"Economies of Affectivity"

Juan Martín Prada

Life and Biopolitics

It is no longer an exaggeration to claim that we are in the "biological
century", judging by the intense development and the dimension of the
achievements attained in recent years in some of the life sciences, such as
Genomics and Biotechnology. However, let us not forget that the increasingly
more efficient knowledge of the biological processes or genetic
determinations of life and its functional mechanisms is only a small part of
biopolitical action, whose real capacity for regulation is much more
extensive, spanning all of the vital processes that ultimately make up the
collective production of subjectivity. Thus, the capacity to improve or
transform bodies or the biological conditions of a life are no longer
prevalent among the keys of biopolitics but rather, more than anything else,
the production and reproduction of ways of living.

Therefore, the permanent questioning of the limits of what is natural and of
human ethics as regards genetic manipulation or the fact that the scientific
industries aimed at these areas of work should be the most probable
environment for the future capitalism revolutions[1] to take place, are just
a minimum number of problems within the extremely complex series of
biopolitical practices with which any exercise of power is integrated with
the logics of vitality (and from which it would be non-differentiable).Thus it seems inevitable to validate Giorgio Agamben's claim that the
concept of life should constitute the object of the philosophy to come[2].

It is certainly obvious that the most industrialised societies have reached
the full stage of consolidation of this process in which the zoé (bare life)
will gradually merge with the field of the political (although this process
is actually more likely to have occurred inversely). The diagnosis posed by
Michel Foucault in the seventies regarding the concept of biopower is
obvious today. It is evident that power has taken intense control over life,
it is exercised at the level of life, losing almost all its autonomy and
transcendence, the exteriority it used to have from its field of
application, now acting from inside life, regulating it from the inside, an
integral part of it. And if power is not exercised on individuals, but
rather if it moves around them (we all make it move, at varying degrees of
consciousness), it seems logical that the most efficient dispositifs in the
exercise of power can no longer be unilateral or permanent, but rather
participative, adaptive and reversible.

Thus, more than through the exercise of traditional political sovereignty,
power acts by producing and extending ways of living, ways of enjoying and
experiencing life. Therefore, biopower should be understood to mean much
more than power over bodies, much more than technologies to control the
biological or physical life of the population. In short, almost all
politics today are biopolitics, because practically all of the political and
economic strategies now focus on life and the living ( whereas this term
does not refer only to the biological, but to the wider, vital sphere)[3].

Production and Affectivity

Throughout the recent history of industrial and commercial practices,
affectivity has generally acted as a language or a means that incites a
certain positive predisposition in the interlocutor, like when a salesperson
smiles and affectionately greets a new customer (in fact, many affective
expressions are socially and not emotionally motivated). However, the
gradual acknowledgement of the relationship between affectivity and business
effectiveness has meant that little by little, values such as personalised
attention, closeness and proximity to the customer have become some of the
essential principles of corporate action. To make the customer feel valued,
to ensure that he/she notices that the company appreciates his/her interest
in a particular product or service and considers him/ her to be important,
to ensure that the customer has sufficient expectations that he/she will
receive personalised attention, or even that he/she is going to be a friend
and not only a customer (as is often offered in advertising for banking
services, for example), are some of the practices of this emerging
"emotional marketing" whose priority strategy would be to "captivate the
customer's heart"[4].

It can come as no surprise that in a society in which the majority of the
goods that are consumed are services with a duration in time (telephony
services, Internet connection, etc.), to achieve customer fidelity often
depends more on the establishment of these relations of appreciation and
attention that the customer seeks, rather than the actual quality or the
comparative assessment of the cost of the service offered. A humanisation of
the corporate production and management systems, however, which very often
only exists in a virtual sense in its slogans and advertising spots, based
on sentences of the type, "we want to get to know you" or "the most
important thing is to be close to you". Therefore, it seems to be almost
evitable that the increasing computer automation of the productive and
management processes in companies should only be able to generate the mere
effects of closeness, affective simulations of service for the user, who
will not cease to complain about the lack of contact with actual "flesh and
blood" people when hiring services, solving doubts or presenting complaints.
In order to reduce the negative consequences of these situations, there has
been a major proliferation of a whole sector of workers for remote
assistance, normally subject to unusual timetables, with low salaries,
mostly formed by young people and especially by women, whom the human
resource departments in companies usually consider to be better suited to
this role of patient attention to users and customers, for friendly
processing of their complaints and indignations. This reminds us of the
persistence of the damaging effect of the loss of prestige of affective work
throughout the history of humanity and its being assigned to the sphere of
the feminine, of the presumed incompatibility between affection and control
down through the centuries.

