the second interview she had learnthe had died a year previously. We are talking about the effects of this event when shedescribes taking her son to the home of the parents who adopted her:

Emma: In that depression there's a sort of flatness and a sort of ... lack of

animation ... and a lack of any sort of sharp feelings ... and, and ... so ... and musicis something, it always ... it has a sharpness for me, yeah (Ben: yeah) and therewas just no place for it ... this week ... in that dullness (Ben: yeah) ... and every nowand again it just breaks through ... like ... so anyway ... Monday about eight thirty

744 B Anderson



taking Noel to my Mum and Dad's and he was badgering me ... he'd beenbadgering me on Sunday for cheerful music, and umm ... I felt that I could bear

it and might actually take me mind off it ... so I put the usual tape on ... you knowGina G, and Hot Stuff by Donna Summer ... I totally disengaged from it, I put iton for Noel, and it was really brilliant to see him dancing along but it made me feel... quite sad ... cos I couldn't feel anything with it ... I felt like there was this hugeglass wall, or glass ... glass ears ... or

_that I couldn't engage with him at all ... it

just felt ... dead ... I couldn't engage with him at all_

so anyway got back home ...flicking through the channels and I got some soul music, and I don't know ... whatit was ... something I didn't know ... proper old soul ... and it cheered me up, it wasbrilliant

_I felt better. I felt instantly better because of that ... as I had been sort

of weeping on my way to dropping off Noel when ... like ... Hot Stuff had been on... but this ... it reminds me of friends and dancing and home and my other family

_so ... you know I'm not going to feel like this always.

In this case, and in Steve's case, a renewed feeling of other tendencies and latenciesemerges from a disruption, or opening up of difference, in the pattern of broaderaffective flows that feed back to change the sense of space ^ time. Emma describes asimilar set of transitions in feeling, and emotion, to Steve. The hopefulness shedescribes opens up around a point of diminishment that emerges from relations withboth her child and her biological father to make the car a site enacted by the circula-

tion of grief. The grief, and flatness of depression, that is transmitted in the eventof her biological father's death feeds into a momentary interruption of her relationwith her son that means she finds it hard to attune to him in the context of his day-to-day affective fluctuations. Music induces, and escalates, this diminishment so it framesher relation with the world by enacting a set of distinct feelings (``it made me feel ...quite sad ... cos I couldn't feel anything with it ... I had been sort of weeping on myway to dropping off Noel'' ). Later, after she has returned home, soul music slowlycomes to induce and amplify a disposition of hopefulness through a disruption of thetransmission of grief. Emma remembers a time and space that is still forthcoming by

reliving the intensities of a past set of events: the materialities of music induce a not-yetsource of hope by placing her home into contact with its affective past (``it reminds meof friends and dancing and home and my other family'').

The third point of divergence that creates different space ^ times of hope is there-fore a moment of discontinuity in which a threshold is crossed through the creation of an intensified connection with life (the `glimmer' or `spark' of hope). From a contextof potential diminishment, where that diminishment is still intimate, something happens

to enable bodies to go on with a renewed openness to a ``palpable sense of reality''(James, 1982). Benjamin (1969) provides us with an intensified sense of this moment of

transition in the allegory of the electrifying `spark of hope' that holds the capacity todraw past and future together in the explosive disruption of `now time'. Hoping is nothere dependent on the exercise of an individual faculty ``but is carried under theintrusion of an outside'' (Deleuze, 1988b, page 87). There is a transindividual beginning

again that reanimates the present in response to the transmission of despair and grief.To speak of hope is therefore to speak of not-yet-become ``seeds of change, connectionsin the making that might not be activated or obvious at the moment'' (Massumi,2002b, page 221). The affectivities of the opening up of hope, a movement that alwayssurprises thought, are ignored or considered to be illusory in the argument that hope

indicates the absence of joyful passions (Nietzsche, 1986). It is, however, the ingressionthat this moment registers that has long been heralded as the mystery of hope bysecular writers who value an ethic of hope. Lingis (2002), for example, has talked of it in relation to an act of forgetting the past. Hope, to quote Lingis (2002, page 23),




