Affected: On Becoming Undone and Potentiation [1st ed.] 9783030627355, 9783030627362

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Affected On Becoming Undone and Potentiation

Affected “Reading this book takes the reader on a journey through a thoughtscape that starts on an individual level and takes us all the way ‘up’ to the entirety of contemporary life. In this journey, Rick Iedema shows with a profound analytical precision the existential strength of ‘being moved’, being affected. Departing from a life being shattered, the books exposes with the help of Spinoza, Sloterdijk, and others, the many layers and forms of ‘becoming’. While written during the COVID-19 crisis and extreme bushfires literally next door the book is not only a plea for new ‘structures of feeling’, but also for a new way of doing social science research, as today’s complexity and pace of change are too intense to be adequately captured and controlled by ponderous forms of analysis. Although Iedema refuses (rightly so) to offer an alternative research model of how to understand life and the world we live in, he does not leave us empty-handed. His discussion at the end of the book about potentiation and anthropotechnics shows us the way towards personal and intellectual courage: one that allows uncertainty and nurtures emergent kinds of sense and intelligence.” —Jessica Mesman, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

Rick Iedema

Affected On Becoming Undone and Potentiation

Rick Iedema Health Faculities King’s College London London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-62735-5 ISBN 978-3-030-62736-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62736-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preamble---Affected: On Becoming (Undone)

Origin of This Book This book was written not from the beginnings of an idea or an argument, but from a growing sense that “to ‘philosophise’ about being shattered is separated by a chasm from a thinking that is shattered” (Heidegger, 2000 [1946]). This sense of chasm remained my principal guide. I went back to it when I was left wondering while writing, where next with this? For the purpose of the present book, I flesh this sense out by including the odd vignette recounting a person’s experience of becoming undone and loss. The person in question shall remain anonymous. Perhaps my sense of this chasm between discourse and distress had been widening for a while. Since 2008 I had become interested in organisational failure and harm caused to service users. Over a period of several years, my investigation of organisational ‘incidents’ in health care made me worry about staff and patients whose harm was ignored to protect the reputation of the service, its management, the bureaucracy and politicians. Wanting to go beyond interviews and focus groups, I immersed myself in what people in those organisations were doing and experiencing. Having videoed care work for some years (Iedema, Long, Forsyth, & Lee, 2006), and sitting down with them to hear what the footage now enabled them to say and ask (Iedema, 2020b), I involved people in videoed interviews as a way of making the portrayal of their distress more tangible, and more immediate for my audiences. I also turned to theatre (Iedema, 2020a) to

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engender still more energy among people to come to grips with the experience of distress and harm, and to discuss otherwise unspeakable things and unremembered feelings. If I had an aim and a procedure, these were no longer to do with where I started in academia: analysing and generalising about socialorganisational life. Rather, my aim and procedure became increasingly focused on wanting to move people by engaging them with what had moved (harmed) others. Increasingly, all I wanted to do was to enable if not to oblige people to confront hitherto hidden things and get them to say new and different things about their own otherwise taken-as-given ways of being, doing and saying. If anything characterised my research it was a hollowing out, a depletion of knowledge and expertise, in favour of questioning, moving and wondering. This was also because I moved more and more towards handing problems, deliberations, decisions and conclusions over to research participants whose ways of addressing these difficult things were so often interesting and surprising. Their energy made me move away from the rigidities of social science (‘this finding is validated’; ‘my relations with participants are pre-determined’; ‘my researcher identity and my research practice are defined by these theories and methods’; ‘this critique is justified by this evidence’), and invent different ways of doing social science. Important milestones for me were Still & Costall’s wonderful (1991) collection Beyond Cognitivism which I read in the 1990s. The papers in this volume relieved me of any remaining psychologistic misapprehensions: action is not the effect of thought; thought does not rule us. I also read John Law’s (2001) After Method in the early 2000’s. I carried that book in my back pocket ever since to remind me it was fine to question and withdraw from the assumptions, procedures and methodologies that continued to define the direction of social science and the context of my career. These books steered me on to all kinds of other amazing writers that questioned methodological, theoretical and interpretive dogmas (e.g. Shapiro, 2005). Perhaps they led me to my academic fall-from-grace, my disciplinary exodus, my degeneracy. Mind you, degeneracy may sound bad, but, as I explain later in the book, degeneracy is a kind of strategic-tactical opportunism that plays a critical role in individual survival (Virno, 2004) and species evolution (Edelman, 2006). Degeneracy makes possible the shedding of non-critical practices, unwarranted rules and ineffective assumptions. Degeneracy risks going without rather than hang on to non-critical things. It reminds me of James’ definition of

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the ‘radical pragmatist’. According to him, “[a] radical pragmatist … is a happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature” (James, 1907: 256). In the midst of this descent into personal-professional degeneracy Katherine Carroll and I put together an article from my readings of Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres (Sloterdijk, 1998, 1999, 2004). I read Spheres when I was beginning to disconnect from my disciplinary bearings and academic moorings. My mood chimed with Sloterdijk’s rampage across disciplines, theories, ambitions and divisions, shamelessly energising if not steroidising (among other things) philosophy, anthropology, communication theory, sociology and (art) history. While his endless stream of thick books may appear to just inflate the stock of knowledge, his work in fact constitutes an extended exercise in acrobatic thinking. Sloterdijk takes you places you suspect you’ve been before, but never consciously, making the most distant and untravelled regions of existence recognisable, thinkable and discussable in a language so agile it feels futuristic and otherwordly. Reading him, I could readjust my uncertainties and confusions with increasing intellectual courage and flexibility. Steeped in Sloterdijk, the article I just mentioned turns research on its head: instead of approaching the world with a question, a method for answering it, and the goal of knowing more, it argued we should approach the world as a spatial-relational (‘spherical’) dynamic—or as a tangle of people in space-specific relationships and ever-evolving (and, in this day and age, increasingly fast-changing) ‘co-immunities’, a Sloterdijk concept. Co-immunities: more or less temporary collections of spatially or technologically connected people constantly refreshing and resourcing their communally constructed immunity. Sloterdijk’s co-immunisation highlights not so much the deliberative and moral aspects of contemporary co-existence, as its anthropotechnics according to which techniques and technologies are harnessed to realise the aim of communal security1 and the pressure of creating advantage. Studying or understanding the dynamics of human spheres, the article argued, should mean (among other things) participating in and contributing to their spherical becoming. Such becoming was inevitably contingent on engendering relations of safety and trust. This is the meaning of the article’s title: ‘spherogenics’, the engendering of spheres

1 The word security derives from securis (Latin: axe) and secõ (Latin: to cut). Security thus derives from the proto-technological act of ‘cutting off from’.

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of co-immunity. For me, this concept defines research as the endeavour to bring about and account for the becoming of social-organisational realities. Without wanting to dismiss critique and formal knowledge, I now regard my research as less in the business of knowledge production than of nurturing emergent kinds of intelligence from a (re)energised human sociality (Iedema & Carroll, 2015). Nurturing these things is contingent on being moved by and being able to move those in whom we are interested. Being moved is what this book is about.

A Note on Method I leap across literatures and enjoy the creativity of the ideas and thoughts I find there. This involves not necessarily following the rules of conventional scholarship. For philosophers, the route to a reappreciation of the present is through delving into the intentions of and relations among philosophers’ writings: How should this or that be understood? What evidence is there for believing that statement X means Y, or that author A meant B? What do these things say and what don’t they say? My approach in contrast is more one of going through philosophical corners and navigating conceptual intersections at high speeds, if not recklessly ignoring the existing road network altogether. For their part, social scientists scavenge data in all kinds of formats, personal accounts, audio/video recordings, large databases or any other information in any other medium. They hold that data up as guarantor for the legitimacy of their claims about recognisable and tangible forms of life, using their analytical tools and discursive procedures to produce findings and conclusions about the state of the present or the past, and to make predictions about the future. The social sciences capture our beings, doings and sayings. My work abandons much of this, other than by drawing on brief vignettes that specify one person’s experience of becoming undone. In doing so I scale the prevailing expectations of science back and slow science down (Stengers, 2018). This gives me time to engender more defensible and responsive ways of going on. The humanities are now steeped in posthuman scholarship whose (grand) narrative fixes on what exceeds human and ordinary life. Its principal concern is to adjust the lenses through which we apprehend life away from our personal crises and towards global crises, from human life towards pan-organic and inorganic life. Posthumanities erase the personal on account of its misapprehension that experience matters at all in a

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world where becoming means that humans are an evolutionary blip in the grander scheme of inscrutable things and events, and that what we experience as ‘the present’ is no more than what we cease to be: … the present therefore produces a multi-faceted effect: on the one hand the sharp awareness of what we are ceasing to be (the end of the actual) and on the other the perception – in different degrees of clarity – of what we are in the process of becoming (the actualization of the virtual). (Braidotti, 2019: 36)

Given my invocation of a single person’s experience of becoming undone, I fail here too. My approach and style of writing will therefore exasperate proponents of each of these endeavours. My defence is that my intention in this book is to come to terms with ‘becoming undone’ and ‘becoming different’, and to clarify my fascination with this idea of Spinoza’s: our power to be affected enhances our power to act. My exploration of this idea results in an account of a journey into realising that “there is no crisis here, just a huge vitality of inspiration” (Braidotti, 2017: 15). Finally, keep in mind while reading this, that, really, … We shouldn’t be producing books—unified totalities that reflect a wellordered world, we should be producing texts that are assemblages—unexpected, disparate and productive connections that create new ways of thinking and living. (Colebrook, 2002: 76)

References Braidotti, R. (2017). Posthuman critical theory. Journal of Posthuman Studies, 1(1), 9–25. Braidotti, R. (2019). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(6), 31–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327 6418771486. Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge. Edelman, G. (2006). Second nature: Brain science and human knowledge. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Heidegger, M. (2000 [1946]). Über den Humanismus [Letter on humanism]. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Iedema, R. (2020a). Hear me: Intervention theatre. In P. Crawford, B. Brown, & A. Charise (Eds.), Companion for health humanities (pp. 239–243). Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.

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Iedema, R. (2020b). Video-reflexive ethnography as potentiation technology: What about investigative quality? Qualitative Research in Psychology. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2020.1794087. Iedema, R., & Carroll, K. (2015). Research as affect-sphere: Towards spherogenics. Emotion Review, 7 (1), 1–7. Iedema, R., Long, D., Forsyth, R., & Lee, B. B. (2006). Visibilizing clinical work: Video ethnography in the contemporary hospital. Health Sociology Review, 15(2), 156–168. James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co. Law, J. (2001). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge. Shapiro, I. (2005). Flight from reality in the human sciences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sloterdijk, P. (1998). Sphären I: Blasen—Mikrosphärologie. Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp. Sloterdijk, P. (1999). Sphären II: Globen—Makrosphärologie. Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp. Sloterdijk, P. (2004). Sphären III: Schäume. Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp. Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science (S. Muecke, Trans.). Oxford: Polity Press. Still, A., & Costall, A. (1991). Against cognitivism: Alternative foundations for cognitive psychology. Hemel Hampstead, UK.: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Virno, P. (2004). The grammar of the multitude. New York: Semiotext(e).

Contents

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Transgressions Descent into Greed Child Sexual Abuse Digital Surveillance Academic Misconduct Research Integrity Clinical Incidents Loss of World The Monstrous References

1 2 3 5 6 8 10 12 15 19

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Affects Affect as Practice Vitalism—Active/Passive Sense Modulates (or Exceeds) Meaning Conclusion References

25 25 31 39 41 41

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Undoings Undoing Loss of Meaning Effacing Self Passivity

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Conclusion References

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Prosociality Introduction Prosociality Empathy The Power to Be Affected Being Moved as Sociopolitical Priority Conclusion References

69 69 72 74 84 86 90 91

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Potentiation Introduction Being Moved: A Proximity that Requires Distance The Ecstasy of Standing Outside A Becoming of Becoming: Potentiation What Keeps Us: The Ingenium References

97 97 99 104 109 115 118

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Conclusion Looking Back and Looking Forward Reprise References

121 121 126 127

Index

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CHAPTER 1

Transgressions

Abstract This first chapter starts with a description of organisational transgression and dysfunction that affected many people and that became publicised through a number of governmental inquiries, research into organisational ‘incidents’, media reports of scandals, and the like. The chapter then shifts gear to question whether framing these dysfunctions as individuals’ or groups’ transgressions of particular moral codes does justice to what is at issue here. Does the morality that trades in judgements of (dys)functionality still apply to what some now refer to as a ‘third modernity’ where rules are becoming more contested (de Vulpian in Towards a third modernity: How ordinary people are transforming the world. Triarchy Press, Axminster, UK, 2008)? In attempting to answer this question, the chapter refracts the problem of organisational dysfunction through the prism of affect and the notion ‘monstrosity’. Keywords Institutional transgression · Dehumanisation · Monstrosity · (positive/negative) affect

© The Author(s) 2021 R. Iedema, Affected, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62736-2_1

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Descent into Greed First, in almost every case, the conduct in issue was driven not only by the relevant entity’s pursuit of profit but also by individuals’ pursuit of gain, whether in the form of remuneration for the individual or profit for the individual’s business. Providing a service to customers was relegated to second place. Sales became all important. Those who dealt with customers became sellers. And this confusion of roles extended well beyond front line service staff. Advisers became sellers and sellers became advisers. (Hayne, 2019)

The Royal Commission into the Australian Banking and Insurance Industry concluded in February 2019 with the publication of its Final Report (Hayne, 2019). The findings of the Royal Commission were scathing about the practices in the Australian banking industry: continuing to charge customers after their death; denying customers insurance payouts; hoodwinking the public into paying for services that did not exist and taking up mortgages they would not be able to afford, and so on, and so on (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-04/bankingroyal-commission-report-at-a-glance/10777188). While none of the major banks escaped condemnation, the Commission regarded the National Australia Bank (appropriately abbreviated as ‘NAB’) as an outlier. This bank’s leadership persisted in downplaying and denying the seriousness of NAB’s transgressions right through the inquiry (Bartholomeusz, 2019). The normalisation of deceit in this organisation in particular had rendered employees at all levels immune to the damage and distress they caused service users, including account holders, mortgagees and insurees. The size of the scandal was of such magnitude that it was reported on internationally (cf. the reports compiled in the June 2019 issue of The New Yorker: The New Yorker, 2019). NAB’s most recent website is populated by two moderately happy, semi-smiling customers, advertising information about ‘community partners’ and ‘people who make a better Australia’ (https://www.nab. com.au/). Here, the media portrayal serves to background (if not bury) the more sinister dimensions of banking uncovered in the Royal Commission Inquiry. The contrast between the media portrayal and the inquiry findings could not be more stark. Their relation is not merely one of contradiction, perhaps, but also one of cancellation: smiles and domestic happiness are made to dominate over disconcerting legal facts. (A closer

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look at the NAB website page reveals a pervasive dull grey and authoritarian font on the left-hand side of the image1 with the kitchen scene squashed into the right-hand side of the picture, an awkward distance between the man and the woman, dour black and grey jumpers and a tense and trite symbolisation of ‘togetherness’. It’s not all good, yet.) Organisations will portray their operations and aims as ethical and professional, and as upholding these standards for everyone who works in them and with them. Only in some circumstances will organisations subject conflicts of interest and the affective dynamics that drive them to scrutiny and confront them using the standards and principles inscribed into their codes and policies. Oversight bodies tend to err on the side of condoning rather than confronting questionable and transgressive practices (The New Yorker, 2019). Thus, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), a government body called into being to monitor banking and finance industries, was found to have condoned unacceptable banking and insurance practices and to have ignored a large number of consumer complaints over several years (Hayne, 2019). The Royal Commission into the Australian Banking Industry was pushed through parliament against the will of the (then Turnbull-liberal) government in power, thanks to the opposition party teaming up with independent members of parliament. The Commission’s findings have stunned even those who were convinced that there was a need for an inquiry into banking practices.

Child Sexual Abuse In 2017, two years before the Royal Commission into the Australian Banking and Insurance Industry, Australia conducted the Royal Inquiry into Institutions’ Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The focus of this inquiry was on sexual abuse acts committed by institutions’ (staff) members, on protection given to these people by other people employed by the institution, and on the general culture within these institutions towards accountability for illegal behaviour: “The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was established in response to allegations of sexual abuse of children in institutional contexts that 1 In western forms of visual depiction, the left-hand side of the visual tends to portray what is or was (the ‘given’), whereas the right-hand side portrays what will be or should be (the ‘new’) (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996).