In this regard, we should highlight that the
traditional association of women to emotions and affection, limited to the
intimate space o the home and restricted to providing loving care for the
family, has always been opposite the presumed coldness of the man in his
professional relations and links. A differentiation on which actively
discriminatory practices towards women have been sustained, leaving them
outside the "cold", organisational fields of masculine work and therefore
far from the exercise of public or corporate power or responsibility. A
separation that has been nurtured, deep down, by an ancestral paradox: the
mothers' dedication to looking after children and families has always been
considered to belong to the sphere of voluntary work (and has therefore
never been remunerated), but without bearing in mind that it is generally
caused by an involuntary or even mandatory situation (i.e. to have children
or not to be able to work outside the home). A paradox that is compounded by
many others, especially the one that is derived from the fact in spite of
new technologies taking affective work practices outside the reproductive
and family sphere to make them work as an engine for production (what some
have called a certain "feminisation of work"), this has not led to a higher
economic valuation, in general, of the affective work activities that are
most common in all fields of industrial production today.

Of course, it is possible that in the near future we may cease from
considering affectivity to be merely an added value for work or a means of
facilitating it. This will happen when the key to the new production
processes will not consist only of care and attention to the individual
adopting market logic. Perhaps then the circumstances would be right for the
real discovery of the immense productive force of affections and emotions,
which will mean that affectivity may be considered as a job in itself,
requiring a total rethinking of affectivity within the future forms of
biopolitical production. It is clear that the first step towards this
situation has already been taken, and it is the aforementioned dissolution
of the former incompatibility between work and affection, by virtue of which
affectivity is for once and for all liberated from its former, restrictive
enclosure in the contexts of intimacy and the family and is gradually
becoming the real object of production in new industries that are
increasingly designed to produce new forms of life and subjectivity.

And in this context of multiple interrelated dynamics, the presence of the
body, subject for decades to the immense proliferation of its images at the
service of fashion, cosmetics, dietetics or the health industries in
general, is extremely intensified in many other channels as a result of the
emerging interest in managing its emotional chemistry. Emotion, understood
as the alteration of the body that is linked to a certain affective state or
mood, is a privileged point in the new economic dynamic, which invests great
efforts in propitiating its intensified experience in several ways[5].

Precisely in order to manage affection and emotional involvement in specific
fields, they are constantly resorting to a countless number of narrations
and representations, For example, the celebrity gossip programmes or soap
operas, two of the most important components of the television industries,
show us the intensity of the pleasure that seems to be derived from
experiencing affective relations through those of others (perhaps because of
the compensatory capacity of this process), showing the immense power of the
trend towards the most extreme simplification of affectivity ( reality shows
like Big Brother are good examples of the dynamic of reducing affective
complexity, taking the affection/ disaffection polarity to its maximum
expression, focussing precisely on the expression of this polarity and
providing the public with their only possible participation with the
contestants: to vote for/ against someone).

On the other hand, the biopolitical paradigm is fast imposing the
consideration of human beings more as the possessors of a life to enjoy and
make the most of rather than as political subjects (or as political subjects
inasmuch as they are possessors of life), which means that the context of
the societies with the highest rates of consumption is no longer propitious
for disciplinary technology, not even for the pole of biopower that Foucault
believed was focussed on an "anatomopolitics" of the human body, based on
the pretension to achieve its best possible adaptation to the production
system so that it would be capable of producing more and better.
Nowadays, the individual as a living body, is starting to be considered as a
wealth in him/herself, even when not active in employment. For example,
anyone that strolls around any of the macro centres for leisure and free
time that proliferate in the outskirts of our cities is actively
collaborating, just with his/her expectations of having a good time, in the
production of an "affective territory", an environment of collective
relaxation and receptivity to pre-designed entertainment, a space where
he/she and many others will feel good, thus allowing to set in motion all of
the complex systems of consumption and membership of the increasingly
powerful "conscience industries". This is because the productive value of
subjects no longer lies in their potential as a force of production as
workers, but in their condition of the possessors of a life that yearns for
entertainment, enjoyment, satisfaction. That is why it has been said on so
many occasions that life itself "works" nowadays).