`àrises from a break with the past. There is a kind of cut and the past is let go of.''Bloch (1986, page 174), slightly differently, thinks of it as a response to the differential

imperatives of the future. Hope, to quote Bloch, discloses ``dawnings on the front of theprocess.''The disposition of hopefulness, or more precisely how new connections are estab-

lished that disrupt a diminishing organization of space ^ time, opens the present totransformation by disclosing a topologically complex space ^ time of the not-yet thatis on the horizon of what has already become in èveryday life'. This emerges from abody comported to become more affected by already-existing tendencies and latenciesin a process that results in the disclosure of space ^ time as a sphere of heterogeneitiesand pluralities öthat is, to follow Taussig (2002) hope can be thought of as akin to a

kind of sense. Emma, for example, names a future good that is desired, and discloses,importantly, the source of help by which one can attain it. The outside is named asa set of tangible connections to old friends and family that, when induced throughsoul music, disrupts the affective trajectories that dominate her life and enable hermomentarily to trust that her depression will be overcome in a time and space thatis forthcoming. For Steve there are other people out there, including Thom Yorkeand perhaps me, who sense the despair he does and enable him to name not beingdepressed as a hope that changes, again momentarily, how he orientates aroundhis home and neighbourhood. The results are nonsynchronous sites of experience

animated by flashes of ànticipatory illumination' which disclose that ``the world itself, just as it is in a mess, is also in a state of unfinishedness and in experimental processout of that mess'' (Bloch, 1986, page 221). The disclosure of that which is not-yet öanintimation of what, following Benjamin (1969), we could term `messianic space ^time' ö is a point of differentiation between practices of hope (in that the identity of the outside varies), but it is also that which enables hope to be spoken of as a specificconstellation based on an affective relation to an open not-yet elsewhere or elsewhen.

In both cases the effect of this performative moment, this calling forth of anoutside, is an intensive colouring of ongoing experience that induces an escalation of

the disposition of hopefulness, from which the naming of a hope emerges and intowhich such a naming of a hope feeds back. This process of affective contagion isattuned to when people describe the atmosphere of a space or time as hopeful or ashopeless as felt through their own disposition yet existing independently of it. In thecases of Steve and Emma hope has, however, simultaneously crossed over a thresholdof indeterminacy to be felt personally as an emotion. The beyond moves through aprocess of concrescence from being an absolute impossibility to being an outside that isrelative to a body disposed to sense and assimilate it. Otherwise it is impossible to saywhat is not-yet because it is without content or form: a ``surplus always exterior''

(Levinas quoted in Bourassa, 2002, page 72). Through a process of resemblance andlimitation the full range of available potentialities is curtailed by the ability to thinkand name a hope (Deleuze, 1991). It is, therefore, in this process of concrescence thatthe emotion of hope becomes fixed in the determinations of the already becomethrough the taking place of specific spatially and temporally distributed narratives of hope. We should note, for example, how capitalism is marked by hopes of upwardsocial mobility and how consumer culture functions as a machine for generating, andcirculating, hope by working on spatially and temporally variable definitions of whatcan be hoped for (Hage, 2003). Relations that diminish and destroy are, however, still

present and are actualized in feelings of loss when the object of hope fades away or infeelings of disappointment when the object of hope passes unrealized. The frequency of such a counter movement of affect heralds the openness of hope to the hazard of thatwhich is not-yet: the extent to which becoming and being hopeful involve a relation of

746 B Anderson



trust in, and for, a life that is felt affectively to be infused by something that is,however, not-yet `here and now' [see Lasch (1991) on the differences with optimism].

Through a relation of trust the affective register of space ^ time is drawn into contactwith what is ``given as not in my control to bring about [but] sustains me in myopenness and my becoming'' (Stenbock, 2003, page 8). The resulting lack of guarantee,a hoped body's openness to something better, is brought forth in the context of illness,for example, when trust is enacted against the evidence of present corporeal suffering(Lingis, 2002) or in protest cultures animated by a belief in the possibility of analternative world despite deep and lasting inequalities (Parker, 2002). In each casean imperative to hope emerges ``from a situation that invites us to despair and togive way to a pessimistic fatalism, a mistrust, which sees reality as uninterested in

effecting our good or any absolute good, as something in which we put no credit ''(Cain, 1963, page 68, emphasis in original).

6 Concluding comments: thinking from hope

` But the ideal here is not to shed all affect. Rather, it is to transform those affectswhich are passions into different affects.''