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had been emerging in Australia for many years” (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017). The reference to ‘many years’ may remind the reader that this inquiry followed on from the 1997 Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (‘Bringing them home’) which outlined allegations of institutional sexual abuse of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children (Wilson, 1997), a 2004 inquiry whose report was titled Forgotten Australians: A report on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of -home care as children, and a 2005 inquiry whose report was titled Protecting vulnerable children: A national challenge. Collectively, these reports make clear that child abuse in Australia was and perhaps still is institutionalised. It took decades and decades for the nation to confront this systemic destruction of children and take on the pervasive mutual protection by and of perpetrators high up in these (often prominent) institutions. The latest and most widely reported conviction to come out of these inquiries was that of Cardinal George Pell in 2018 for acts committed several years earlier. At the time of his conviction, Pell was officially employed at the Vatican. The Vatican. The 2017 report’s Executive Summary starts with a section titled “A National Tragedy”: Tens of thousands of children have been sexually abused in many Australian institutions. We will never know the true number. Whatever the number, it is a national tragedy, perpetrated over generations within many of our most trusted institutions. The sexual abuse of children has occurred in almost every type of institution where children reside or attend for educational, recreational, sporting, religious or cultural activities. Some institutions have had multiple abusers who sexually abused multiple children. It is not a case of a few ‘rotten apples’. Society’s major institutions have seriously failed. (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017)

These reports, put together, detail individuals’ and their organisations’ moral disengagement, or what Bandura and colleagues refer to as dehumanisation (Bandura, Caprara, & Zsolnai, 2000). This moral disengagement and dehumanisation took place, and possibly still takes place, in organisations that we regard as emblematic of society’s highest norms and standards: churches, schools, sports clubs. This conclusion upends our commonsense understanding of the sources of crime, injustice and

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dysfunction as emerging from (organised groups of) rather brutish individuals, from their personality deficits and upbringing deficiencies, lowerclass accents, and generally deviant behaviours. This is a ‘commonsense’ that is consistently endorsed by much of contemporary cinema (Spina, 2017): it is individuals (however well-organised) deviating from the social norm who are responsible for far-reaching wrongdoing and ruthless exploitation of others. But the scale of institutionalised dehumanisation reported in Australia puts paid to such stereotyped portrayals. True, citizens’ faith in political and commercial institutions has a long and chequered history (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018). Yet the notion that civic institutions may be engaged in systemic wrongdoing, exploitation and destruction of people challenges all but the most jaundiced. And if institutionalised dehumanisation is rampant in banking, schooling, religions and sports, what is the chance that it also permeates institutions that have not yet been hauled through the wringer of a public enquiry?

Digital Surveillance Shoshanna Zuboff in her latest book The age of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) describes the exploitation of ordinary citizens by big data companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These companies exploit what Zuboff calls people’s ‘behavioural surplus’: the human features and conducts made available to these companies for analysis and algorithmic computation through people’s use of phones, search engines, social media and related technologies (Zuboff, 2019). Zuboff likens this digitised data surveillance and extraction trend to early twentieth-century totalitarianism. She warns us against its ultimate effect: the hive, where humans are ruled by dysfunctional organisations who have assumed full control of human nature and human future, and subjected these to their capitalist priorities under the aegis of anodyne claims about ‘connecting people to friends and information’. Zuboff’s verdict on the technologification and datafication of everyday life is scathing. It is not OK, she writes, “to have our best instincts for connection, empathy and information exploited by a draconian quid pro quo that holds these goods hostage to a pervasive strip search of our lives. It is not OK for every move, emotion, utterance, and desire to be catalogued, manipulated, and then used to surreptitiously herd us through the future tense for the sake of someone else’s profit” (Zuboff, 2019: loc

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9404). Zuboff’s 800-page book exposes the dehumanisation of organisations whose big data operations extract from us ‘our human nature’ and deny us our future by seeking to narrow the window that looks out on existential uncertainty and complexity. Seething with anger at the unconscious practices she uncovered through years of research into their practices, Zuboff compares those running Google, Facebook, Twitter and so forth to early twentieth-century totalitarian dictators such as Stalin, because for them too there were no limits to what they did to people to further their power and interests. While not routinely abusing or killing people, she claims that contemporary data organisations are in the business of extracting humanness for capitalisation, and thereby creating a ‘division of learning’ that will yield immeasurable power over the future and human nature to data owners. It will relegate the larger and poorer part of humanity into increasingly automatised and datafied subjugation.

Academic Misconduct The above accounts shine a light on how perversity may become deeply institutionalised, officially sanctioned, and widely protected, even by people outside the organisation in question. Misconduct is no longer the preserve of the lone wolf. It colonises a whole ecology of willing players and enabling resources. It is less particular individuals than that whole ecology of transgression and subjection that defeats those at the receiving end, even before they are pushed so hard that they might think of challenging it. If the accounts above describe extremes of institutionalised wrongdoing, there are also all kinds of rather less visible transgression that equally affect people’s lives and well-being. Academia is one such site: one where learned subtlety manifests not just in elegant conclusions and powerful discoveries, but also in advanced forms of wrongdoing and harm. Academia is in some respects like the church: an institution whose lofty function and altruistic aims make it near enough impossible for a person to contemplate its involvement in institutionalised wrongdoing and harm. There are signs however that institutionalised dehumanisation in academia may be more prevalent than is commonly known or admitted. Consider this recent article published in The Guardian in 2019:

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“UK universities pay out £90 m on staff ‘gagging orders’ in past two years: Fears that confidentiality clauses are being used to silence victims of misconduct” “UK universities have spent nearly £90m on payoffs to staff that come with “gagging orders” in two years, raising fears that victims of misconduct at higher education institutions are being silenced. As many as 4,000 settlements, some of which are thought to relate to allegations of bullying, discrimination and sexual misconduct, have been made with non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) attached since 2017. The figures, uncovered by the BBC, have prompted allegations that universities are deliberately using gagging orders to stop grievances becoming public. Dozens of academics told the corporation they were made to sign NDAs after being “harassed” out of their jobs following the raising of complaints” (Murphy, 2019).

The reporter of the article goes on to note that “It is not clear how many of the payouts relate to allegations of bullying, harassment or sexual misconduct as many of the institutions were unable to disclose why the NDAs were signed” (Murphy, 2019). We thus do not have a view of the actual scale of wrongdoing in academia. To investigate this lack of insight into institutionalised wrongdoing in academia, I wrote a research grant in 2014 which aimed to explore academics’ experiences with academic misconduct and universities’ handling of that misconduct. My focus was not principally on sexual harassment and bullying but on academic misconduct per se: plagiarism and falsifying of track records. I was particularly interested in what Garfinkel called ‘degradation ceremonies’ (Garfinkel, 1956): the subtler forms of ‘scientific’ intimidation (the practices of belittling and/or marginalising others’ work), and ‘scientific’ appropriation (the practice of not citing those who should be cited and crediting others or oneself instead). To inject this grant with additional muscle, I sought involvement from national academies, the overarching national body representing universities, and from my own university’s senior leadership. All declined. I binned the proposal, having concluded that academia’s Lance Armstrong2 moment was yet to come. 2 Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France 7 times. He was suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs for much of his career, but denied this all through his

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Research Integrity People’s views about what is appropriate research rarely align, but you would think that research activity generally and more or less adheres to the few ground rules that typify the scientific vocation: honesty, respect, accuracy, openness and precision. These ground rules apply across the board, whatever science you practise, and whether you’re interested in history, linguistics, psychology, engineering, medicine, accounting, biochemistry or dentistry. People engage in research on the assumption that colleagues will not move goalposts past the wrong side of these academic ground rules. Generally, people engaged in academic research are so busy thinking of research ideas, writing proposals, managing projects and people, analysing and interpreting data, writing up research and thinking of the next proposal, and so many of these things have to run the gauntlet of colleague-scrutiny, that one would assume spending time on finding out how to stretch these values and bend the rules would seem like a waste of time at best and an absolute folly at worst. But what if research integrity is not at all as self-evident as is generally assumed among researchers (Anderson, Shaw, Steneck, Konkle, & Kamata, 2013)? What if the pressures on academics are producing offlimits behaviours to meet their faculties’ expectations of 10 journal articles and around the equivalent of their academic salary in income every year (Hil, 2012)? In the light of the rising floor of these expectations being about to hit the sinking ceiling of limited and more thinly spread funding and shrinking career opportunities, should we not ask questions about whether people’s research integrity might be tested, or perhaps even compromised at times? Hil finds that “performance checkers now run universities, meaning that the ever-diminishing chances of doing worthwhile research have been increasingly sidelined by the drudgery of having to make money” (Hil, 2012: 132). This situation raises questions, surely, about how long it will be until we arrive at the point now attained by competitive sport, where pressure and ‘performance enhancement’ produced not just victories and glory, but also drug testing and athletes’ career and during an investigation mounted against him by the international doping agency USADA. A 2012 USADA arbitration that established he had engaged in doping ended Armstrong’s cycling career. He never contested the arbitration while continuing to deny ever using drugs. Then, in a 2013 Oprah Winfrey interview, he confessed to always having used doping because ‘he was a guy who wanted and expected to get everything’ (Macur, 2014).

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fall from grace. Lance Armstrong’s fall took down much more than just the man himself, to the point where now we suspect many athletes to partake in doping when we hear of their extraordinary achievements and frequent early deaths. Like competitive sport, academic research has witnessed transgressions of the code of research integrity and professional conduct, but these academic transgressions have not yet reached public consciousness beyond attention being drawn to the odd ‘bad apple’ (Faneli, 2009). Strategically, academic research organisations where these ‘bad apples’ are employed have not yet had to recuse themselves from the investigation of universityinternal academic misconduct given the risk of conflict of interest. At present, it is not uncommon for notifiers of academic misconduct to be sacrificed (Murphy, 2019), no amount of carefully crafted whistle-blower protection and legislation notwithstanding (Lewis, Brown, & Moberley, 2014). No doubt due to notifications of research irregularities via channels other than those internal to universities, journal article retractions and research ethics transgressions are on the rise globally (Corbyn, 2009, August 20). To be sure, this rise in notifications and retractions has motivated researchers from around the world to meet and negotiate principles for governing research practice and conducting misconduct investigations (e.g. http://wcri2019.org/). Individual nations now also have their own agencies for monitoring research integrity: the US Office for Research Integrity, the Australian Research Integrity Committee, the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty and the UK Research Integrity Office. Few cases tend to be reported however to these agencies (Anderson et al., 2013). If research inaccuracy and falsification cases are reported, it is through the public media targeting scandals (Sovacool, 2008). Only isolated reports have appeared with evidence that research inaccuracy and falsification constitute a rather more pervasive or systemic problem (van Kolfschooten, 2012). This situation where suspicion cannot be converted into investigation let alone confirmation may be due to the fact that a clear conflict of interest attaches to universities (where the researchers accused of misconduct are employed) investigating internal misconduct. Not least, this conflict is evident from the time it takes them to act on the notifications in question, and the manner in which such cases are ‘resolved’ (van Kolfschooten, 2012). It is not in universities’ interest to advertise staff transgressions to the world as this reflects negatively on the institution

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and the departments involved. This situation renders the whistle-blower doubly vulnerable, as she/he is exposed not just to those who are the subject of and may challenge the grounds of a misconduct accusation, but they are also exposed to the power (and wrath) of those in charge of upholding the university’s reputation and standing in the public eye.

Clinical Incidents This ‘academic’ tension between honesty and standing is apparent also in another sphere of life: health care—yet another domain not commonly associated with but frequently involved in inconceivable transgressions against patients and families. During the 1970s, Ivan Illich published a series of diatribes against what he regarded as the institutionalisation of immorality. He targeted the institutions of schooling (Illich, 1970) and medicine (Illich, 1976) among others, which he saw as ‘conspiracies against the laity’ (Shaw, 1906). With regard to medicine, Illich wrote in the opening paragraph of Medical Nemesis, that medical practice “has become a major threat to health” (Illich, 1976: 1). Illich coined the term ‘iatrogenic’ to refer to harm caused by or during medical intervention. Since then, the term ‘iatrogenic’ has been overtaken by more anglophone but no less sterile expressions to refer to healthcare-caused harm, including ‘clinical incidents’, ‘adverse events’, ‘sentinel events’, and, most non-descriptive of all: ‘never events’.3 How often do clinical incidents happen, and how serious are they? From April to June 2018 (3 months), England-based services (or at least those clinical practitioners willing and prepared to do so) reported a total of over 500,000 incidents into the NHS’s National Reporting & Learning System (NRLS). From October 2016 to September 2017 (12 months), the NRLS clocked 434,562 incidents that caused a low level of harm (according to the reporting clinicians), 52,536 incidents causing moderate harm, 5,525 incidents causing severe harm and 4,449 incidents 3 An incident that through luck or insight missed harming a patient is referred to as a ‘near miss’. It is not called a ‘near hit’, even though what would have been ‘near’ (and for that reason a critical consideration) was the hitting or harming of the patient. To say that an incident almost missed a patient does not make sense: the incident either misses the patient; it misses them by this much, or it does not miss them. You can say though that you almost missed the bus but that you just caught it in time. If you say the bus almost missed me, you were expecting it to notice you or run you over.

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that resulted in the death of the patient (NHS Improvement, 2019). These figures are high, but need to read in the context of the almost 24 million patients who attend NHS England Accident & Emergency services every 12 month period (in this case, 2017–2018).4 Incident reporting was made mandatory in health care following several high-level scandals and high-profile inquiries revealing the ecological (i.e. networked, widespread) nature of harm perpetrated on and kept secret from patients (Hindle, Braithwaite, Travaglia, & Iedema, 2005). In the early 1990 s, a whistle-blower (Stephen Bolsin) reported what he regarded as sub-standard heart surgery at the UK’s Bristol Royal Infirmary (Bolsin, 1998): babies were dying at higher rates than elsewhere in the UK and the world. It took several years for Bolsin’s complaint to be investigated by the hospital and by the UK’s General Medical Council (GMC), and this occurred only after Bolsin finally went to the public media because he was met with indifference and even hostility from his hospital’s management and from the GMC (Bolsin, 1998). It took several more years for an Inquiry to investigate Bolsin’s complaint and publish protracted responses to it. Published in 2001, ten years after Bolsin raised the alarm, the inquiry report stated: The NHS is still failing to learn from the things that go wrong and has no system to put this right. This must change. Even today, it is not possible to say, categorically, that events similar to those which happened at Bristol could not happen again in the UK—indeed, are not happening at this moment. (Kennedy, 2001)

I became interested in healthcare organisational responses to internal problems and wrongs during my study of ‘clinical incidents’: care gone wrong for patients, either because of individual clinicians’ errors, persistent service problems setting clinicians up to fail, equipment failures, management cutbacks, or just ‘snafus’.5 Since 2007, we have interviewed hundreds of clinicians and patients involved in ‘unexpected events and outcomes’ (Iedema, 2018; Iedema et al., 2008). Over the years, we found that healthcare organisations that openly acknowledge care failures to the patients that were harmed as a result are as yet rare (Iedema & Allen, 4 https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/hospital-acc ident--emergency-activity/2017-18. 5 Snafu: ‘situation normal – all fucked up’.

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2012). Those managers and clinicians who in charge of these patients’ care and that did speak openly about incidents and harm had to put aside reputational concerns, manage internal politics and allegiance networks, grit their teeth in the face of legal risks and payout fears, and confront uncertainty about the emotional fall-out following their admission of responsibility. They were in the minority however (Iedema et al., 2011). Openness to patients about care gone wrong has become increasingly prominent in policy in recent years (National Patient Safety Agency, 2009). The UK Government signed off on the Duty of Candour Act in 2015 which renders non-disclosure of internal failures to patients resulting in their harm an offence. One important reason for governments and insurers to be talking about honesty and incident disclosure to patients about health service-caused harm is that openness about failures reduces these patients’ inclination to sue (Berlinger, 2003): patients tend to forgive clinicians and services if they feel they have been treated respectfully (Iedema & Allen, 2012). Incident disclosure is the practice of the service managers and/or the clinicians telling the patients openly what went wrong. Complicating the practice of incident disclosure however is that patients often disagree with healthcare professionals about what warrants being disclosed as failure or wrongdoing (Gallagher, 2009). If the failure or wrongdoing is acknowledged, this is often done in ways that those harmed experience as underestimating the impact and severity of the harm or the wrong (Iedema et al., 2008), few of those who experience incidents are openly told what happened (Iedema et al., 2011), and still fewer are invited to come to an agreement with the service about (or ‘co-construct a perspective on’) what went wrong (Iedema & Allen, 2012). Adding insult to injury, the emotional cost of not just the clinical incidents themselves, but of their non-disclosure, has now been found to be inordinately high (Bell et al., 2018; Iedema, 2018).

Loss of World Let me change gears. I want to switch from discussing dysfunctional and transgressive organisations to articulating what it feels like to become caught up in organisational dysfunctionality and transgression. But I don’t simply want to ask, What happens to people who get caught in the crossfire between upholding rules and offending powerful factions? Or, What happens to people who insist on “speaking truth to power” (Wildawsky,

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1979)? Rather, I want to ask, What defines the interests of those who participate in the kinds of conflicts and transgression discussed above? And, on a broader front, Do moral judgements of (dys)functionality and attributions of transgression still apply given our contemporary circumstances have mutated out of “an explosion of complexity in the 20th century” and a vanishing “capacity of hierarchy [and authority] to simplify things” (de Vulpian, 2008: 14)? At the same time, I want to ask, To what extent do these contemporary circumstances call for an alternative logic, a different relatio-rationality, one that I now feel only becomes feasible and tangible, paradoxically, through a ‘loss of world’ and a ‘becoming undone’, on the part of those harmed (Grosz, 2011)? Let me acknowledge first off that, having researched incident (non)disclosure in health care for several years, I had thought that services’ reluctance to disclose incidents was an effect that grew from excessive power, moral weakness, complicitness, small-minded priorities and negative expectations about the fall-out of transparency, inclusion and openness. All these things were very easy to project onto both others and The Other (i.e. the arrogant nurse; the disinterested doctor; the squirmy manager). It was only when I became aware of the (non)disclosure of an incident in my own organisation that I was confronted with a much more complicated array of motivations for protecting and continuing ‘business as is’ and defeating its challengers. These motivations defined and animated a whole ecology of being, an impalpable, surreptitious network of relationships, subtly-negotiated and invisibly-maintained commitments, unquantifiable acts and untraceable decisions. Collectively, these revealed, through their targeted destruction of what came in their path, their unfathomable operations, their obduracy, their expediency.