Of course, the new biopolitical economy aims above all to extract a surplus
from life, a corporate profit obtainable in life and from life, with a
global and biopolitical territorial structure led by large multinational
companies, producers and exporters of specific ways of life and enjoyment.
Thus the domination becomes more diffuse, inherent to the social body,
permanently interiorised in the latter. Society and power have now
established an integrated, qualitative relationship. The individual serves
and is served, in turn, by an economy based on desire, affectivity and
pleasure, even in the joyful disappearance induced by the entertainment
industries. Therefore, in the context of the most highly developed
technological societies, economic power does not intend to continue to base
all of its privileges on the exploitation of its subjects as a workforce but
on the increasingly lucrative regulation of their ways of life, life
dynamics and personal and affective interactions, emotions, consumer habits
and satisfaction.

In other words, in today's context, the concept of production (historically
linked to that of goods) is being continuously extended, because the new
industries, increasingly oriented to pleasure and entertainment, and to the
computerised production of "intangible" goods and information, are really
producing contexts of interpretation and assessment, forms of identification
and membership, interpersonal behaviour and human interaction — in other
words, its mission is essentially the production of sociability itself. If
this is its objective, we can hardly digress from Michael Hardt's claim that
the hegemonic form of economic production is what is defined by a
"synthesis of cybernetics and affectivity"[6], and by its vision of the
biopolitical context as "the field of productive relations between
affectivity and value"[7] .

Affective Technologies

The nature of the mechanisms for the production of collective subjectivity
are intrinsically affective nowadays. In a way, the most important raw
material that will be used by the new "social worker"[8] in the immediate
future will be affectivity, as this is already one of the main engines of
biopolitical production (some have appropriately defined affection as
"productive subjectivity"[9]). This explains why the most successful
products of the new industries are the ones that are characterised by the
necessary flexibility and capacity to adapt to each user, his/her tastes or
particular needs (such as the possibilities of "personalising" computer
products) and, especially, the interpersonal communication technologies,
specifically designed to exploit the field of emotions and affective
interactions. Of all of the technologies in existence today, the mobile
telephone and the Internet chat rooms are the leaders in producing feelings
related to the wellbeing of company and proximity, the states of proximity
and the continuous evidence of interpersonal affectivity, offering the best
of the technological representations of this new fusion that exists today
between communication and affection. Thus the eminently affective nature of
communication appears to be fully recognisable in all of human interactions,
intensified by the proliferation of these new technologies that we could
well call "affective technologies", responsible for an addictive technical
mediation of affectivity that allows for the intensive multiplication of the
(continuous) exchange of its need.
In this regard, it is highly descriptive that the immense growth in the
number of calls or SMS messages between mobiles in recent years is
statistically proportionate to its informative insignificance beyond its
basically affective nature. This is similar to the case of communicative
interactions in Internet chat rooms, in which the visual representations of
emotions and various expressions using "emoticons" or by innumerable
interjections of enthusiasm or displeasure seem to be more a case of
attempts at what Daniel N. Stern called "interaffectivity", the
correspondence between the emotional state as the individual feels it inside
and how it is observed "in" or "inside" another[10].

Affectivity and Sociability

And if affectivity as a concept takes on extreme importance today, it is
also because its most negative symptoms, like depression and anxiety, are
ever on the increase. In fact, it is possible that most of contemporary
anxiety could be described as floating affectivity, as the unsatisfied yet
eager willingness to affect and be affected emotionally by the environment
(let us not forget the definition of the human being as "pure
affectivity"[11] linked to ontology overcoming phenomenology).