Lloyd (1996, page 99)

` the worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for. Their trust in life would notbe worth much if it had not survived disappointments in the past, which the

knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrates the continuingneed for hope.''Lasch (1991, page 81)

Hope is entangled in the circulation, and displacement, of other affects and emotions.The result is that actual hopes possess different qualities of durability and mobility andslide into and out of broader movements of hope and dispositions of hopefulness:witness how, for example, the disappointment of hope can deplete space ^ time just asthe realization of a hope can reanimate space ^ time. I have, nevertheless, aimed todescribe how hope emerges from a set of qualitatively distinct relations between bodies

and therefore from specific types of encounters. The disposition of hope is best definedas a relation of suspension that discloses the future as open whilst enabling a seeminglyparadoxical capacity to dwell more intensely in points of divergence within encountersthat diminish. Becoming hopeful is therefore different from becoming optimistic. Itinvolves a more attuned ability to affect and be affected by a processual world becauseit is called forth from the disruptions that coax space ^ times of change into beingwithin that world. Compare becoming hopeful with becoming bored, a similar move-ment of suspension but one that stills and slows space ^ time to diminish the quality of experience through the production of meaninglessness and indifference (Anderson,

2004b). Moments of divergence are, however, integral to the processes by whichspace ^ times become consecrated as hopeful or hopeless: diminishment, disjuncture,hopefulness, the creation of an outside, the enaction of trust and dependence, the crea-tion of a specific determinate hope, the feedback of hope into life, and the movementof hope into other intensities.

By attending to hope I have aimed in this paper to open up a broader research focus onhow the circulation, and presence^ absence, of hope is spaced and timed. Underpinningmy more circumspect focus on two cases in this paper has been an exemplification of how different modalities öaffect, feeling, and emotion öenliven or dampen space ^ time.

Developing the beginnings of a vocabulary of the more-than-rational or less-than-rationalcounters the argument that a focus on the nonrepresentational has served to initiate areturn to a ``generic and celebratory notion of the embodied nature of human existence''(Nash, 2000, page 655). Attuning to the differences between modalities makes impossible




a celebration of human existence per se by producing a renewed specificity about whatnonrepresentational styles of thinking and feeling aim to sense and disclose as part of a

replacement of the idea of `culture' with a more expansive notion of `everyday life' (seeSeigworth and Gardiner, 2004). The taking place of hope has not only been the object of the paper but has also, more radically, functioned to exemplify the beginnings of a theoryof affect based around the multiple articulations of excess embedded in the category of the`not-yet'. I am not arguing here that hope should be identified as a basic emotion fromwhich others are derivative: this is a will to reduce that has driven many accounts of themore-than-rational, from Spinoza's (1910) distinction between joy and sorrow to Tomkins's(1995) identification of eight, and later nine, core affects. Instead, attuning to how hopetakes place, how it attaches and moves bodies, calls us to question how we attend to the

more-than-rational or less-than-rational. Moreover, because of the absurd singularity of beginning from just one constellation of relations, making the taking place of hopeexemplary invites a necessary deconstruction of any subsequent vocabulary of affect.I therefore want to conclude by thinking through how hope, like enchantment (Bennett,2001), joy (Thrift, 2004b), shame (Proybn, 2000b) or wonder (Game and Metcalfe, 2002),provokes a set of issues for a theory of affect and for how to be political affectively.

In the literature currently emerging around nonrepresentational theories the move-ment of affect has been grounded in a specific idea of a surplus, or extra, that movesbetween contexts. There has been a corresponding sense that, rather than being hostile

to the form of the human, affect is akin to a gift of virtuality. This equation has cometo act as a guarantee that makes everyday life political again after a recognition of thelimits of a representational politics. To begin from hope, in contrast to, say, Massumi's(2002a) discussion of confidence or Bennett's (2001) discussion of enchantment, is tosupplement this understanding of excess by incorporating a sense of the tragic öone of the multiple meanings of the excess of the not-yet ö into our attunement to the affectiv-ities of everyday life. Becoming hopeful takes place from within specific encountersthat diminish or destroy and therefore although it senses the ``front of processes'' italso, simultaneously, holds ``the condition of defeat precariously within itself'' (Bloch,