2012: John discovers that a senior colleague (SC from here on) fudged their track record to obtain project funding. Not once: more than once. Not in a minor way. A major way. Books that didn’t exist. Names that were changed around on books and articles to ensure SC’s name came first and thus ‘looked better on paper’. He reports this to management and hands over evidence of grant proposals that were compromised by falsification. He thinks that for him this is the end of the matter. He’s done his bit, now the rest will be automatic. But what happens next is anything but automatic.

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Management informs John that they have invited SC to respond to the charges of falsifying their track record. Hmmm. Ok. Surely the answer can’t be much other than ‘sorry, my mistake’, or ‘won’t happen again’, or even ‘I’m so ashamed’. But no. The SC’s answer, besides a flat denial and tortuous justification, becomes an all-out attack on John. SC proceeds to mobilise a whole network of allies through circulating rumours and counter claims. SC turns out to have surprisingly easy access to the university’s upper management (UM from here on, which refers to about 3 or 4 people). SC persuades UM that it is not he, but John who is guilty of misconduct; namely, bullying, intimidating staff, even, SC alleges, him attempting to break into SC’s office. While this is going on, other strange things start to happen. John finds his car tires punctured, twice and in quick succession, by nails inserted at straight angles into the rubber, in the office carpark (where the SC also parks their car). Posters advertising John’s latest book launch disappear from the university’s corridors and walls. Charts appear the size of walls advertising SC’s claimed international network with photos of ‘colleagues’ dotted around on a map of the world, as if to advertise their legitimacy, importance and trustworthiness. John initially rejects all these developments as just signs of distress, but SC’s strategy gains momentum. Bolstered by multiple statements from friends (never revealed or shown to John, it should be said; always just hinted at by UM), an alternative problem to that of academic track record falsification begins to crystallise in UM’s language: not SC but John has a behaviour problem. John’s demands for closer scrutiny of academics’ approach to compiling and submitting track records to funding agencies are seen as evidence of misguided concern and as meddling with a domain that falls under UM’s remit. John’s impassioned defence of academic integrity is now construed as a ‘worrying obsession’. John now understands that UM’s diffidence and reluctance to report back to him about how they’ve investigated the matter means they have chosen SC’s side. Other colleagues—the few he trusted with this matter—begin to show reluctance to engage with John’s dilemma, let alone share in his outrage and give him support. How could he get them to listen? The whole place was now lost to reason. It was now becoming monstrous.

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The Monstrous Always able to become different from itself, life has always been monstrous. For this reason, Tarde saw “the normal” as “the degree zero of monstrosity” (cited in Osborne, 2016: 195). Efforts to replicate the normal as status quo in the face of monstrosity are equally monstrous. In “seeking to fight evil, do good and protect the moral order, you disrupt the boundaries of the very same moral order that you seek to protect”, and “[f]ighting evil, you enact the very violence that makes you evil” (Thanem, 2011: 4). We have all “been drawn into a sort of complicity with … the monstrous” (Sloterdijk, 2016: 237). Think of worldwide industrialisation and environmental destruction (Latour, 2018) or the datafication of human sociality (Zuboff, 2019) which are effecting a “redistribution of subjectivity among humans and things” (Sloterdijk, 2016: 243). At the levels of evolution, organisation and sociation, everyone of us now participates in monstrous forms of life. To be modern, one must be touched by the awareness that, beside the inevitable fact of being a witness, one has been drawn into a sort of complicity with the newer form of the monstrous. If one asks a modern person, ‘Where were you at the time of the crime?’ the answer is: ‘I was at the scene of the crime’—that is to say, within that totality of the monstrous which, as a complex of modern criminal circumstances, encompasses its accomplices and accessories. Modernity means dispensing with the possibility of having an alibi. (Sloterdijk, 2016: 237)

Modernity “transposes the monstrous into everyday life” (Duclos, 2018: 50). This growth of the monstrous in daily practices, presences and experiences happen not so much because our community-protecting or co-immunological practices and resources are weakening or breaking down allowing monstrous alterity to take over. Monstrous modernity is not merely about technology, violence, deviation, and permissiveness, nor about a loss of hierarchy and authority. Instead, it is about complexity that increasingly permeates modern life through its relentless pursuit of change and novelty: “the monstrous rises to the surface as transformative and differentiating unveiling” (Duclos, 2018: 51).

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Over a period of two to three years, John’s institution grew from a nurturing cocoon into a place filled with monstrosities. He soon realised he was not just up against SC, but a whole bunch of people, including managers and upper managers, human resource people, and SC-allies who didn’t even work in the place but somehow were given a say in the matter. Then there were the colleagues who previously wanted a piece of him and who now turned into a wall of fence-sitters, cold-shoulderers, and heads-in-the-sand. People who had been friendly to him in the past now acted strangely and stand-off-ish. This made him wonder if there was a bandwidth of disparaging gossip somewhere he was unable to pick up. But even if there was such a thing, he had no idea about where and how to begin to tune into it. Taking on academic falsification seemed such an obvious, natural, and easy thing to do from a position of status and strength. But now this mess began to reveal capacities and forces that he had never had to contend with, never even considered possible. The whole thing was turning monstrous. By the time he came to see that he was entangled in this mess much more deeply than he’d ever realised, his academic cocoon had fully disintegrated.

A 1940 article on organised criminality posits a link between institutionalised misconduct and the close relationships among perpetrators. Sutherland saw institutional misconduct as “determined largely by the comparative frequency and intimacy” of contact among perpetrators amidst communities that are “not organised solidly against” misconduct (Sutherland, 1940: 11). Sutherland’s work ensured institutional misconduct was put on the agenda under the label of ‘white-collar crime’ (Simpson, 2019), and his ‘intimacy of contact’ thesis is echoed in the ‘social cocoon’ metaphor that was coined in this context some 40 years later. The image of the ‘social cocoon’ captures in graphic form the monstrous affordances of close bonding if harnessed to enact and protect institutionalised misconduct (Ashforth & Anand, 2016; Greil & Rudy, 1984). These two notions—monstrosity, cocoon—both carry an affective charge. They both talk about shelter: the one destroys shelter and the other ensures shelter. Monstrosity carries a negative affective charge;

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cocooning a positive one. Shelter means positive affect; the destruction of shelter can be monstrous. Affect has been increasingly foregrounded in twenty-first-century theorising, perhaps as an attempt to re-enchant our world with monsters and castles, and to rescue life from the relentless urge to critique, analyse, produce evidence. The interest in affect perhaps counters a rising sense of anomie by posing questions (again) that science has eschewed for decades: How was it that certain fashions, fads and trends seemed to spread throughout populations with a rapidity that seemed to defy the action of logic or rationality? How did certain fears and forms of hysteria, mania and emotion spread such that they appeared to bypass rationality and reason? What caused individuals in groups to behave in ways that might perplex, bemuse or undermine their sense of themselves as subjects in other contexts? What enabled certain individuals to command the obedience, compliance, love and adoration of others, such that they would be exalted and revered as charismatic leaders? (Blackman, 2013: 23)

Affect does not submit to straightforward data gathering and to predetermined scientific procedure. Affect eludes and transgresses. From the mid-1990s on, affect theory started to bring some of these tropes together (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Ticineto-Clough, 2008). It defined affect as “becomings that go beyond those [who] live through them” (Smith, 1998: xxx). But affect as a concept may refer to different phenomena. On the one hand, it concerns our “ability to affect and be affected” (Massumi, 1987: xvi), which is derived from Spinoza’s term affectus . Massumi, one of the original proponents of affect theory, saw this aspect of affect as “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (Massumi, 1987: xvi). On the other hand, affect manifests as affection (Spinoza’s affectio) or “each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies)” (Massumi, 1987: xvi).6 Whereas conventional psychology may be said to have focused on individuals’ states of affection (joy, confidence; anxiety,

6 Steinberg cautions that Spinoza himself was “not always especially careful to distinguish ‘affects’ from ‘affections’” (Steinberg, 2018: loc 37).

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sadness, fear, guilt, shame), affect theory prioritises supra-individual affective dynamics (Seyfert, 2012). Cocooning produces positive affects as it confirms our endeavours to protect and persevere in living. Positive affect “is a person’s passing from a lesser perfection to a greater perfection” (Spinoza, 2001: III, 76). The monstrous entrains negative affects as our endeavours to persevere in living fade and relations decompose. Negative affect “is a person’s passing from a greater perfection to a lesser perfection” (Spinoza, 2001: III, 76). The monstrous brings us ‘sadness’: “we strive to imagine the destruction of things that bring us sadness or reduce our power of acting … So we will rue the enhancement, and rejoice in the diminution, of the power of a hateful or harmful thing” (Steinberg, 2013: 397). Negative affect may also evoke a secondary affect, such as a doubt, or a check. … if we hate a thing like us, then … we shall be affected with an affect contrary to its affect, not like it. (Spinoza, 2001: III, 27)

The monstrous and the cocoon are in perpetual tension; this tension is because no one state (affectio) ever being able to overcome becoming. Affect as affectus is movement, becoming, the power to be affected and the power to become (other). In Chapter 3, I will recount that for Judith Butler becoming human is contingent on becoming other through becoming undone (Butler, 2005). For Liz Grosz, becoming is defining of life as always becoming different through evolutionary pressures (Grosz, 2011). For Mari Ruti (2014), Susan Brison (2002), Jean Amery (1980) and others, becoming can be anchored in trauma when it transgresses into becoming inhuman. The way we construe these becomings is inscribed into what Spinoza called our ingenium: “By ingenium we should understand … a memory whose form has been determined by the individual’s life experience and by his various encounters” (Balibar, 1998: 29). Ingenium thus captures “the affective vulnerability and natural sociability of human beings” (Dahlbeck & Dahlbeck De Lucia, 2020: 8). I will return to the ingenium and its malleability in Chapter 5. Affect theory revived the possibility of human association as driven by pre-discursive impulses, and by pre-semiotic or ‘immediate’ (unmediated, unrepresented) energies (Mazzarella, 2010). For affect theorists, the ‘sad’ fate of these impulses and energies was to be captured, channelled, simplified and reduced by becoming culturally, linguistically and/or semiotically mediated (Brennan, 2004). For them, then, these impulses and

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energies were conceivable as ‘autonomous’, before being colonised by meaning and guided by intention. Their arguments for ‘the autonomy of affect’ were persuasive (Massumi, 1995), but so were counter-arguments challenging the ‘romantic’ dichotomy with which the autonomy thesis split unmediated affective energy apart from socialising and mediating representations (Mazzarella, 2010). Other arguments framed unmediated affect as confronting us with too much monstrosity, registering our pervasive need for “a protective distance from what is unbearable” (Duclos, 2018: 44, citing; Sloterdijk, 1989: 39). Here, the mediation of affect shields us from “the insufferability of truth in all of its immediateness” (Duclos, 2018: 44). I discuss these stances for and against the autonomy of affect in Chapter 2. Chapter 2 also explores the empirical dimensions and semiotic implications of affective overwhelm. In Chapter 3, I delve into the loss of intimacy and of place, guided by the theme of ‘becoming undone’ (Grosz, 2011). Chapter 4 looks at how we are affected and why through being affected our capacity to act is enhanced. Chapter 5 explores becoming from the perspective of potentiation, or the attempt to harness the excess energy needed for and produced by becoming to life as we experience it. Chapter 6 offers a brief conclusion to the book.

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Mazzarella, W. (2010). Affect: What is it good for? In S. Dube (Ed.), Enchantments of modernity: Empire, nation, globalization (pp. 291–309). New York: Routledge. Murphy, S. (2019). UK Universities pay £90million on staff gagging orders in the past two years. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.thegua rdian.com/education/2019/apr/17/uk-universities-pay-out-90m-on-staffgagging-orders-in-past-two-years?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. National Patient Safety Agency. (2009). Being open: Communicating with patients, their families and carers following a patient safety incident. Retrieved from https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20090608153835/http:// www.npsa.nhs.uk/nrls/improvingpatientsafety/patient-safety-tools-and-gui dance/beingopen/?vAction=fntReset. NHS Improvement. (2019). NRLS national patient safety incident reports: Commentary. Retrieved from London. https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-con tent/uploads/2020/03/NAPSIR-commentary-Sept-2020-FINAL.pdf. Osborne, T. (2016). Vitalism as pathos. Biosemiotics, 2016(9), 185–205. Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. (2017). Final Report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Retrieved from Canberra: https://www.childabuseroyalcommis sion.gov.au/final-report. Ruti, M. (2014). Is autonomy unethical? Trauma and the politics of responsibility. In M. O’Loughlin (Ed.), The ethics of remembering and the consequences of forgetting: Essays on trauma, history, and memory (pp. 39–52). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Seyfert, R. (2012). Beyond personal feelings and collective emotions: Towards a theory of social affect. Theory, Culture & Society, 29(6), 27–46. Shaw, G. B. (1906). The doctor’s dilemma. Retrieved from http://www.gutenb erg.org/files/5070/5070-h/5070-h.htm. Simpson, S. S. (2019). Reimagining Sutherland 80 years after white-collar crime. Criminology, 57 (2019), 189–207. Sloterdijk, P. (1989). Thinker on stage: Nietszche’s materialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2016). The time of the crime of the monstrous. In Not saved: Essays after Heidegger (pp. 237–250). Cambridge: Polity Press. Smith, D. W. (1998). Introduction: ‘A life of pure immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique et Clinique’ Project. In Essays critical and clinical (pp. xi–liv). London: Verso. Sovacool, B. K. (2008). Exploring scientific misconduct: Isolated individuals, impure institutions, or an inevitable idiom of modern science? Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 5(2008), 271–282. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673008-9113-6.

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Spina, F. (2017). Crime films. In Oxford research encyclopaedia of criminology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spinoza, B. (2001). Ethics (W. H. White & A. H. Stirling, Trans.). Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Steinberg, J. (2013). Imitation, representation, and humanity in Spinoza’s ethics. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 51(3), 383–407. Steinberg, J. (2018). Spinoza’s political psychology: The taming of fortune and fear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1940). White-collar criminality. American Sociological Review, 5(1), 1–12. Thanem, T. (2011). The monstrous organization. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. The New Yorker. (2019). Scandals and Schemes on Wall Street. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/sunday-reading-scandalsand-schemes-on-wall-street. Ticineto-Clough, P. (2008). The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory Culture and Society, 25(1), 1–22. van Kolfschooten, F. (2012). Ontspoorde wetenschap (“Derailed Science”). Amsterdam: De Kring publishers. Wildawsky, A. (1979). Speaking truth to power. Boston, MA: Little Brown. Wilson, R. (1997). Bringing them home: A guide to the findings and recommendations of the National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. Retrieved from Sydney. https:// humanrights.gov.au/our-work/bringing-them-home-chapter-1. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. London: Profile Books.

CHAPTER 2

Affects

Abstract This chapter delves more deeply into affect as descriptor of specific aspects of life. In doing so, I address Wetherell’s concept of ‘affective practice’ and rehearse Martin’s, Leys’ and Mazzarella’s critiques of affect as unqualified, autonomous energy. I next pose, the following question: if some scholars (like Wetherell, Leys, Martin and Mazzarella) insist on life as meaningful ‘all the way down’, and others (Grosz, Deleuze, Massumi, Colebrook and others) prioritise (politically, analytically) the undifferentiated force that is life before it gets entangled with secular agendas, everyday meanings and individual identities, what route is best to make sense of situations that don’t make sense; ones where we experience a loss of meaning? Keywords Affect · Affective practice · Autonomous affect · Loss of meaning

Affect as Practice John reported a senior colleague (SC) who falsified his track record on their shared funding applications. He also informed management that they had an accountability to him regarding the nature

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and effectiveness of their response given his grant applications (which included SC’s falsified claims) and therefore his personal academic integrity had been compromised. When nothing seemed to happen, John insisted to management that they should produce ‘an appropriate response’ to his complaint and to his evidence of the colleague’s transgressions. But instead of receiving such a response, management, now backed by upper (university) management (UM), began to target John’s legitimacy and identity. It seemed like he was subjected to a ‘constructive dismissal’.1 He received official letters with lists of concocted accusations that were clearly written by SC using their awkward expressions and bad sentences. John was instructed to attend counselling sessions, go for psychological tests, and finally was sent for psychiatric assessment—all of which he refused. When he questioned the need for such sessions, tests and assessments, he received a personal warning from UM. The warning ended with a paragraph stating that one more warning would be sufficient ground for his dismissal. All this was monstrous, if monstrous is a term that describes things, events and people that seem unlikely, unreal, impossible, unbearable, unliveable. The institution had defined his world and his identity, but now it transmogrified into a living hell. What he needed for dealing with this ‘loss of world’ lay way outside of his personal capacity, but was also way outside of his professional zone. He needed friends, not colleagues. He needed trust, not status, output and income. He needed alliances, not esteem. He needed strategy and tactics, not ethics, morality and rules. He had no clue about where to start with finding what he needed now. These feelings refused to fit into a recognisable narrative, with interactions and meanings drowning in a tumult of confused thoughts, chest palpitations, estranged limbs doing unrecognisable things, as if he was now a split second out of time with himself.