And if on the one hand, communication technologies can in fact increase or
create the conditions for new affective interactions, it is also true that
they are potential resources for isolation, due to the addictive protection
afforded by bodily distance, technical and telematic distance between bodies
that interact in an ever frequent virtualisation (understood as
bodilessness) of affectivity. This is very much linked to the reclusion and
increasing isolation of a very high number of adolescents and young people,
the most dramatic representation of which would be the adolescents suffering
from the Hikikomori syndrome: closed up in their rooms, after any kind of
academic or affective failure, they avoid maintaining any relations with
their families and friends, shying away from any personal contact,
dedicating their time to watching television or playing on the videogame
console. This syndrome occurs not only because the most technologically
advanced societies are increasingly incompetent in solving problems of an
affective nature (mostly because they have given absolute priority to
competitiveness and to the recognition of success), but also because the
domestic entertainment technologies afford the depressed individual an
active abandonment, a stimulating hideaway. What these entertainment
technologies offer is a set of activities that despite requiring high levels
of concentration and energy — like what is required by the exciting action
of videogames — the individual does not have to expose or risk him/herself
affectively. In this hideaway, everything is liable to be disabled,
temporary, and innocuous from any affective responsibility. Nobody can hurt
you because there is nothing and nobody "real" at stake.

We could even go so far as to talk of an important transformation provoked
by the temporary dynamic to which the society of the media and especially
all of the entertainment technologies induces. It is surely possible to
claim that the experience of time imposed by these technologies is more
relevant in hindering affective interactions than the weight exercised by
their contents, fundamentally based on the practice and identification of
violence and entertainment.

The predomination of the reflex impulse, perhaps
more dependent on the speed with which it takes place than on its precision
is, too often, the only thing that allows the videogame to continue. And if
this experience is more and more often becoming a habit, in which one only
responds to the here and now, in its instantaneity and immediacy, we cannot
fail to consider this situation to be yet another difficulty for opening up
to the experience of affective interaction. This is because there can be no
doubt that affection requires time and this provides evidence of the
constructive capacity of affective interaction compared to a system based on
the motto "there is no time to lose".

Perhaps affection could even be
defined as shared biography, with either people or other beings, even with
places or environments, like the memory of accompanied time (in most
videogames, for example, there is no company; the most is the accompaniment
in the on-line multi-player versions).

Affective Resistance

It does not appear to be of no use to propose the study of the systems of
collective order in a society precisely through the moments in which it is
moderately or momentaneously disordered, like in its parties and excesses,
its nightlife, or in the always unforeseeable sphere of affections. To take
affectivity as the axis for social analysis and research seems even to
promise the solutions for many of the problems of burnout that have arisen
regarding some of the key issues in the aesthetics and politics of our
times, such as, for example, the issue of identity, a concept that has
almost always been studied on a negative basis, i.e. as regards its
conflicts. On the contrary, to consider affectivity to be a methodological
axis for study would oblige us to study identity on a positive basis, in its
enjoyable functioning. There is no doubt that our social and political
thought is increasingly from the heart rather than from the traditional
exercise of criticism, which has time and time again been neutralised by the
institutions and bodies of political action and government.

And it is precisely from the emotional apprehension of social relations and
the regulation of the perceptions (let us not forget that affectivity is an
essential element in perception, as Bergson claimed on so many occasions),
that the new cultural and entertainment industries derive their greater
capacity for social transformation and their most important lucrative
potential. It is no coincidence that these are exactly the same elements
where some of the most radical artistic practises of the avant-garde and neo
avant-garde movements, particularly those based on the correspondence or
comparison between "art and life" (and therefore also biopolitics in the
fullest sense of this term) focussed the possibility of a critical and
emancipating action against the impositions of the "conscience industries".

Therefore, we may claim that our days will witness the culmination of the
appropriation by biopolitical production of some of the principles that used
to oppose the former systems of economic and political domination a few
decades ago. Nowadays, contrary to the mechanisms that characterised
industrial production in the past, the mechanisms of today's biopolitical
production are nor only related but they fully coincide with those that are
based on the expression of difference and diversity, freedom and singularity
(the characteristics of young fashion, for example), ecology or solidarity.
Therefore, the deployment and globalisation of certain ways of living are
not carried out from an ideological or evaluative structuring (which
although still active, is hardly effective), but rather by extending
dynamics and habits of action that become particularly intense in the
spheres in which, like the culture of leisure and entertainment, are
unquestionably more useful in extracting a surplus from life, by touching on
the most non-renounceable and permeable aspects of the latter: emotions,
affectivity, enjoyment, happiness, fun, etc. Thus one may be against the
particular interests and inequalities that go along with today's system of
production, but it is almost inevitable to be more or less involuntarily
condescending with the practices in which the entire biopolitical system
becomes stronger, because they have precisely been mingled with those of
life itself.