1998, page 341). How, then, can we be a little more melancholy about the movementsand countermovements of affect? One alternative would be to attune to the generaleconomies of expenditure and disposal that mark the circulatory dynamics of partic-ular affects (Ahmed, 2004b). The attunement to how the circulation of affect performs,and is effected by, spatial and temporal distribution offers a means of sensitizing us tothe inequalities at the heart of affective economies: inequalities that make ever thinkingof the transmission, and contagion, of affect as a pure gift impossible. How, thereafter,can we think the expression and qualification of bodily background feelings andemotions without assuming the animating feed forward, and feedback, of affect into

the life of space ^ time? One relatively unexplored theoretical direction is the richphenomenology of feeling and emotion found in the work of Tomkins. Tomkins arguesthat the affects analogically amplify a separate drive system, therefore ` any affectmay have any object ... affective amplification is indifferent to means ^ end difference.It is enjoyable to enjoy. It is exciting to be excited ... . Affect is self-validating withor without any further referent'' (Tomkins, 1995; cited in Sedgwick and Frank, 1995,page 7). This could be supplemented by an engagement with certain branches of contemporary neuroscience that describe how emotions emerge from specific, relation-ally constructed states of the body (Damasio, 2003). The benefit of these two literatures

is that they refuse to equate the biological with the essential and thus open up, ratherthan reduce the social to, a huge neuropolitical domain consisting of actants such ashormones and brain synapses (see Brennon, 2004; Connolly, 2002). However, if socialscience work is to avoid the very real risks of either tying the less-than-rational and

748 B Anderson



more-than-rational to the individual, or colluding with the contemporary project of neuroreductionism, there is a need to combine this work with a vocabulary that can

conceptualize how feelings and emotions move through intersubjective processes of ``expression, communication, escalation, and control'' (Tomkins, 1995, page 145).We can now move to hint at the shape of an affective cultural politics that aims to

tend to, and enact, different capacities to affect and be affected rather than correcttypes of representation (Probyn, 2004). If we think from how hope takes place, apolitics of affect begins from the assumption that life is an intersecting multiplicity of harmonious and disharmonious relations. Being political affectively must thereforeinvolve building a protest against the affectivities of suffering into a set of techniquesthat also aim to cultivate `good encounters' and anticipate `something better'. How,

though, can we engage with the vectors of diminishment that form the still not, theground that haunts an imperative to hope, without reproducing the lifeless rhetoric of doom that marks too much critical engagement with the world? One response is tolearn from the affective fluctuations of everyday life and foster certain types of hopeand hopefulness because of, rather than despite, the tragedy and injustice of sufferingeach emerges from. I think there are two reasons why the type of relation we name ashope could become a contestable regulative ideal in addition to enchantment (Bennett,2001) and joy (Thrift, 2004b) or emotional liberty (Reddy, 2001) and equality or solid-arity of feeling (Smith, 2002). First, certain types of becoming hopeful pose the ques-

tion of what will come to be by dimly outlining the contours of something better andtherefore enacting potentialities and possibilities, whilst, at the same time, being``something that does not, in spite of all, make peace with the existing world'' (Bloch,1998, page 341). Such types of becoming can animate an ethos of engagement in whichthe world ``just as it is in a mess, is also in a state of unfinishedness and in experi-mental process out of that mess'' (1986, page 221). Second, certain types of becominghopeful result in a specific type of mutuality based on a trust for life. New alliances atthe level of affect and emotion can be produced in the present that question the easyequation between transcendence and a future elsewhen or elsewhere in favour of an

immanent transcendence from within vectors of diminishment.My argument is, therefore, that becoming and being hopeful can, when enacted asa certain type of relation, exemplify a change in being affect ^ affected that expressesthe emergence of a set of arrangements that are, in Nietzsche's (1986) terms, `lifeenhancing'. Two caveats are necessary at this point to remind us that hope is notgood per se and that an immanent evaluation of hope must take place in relation toempirical work that focuses on the different modalities, and processes, outlined insection 2. First, certain types of hope can be brought into question according to thebasis of the disposition of the body that is enacted and the relation with the world that

is expressed as well as the content of what is hoped for. For Spinoza, and followinghim Nietzsche, certain types of hope are little more than a means to delay, perhapsindefinitely, the ethical task of replacing relations of sadness with the composition of

joyous encounters. Second, and following on from this note of caution, there arenumerous occasions when the enactment of hope catalyzes relations of injustice.Witness, for example, how hope is part of the processes, and practices, that make upcontemporary neoconservatism. George Bush, speaking during `Operation Iraqi Free-dom', stressed, for example, that ``we are bringing aid to the long suffering people of Iraq, and we are bringing something more: we are bringing hope'' (president's radio

address, 5 April 2003). Here the act of bringing hope, in the context of contemporarygeopolitics, enacts a division between the hopeful and hopeless that ties the hopelessinto a network of obligation. These two caveats point to the lack of guarantee bound upwith becoming and being hopeful. Nevertheless, to be able to foster a technique of




affective modulation, it is imperative to hope that although life ``holds the conditions of defeat precariously within itself'' it still ``dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place

where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy''(Bloch, 1998, page 341).