Reflecting on a recent research outing, Margaret Wetherell recollects that “[m]y participant reported feeling depressed. I, however, felt happy enough, secure in my privileged academic story lines, already mentally 1 Constructive dismissal is an employee’s resignation caused by the conduct engaged in by the employer.

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formulating an emblematic research event featuring neo-liberalism and colonial history, canonical national emotions, distinguished versus banal affect, the contrast with the more intense engaged wairua of Maori research participants, and so forth” (Wetherell, 2015a: 84). Affectively, Wetherell and her research participant are experiencing a quite different atmospherical and relational present. The participant felt depressed at finding the market they were to visit together closed. Wetherell bypassed this disappointment entirely and ruminates about the study that brought her there in the first place, and where the study may take her next, intellectually and academically. Spending no more words on the experience of visiting the (closed) market, Wetherell goes on to applaud the “profoundly exciting flowering of new ways of working” in “psychosocial” research (Wetherell, 2015a: 84). The defining feature of these psychosocial studies is that they “avoid formulating affect as a kind of extra-discursive and uncanny excess”. ‘Uncanny excess’, in Wetherell’s view, refers to “an event that is unfamiliar and undomesticated” (Wetherell, 2012: 154). Uncanny may also mean ‘unhomely’ or ‘without home’ (cf. the German ‘unheimlich’ and ‘ungeheuer’). Wetherell equates ‘uncanny’ with excess, thereby aligning it with explanatory schemas that invoke depth-psychological mechanisms and intricate psychoanalytical constructions, such as ‘repression’ and ‘transference’. On her view, what may appear uncanny, unfamiliar and undomesticated to me may be understood very differently by the analyst-researcher who consults, replays and analyses my observable behaviour in the form of a memory account, a transcript or a recording. For the analyst-researcher, my uncanny experience may be ‘unmasked’ as no more than a “continuity of practice, personal history and context” (Wetherell, 2012: 154). If something appears uncanny to me, the person experiencing that something is uncanny, this experience “is perhaps too embedded in pre-history, has to do with a past life, and with relationships that have entirely disappeared from view, or are culturally troubling, and so on” (Wetherell, 2012: 154). I may be experiencing confusion, pain or grief, and yet for the analyst, these “bursts of intense affect are less uncanny, eerie and weird than they may appear” (Wetherell, 2012: 30). Wetherell’s Affect & Emotion (Wetherell, 2012) assertively frames affect as observable and analysable social practice; hence her signature concept ‘affective practice’. The term ‘practice’ is no doubt used here to underscore affect’s regularity and analysability. Wetherell scaffolds her

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argument with examples of enacted affect (drawing on research by Capps & Ochs, 1995; Goodwin, 2006), arguing that feelings of affective overwhelm and claims about affective mystique evaporate under the gaze of social-psychological affective practice analysis. To support her view of the emergence of affect as being historically and biographically traceable, Wetherell (selectively) cites Mead (“the emergent when it appears is always found to follow from the past”) to cut uncanny affect further down to size (cf. Stenner, 2018 on Mead’s views on ‘emergence’). Here, analysis has no limits while complexity is kept on a very short leash. Affect’s apparent complexity and baffling intensity are just unfortunate refractions of insufficient (biographical-historical) data and unfinished (discursive-practical) analysis. Nothing that affect does is unobservable and inarticulable in or as practice. Indeed, affect is as analysable as manifest discourse: “[a]ffect and discourse, so frequently divided, intertwine as topic” (Wetherell, 2015a: 85). The view that affect and meaning mutually constitute one another2 is elaborated also in Ruth Leys’ work. Leys critiques ‘affect theorists’ (notably Connolly, 2002; Massumi, 2002) for promoting an “antiintentionalist” position (Leys, 2017: 352). ‘Anti-intentionalism’ puts limits on human agency in the interest of defining affect as “unconscious, never-to-conscious autonomic remainder” (Massumi, 1995: 85). Countering this, Leys views affect as always already social and intentional, and she regards her account as “not mak[ing] the error of separating the affects from cognition or meaning in the way the recent [affect] theorists … do” (Leys, 2011: 468–469). For this, Leys has been accused of ‘cognitivism’ according to which human activity is managed entirely through rational-cognitive means (Still 2 For Hayley, meaning marshals semiosis (as the structured negotiation of relations and interactions by means of sign routines) and operates at the level of consciousness (i.e. the process of discerning and imposing coherence in/on events and experiences), as well as at the level of the ‘cognitive unconscious’ as ‘unthought’ (Hayley, 2017). An example of ‘unthought meaning’ is my sub-conscious response to your sub-conscious facial or bodily gesture. In her account, Hayley prioritises ‘information processing’ as defining capability of this ‘cognitive unconscious’: “a member of the Homo Sapiens species … is capable of using reason and abstraction but is not wholly trapped within them; embedded in her environment, she is aware that she processes information from many sources, including internal body systems and emotional and affectual nonconscious processes” (Hayley, 2017: 63/4). For Hayley, information (i.e. cognition) equates with re-presentation as neuronal mapping of another (potential originary) neuronal event. This mapping may be conscious or unconscious. For her therefore affect is essentially ‘nonconscious’.

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& Costall, 1991): “Leys … endorses a version of the cognitivism to which affect theory provides a refreshing corrective” (Cromby & Willis, 2016: 483).3 To escape this charge of cognitivism, Cromby and Willis proceed to ground life in “a view of experience which understands it as primordially constituted by feelings” (Cromby & Willis, 2016: 484). For them, feelings are not unqualified intensities but ‘qualifying intensities’. Depending on their intensity, these feelings, and “especially nervous ones, above a certain (probably fluctuating) limen of intensity, enter into psychical phase … of being felt” (Cromby & Willis, 2016: 484). This stance anticipates my discussion below about sense as the felt dimension, the ‘qualifying intensity’, that animates meaning-making. Before I can proceed to discuss sense as that which anchors meaning in affect, I need to go into the background of how affect and vitalism more generally rose in popularity in the latter part of the twentieth century. I’ll restrict myself to three overarching reasons. The first is that, after decades of structuralist and post-structuralist concern with language, textuality and the structures of semiosis, a desire arose across the humanities (e.g. Foucault, 1977) and social sciences (e.g. De Certeau, 1984) to re-engage with the material and bodily dimensions of existence. Echoing trends in feminist theory (Butler, 1993; Grosz, 1994), Sedgwick and Frank (1995) came to prominence when they sought to retrieve the body’s biology, albeit via Tomkins’ affect phenomenology that advocated for a fixed set of universal in-person emotions (Leys, 2011), rather than for affect as it became defined subsequently: a dynamic supra-personal force or energy. Be that as it may, this interest in biology served to counter “the structuralist reliance on symbolisation through binary pairings of elements, defined in a diacritical relation to one another and no more than arbitrarily associated with the things symbolised” (Sedgwick & Frank, 1995: 497). With this, affect took on the role of collector concept, foregrounding sense more specifically as the space between symbolisation and the things symbolised (see Chapters 3 and 4). A second reason centred on the perceived limits of critique as overarching analytical motivation and perspective (Latour, 2004; Sloterdijk, 1984). Critique harbours the conviction that humans are or should be 3 Leys’ cognitivism is further confirmed by her take on people’s articulations and experiences of trauma, which she regards as limiting only “theatrical self-representation – and hence conscious memory”, but not representation per se.

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capable of better ways of living, relating, thinking and theorising, and that life could or should be lived better. While this stance may seem unassailable, it presupposes that the critic can exempt themselves from life and apprehend and judge it from a safe and more knowledgeable outside (Foucault & Deleuze, 1977), rather than also and inevitably being caught up in the suboptimal realities and limits of life and human agency (Sloterdijk, 1984). This acknowledgement accompanied another. At a time when the role of humans in shaping life on earth was consolidated with neologisms such as the ‘anthropocene’ and ‘technofossils’ (Zalasiewicz & Williams, 2016), forces larger than human life (e.g. evolutionary and cosmic forces) became a motivation for ‘prepersonal’ and ‘posthuman’ conceptions (Barad, 2003; Grosz, 2011; Haraway, 1992). Affect theory keyed in (again: see Blackman, 2013) to the supra-human by recognising the significance of energies connecting bodies ‘at a distance’ (Massumi, 2002), mimesis (Gibbs, 2010), atmospheres (Bohme, 1993), and the like. The third reason takes inspiration from the idea of the universe’s unceasing becoming. Here, Deleuze’s ‘difference’ plays a role in so far as it frames all-life-as-becoming: “difference is the undoing of all stabilities” (Grosz, 2011: 112).4 As Grosz explains, Deleuze’s concept of difference is not comparative but originary: this difference does not fix things in opposition but is inherent in things as such, since any thing is always on the way to becoming different. Defining life per se, difference is the “capacity to become different” (Greco, 2019: 11). This means that “the constraint of coherence and consistency in subjects, and in the identity of things and events, is less significant than the capacity or potential for change, for being other” (Grosz, 2011: 112). An unsettling implication of framing difference as energy-to-become is that such difference will transcend or go beyond organic becoming. As such, difference is a force that transcends every thing. In that sense, difference realises a non-human/non-organic, a ‘machinic’, or even a cosmic becoming. Collectively, these three reasons represent a progressive withdrawal from human-centric reasoning: the first advocates for an exit from cognition in favour of the body as a whole; the second advocates for an exit from the individual in favour of pre-personal and supra-individual phenomena, and the third advocates for an exit from humanity per se 4 Grosz’s complete sentence is: “difference is the undoing of all stabilities, the inherent and immanent condition for the failure of identity”.

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in order to envisage a post-human logic of becoming (Braidotti, 2017).5 Affect theory espouses these concerns by prioritising that which drives the whole of existence: vitalist energy.

Vitalism---Active/Passive This calling into question of human-centric reason has been accompanied by a resurgence in interest in vitalism. The first thing to acknowledge here is that the notion ‘difference’ defined as the ‘capacity to become different’ has a close affinity with the notion ‘vitalism’. Something is alive or ‘vital’ if and when it has the capacity to become different. But whereas some conceptions of vitalism prioritise purely organic life (Colebrook characterises this as ‘active or organic vitalism’), others encompass both organic and inorganic phenomena (she refers to this as ‘passive vitalism’ [Colebrook, 2010]). The latter ‘passive’ vitalism posits a fundamental continuity between living and non-living phenomena, as well as a shared capacity to become different. Such vitalism does not stake its definition on organismic features. It offers a “concept of life [that characterises] not what a certain type of being is but what it is not (yet)” (Greco, 2019: 11). According to this more extensive or ‘passive’ vitalism (‘passive’ in the sense that this vitalism exceeds anything and everything a human might want or do), everything is undergoing difference and is ceasing to be what it is, however slowly or rapidly. Hence, difference manifests in and as entities’ speeds of becoming: rocks change slowly; plants more rapidly; insects more rapidly still. Vitalism, then, describes life not as that which manifests itself to us, but as that which promises to manifest in ways that are not (yet) visible, sensible or evident. This vitalism embodies an energy that exceeds what is. The vitalist abstraction of ‘that-which-is-not-yet’ links to the original definitions of affect where affect “exceeds all efforts to contain it, even our efforts to contain its thought in the affective turn” (Ticineto-Clough, 5 Colebrook frames the reasons for the shift from information and structure towards affect and becoming as: “three general features: a rejection of any centre, model or privileged term from which relations would follow (decentring); a refusal to posit any principle outside life that would govern living systems (immanence); and a demotion of cognition or information-based forms of relation to do with calculation in favour of relations that are always determined by specific powers and not some matter in general (affectivity)” (Colebrook, 2010: 32).

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2007: 28). Here, affect is autonomous, until, that is, it is qualified by being named and appropriated, subjecting affect to closure and constraint: 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, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. (Massumi, 2002: 35)

Once named and qualified, affect yields its energetic potential to structure or “the place where nothing ever happens”. Massumi saw structure (meaning, language, representation) as taming affect, and he accused analysts of restricting their understanding of affect to “that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a selfconsistent set of invariant generative rules” (Massumi, 2002: 27). With this, the dichotomisation of affect and meaning/language became total: meaning-making domesticates and technologises a prior, purer affectivity. Unfortunately, this dichotomisation presents two problems. First, it downplays the phylogenic reality that meaning and languaging are contingent on and therefore permeated by affect. This is because they arise in and from affect as it constitutes an ontogenic space of interpersonal immediacy and intimacy (Thibault, 2004). As I will discuss in Chapter 4, this space opens up what Halliday referred to as an ‘interpersonal gateway’ into meaning-making (Halliday, 1975). For individuals to be able to learn how to mean, they need nurturing through close interpersonal connections and affective relations. In short, meaning is contingent on and inseparable from ontogenically prior affect. Second, divorcing affect from meaning as is suggested by original affect theory risks complicating our accounts about the here-and-now dynamics and tensions that permeate the becoming of meaning (or its becoming undone) in the present. This point homes in on meanings’ struggle to make sense, an affective concern that regulates meanings’ authority, or their legitimacy to mean and be meaningful in the now. This is where we locate sense: sense is what motivates or gives rise to meaning in the first place, without which meaning might flounder if not founder. This is why “Deleuze … put sense before and beyond meaning” (Colebrook, 2010: 3). Sense embodies the dynamics defining of whether and how meaning secures sufficient meaningfulness for it to be heard as meant. If meaning equates to that which is said and heard, sense refers

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to the prior dynamic from and through which meaning arises and then gains a foothold in existing flows of meaning-making. If the meaning of It is sunny is to represent a specific set of (experiential, interpersonal, expressional) dynamics, its sense is anchored in the whole ecology of affects that invests It is sunny with adequate sensibility, feasibility, confidence and significance for it to become meanable, sayable and hearable. Meaning is thus contingent on and inseparable from sociogenically (or ‘spherogenically’6 ) prior affect. Third, divorcing affect from meaning runs counter to phylogenic explanations of how hominids came to inhabit the human(ising/ised) clearing. Theories of the formation of human sociality foreground the affective, spherogenic or self/other-domesticating energies defining of how hominids and early humans shaped and inhabited the spaces where their new affective-practical-technical lives became both possible and necessary (Protevi, 2019; Sloterdijk, 2017). Self-domestication was thus not just a matter of practical-technical and biological-evolutionary developments, such as hominids’ move out of the trees into bipedal life in the savannahs (Deacon, 1997), early humans’ expanding modes of tool and symbol use (Rossi-Landi, 1975), or humans’ shift from hunter-gathering into agrarian settlement and complex languages (Halliday, 2004). Rather, self-domestication as the logic that governs humans in how and where to be equally arose from complex relational (Sloterdijk, 2017) and societal (Protevi, 2019) developments (see Chapter 5). In short, meaning (or the logic of how and where to be) is phylogenically contingent on and inseparable from affect. Collectively, the above three points suggest that the vital energy of affect makes life and meaning possible by permanently permeating both. This conclusion accords affective-vital energy at once a degree of autonomy, and a practical contingency (as modulation of and manifestation in what is unfolding). This returns us to Cromby and Willis’ principle according to which affect is the qualifying intensity that animates and modulates the ‘author-ity’, the weight, the licence and the mandate of meaning (Cromby & Willis, 2016).

6 Spherogenics refers to the engendering of social spheres (Iedema & Carroll, 2015), where spheres are more or less volatile spatial arrangements of agential-material affordances. The term ‘assemblagenic’ could be proposed as equivalent, if assemblage is understood as agencement or the ‘agentification’ of that and those that inhabit the assemblage.

