What are the politics of affect? And is this a well-posed question in the first place? Why affect now? In what sense is a given politics affective?
As discourses of shame sweep across dominant media in the UK, what are the implications of naming this discursive coding an affective politics? Is such an affect being mobilized to obscure historical relations of injustice, xenophobia, and inequality in the UK today? For some on the left, such a naming aims at re-working sentiment toward a pluralistic, anti-xenophobic, democratic, socialist politics.
I support a pluralistic, anti-xenophobic, democratic, socialist politics. Why is it then that I find this naming more a blockage in method rather than a strategy toward radical transformation?
Let us be clear: if we agree with Lauren Berlant and her interlocutors at Variant, we do well to have some clarity about the feeling of disgust that animates radical, experimental politics today.
Media Assemblages 