Acknowledgements. Thanks to Steve, Emma (both pseudonyms), and the other research participantsfor talking to me about music and hope. A large number of friends and colleagues commentedon earlier drafts of this paper. Even though I did not take all their advice, thanks go to:Dave Featherstone, Katrin Ho « rschelmann, Louisa Cadman, Deborah Thien, Arun Saldanha,Mark Paterson, and Susan Smith. The paper also owes much to the generous comments of tworeferees and the supportive and stimulating environment of the Social/Spatial Theory researchcluster at Durham. Special thanks, as ever, to Rachel Colls.

References

Ahmed S, 2001, ``The organisation of hate'' Law and Critique 12 345^365Ahmed S, 2004a,``Collective feelings. Or, the impressions left by others'' Theory, Culture and Society

21(2) 25 ^ 42Ahmed S, 2004b Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh)Amin A, Thrift N, 2002 Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Polity Press, Cambridge)Anderson B, 2004a,``Recorded music and practices of remembering'' Social and Cultural Geography

5 1^19Anderson B, 2004b, ` Time stilled öspace slowed: how boredom matters'' Geoforum 35 739^754Anderson B, 2005,``Practices of judgement and domestic geographies of affect'' Social and Cultural

Geography 6 645^660

Anderson K, Smith S, 2001, ``Emotional geographies'' Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers, New Series 26 7^10Ansell Pearson K, 1999 Germinal Life:The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (Routledge, London)Bataille G,1985 Visions of Excess: Selected Writings1927 ^ 1939 Ed. A Stoekl, translatedby A Stoekl,

C Lovitt, D M Leslie Jr (Manchester University Press, Manchester)Benjamin W, 1969, ``Thesis on the philosophy of history'', in Illuminations translated by H Zorn

(Pimlico, London) pp 245 ^ 255Bennett J, 2001 The Enchantment of Modern Life. Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton

University Press, Princeton, NJ)Bloch E, 1986 The Principle of Hope volumes 1 ^ 3, translated by N Plaice, S Plaice, P Knight

(Blackwell, Oxford)

Bloch E, 1998, ` Can hope be disappointed?'', in Literary Essays translated by A Joron (StanfordUniversity Press, Stanford, CA) pp 339 ^ 345

Bourassa A, 2002, ``Literature, language and the non-human'', in A Shock to Thought: Expressionafter Deleuze and Guattari Ed. B Massumi (Routledge, London) pp 60 ^ 76

Brennon T, 2004 The Transmission of Affect (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY)Brown S, Stenner P, 2001, ``Being affected: Spinoza and the psychology of emotion'' International

Journal of Group Tensions 30(1) 81 ^ 105Caille ¨ A, 2001, ``The double inconceivability of the pure gift'' Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical

Humanities 6(2) 23 ^ 39Cain S, 1963 Gabriel Marcel (Bowes and Bowes, London)Capital and Class 2003, ` The geographies and politics of fear'' 80 (Summer) (special issue)Connolly W, 1999 Why I Am Not a Secularist (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)Connolly W, 2002 Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (University of Minnesota Press,

Minneapolis, MN)Damasio A, 1994 Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (Picador, Basingstoke,

Hants)Damasio A, 2003 Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (Harcourt, Orlando, FL)Davidson J, 2003, ```Putting on a face': Sartre, Goffman, and agoraphobic anxiety in social space''

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21 107 ^ 122DeLanda M, 2002 Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (Continuum, London)Deleuze G, 1978, ``First seminar on Spinoza'', http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14

&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2Deleuze G, 1988a Spinoza: Practical Philosophy translated by R Hurley (City Lights Books,San Francisco, CA)

Deleuze G, 1988b Foucault translated by S Hand (Continuum, London/New York)

750 B Anderson



Deleuze G, 1991 Bergsonism translated by H Tomlinson, B Habberjam (Zone Books, New York)Deleuze G, 1998, ` Spinoza and the three ethics'' Essays Critical and Clinical translated by D Smith,