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In shifting our attention from meaning to sense,7 we thus foreground the emergence and the senescence of meaning, rather than prioritising its (ideational) interpretations and (interpersonal, expressional) accomplishments (Dawkins, 2020). Sense brings to life or stifles the possibility of meaning arising; sense inhabits the intensity of pain and pleasure, and it determines the force of significance and of relevance. Anchored in affect, sense is thus to be read as operating prior to its initiation in or as meaning, but not separately from meaning which is its medium.8 Above we saw that the abstraction of affect as domain beyond meaning met with extensive critique (e.g. Leys, 2011; Wetherell, 2015b). One such critique was detailed above: Wetherell’s denial that affect, including anything ‘uncanny’, could manifest in terms not available within the confines of meaning and language. Now, we realise that sense, as the affective dimension of meaning-making, is not separable from meaning, but anchors meaning; it licences meaning. That is, sense modulates my feeling convinced about what I say, and my feeling entirely unsure. I may not even be able to make or articulate meaning. Sense, within this context, is only autonomous in so far as it determines how meaning feels. As seen above, Wetherell’s challenge to affect as autonomous momentum was psychological, or indeed psychoanalytical9 : “bursts of intense affect are less uncanny, eerie and weird than they may appear” (Wetherell, 2012: 30). Wetherell’s confidence here seems anchored not just in Freud’s analytical colonisation of the unconscious (Freud, 2003 [1919]) but also in Tomkins’ description of ‘affective scripts’ (Sedgwick & Frank, 1995: 499). The presumption of pattern, however coded, wins

7 In Frege’s Sense and Reference (1952), sense is meaning where reference is the object of meaning. Sense as discussed in the present chapter draws on a different notion of sense (Deleuze, 1969). Williams explains Deleuze’s sense as anchored in existence: “Existence is sense and not to be confused with meaning for humans” (Williams, 2008: 23). For Whitehead too, sense (he uses the term ‘sensum’) precedes meaning as it lacks “contrasts or patterns” and as such “does not, for its own realisation, require any eternal object [representation]” (Whitehead, 1960: 114). 8 Whitehead articulates a related idea as follows: “The simplest grade of actual occasions must be conceived as experiencing a few sensa, with the minimum of patterned contrast. The sensa are then experienced emotionally, and constitute the specific feelings whose intensities sum up into the unity of satisfaction [i.e. meaning]” (Whitehead, 1960: 115). 9 Wetherell’s challenge takes heart from Freud’s claim that the uncanny “is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition” (Freud, 2003 [1919]: 15).

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out over the experience of both the becoming of meaning and the dissolution of meaning (as the inability to mean). In a similar vein, Emily Martin regards social life as steeped in and impossible without meaning and intention. Her challenge to affect theory is anthropological, as she sees it “[r]emoving any interest in intentionality”. For her, affect theory “remove[s] socially produced contexts of use as a necessary and sufficient basis for what actions and words mean to people” (Martin, 2013: S156). To sum up, affect theorists foreground momentum, impulse, energy or vitality, against the background realisation of life’s capacity to be(come) what it is not. In contrast, the psychologists and anthropologists encountered seek to redeem, analyse and hold up as explanatory of life its patterned and structured dimensions. The former regard the present as what we cease to be. The latter regard the present as what bears out the logic and persistence of (patterns of) the past. The former set store by the energy of affect to affect and transform life, meaning and people. What matters here is sense as the modulator of how life, meanings, others and circumstances feel and of how these constantly change. The latter prioritise meaning as patterns and structures, and they see meaning as the (potentially indirect) realisation of affect.

Among many other things, John felt his institution’s instructions and directives for him to submit to counselling and testing were like an assault (one was emailed to him a day before Christmas Eve). This was no longer a mode of communication inviting response, evidence or arguments. This was communication aiming for damage perpetrated through language made to appear appropriate and legitimate, through whitewashed threats concealed in a depersonalising discourse of rules and requirements. He spent most of this Christmas holiday in a daze of bewilderment and a cloud of fury. Nothing could really be said anymore after this. No argument, no evidence, no response could reach the people who were shrouding themselves in a formality with the effect of a ‘mobbing’ (James, 2015).

A vexing question that remains is this: What are the implications if we analyse our own experiences as ‘affective practices’, as Wetherell suggests we do? For her, “bursts of intense affect” remain contained within the affective logic of our bio-histories (Wetherell, 2012: 30). Martin holds

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that ethnological analysis will render the “incomprehensible meaningful” (Martin, 2013: S157). Lewis and Mazzarella (see below) regard bursts of affect as essentially political. What these latter perspectives have in common is that for them affective experience is to be equated to affective display. Everything including intense or overwhelming feeling manifests as in situ performance of a describable identity, biography, sociality or positionality. Affect is performative as its root is “the logic of shared life” (Wetherell, 2012: 80). This logic is “affective-discursive” (Wetherell, 2015b: 152), and it is “social all the way down” (Martin, 2013: S157). To hammer this point home in her 2012 book, Wetherell describes a schoolgirl who is accused of breaking a hopscotch rule by her classmates (an example she takes from Goodwin’s [2006] work on playground dynamics). Her description aims to highlight the logic, the empirics and observability of enacted affect to avoid “formulating affect as a kind of extra-discursive and uncanny excess” (Wetherell, 2015a: 84). Acknowledging the “overly deterministic tendencies in post-structuralist discourse theory and the tendencies of fine-grain work to refuse to raise its gaze from the transcribed marks on the page” (Wetherell, 2013: 353), Wetherell nevertheless elevates Goodwin’s example to proof of how the accuser and the accused display an observable and explicable behavioural practice bearing out a symbolical logic. Thus, she writes, in exclaiming that one of the girls broke the hopscotch rule, the accusing girl’s … … moment of affect involves her whole body and her movements are intimately choreographed and patterned with her words. Her words and her body demonstrate her affective position and stance in the ongoing interaction. She is first a judge, then an accuser, and then the demonstrator of exactly what was wrong … this affective display is normatively organised as part of socially recognised routines or affective practices. (Wetherell, 2012: 80)

Interestingly, Wetherell’s focus is on the accuser rather than on the girl being accused, aside from noting that the latter “is swept up in this affect [and] her body stance … is somewhere between a cringe, a smile and a shrug” (Wetherell, 2012: 80). She looks embarrassed, amused and annoyed, engaged in what looks like a local, relational, affective counter-point to a justified accusation that catches one out in an illegitimate act. (Wetherell, 2012: 80)

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The interesting aspect of this account is Wetherell’s priority to frame the interaction not as an emotional conflict, a potential crisis, but as a “normative back and forth”, a “dance”: The affective pattern is in fact distributed across the relational field and each partner’s part becomes meaningful only in relation to the whole affective dance. (Wetherell, 2012: 87)

Foregrounding the affective choreography and normative regularity of highly charged and tense events has its value. Taking such an ‘ethnological’ perspective on affective events may enable analysts as well as participants to perceive affective moves and habits of which we may not have been aware (Iedema & Carroll, 2015), and this may defuse their intensity. By the same token, such perspective backgrounds the conflictual and destabilising intensities that the accused girl may have been experiencing: her humiliation, resentment, confusion, frustration and continuing doubts. So I want to ask: in bypassing affective intensity (and by coding this ‘simply’ as ‘cringe, smile, shrug’), by ruling out affective excess as no more than a misconception, and by accounting for the girls’ exchange in terms of an ‘affective practice’ and a ‘dance’ captured as semiotic-discursive behaviour, what do we lose, what do we gain? One answer is Mazzarella’s who emphasises the political significance of such semiotic-discursive analysis. As do Wetherell, Martin and Leys, he rejects the notion that affect ever manifests outside of meaning and intentionality (Mazzarella, 2010). Mazzarella regards ‘autonomous affect’ (as defined by Massumi and his affect-theoretical colleagues) as an “illusion of pre-mediated existence – of immediation”. For him, the idea of autonomous affect operating outside of meaning or semiosis relies on “a crudely romantic distinction between, on the one side, all-encompassing form (whose totalising ambition must be resisted) and, on the other side, the evanescent forms of affective and – it is often implied – popular potentiality (which must be nurtured and celebrated)” (Mazzarella, 2010: 301). Here, unmediated affect or ‘affective immediacy’ (cf. Deleuze’s ‘pure act’10 ) is ‘a fantasy’.

10 Colebrook explains how Deleuze generalised about this dynamic in terms of three general modalities. The first refers to relations that are ‘pure acts’. As with chemotaxis, pure acts offer ‘zero-intensity’. They are programmatic and immediate as there is no freedom at this (molecular) level in how the organism reacts: “molecular perception …

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Unmediated affect is a fantasy, in Mazzarella’s view, because its very idea goes against the inevitable meaningfulness of all of human behaviour, notwithstanding the instability and indeterminacy of meaning. So rather than invoking the spectre of ‘immediate (unmediated) affect’, and positing the emergent [i.e. affect] as the only vital hope against the dead hand of mediation [i.e. meaning and its patterns and structures], why not consider the possibility that mediation is at once perhaps the most fundamental and productive principle of all social life precisely because it is necessarily incomplete, unstable, and provisional? (Mazzarella, 2010: 302)

Here, Mazzarella makes an important point. Pace Massumi, structure is never fully ‘dead’, as anything structural and patterned inevitably remains suspended in the currents and rapids of social exchange, intention and interpretation. Put differently, life and becoming, affect and life’s energy, all manifest through and as contested structures and patterns. But for this point to hold, it must be stated in more accurate terms. Above I intimated that the crux of Deleuze’s questioning of semiotic theory was the realisation that, for any specific meaning to emerge and be articulated, some ‘knowledge’ of what is to be meant will need to already exist: I’m aware of the pain that I’m trying to articulate in advance of its articulation. My sensed knowledge—my sense—of pain as the to-be-semiotised object however is not fixed and stable. The pain fluctuates in intensity, feel and locale, and my sense of it morphs accordingly, potentially to the point where the pain becomes overwhelming and renders me incapable of articulating its meaning and perhaps even preventing me from making meaning per se.

is nothing other than what it receives” (Colebrook, 2006: 7). The second refers to ‘pure perception’: here, whatever goes on is met with pure, un-acting, un-responding contemplation and acceptance: “not acting [creates the possibility of] perceiving the difference and multiple potential of what is presented (a God’s-eye view or grasp of the whole of life”) (Colebrook, 2006: 7). Caught in-between these two extremes, human perception/action hovers around “a midway point between a molecular perception that is nothing other than what it receives, with no delay or decision – a pure act – and a pure perception that in not acting, moving or selecting … is capable of perceiving the difference and multiple potential of what is presented” (Colebrook, 2006: 7). The task now then is not one of aligning meaning and experience by accepting “the existence of a system of signification, but [one of examining] how such systems emerge, work and are produced” (Colebrook, 2006: 44).

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Here, I struggle to mean. Any articulation of my sense-knowledge of my pain does not just inadequately re-present the pain. It also unduly frames the pain thereby obscuring if not erasing the pain as original object (Dawkins, 2020). This is when the articulation (the meaning) overshadows the pain to the point of the articulated meaning losing track of its original legitimacy (as descriptor of a feeling), separating from its Lacanian ‘point de capiton’,11 or its meaning-knowledge-object anchorage. Here, it becomes evident that “[w]e don’t only interpret what words (for example) mean; we also feel how they do (or don’t) connect, flow, associate, imply, contradict, gloss, suggest, connote, and so on” (Cromby & Willis, 2016: 486). While Mazzarella acknowledges that meaning can become unstable, uncertain and ineffective, he glosses over the possibility of meaning becoming so unstable as to lose communicative grip and efficacy. This is the point where the sense that ordinarily legitimates meaning drains from its relations, leaving meaning senseless, unable now to confirm relations, or invest them with energy and confidence: here meaning turns meaningless. But, while Mazzarella admits instability, he rules out senselessness and meaninglessness. And yet, the practical possibility of meaninglessness (the point where our pre-articulated knowledge of the object becomes unable to settle into meaningful relations) raises a dilemma for those for whom the inadequate or failed rendering of sense as meaning constitutes ‘merely’ a personal-mental misapprehension (since all of life is always tied to meaning all the way down), and can never be experienced as a crisis of meaning-making per se.

Sense Modulates (or Exceeds) Meaning If instability and indeterminacy are defining of sense as Deleuze suggests, they are intrinsic to meaning-making, albeit variable in manifestation and effect. Think of moments of overwhelm—“moments or spaces of disorientation, when we are ‘in the dark’ [and] we may try to appease ourselves by humming a tune, clapping our hands or tapping our fingers … as a sort of rhythmic reaction that constitutes a reassuring resource, a 11 Wilden comments in a note accompanying his Lacan translation that Lacan regards meaning as ‘buttoned to experience’: “Lacan has suggested there must be some privileged anchoring point or ‘point de capiton’, points like buttons on a mattress” (Wilden, 1981: 273).

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protective mechanism, an antidote against fear and chaos” (Ingala, 2018: 190). Think also of very ill patients, whose language ‘collapses’ “in the face of incommunicable profundities which escape existing communicative gestalts” (Greco & Stenner, 2017: 158). On a more general level, too, there appear to be all kinds of opportunities for overwhelm: think of how living has been characterised “as a kind of … wandering … without determinate, ultimate finality”, with human beings “the least finalised of all” (Osborne, 2016: 195). In each of these instances, chaos and uncertainty are not just obstacles to a functioning explanation. Rather, they represent a ‘non-dimensional state’: The experience of chaos is not so much that of a mere disorder as that of a non-dimensional state, of pure and formless undifferentiation, a non-space or a non-time with no points of reference and no localisations; hence the disorientation. (Ingala, 2018: 193)

During these moments, life struggles to ‘cut out’ liveable milieux from its environments. Life may fail, facing “critical conjunctures where the environment … overwhelms the milieu and the organism is stranded without normative horizon” (Osborne, 2016: 197). When the entire relation between the organism and the environment breaks down the organism enters … the catastrophic situation, the response being a form of ‘catastophic reaction’ or normative disarray …. (Osborne, 2016: 197)

This experience of instability, uncertainty and disorientation necessitates a ‘mutual grappling and capture’ between the sensible (my sense of disarray) and the articulable (what I can say about it): Between the [sensible] and the articulable we must maintain all the following aspects at the same time: the heterogeneity of the two forms; their difference in nature or anisomorphism12 [and] a mutual presupposition between the two, a mutual grappling and capture …. (Deleuze, 1988: 67/8)

12 The absence of an exact correspondence between words and expressions in two different languages.

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This absence of an exact correspondence between the sensible and articulable means they may fail in their ‘mutual grappling and capture’. Such failure means our senso-semiotic milieu is disintegrating. At such times, we tend to retreat to rhythm as the simplest enactment of being alive, since rhythm permeates our bodies in numerous ways, including the heartbeat, breathing, sleeping, digestion, and so forth, and life is in that sense fully polyrhythmic (Protevi, 2013: 161). Since rhythm has been argued to be humans’ first way of “keeping together in time” (McNeill, 1995: 22), it may also be their last. In the next chapter, I discuss how a loss of meaning may also lead us in the opposite direction away from meaning, as it attenuates our urge to mean and open us up (more) to the realm of sense. Focal in that discussion is how disorientation and disarray may engender a very different crisis, warranting not a resurrection of but a ‘letting be’ of meaning.

Conclusion This chapter has clarified the stances of affect theorists and of their critics. I addressed the autonomy of affect thesis and related it back to Massumi’s vitalist claims and to the pre-organic stance evident in Deleuze’s work. The latter posits sense as a space of instability where the sensible and the articulable are caught up in ‘mutual grappling’, impelled by life’s inevitable and ongoing becoming. The next chapter delves further into becoming from the perspective of becoming undone, and considers the transformations of sense this may entrain.

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Capps, L., & Ochs, E. (1995). Constructing panic: The discourse of agoraphobia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Colebrook, C. (2006). Deleuze: A guide for the perplexed. London: Bloomsbury. Colebrook, C. (2010). Deleuze and the meaning of life. London: Continuum. Connolly, W. (2002). Neuropolitics: Thinking, culture, speed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cromby, J., & Willis, M. E. H. (2016). Affect—Or feeling (after Leys). Theory & Psychology, 26(4), 476–495. Dawkins, R. (2020). From the perspective of the object in semiotics: Deleuze and Perice. Semiotica, 233(2020), 1–18. De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. London: University of California Press. Deacon, T. (1997). The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and brain. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Deleuze, G. (1969). Logic of sense (C. V. Boundas, M. Lester, & C. J. Stivale, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault. London and New York: Athlone Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M., & Deleuze, G. (1977). Intellectuals and power. In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews (pp. 205–217). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Frege, G. (1952). On sense and reference. In P. Geach & M. Black (Eds.), Translations from the philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege. New York: Blackwell. Freud, S. (2003 [1919]). The “uncanny”. London: Penguin. Gibbs, A. (2010). After affect: Sympathy, synchrony and mimetic communication. In M. Gregg & G. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 186–205). Durham: Duke University Press. Goodwin, M. (2006). The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of stance, status, and exclusion. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Greco, M. (2019). Vitalism now—A problematic. Theory, Culture & Society, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419848034. Greco, M., & Stenner, P. (2017). From paradox to pattern shift: Conceptualising liminal hotspots and their affective dynamics. Theory & Psychology, 27 (2), 147–166. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Grosz, E. (2011). Becoming undone: Darwinian reflections on life, politics and art. Durham: Duke University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. (1975). Learning how to mean. London: Edward Arnold.