Therefore, the possibility of effective political resistance, appears to
reside, more than in the negativity of criticism, in an operation from the
inside of biopolitical production itself, in that the subjects should active
appropriate the latter. This process is only possible, of course, after we
have acknowledged the emancipating potentials that are inherent to some of
the principles that, like affection, cooperation, meeting, attention or
care, form an essential part of the bio political productive dynamic. Up to
now, the capacity of social transformation of these principles had remained
practically dormant, inactive, as they were maintained at the superficiality
required by their immediate usefulness and productive efficacy. To
acknowledge in these principles a really collective, social purpose, is the
mission of the new resistance, which should make very clear the potential
they contain for the production of community and beyond the latter, for
generating an active deployment of the principle of commonness.

And it is probably the expansive power of "freedom and ontological opening"
contained in affection that is most promising in this mission. Toni Negri's
and Michael Hardt's claims that political rebellion would be replaced by a
"project of love", or the graphic exemplification that they propose in their
book Empire of the future life of political militancy with the figure of
Saint Francis of Assisi (he who identified real wealth as the "common
condition of the multitude") are certainly two of the most explicit examples
that we might mention within the countless set of proposals launched in this
direction by the most recent political theory.

Of course, in order to
achieve this, it is necessary, in the first place, that communication should
no longer be usurped by the economy, that it be allowed to flow. In order to
do so, the creation of an endless number of new channels, of free means for
collective contact and interpretation, of free technologies for meeting and
creation, should go on. We already know, this teleology of the common, also
specified in the enlightening potentials of the "general intellect", is the
power of solidarity, exchange and cooperation, of the occurrence of the
subject through actively being with others, of a certain dissolution of
being in language, in communication, participation and collective, shared
creativity, all of which will be fuelled, of course, by the enjoyment and
happiness that belong to a radical (and affective, of course) opening up to
diversity.

Notes:

[1] See Maurizzio Lazzarato, Les Révolutions du Capitalisme. Empêcheurs de
Penser en Rond, Paris, 2004.

[2] See G. Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford
University Press, 1999.

[3] Under no circumstances, however, should we forget that the old
disciplinary technology that arose at the end of the 17th century, is still
active, buried in biopolitics. For example, in the international events of
recent years, particularly those that were derived from the so-called fight
against international terrorism, the right to die, the threat over the
individual's life that belonged to the traditional sovereignty regimes,
continues today, almost paradoxically, alongside the most intense of the
orientations for dealing with life and the productive regulation of its
processes that characterise the political systems of the countries that are
most advanced in terms of economics and industry (and which paradoxically,
are the ones that play the leading role in this contradiction).

[4] See Brian Clegg, Cautive el corazón de los clientes y deje que la
competencia persiga sus bolsillos (Capturing Customers Hearts: Leave the
Competition To Chase Their Pockets) Pearson Alhambra, Madrid, 2001.

[5] In the repertoires offered by the new emotion markets, life experiences
are the most relevant goods to be consumed. We could therefore speak of a
commercialisation of the experiences of life themselves and of their most
adequate contexts, through a countless number of systems acting in a very
wide spectrum of action, from the chemistry of the vitality of energy drinks
or new designer drugs to the leisure culture or methods of relaxation and
for combating stress.

[6] Michael Hardt, "Affective work" (text included in this same e-show).

[7] Ibidem.

[8] According to Toni Negri, the "social worker" would replace the
"professional" worker and the "mass worker" of the past, "the social worker
is the producer, the producer, before any good, of his/her own social
cooperation" in "Eight preliminary theses for a theory of constituting
power", "Contrarios" Criticism and Debate Journal, April, 1989.

[9] See Toni Negri, "Value and affection", here.

[10] See D. N. Stern, El mundo interpersonal del infante (The interpersonal
world of the infant). Ed. Paidós. Barcelona, 1991.

[11] We should remember that Spinoza had already identified life with
affectivity. However, it was Michel Henry who defined the subject as "the
appearance of appearing", "pure affectivity" in his work Phénoménologie de
la vie, PUF, Paris, 2004.