M Greco (Athlone Press, London)

Deleuze G, Guattari F, 1994 What is Philosophy? translated by G Burchell, H Tomlinson (Verso,London)

Dewsbury J-D, 2000, ``Performativity and the event: enacting a philosophy of difference''Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 473^496

Dewsbury J-D, 2003, ``Witnessing space: `knowledge without contemplation' '' Environment and Planning A 35 1907 ^ 1932

Diprose R, 2002 Corporeal Generosity (Routledge, London)Fraad H, 2000, ` Exploitation in the labourof love'', in Class and its Others Eds J-K Gibson-Graham,

S Resnick, R Wolff (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) pp 69 ^ 86Game A, Metcalfe A, 2002 The Mystery of Everyday Life (Federation Press, Annandale, NSW)

Gardiner M, 2000 Critiques of Everyday Life (Routledge, London)Gatens M, Lloyd G, 1999 Collective Imaginings: Spinoza Past and Present (Routledge, London)Gibson-Graham J-K, 1996 The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political

Economy (Blackwell, Oxford)Grossberg L, 1992 We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture

(Routledge, New York)Grossberg L, 1997 Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (Duke University Press,

Durham, NC)Hage G, 2003 Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Pluto Press,

Annandale, Queensland)Harvey D, 2000 Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh)

James W, 1982 The Varieties of Religious Experience (Penguin Books, Harmdondsworth, Middx)Katz J, 1999 How Emotions Work (Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL)Koskela H, 2000, ` The gaze without eyes: video-surveillance and the changing nature of urban

space'' Progress in Human Geography 24 243^265Kumar A, 2000, ``Foreword: in class'', in Class and its Others Eds J-K Gibson-Graham, S Resnick,

R Wolff (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) pp vii ^ xiiiLasch C, 1991 The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (W W Norton, New York)Latham A, with Conradson D, 2003,``The possibilities of performance'' Environment and Planning A

35 1901 ^ 1906Lee R, Leyshon A,Williams C (Eds), 2003 Alternative Economic Spaces (Sage, London)Lingis A, 2002, ``Murmurs of life'', in Hope: New Philosophies for Change Ed. M Zournazi (Pluto

Press, Annandale, Queensland) pp 22 ^ 42Lloyd G, 1996 Spinoza and the Ethics (Routledge, London)Lupton D, 1998 The Emotional Self: A Sociocultural Exploration (Sage, London)McCormack D, 2002, À paper with an interest in rhythm'' Geoforum 33 469^485McCormack D, 2003, Àn event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect'' Transactions of the

Institute of British Geographers, New Series 4 488^507Marcel G, 1965 Being and Having translated by A Black (Collins, Glasgow)Marcel G, 1967, ``Desire and hope'', translated by N Lawrence, in Readings in Existential

Phenomenology Eds N Lawrence, M O'Connor (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ)pp 277^286

Marks L, 2000 The Skin of Film (Duke University Press, Durham, NC)Massumi B, 2002a Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect and Sensation (Duke University Press,Durham, NC)

Massumi B, 2002b, ` Navigating movements'', in Hope: New Philosophies for Change Ed. M Zournazi(Pluto Press, Annandale, Queensland) pp 210 ^ 244

Massumi B, 2002c, `Ìntroduction. like a thought'', in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuzeand Guattari Ed. B Massumi (Routledge, London) pp xiii ^ xxxix

Nash C, 2000, ``Performativity in practice: some recent work in cultural geography'' Progress inHuman Geography 24 653^664

Nietzsche F, 1986 Human all too Human volume 1, translated by R J Holland (Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge)

Nunn K, 1996, ``Personal hopefulness: a conceptual review of the relevance of the perceived futureto psychology'' British Journal of Medical Psychology 69 227^245

O'Sullivan S, 2001,``The aesthetics of affect: thinking art beyond representation'' Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6(3) 125 ^ 135




O è Tuathail G, 2003, ```Just out looking for a fight': American affect and the invasion of Iraq''Antipode 35 856^870

Parker M (Ed.), 2002 Utopia and Organization (Blackwell, Oxford)

Parse R, 1999 Hope: An International Human Becoming Perspective (Jones and Bartlett, Sudbury,MA)