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Halliday, M. A. K. (2004). On grammar as the driving force from primary to higher-order consciousness. In G. Williams & A. Lukin (Eds.), The development of language: Functional perspectives on species and individuals. London and New York: Continuum. Haraway, D. (1992). The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P. A. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 295–337). New York: Routledge. Hayley, K. (2017). Unthought: The power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago. Iedema, R., & Carroll, K. (2015). Research as affect-sphere: Towards spherogenics. Emotion Review, 7 (1), 1–7. Ingala, E. (2018). Of the refrain (The Ritornello). In H. Somers-Hall, J. A. Bell, & J. Williams (Eds.), A thousand plateaus and philosophy (pp. 190–205). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. James, J. (2015). Bad behaviour in the Australian public service. Australia: Kindle. Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Enquiry, 30(Winter 2004), 225–248. Leys, R. (2011). The turn to affect: A critique. Critical Inquiry, 37 (3), 434–472. Leys, R. (2017). The ascent of affect: Genealogy and critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martin, E. (2013). The potentiality of ethnography and the limits of affect theory. Current Anthropology, 54(7), S149–S158. Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31(Autumn), 83–109. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Mazzarella, W. (2010). Affect: What is it good for? In S. Dube (Ed.), Enchantments of modernity: Empire, nation, globalization (pp. 291–309). New York: Routledge. McNeill, W. H. (1995). Keeping together in time: Dance and drill in human history. Boston: Harvard University Press. Osborne, T. (2016). Vitalism as pathos. Biosemiotics, 2016(9), 185–205. Protevi, J. (2013). Life, war, earth: Deleuze and the sciences. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Protevi, J. (2019). States of nature: Geographical aspects of current theories of human evolution. Political Geography, 70(2019), 127–136. Rossi-Landi, F. (1975). Linguistics and economics. The Hague: Mouton. Sedgwick, E., & Frank, A. (1995). Shame in the cybernetic fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins. Critical Inquiry, 21(2), 496–522. Sloterdijk, P. (1984). Critique of cynical reason. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Sloterdijk, P. (2017). The domestication of being: The clarification of the clearing. In P. Sloterdijk (Ed.), Not saved: Essays after Heidegger (pp. 90–148). Cambridge: Polity Press. Stenner, P. (2018). Liminality and experience: A transdisciplinary approach to the psychosocial. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Still, A., & Costall, A. (1991). Against cognitivism: Alternative foundations for cognitive psychology. Hemel Hampstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Thibault, P. (2004). Brain, mind and the signifying body. London: Continuum. Ticineto-Clough, P. (2007). Introduction. In P. Ticineto-Clough & J. Halley (Eds.), The affective turn: Theorising the social (pp. 1–33). Durham: Duke University Press. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. London: Sage. Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and discourse—What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice. Subjectivity, 6(4), 349–368. Wetherell, M. (2015a). Tears, bubbles and diappointment—New approaches for the analysis of affective-discursive practices: A commentary on ‘Researching the psychosocial’. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 12(2015), 83–90. Wetherell, M. (2015b). Trends in the turn to affect: A social-psychological critique. Body & Society, 21(2), 139–166. Whitehead, A. N. (1960). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology. New York: Harper Row. Wilden, A. (1981). Translation of J. Lacan: Speech and language in psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Williams, J. (2008). Gilles Deleuze’s logic of sense. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zalasiewicz, J., & Williams, M. (2016). Dawn of the Anthropocene: Five ways we know humans have triggered a new geological epoch. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/dawn-of-the-anthropocene-five-ways-weknow-humans-have-triggered-a-new-geological-epoch-52867.

CHAPTER 3

Undoings

Abstract This chapter describes the impact of becoming undone and explores its consequences for the theorisation of meaninglessness. The discussion touches on the effacement of self and moves on from there to address the significance of passivity and of ‘passivity competence’. Bypassing narratives that privilege self-reinvention of self after loss, the chapter invokes two of Simondon’s concepts with which to frame the self as delicate precarity: transindividuation and transduction. These concepts underscore that, insofar as the self is able to find immunity in meaning, all meaning is destined sooner or later to fail. But thanks to this precarity, life gains on another front: the intensifying sense of affective immediacy, of life opening up to a “resonance of being in relation to itself”. This resonance reconnects to the issue of passivity and to how passivity opens up the possibility of our ‘participation in unfamiliar others’ movement/expression competence’. Keywords Meaninglessness · Transindividuation · Transduction · Affective immediacy

© The Author(s) 2021 R. Iedema, Affected, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62736-2_3

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Undoing Mediation was considered necessary following the filing by the senior colleague of a counter-complaint, claiming harassment. The mediation process was conducted by someone who was a mediation specialist, not an academic, and for whom academic track record statements therefore may not represent what they did for John or for the funders from whom he had sought and intended to seek funding. John’s reporting of SC’s falsifications, together with the relevant clauses from funding bodies’ websites detailing misconduct criteria and instant rejection of applications or projects in progress, was thereby reduced to a series of obligatory mediation encounters between two people who now loathed each other. The mediation process materialised in one very awkward and tense encounter during which John insisted that any agreement coming out of the mediation would have to include a collaborative statement that inaccurate track record claims henceforth were unacceptable. This is where the process broke down, and the senior colleague departed the meeting and went overseas, refusing to attend any further meetings. A much watered-down e-agreement was reached about needing to maintain a respectful relationship and desist from speaking derogatively to each other or about each other to others. It got pared back from academic conduct agreement to politeness treaty. John ultimately signed the agreement, duly noting that UM stipulated in an intimidating cover letter that the mediation document was not to be shared with anyone else. Upon signing and returning the agreement document, John received this in reply (extract): [logo] [date] Dear John I acknowledge receipt of your letter of [date] in relation to the mediation between yourself and [SC]. …

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… I must point out that success of the mediation is defined not only as signing of a Work Relationship Agreement, but by compliance with it. Should the terms of the mediation agreement be breached, [SC]’s complaint [against you] will be formally investigated. [Signed, Faculty leadership] This, in addition to several subsequent management interventions, completed John’s undoing. Their mobbing and threats had now entirely annihilated him.

In the previous chapter, I discussed the ways in which relations among affect, meaning and becoming are construed in the literature. For some of the authors reviewed in Chapter 2 affect and meaning are always already intertwined, such that no affect is ever without meaning. For them, the idea that our ways of being in the world include a potential regression from meaning down to rhythm, or a lapse from meaning into reflexes drained of semiosis but steeped in affect, is a fallacy: for them, these are not instances of excess affect, and their apparent lack of meaning signals no more than the absence of a rigorous explanation. Such explanation, they claim, will acknowledge my distress or pain to be occasioned by (unexpected) events, but primarily elicits their affective meaning by analysing how and how severely they test the vigour and persistence of my own thwarted expectations and failed identifications. Any remaining disorientation and uncanny feelings of ‘non-dimensionality’ (Ingala, 2018) simply call for greater effort at understanding, more accounting for what happened, more discourse. The disagreement between those who advocate for the discursive constitution of affect and reject affect’s pre-personal autonomy (Leys, 2017; Martin, 2013; Wetherell, 2012), and those who define affect using terminologies that evoke a ‘space beyond meaning’ turns on how the different stand-points frame meaning. For the former, meaning as in the act of making meaning (speaking, languaging, symbolising, representing) permeates being in the world. For them, the absence of meaning is a theoretical impossibility and an experiential misapprehension of the meaning of our circumstances. For the latter, our faith in and concern with meaning are precarious claims to dwelling within meaning. Here,

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meaninglessness finds a theoretical home as that place where what is sensed (as yet) defies or negates articulation. This chapter questions the stance that subscribes to the discursive constitution of affect by delving into meaninglessness as affective register, as a sense we have of life. As seen in Chapter 2, sense is affectivity, and affectivity pertains to a realm beyond meaning: “Affectivity is a way of thinking of life without a recourse to meaning; before there are concepts and sign systems there are non-conscious bodily responses that enable a being to make its way in the world, and to form primary differentiations from which meaning (as systematised and repeatable) will be possible” (Colebrook, 2010: 32). Once meanings are established, affectivity may engulf meanings that commonly make sense but which now falter and fail. Meanings’ faltering may affect breathing, metabolism and brain function (van der Kolk, 2014) and may reduce us to increasingly simple invocations, iterations, rhythms (cf. ‘ritornellos’1 ), as the only reassuring means and only remaining possibilities for going on and ‘making sense’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; Ingala, 2018). In what follows, I explore becoming undone and meaninglessness as realisations of a particular affective register.

Loss of Meaning … becoming in Deleuze’s work is always coupled in a manner that is the undoing and positive destruction of any subject who would claim to be the agent of becoming. (Colebrook, 2017: 118) A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988: 311)

1 A ritornello is a recurrent musical pattern wedged in between variations.

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In the dark, we are challenged to acknowledge that the meaning we try to make of that which resists meaning is not so much a re-presentation as a de-presentation of what is going on and who we are. In its urge to capture that which now is bigger (or smaller) than it, meaning risks ‘breaking apart at any moment’. The sense of meaning loses ground to a beforemeaning realisation: meaning captures us (rather than the world or the dark) in a limited and limiting sphere, clearing and shelter. This realisation reveals that we can now live through “unspoken depths” that invoke a “language beyond language” (Stenner, 2018: loc. 1394), subjected to what “cannot be contained within an order of meaning” (Colebrook, 2010: 118, citing Deleuze & Guattari 1977: 204). ‘We’ (the meanings, performances, senses that have buttressed our existence) are becoming, through becoming undone. This point, where the sense of meaning becomes volatile and dissipates, takes on a double function. This undoing of what we had, what we were, and what we knew, in effect, strips us of everything we took to define us and life. In doing so, it lays bare sense beyond meaning as life that persists beyond meaninglessness. This encounter with unmeant sense initially spirals into confusion at how life can be beyond meaning. But when sense encounters the last vestiges of meaning, the intensity of this encounter enlivens the sense of impending meaninglessness as more than simply lack and absence. Here, there is an intensity that begins to make ‘unmeant sense’. Sense as sense begins to make sense, not as meaning, but as sensed affectivity. This sensed affectivity, we realise, can and probably will persist as intensity without meaning, in spite of us, without us needing to update how we account for it, or perhaps acknowledging no account will account for it or for us as did earlier accounts. This novel sense may next evoke a “willingness to become undone” (Butler, 2005: 80). As world, self, sociality and meaning disintegrate, flung well beyond the possible, we sense a ground to life that the figure(s) of meaning evidently and all along must have obscured. Here, we face … … a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance – to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession. (Butler, 2005: 136)

The loss of meaning now becomes a chance ‘to vacate’ that which we possessed and ‘address ourselves elsewhere’. Having to vacate ourselves

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in this way is our “chance of becoming human” (Butler, 2005: 136). Loss somehow reaches beyond itself, revealing life and sense where previously none was assumed to be possible. This is stepping through the looking glass—leaving life as what was known and meant and entering an entirely different life of intensity and things bigger than meaning could ever contain. Butler writes that “[t]o be undone by another is a primary necessity” (Butler, 2005: 136). Such transmutation into becoming undone by another or others, and our descent into groping towards any remaining possibilities for being and meaning are both ‘monstrous’ and more than ‘monstrous’. Our attributions of others being monstrous, evil, inhuman, malicious, immoral, horrible, or vile now not only merely raise the temperature of censorious censorship against how others live their lives, but also help obscure the histories of how we got entangled with them and their malevolence in the first place. Seeing this, the affective intensity of what is happening transmutes into a sense of resignation. Now these attributions and judgements lose their moral force as they struggle to contain a terrifying, unexplored continent of sensibilities and complexities simmering beneath any stultifying condemnation of others’ violations. We can now ask a previously unthinkable and impossible question: What might it mean to undergo violation [by someone/something evil or monstrous], [and] to insist upon not resolving grief and staunching vulnerability too quickly through a turn to violence, and to practise, as an experiment in living otherwise, nonviolence in an emphatically nonreciprocal response? What would it mean, in the face of violence to refuse to return it? (Butler, 2005: 100)

Would it ever be possible to refuse to return a violation (to refuse judging it to be monstrous), or even just to defer returning it? For Butler, deferring (refusing) our responses to and judgements about monstrous acts or destructive events means letting go of our ‘inhuman self-preservation’. One seeks to preserve oneself against the injuriousness of the other, but if one were successful at walling oneself off from injury, one would become inhuman. In this sense, we make a mistake when we take ‘self-preservation’ to be the essence of the human, unless we claim that the ‘inhuman’ is constitutive of the human. (Butler, 2005: 103)

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In a double move, the grief of loss confronts us as an affectivity that exceeds us, posing “a predicament that we cannot solve”, and it scuttles the effectiveness and legitimacy of any response we may mount to it. Butler puts it thus. “If the human is anything, it seems to be a double movement, one in which we assert moral norms [‘this is/they are monstrous’] at the same time as we question the authority by which we make that assertion” (Butler, 2005: 103). Butler’s description of how injury makes it possible for our responses to it to be at once formulated and questioned reminds me of Simondon’s point about meaning-making (‘communication’) foundering upon “that which is larger and that which is smaller than it” (Simondon, 2009: 9). For him, meaning-making inevitably and always splinters and regathers as it unfolds through “successive individuations”. Its precarity, once apparent through meaning faltering and failing, opens out to an unsuspected space, a misrecognised immediacy, where life amplifies an indigenous sense by reclaiming a “resonance of being in relation to itself”. [This] resonance of being in relation to itself [connects] the individuated being to the pre-individual [sensed] reality that is linked to it… The psychic is made of successive individuations that allow the being to resolve the problematic states that correspond to the permanent putting into communication of that which is larger and that which is smaller than it. (Simondon, 2009: 9)

Grief discloses and foregrounds sense: sense as the felt (in)adequacy of what things mean and have meant; sense as the negation of dialectic thought, and sense as the affectivity inherent in increasingly precarious attempts at making (‘individuating’) meaning. Sense now unlocks meaning as effort, as labour, always already having to and having had to reconcile ‘that which is larger and that which is smaller than it’. Making meaning no longer simply is a practice, a normality, a pleasure, a confidence or a refuge. Meaning is now theatrical and acrobatic: it performs, declares, confirms; it labours to individuate meaning as this meaning or that meaning. Its individuation is the dynamic performance (from its exploration to its confirmation) of a sense-meaning truce as meaningmaking strains to contain ‘that which is larger and that which is smaller than it’. Grief makes sense here as it fires up a pre-individual, pre-meaning reality that traverses these individuating (meaning-making) dynamics and

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performances. The gateway to a pre-individual pre-theatricality, grief confirms sense as being the ground for the figure of meaning. Grief reveals not just the “bipolarity that is constitutive of individuation” (Stiegler, 2009: 48), but it achieves something even more noteworthy: it transmutes the pre-individual intensity of sense into figure in the foreground, and it relegates the urge to mean to the background. This is because grief reveals that meaning (individuation) only stabilises life in so far as that it manages to keep pre-individual reality at bay: … individuation does not exhaust with one stroke the potentials of preindividual reality. (Simondon, 2009: 5)

At this juncture, sense makes sense. Its newfound legitimacy springs from its capacity to shrink our urge to mean. A clearing now appears with a vista onto sense as the (previously taken-as-given and unremarkable) labour of individuation, of meaning-making, of representation and signification. This vista exposes meaning as corralling this pre-individual reality within the strictly policed confines of what is ‘meaningless’ and ‘monstrous’, with meaning at once elevating itself as promissory if not as guarantor of sociability, personhood and truth. But the splintering of meaning by ‘that which is larger and that which is smaller than it’ discloses sense as immensity beyond meaning: an expanse of sensate and insensate life which used to be forced to seek shelter in meaning for the actualisation and determination of a specific and closed form of life at the expense of life. If sense is a dynamic multiplicity of feeling among which meanings search for a toe hold of confidence and recognition, meaning is the individuation through performed affirmations and closures permanently evading and negating its own precarious or metastable tensions. If sense leaves me confident about what I’m saying now and tense with doubt straight after, meaning tranquillises by rendering what is said and written into an improbable author-ity by an imposing tensegrity.2 2 ‘Tensegrity’ or ‘tensional integrity’ was coined by Richard Buckminster Fuller to describe how phenomena can ‘transduce’ forces across manifold structural-systemic dimensions, enabling them to accommodate much larger forces than would otherwise and normally be possible. In his paper ‘Tensegrity and mechanotransduction’, Ingber describes how “molecules, cells, tissues, organs, and our entire bodies use ‘tensegrity’ architecture to mechanically stabilize their shape, and to seamlessly integrate structure and function at all size scales. Through the use of this tension-dependent building system, mechanical

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A parallel to the sense-meaning tension is to be found in Heidegger’s original description of ‘falling into they’ and ‘fallen-ness into inauthenticity’. Such a fall(en-ness) he regards as the effect of an inauthentic Being-with others through our ‘subjection to Others’ and the meanings they attach to and impose on life. Subjecting ourselves to Others’ meanings distances us from a more authentic sense: “this distantiality which belongs to Being-with, is such that Dasein, as everyday Being-with-oneanother, stands in subjection to Others” (Heidegger, 1962: 164). Indeed, ‘everyday-Being-with-one-another’ becomes Others’ to do with as they please: “its Being has been taken away by the Others … to dispose of as they please” (Heidegger, 1962: 164). Explaining why accepting Others’ meaning constitutes a ‘lapsing into they’ and is a mark of inauthenticity, he equates ‘they’ with “averageness, and levelling down, as ways of Being for the ‘they’” (Heidegger, 1962: 165).3 This levelling down is tantamount to ignoring the ‘I’ or Self as inherently ‘volatile’: “the Self is conceived only as a way of Being [which is] tantamount to volatilising the real ‘core’ of Dasein” (Heidegger, 1962: 153). The parallel here is thus as follows: meaning involves levelling down to the understandings, decisions and priorities of ‘they’ or Others; in contrast, sense involves opening up to the volatility of Self and of the ‘core of everyday Being-with-one-another’. The volatility of sense troubles, undermines and potentiality annihilates publicly sanctioned meanings.

forces applied at the macroscale produce changes in biochemistry and gene expression within individual living cells” (Ingber, 2008: 198). Relieving itself of reliance on the laws of material reality and gravity, tensegrity optimises the vertical reach and horizontal carrying capacity of structural phenomena. 3 Heidegger writes: “… the real dictatorship of the “they” [becomes tangible when we] take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking” (Heidegger, 1962: 164). Stiegler describes Heidegger’s ‘they’ as follows: “Distantiality, averageness, and levelling down, as ways of being for the they, constitute what we know as ‘publicness.’ Publicness proximally controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted, and it is always right. Thus the particular Dasein in its everydayness is disburdened [normalised, naturalised] by the ‘they’ … there are several dimensions of the they, which can also be understood as the one [il ], as the impersonal, which is the condition of what Heidegger himself calls the They, but which could not be reduced to it. I have attempted elsewhere to characterize this one as what I call here “the dead” …” (Stiegler, 2009: 53)

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This volatility reappears in Simondon’s work as ‘transduction’. Simondon discusses the ‘transduced’4 subject as a life force that struggles against entropy (dissolution, dissipation), and that maintains a self-organising negentropy through form-making, form-testing and formtaking (Letiche & Moriceau, 2017). In contrast to Heidegger’s criticism of the inauthentic meanings and borrowed concerns of ‘they-ness’, Simondon sees signification (here: meaning, representation) as both volatile and as complexifying the subject’s “collective relationship with being” (Simondon, cited in Scott, 2014: 150). With this, Simondon sees the subject’s being as anchored in the constant effort and frequent failure to reconcile sense with meaning. The common thread here is the volatility of self, of self-other relations, and of meaning. Volatility, when reaching a point of excess (through loss, distress, anguish, grief), effectively unveils the inauthenticity (Heidegger) and precarity (Simondon) of familiar and preferred regimes of meaning. Volatility exposes the laboured performance of transduction as an acrobatics aimed at warding off entropy, dissolution, and the fear of becoming ‘unthinkable’. Volatility thus acts on two fronts; it discloses a drop-off of access to meaning and discursive formations (language/discourse/cognition slip away from habitual control), and it foregrounds sense as the body resorts to ‘meanings that become hollowed out of meaning’: gasping, crying and palpitations. … physical and semiotic systems [are] in shreds, a-subjective affects, signs without significance where syntax, semantics, and logic are in collapse … [they include] precious, metaphorical, or stultifying regimes as well as crieswhispers, feverish improvisations …. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988: 147)

Volatility in excess reaches into Simondon’s ‘pre-individual reality’ where it puts the author-ity of meaning at risk. Excess is thus a liminal place or ‘hotspot’ (Greco & Stenner, 2017) that intensifies body sense. Its intensity disrupts the familiar and well-rehearsed sensed-meant-performed self as a “tempting tranquillisation” (Heidegger, 1962: 178) distracting us 4 Simondon emphasises that transduction is not a subject’s entry into form (signification,

meaning, semiosis, representation), but is no more than its endlessly form-seeking tension and form-testing dynamic: “The thought that we name transductive does not consider as the unity of a being that which is conferred by the form informing matter, but by a defined regime of the operation of individuation, which founds being in an absolute manner” (cited in Scott, 2014: 18).

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from the sensate intensity and vital acuity of becoming undone. Excess discloses the rehearsed sensed-meant-performed self as a tranquillisation of sense. Unsedated, sense is a volatile vitality that ordinarily recedes behind the labour of identification, thought and discourse, but which now cuts out new milieux for meaning (through semiosenescence as the loss of meaning and semiogenesis as the emergence of meaning): “sense … is the potentiality for relations that exceeds and transcends any lived meaning” (Colebrook, 2010: 3). Sense now becomes our ‘knowledge of pre-individual being’. This is not a knowledge constituted in axioms and logic, but one that permanently struggles to bind and differentiate (individuate and confirm) actor and act; speaker and spoken, knower and known: As for the axiomatization of the knowledge of pre-individual being, it cannot be contained within a pre-existing logic, because no norm, no system that is detached from its contents can be defined: only the individuation of thought can, by realizing itself, accompany the individuation of beings that are different from thought itself. (Simondon, 2009: 13)

Here, we realise that there is no foundational knowledge possible or available about that (us, reality) which we presumed to know so well. Here, we are confronted with our own individuation not as a progressive formation into a truer selfhood but as a never-to-be-settled and alwaysopen-ended metastability. In essence, we ‘are/become undone’ on the way to becoming human. What we lose in meaning we gain in sense. The ground zero of individuation becomes sense-able: there where the alchemy that converts life into semiosis takes place. Far from uncovering a more authentic or more basic self, this ground zero reveals no more than a metastable sense-meaning dynamic, an ongoing transduction, a tensegrity, a constant shifting and tensing of increasingly expansive and extensive forces. Grasping this, somehow, we apprehend the point of our undoing: this is the juncture where it is revealed that the knowledge we held of life and ourselves and any routines that we held to individuate and express us, is no longer all, ours, final. What is (left), now, is an individuating oceanic dynamic that is buoyed by singularities, or defining events. Undoing engenders not just an “affective volatility” but also a “heightened propensity for becoming affected” (Greco & Stenner, 2017: 160). The silence or stillness effected by the intensification of sense and the drop-off in the efficacy of meaning at

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once attenuate our urge to mean and heighten our power to be affected. This volatile sensibility, this power to be affected, unsettles, engendering a realm that appears unnameable. This realm is reminiscent of the struggles recounted in the novel L’Innommable by Samuel Beckett. Presented as a single stream of consciousness, Beckett portrays his protagonist’s agony as his heightened power to be affected. The protagonist’s voice is heard struggling to ward off intruding voices uttered by a ‘they’. In Heideggerian fashion,5 L’Innommable pits ‘I’ against an overbearing, noisy and relentless ‘they’; ‘they’ as the totality of socialised, inauthentic, pre-sanctioned meaning; the totality of what has always and historically been meant and said in order for it to continue being meant and said, and thereby ensure that ‘I’ absorbs into ‘they’. Once ‘I’ senses itself, ‘I’ is up against the voices of ‘they-ness’ whose inauthentic noises and over-cooked enunciations prevent ‘I’ from reposing into the a-signifying silence of sense (Beckett, 1953). … I have to speak these words, as many as there are, they have to be spoken, until they find me, until they speak me, strange effort, strange delusion, I have to go on, maybe it’s already done, maybe they’ve already spoken me, they’ve maybe carried me as far as the threshold of my story, in front of the door that opens to my story, that would surprise me, if it’d open up, that’s going to be me there, it’s going to be the silence, there where I am, I don’t know, I will never know, in the silence one never knows, I have to go on, I can’t go on, I’m going to go on. (Beckett, 1953: 108; my translation)6

Beckett’s protagonist has reached the point where, having sensed the unnameability of life through having become fully undone (described in the earlier two novels in the trilogy, Molloy and Malone), he seeks to 5 In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger writes: “if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless ” (Heidegger, 2000 [1946]; my italics). 6 The original reads: “… il faut dire des mots, tant qu’il y en a, il faut les dire, jusqu’à ce qu’ils me trouvent, jusqu’à ce qu’ils me disent, étrange peine, étrange faute, il faut continuer, c’est peut-être déjà fait, ils m’ont peut-être déjà dit, ils m’ont peut-être porté jusqu’au seuil de mon histoire, devant la porte qui s’ouvre sur mon histoire, ça m’étonnerait, si elle s’ouvre, ça va être moi, ça va être le silence, là où je suis, je ne sais pas, je ne le saurai jamais, dans le silence on ne sait pas, il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer.”

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unshackle himself from ‘they’ as the as-yet persistent and overwhelming urge to mean, and relieve himself from all those ‘they’ meanings that insist on being meaningful for capturing what cannot be captured or recuperated from the experience of pre-personal silence. All through the trilogy (of which L’Innommable is the last instalment), Beckett traces the deflation of first Molloy’s, then Malone’s, and finally the Unnameable’s urge to be tranquillised by socially sanctioned ‘they’ thoughts, meanings, sayings and ways of being. This deflation of Beckett’s protagonists’ urge to mean is metaphorised as a journey into (physical) immobility. The journey leads from their waning intentionality (their decreasing urge to mean while needing to mean) to their growing weariness in the face of a wall of deafening, unstoppable and now unidentifiable and unrecognisable meanings. It is clear too that this journey may be wasted and in vain. The they-noise (the pervasive cacophony of intrusive ‘meaningless meanings’) will continue to affect them. The novels suggest that this is a journey into the unnameable silence that is the realisation of ‘fully meaningful meaning’. This is in effect a journey into sense as it leaves immobility and passivity as the only feasible ways of facing what is now an all-consuming but irretrievable inability to ever again mean authoritatively and confidently. As for Beckett’s protagonist, focal for Heidegger is the possibility of pre-personal purity and a silent/silenced (meaningful, fully sensed) authenticity7 : “ça va être le silence, là où je suis, je ne sais pas, je ne le saurai jamais, dans le silence on ne sait pas ”. Here, the ambition is to identify and experience ‘ontological difference’: the distance between ordinary being (Dasein) and ecstatic being (Being); “the difference between selfidentical beings and their Being” (van Tuinen, 2011: 48), or a difference between everyday existence dominated by they-noise (‘Dasein’) and pure, silent, spiritualised Being.8 This ontological difference marks the distance 7 Heidegger writes the following about silence: “To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say-that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one’s reticence [Verschweigenheit] makes something manifest, and does away with ‘idle talk’ [“Gerede”]. As a mode of discoursing, reticence articulates the intelligibility of Dasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a potentiality-for-hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-with-one-another which is transparent” (Heidegger, 1962: 208). 8 Wheeler writes that “one shouldn’t conclude from all this talk of submersion in the ‘they’ that a state of authenticity is to be achieved by re-establishing some version of a self-sufficient individual subject. As Heidegger puts it: “Authentic Being-one’s-Self does

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from the noise of common life to the silence of an unnameable (because no longer able to be captured in or as meaning) Being. Subject to this ambition, the individual is entangled in a relentless verticality.9 As for Beckett the novelist, focal for Simondon is life’s unending negentropic, ontogenetic, individuating and failing struggle to mean and to become: “il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer”.10 Where Heidegger prioritises a pre-personal silence that is experienced as “pure process” (Colebrook, 2014: 28) yet still nameable as l’innommable, Simondon submits to the relentless dynamics that define life’s straining to embed itself in meaning to counter its innommabilité: these dynamics and tensions are not nameable other than as the struggles and vicissitudes that express and define them.11 Before moving on to discuss the effacing of self as a theme that weaves through the discussion up to this point, I want to ask, how does the work encountered in Chapter 2 fit into these portrayals of becoming undone and of the kinds of unnameability it entrains? It appears that for Wetherell, Martin, Leys and Mazzarella, there is neither anything specifically ‘unnamable’ nor any general ‘unnameability’. Anything deemed

not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the ‘they’; it is rather an existentiell modification of the ‘they’ ” (Being and Time 27: 168). So authenticity is not about being isolated from others, but rather about finding a different way of relating to others such that one is not lost to the they-self” (Wheeler, 2011: Section 2.2.7). Colebrook’s interpretation is less generous in that she regards the notion of ‘becoming one with pure Being’ as an “existential imperative for consciousness to be nothing other than its perceptual relation to the world, a pure process without reifying ground” (Colebrook, 2014: 19). Others too have critiqued ‘the ontological difference’ as an excuse for not heeding others and their otherness (Bevir, 2000). Sloterdijk’s recent collection Not Saved: Essays after Heidegger provide a more forgiving interpretation. 9 See Bevir (2000) also for an analysis of shifts in Heidegger’s thought with regard to ‘the spirit’ of Being. 10 Stiegler explains how Heidegger’s ‘fall into they’ is posed differently but relatedly in Simondon’s work. That which is posed in Heidegger as “the originary and tragic question of a fall [déchéance] of the individual in the course of the individuation” is posed in Simondon as “an evident bipolarity that is constitutive of individuation” (Stiegler, 2009: 48). 11 Pushing this perspective even further, Deleuze and Guattari discern an entirely posthuman unnameability “[b]ehind statements and semioticisations [where] there are only machines, assemblages and movements of deterritorialisation that cut across the stratification of the various systems and elude the coordinates of both language and existence” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988: 148).

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unnamable is no more than a marker of the individual’s inability to apprehend their own ‘affective practices’ (Wetherell); their failure to recognise their enactment as steeped in socio-cultural meanings (Martin); theorists’ fantasy of a ‘language of nature’ that isn’t itself a representation (Leys), or a behaviour whose actor denies their own personal-political intentions and commitments (Mazzarella). I venture that all are likely to agree in effect that “the run of the mill affectivity of everyday social life, and moments of extraordinary emotional drama, involve considerable acts of appraisal and construction and high-wire integrations across multiple systems which pull together events, physical registrations, intersubjective coordinations and plural flows of meaning-making in constantly changing patters as situations unfold” (Wetherell, 2015: 157). Never having lost the meaning of meaning perhaps, they assume and take for granted its pervasiveness. I should acknowledge Mazzarella’s case as being somewhat more complex though as he promotes to first principle something that appears akin to Simondon’s transductive dynamic. Thus, he defines mediation (by meaning) as “at once … the most fundamental and productive principle of all social life [and as] necessarily incomplete, unstable and provisional” (Mazzarella, 2010: 302). But Mazzarella at once rules out “[t]his illusion of pre-mediated existence – of immediation [i.e. of ‘pure act’]” (Mazzarella, 2010: 303).12 In short, he emphasises the instability of mediation, but then denies the possibility of existence becoming reduced to immediation, or to the immediacy of body-sense as only feasible act or response. For him, a gasp or palpitation must be an instantiation of an

12 Colebrook explains Deleuze’s ‘pure acts’ as belonging to a tripartite distinction. The first refers to ‘pure act’ relations, that, as with chemotaxis, offer ‘zero-intensity’. They are programmatic and immediate as there is no freedom at this (molecular) level in how the organism reacts: “molecular perception … is nothing other than what it receives” (Colebrook, 2006: 7). The second refers to ‘pure perception’: here, whatever goes on is met with pure, un-acting, un-responding contemplation and acceptance: “not acting [creates the possibility of] perceiving the difference and multiple potential of what is presented (a God’s-eye view or grasp of the whole of life”) (Colebrook, 2006: 7). Caught in-between these two extremes, human perception/action hovers around “a midway point between a molecular perception that is nothing other than what it receives, with no delay or decision – a pure act – and a pure perception that in not acting, moving or selecting … is capable of perceiving the difference and multiple potential of what is presented” (Colebrook, 2006: 7). The task now then is not one of aligning meaning and experience by accepting “the existence of a system of signification, but [one of examining] how such systems emerge, work and are produced” (Colebrook, 2006: 44).

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objective logic and amenable to some biographical, political or therapeutic explanation, with no remainder. While admitting its instability, Mazzarella thus stops at acknowledging the alchemy, the genesis, or the senescence of meaning. He thereby trivialises becoming dislodged from the ‘tempting tranquillization’ of conventionalised meaning that entails ‘falling into they’, and discounts self-ending grief as a biographical-political contingency. His instability runs shy of the “undoing of all stabilities” that produce a “failure of identity” (Grosz, 2011: 112), and steers clear of the individuation of meaning and its self-effacing provocation. For Mazzarella, indeterminacy is retained as abstract, thought-addled principle, never to bare the flux and full intensity of sense.

Effacing Self Nature (by way of moral obligation) builds ‘man’ for stable and closed societies akin to the ant in the ant-hill, but there is another impulse that is distinct from man’s organic being and distinct from moral humanity. This creative dynamism is destructive of the closed figures of man, tearing the intellect from its forms and figures; spirit bears a supra-rational force, especially if we think of moving beyond rationality as the surpassing of any single ratio. (Colebrook, 2014: 100)

Through the ages, self-effacement has relieved us “from the rigidity of man [sic]” (Colebrook, 2014: 20). Stoic self-effacement was a strategy for subduing life’s adversities: “thus the sage is an expert at subduing ills: pain, poverty, disgrace, imprisonment, exile, which everywhere inspire terror, are gentle when they reach him” (Seneca, On Providence §41, cited in Roller, 2001: 76). For its part, religion furthered the technicalisation of this conquest of ills, anchoring monastic practice to ‘anthropotechnical’ self-transformation and self-effacement: “in the sphere of monastic anthropotechnic forms, the monks worked on transforming themselves into statues of the monk, the exemplary sculpture of servient obedience whose legend was incurvatus et humiliates sum” (Sloterdijk, 2013:

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327).13 Here, self-effacement “manag[es] the relation between perceiver and the manageable influx of stimulus [since] beyond pleasure there lies a tendency towards … a dissolution of the bounded and perceiving organism” (Colebrook, 2014: 18). The technicalisation of self-effacement accelerates with biopolitics and its instilling of a governmentality in multitudes. Here, self-effacement is effected through self- and other-directed instruction, regulative scrutiny and behavioural standardisation (Foucault, 1997). As disciplinary mechanisms, instruction, scrutiny and standardisation serve to identify and classify individuals, segregate them from their original multiplicity, and shape them to meet generalised standards and to perform sanctioned conducts. As such, biopolitics is a first “major social technology of discipline [which] works by atomising a multiplicity of people into individuals in order to organise, monitor, utilise or cultivate them as discrete bodies” (Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup-Hjorth, 2009: 99). The biopolitical self is constituted in supra-personal imperatives and priorities which are legitimated by broad-spectrum constraints and collective discipline in the service of greater needs and greater goods. Shaping itself for centuries to the self-annihilating impacts of industrialised and mechanised labour, life now inhabits an entirely novel and runaway spec(ta)cular intensity. This intensity cranks up with every new technology leaving fewer and fewer aspects of life untouched through the expanding reach and pace of digital connection, information and distraction (Zuboff, 2019). Here, self becomes inflected by cascading stimuli and compounding simulacra that shorten the lifespan and shrink the possibility and relevance of self-sustainment. Given these technologies’ corrosive effects on the “closed figures of man” (Colebrook, 2014: 100), they answer in a roundabout way to the original religio-stoic ideal to overcome the self of immediate nonreflexive reflex. Framed thus, self-effacement involves deferring ‘natural’ proclivities in favour of ‘unnatural’ delays yielding unnatural benefits. Among such delays, we can count neoteny (delayed separation of offspring from their parents affording experimental forms of life); representation (delayed experience affording communication); thought (delayed response affording reflection); farming (delayed consumption affording accumulation); capital 13 ‘Incurvatus et humiliatus sum’ is Latin for ‘I’m crooked and humiliated’, and this condition was seen as “evidence of the effects of the Holy Spirit on human material” (Sloterdijk 2013: 327), and therefore good.