Pieper J, 1994 Hope and History translated by D Kipp (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, CA)Potamianou A, 1997 Hope: A Shield in the Economy of Borderline States (Routledge, London)Probyn E, 2000a CarnalAppetites: FoodSexIdentities (Routledge, London)Probyn E, 2000b, ``Shaming theory, thinking dis-connections: feminism and reconciliation'',

in Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism Eds S Ahmed, J Kilby, C Lury, M McNeil,B Skeggs (Routledge, London) pp 48 ^ 60

Probyn E, 2004,`Èating for a living: a rhizo-ethnology of bodies'', in Cultural Bodies: Ethnographyand Theory Eds H Thomas, J Ahmed (Blackwell, Oxford) pp 215 ^ 240

Pugmire D, 1998 Rediscovering Emotion (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh)Reddy W, 2001 Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge)

Roberts J, 1999, ``Philosophizing the everyday: the philosophy of praxis and the fate of culturalstudies'' Radical Philosophy 98 87 ö109

Sedgwick E K, Frank A, 1995, ``Shame in the cybernetic fold: reading Silvan Tomkins'', in Shameand its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Duke University Press, Durham, NC) pp 1 ^ 28

Seigworth G, 2000, ``Banality for cultural studies'' Cultural Studies 14(2) 227 ^ 268Seigworth G, Gardiner M, 2004, ` Rethinking everyday life: and then nothing turns itself inside

out'' Cultural Studies 18(2/3) 139 ^ 159Smith S, 2002, ``Towards a manifesto for feelings'' Soundings 20 102 ^ 116

Social and Cultural Geography 2004, ` Emotional geographies'' 5(4) (special issue)Solomon R, 1992 The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Hackett, Indianapolis, IN)Spinks L, 2001, ``Thinking the post-human: literature, affect and the politics of style'' Textual

Practice 15(1) 23 ^ 46Spinoza B, 1910 Ethics and the Treatise on the Correction of the Intellect translated by A Boyle

(J M Dent, London)Stenbock A, 2003, ` Hoping against hope'', in Essays in Celebration of the Founding of the Organization

of Phenomenological Organizations Eds. C-F Cheung, I Chvatik, I Copoeru, L Embree,J Iribarne, H R Sepp, online at http://www.o-p.o.net/essays/StenbockArticle.pdf

Stern D, 1983 The Interpersonal World of the Infant (Karmac, London)Taussig M, 2002, ``Carnival of the senses'', in Hope: New Philosophies for Change Ed. M Zournazi

(Pluto Press, Annandale, Queensland) pp 42 ^ 63Terkel S, 2004 Hope Dies Last (New Press, New York)Thien D, 2004, ``Love's travels and traces: the ìmpossible' politics of Luce Irigaray'', in `Gender

and Geography' Reconsidered: Women and Geography Study Group Eds K Browne, J P Sharp,D Thien, CD-ROM, pp 43 ^ 48

Thrift N, 2000, Àfterwords'' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 213 ^ 255Thrift N, 2003a, ``Performance and ....'' Environment and Planning A 35 2019 ^ 2024Thrift N, 2003b, ``Practising ethics'', in Using Social Theory Eds M Pryke, G Rose, S Whatmore

(Sage, London) pp 105 ^ 121Thrift N, 2004a, `Ìntensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect'' Geografiska Annaler,

Series B: Human Geography 86(1) 57 ^ 78Thrift N, 2004b, ``Summoning life'', in Envisioning Human Geography Eds P Cloke, P Crang,M Goodwin (Arnold, London) pp 81 ^ 103

Tomkins S, 1995, ` Shame ^ humiliation and contempt ^ disgust'', in Shame and its Sisters: A SilvanTomkins Reader Eds E Kosofsky-Sedgwick, A Frank (Duke University Press, Durham, NC)pp 133 ^ 179

Waterworth J, 2003 A Philosophical Analysis of Hope (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hants)Whatmore S, 2002 Hybrid Geographies (Sage, London)Widder N, 2000, ``What's lacking in the lack: a comment on the virtual'' Angelaki: Journal of the

Theoretical Humanities 5(3) 117 ^ 138Williams S, 2001 Emotion and Social Theory: Corporeal Reflections on the (Ir)Rational (Sage, London)

ß 2006 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain

752 B Anderson



Conditions of use. This article may be downloaded from the E&P website for personal research

by members of subscribing organisations. This PDF may not be placed on any website (or other

online distribution system) without permission of the publisher.