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(delayed valuation affording exchange); labour (delayed gratification affording production); technology (delayed labour affording industrialisation); health care (delayed dying affording life), and so forth. Delay presumes the capacity to domesticate through pacification. Thus what has shaped and what shapes the human is its passivisation through its distancing from natural origins, processes and inclinations. For some, this distancing embodies a logic that runs in excess to what it means to be human, given its wreaking of (among other things) ecological destruction. This leads Colebrook to wonder, “can we imagine the world without us …?” (Colebrook, 2014: 23). Colebrook’s question invokes a self-effacement beyond the human, straining ‘life’ paradoxically beyond the concerns of organic life. Any remaining concerns that we may have about life’s continuation, vitality and survival betray our attachment to ‘organicism’. Organicism is charged with mistakenly conceiving of organismic life as “a self-maintaining, autopoietic whole in which every term is in accord with (and conducive to the maintenance of) every other” (Colebrook, 2010: 141). Organicism thus chooses for ignorance regarding the forces that exceed the interests and exigencies of organic life and denies these forces’ indifference towards organismic survival and well-being. Colebrook rejects organicism in favour of ‘inorganicism’: the end of organic life. This means that for her selfeffacement reaches into a hypothetical post-organic order following the annihilation of all species and their milieux. Here, what reigns are post-human forces capable of “malevolence, stupidity … and opacity”—forces “that thought can never incorporate or master” (Colebrook, 2010: 7). Effectively, in invoking these forces and their post-human universe, Colebrook’s ‘inorganicism’ imagines a ‘time outside of time’ (Meillassoux, 2009) “where we destroy all our own self-fixities and become pure process” (Colebrook, 2014: 28). This self-effacement is not quite total, since it grants disembodied (re-Cartesianised?) thought as being able to make the leap from organic time into inorganic post-time. Perhaps envisaging a post-organic universe inspires different attitudes towards how humans persist in distancing themselves from their original ecologicalenvironmental circumstances, destroying everything in the process. But, for Colebrook, entertaining the hope of attitudes possibly changing is an organicist illusion. On the other hand, if inorganicism demands such acrobatic thought, should it not also be possible to grant organicism a claim to

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life’s unmeasured potential, buoyed by the thought that “no-one has yet determined what the body can do” (Spinoza, 2001: 3, P2)?

Passivity If Colebrook’s account expands the logic of self-effacement and delay to accommodate post-human and inorganic scenarios, it ultimately does no more than linearly accelerate and radically spectacularise the logic of delay and deferral: “this is what an ethics of extinction requires: not an apocalyptic thought of the ‘beyond the human’ as a radical break or dissolution, but a slow, dim, barely discerned and yet violently effective destruction” (Colebrook, 2014: 40). This imagining draws a line from effacement to annihilation, effectively disowning the vertical tensions that equally define organic and human life.14 In describing the spread of progressive ambition beyond specialised institutions, Sloterdijk comments on how from the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century vertical tensions embedded in ageold “monastic self-effacement techniques” began to filter through into secular life. Generating “new forums of admiration [and participation]” (Sloterdijk, 2013: 327),15 these techniques transferred from the monks to the wider public an opportunity to become “structurally superior to themselves, and carry within themselves an asymmetry in which they mould and are moulded” (Sloterdijk, 2013: 327). Being “of an a-political type” (Sloterdijk, 2013: 327),16 and realising “vertical tensions and hierarchical effects” (Sloterdijk, 2013: 327), this asymmetry bypasses biopolitical directives that place subjects primarily within a matrix of regulation, standardisation and scrutiny. On the contrary, verticality places the human endeavour within a logic of conation—a striving, a desire for life, a perseverance beyond limits (Spinoza, 2001). Anchored in monastic techniques, this vertical striving requires

14 What do we make of Colebrook’s ethics envisaging ‘a slow … and yet violently effective destruction’ but being unable to hide that her philosophy, its perspicacity and tenacity, realise all manner of progressive ambitions and vertical aspirations? 15 The English translation of Sloterdijk’s book has a number of infelicities and I have taken the liberty to rectify some of these. In the present quote, ‘geistreiche’ (rich in spirituality) was translated as ‘intelligent’. I prefer to render this as ‘spiritual being’. 16 The translator of Sloterdijk’s 2013 book elaborates this reference to a-politicality by relating it to “the naïve over-politicisations underlying the common ways of discussing biopolitics”.

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and presupposes self-effacement, delay and passivisation. This striving is not just a matter of deferring reactions and rising above pain and suffering, but also of athleticising life beyond what might otherwise appear impossible and improbable, physically, bodily, materially and intellectually (Sloterdijk, 2013). If, as seen, passivity in Colebrook’s rendering of Deleuze’s philosophy refers to resigning ourselves to the idea of species’ effacement by exoorganic forces, it is important to acknowledge that passivity in Sloterdijk’s work plays a very different role. His passivity keys into affect realised as that which ‘moves us every time we make a move’. In that regard, Sloterdijk’s passivity equally undermines Colebrook’s “closed figures of man” (Colebrook, 2014: 100). For Sloterdijk, however, passivity is not a modality of epistemic thought that hypothesises about an anorganic world. Instead, Sloterdijk’s passivity has an ontological dimension through which it accomplishes an attenuation (a deferral) of our reflex responses that are ordinarily hostage to ‘closed figures of being’ Sloterdijk’s passivity is an affective openness and receptiveness towards in situ movements and rapid life developments. Made possible through ‘situations of exception’ (e.g. loss, grief, adversity), his passivity manifests as the deferral of routine thought, judgement and response, and in that sense attests of our ‘passivity competence’. Passivity competence is therefore not of thought but beyond and before thought. Its passivity is an openness less to the past and the logic of thought, than to the demands of the present and the presence of others. This is why Sloterdijk’s passivity heralds the possibility of ‘participation in unfamiliar others’ movement/expression competence’, where movement, expression and competence are descriptors of what any thing or body can do as participant in the contemporary ‘networked world’. … passivity competent conduct belongs to the play/game intelligence that defines all people living in the contemporary networked world, where we cannot make a move without also being moved. … Allowing oneself to be affected symbolises the situation of all those who intervene in themselves through allowing others to intervene in them … [this makes possible] participation in unfamiliar competences [Fremdcompetenz]. (Sloterdijk, 2009: 593/4)17

17 The original in German reads: “In Wahrheit gehört das passivitätskompetente Verhalten zur Spielintelligenz von Menschen in einer entfalteten Netzwelt, in der man

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Sloterdijk’s passivity competence is therefore not an organicist technology exploiting delay and deferral in pursuit of additional ‘unnatural benefit’. Instead, his competence arises as a broadened sensibility and optimised response to the intractable and volatile realities of the present. As broadened sensibility rather than as imagined denouement, Sloterdijk’s passivity can now be seen as offering a trope according to which loss and meaninglessness individuate as affect and sense. This passivity opens us up to what is happening—now (Sloterdijk) or eventually (Deleuze), nurturing our sense of our own and of the world’s becoming.

Conclusion This chapter has delved in the dynamics and consequences of becoming undone. The chapter started with a brief review of Chapter 2, where the argument was set out that affective excess may undermine if not undo the ways in which we inhabit meaning. This undoing was described as overwhelming and no longer admitting conventional descriptions, and throwing us into affective states sometimes marked by gasps, cries and the like. The chapter went on to explain that these marks of becoming undone are at once the distress felt over a loss of world, and a gateway to the realisation that loss is the obverse of becoming human. Becoming human was exemplified through reference to Samuel Beckett’s work where the ‘I’ has accepted being undone, and has given up trying to identify with any of the meanings (‘words’) on offer. I described the ‘I’ struggling against an irrelevant repertoire of meanings and intentions which Beckett refers to as ‘they’. I went on to connect Beckett’s silence and Heidegger’s self-as-care to Simondon’s transindividuation, since all three describe a dynamic that situates our being at the intersection between affect and meaning: at the point where meaning at once arises from and drowns out our original sense of what gave rise to meaning in the first place. I then discussed Colebrook’s explanation keinen eigenen Zug machen kann, wenn man nicht zugleich mit sich spielen läßt. … Sich-Massieren-Lassen symbolisiert die Lage all derer, die auf sich inwirken, indem sie anderen erlauben, auf sie einzuwerken … Teilhabe an Fremdcompetenz.” Sloterdijk’s passivity competence is reminiscent of Spinoza’s ‘power to be affected’: “The greater our power to be affected… the greater our power to act [and] every increase of the power to act and think corresponds to an increased power to be affected - the increased autonomy of the subject, in other words, always corresponds to its increased receptivity” (Hardt, 2007: x).

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of passive vitalism and its concern with organic extinction. I contrasted her thought passivity to Sloterdijk’s practised passivity. Whereas passive vitalism casts thought beyond the confines of organic life into the chaos of anorganic cosmic forces, passivity competence provides an anthropotechnics for dealing with contemporary complexity where ‘making a move inevitably means being moved’ (Sloterdijk, 2013). The next chapter delves further into this very principle: ‘to make a move inevitably means being moved’ in order to ask, How does being moved and being affected enhance our power to act? The next chapter approaches this question via the tropes of empathy and sympathy, before shifting gears to consider the implications of a ‘transductive’ perspective for how our ‘power to be affected’ enhances our power to act.

References Beckett, S. (1953). L’innommable (The Unnamable). Paris: Editions de Minuit. Bevir, M. (2000). Derrida and the Heidegger controversy: Global friendship against racism. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 3(1), 121–138. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230008403305. Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself . New York: Fordham University Press. Colebrook, C. (2006). Deleuze: A guide for the perplexed. London: Bloomsbury. Colebrook, C. (2010). Deleuze and the meaning of life. London: Continuum. Colebrook, C. (2014). Death of the posthuman: Essays on extinction (vol. 1). Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press—Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan Library). Colebrook, C. (2017). Anti-catastrophic time. New Formations, 92, 102–119. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1997). The birth of biopolitics. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Michel foucault—Ethics: Subjectivity and truth (pp. 73–79). New York: The New Press. Greco, M., & Stenner, P. (2017). From paradox to pattern shift: Conceptualising liminal hotspots and their affective dynamics. Theory & Psychology, 27 (2), 147–166. Grosz, E. (2011). Becoming undone: Darwinian reflections on life, politics and art. Durham: Duke University Press. Gudmand-Høyer, M., & Lopdrup-Hjorth, T. (2009). Liberal biopolitics reborn. Foucault Studies, 7 (2009), 99–130.

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Hardt, M. (2007). Foreword: What affects are good for. In P. Ticineto-Clough & J. Halley (Eds.), The affective turn: Theorizing the social (pp. ix–xiii). Durham: Duke University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. Canterbury: SCM Press. Heidegger, M. (2000 [1946]). Über den humanismus [Letter on humanism]. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Ingala, E. (2018). Of the refrain (The Ritornello). In H. Somers-Hall, J. A. Bell, & J. Williams (Eds.), A thousand plateaus and philosophy (pp. 190–205). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ingber, D. E. (2008). Tensegrity and mechanotransduction. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 12(2008), 198–200. Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Enquiry, 30(Winter 2004), 225–248. Letiche, H., & Moriceau, J.-L. (2017). Simondon: Investigating the preorganizational. Culture and Organization, 23(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14759551.2016.1240358. Leys, R. (2017). The ascent of affect: Genealogy and critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martin, E. (2013). The potentiality of ethnography and the limits of affect theory. Current Anthropology, 54(7), S149–S158. Mazzarella, W. (2010). Affect: What is it good for? In S. Dube (Ed.), Enchantments of modernity: Empire, nation, globalization (pp. 291–309). New York: Routledge. Meillassoux, Q. (2009). After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency. London: Continuum. Roller, M. B. (2001). Ethics for the principate: Seneca, stoicism and traditional roman morality. In Constructing autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in JulioClaudian Rome (pp. 64–126). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, D. (2014). Gilbert Simondon’s psychic and collective individuation: A critical introduction and guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Simondon, G. (2009). The position of the problem of ontogenesis. Parrhesia, 7 (2009), 4–16. Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Du muβt dein leben ändern: Über anthropotechnik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Sloterdijk, P. (2013). You must change your life (W. Hoban, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2017). Aletheia or the fuse of truth: Toward the concept of a history of unconcealment. In P. Sloterdijk (Ed.), Not saved: Essays after Heidegger (pp. 175–192). Cambridge: Polity Press. Spinoza, B. (2001). Ethics (W. H. White & A. H. Stirling, Trans.). Ware: Wordsworth Editions.

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Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science (S. Muecke, Trans.). Oxford: Polity Press. Stenner, P. (2018). Liminality and experience: A transdisciplinary approach to the psychosocial. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stiegler, B. (2009). The theatre of individuation: Phase-shift and resolution in simondon and heidegger. Parrhesia, 7 (2009), 46–57. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma. London: Penguin. van Tuinen, S. (2011). “Transgenous philosophy”: Posthumanism, anthropotechnics and the poetics of natal difference. In W. Schinkel & L. Noordegraaf-Elens (Eds.), In medias res (pp. 43–66). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. London: Sage. Wetherell, M. (2015). Trends in the turn to affect: A social-psychological critique. Body & Society, 21(2), 139–166. Wheeler, M. (2011). Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Martin Heidegger. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. London: Profile Books.

CHAPTER 4

Prosociality

Abstract This chapter explores the various ways in which being affected may enhance our capacity to act. This involves reviewing claims regarding human’s primordial prosociality, their empathy and sympathy, and the apparent intensification over time in human foresight and affective constraint. Effectively a thesis about human self-domestication, this intensification of foresight and constraint involved geospatial (as the ‘clearing’), evolutionary (as neoteny or the persistence of youthful experimentality), interactive (as behavioural complicatedness) and anthropotechnic changes that were/are unique to the human species. The crux of this intensification, the chapter concludes, is ‘being affected’. Being affected is not so much a personalised capacity as a species-level affordance, and is ‘metabolic’ in character insofar as it transforms all dimensions of life. Keywords Prosociality · Empathy · Sympathy · Neoteny · Metabole

Introduction Was there ever a feeling of sympathy or empathy between John and his senior colleague (SC)? He can’t remember more than always

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thinking, this person behaves with charm, has innumerable friends, makes innumerable seemingly important and always intense phone calls, and is not of my world. Two decades ago SC used work John had done in a talk without any acknowledgement. He confronted them then. Not a shred of remorse, just bluster and evasion. How could he have forgotten. The struggle that ensued between them this time led SC to open the floodgates of networked power and intimidation, as if this kind of fight was precisely the thing SC had prepared for. For John, it turned into an all-consuming and debilitating distraction that annihilated the immeasurable energy he used to be able to apply to the things he loved and valued. Once, walking on the beach on a weekend in the morning sunshine with his 12 year-old daughter, he picked up an inflated puffer fish by the tail whose bloated skin had turned into a forest of sharp needles. Out of pure rage against what was happening to him, he threw the fish through the air with wild abandon. The fish hit his little girl on the leg, producing a patchwork of bloody marks and rivulets streaking down her skin. He froze at the sight, her bewildered look, and then her crying. He uttered a dazed explanation and a helpless consolation. He crouched there, holding her against him, aghast at what was happening and at what he was turning into.

Chapter 3 considered the experience and the effects of becoming undone. It left unanswered the following question: how and why does being moved enhance our power to act?1 Being moved (carried) is of course defining of the condition of the embryo, as the embryo is “limited to adapting to external circumstances” (Protevi, 2013: 102). Being moved is also an ontogenetic prerequisite for infants to adapt to rhythmic-affective connections that (may) emerge with significant others (Polyanskaya, Samuel, & Ordin, 2019). Embryos’ and infants’ being moved clearly

1 This formulation is Spinoza’s: “Whatever so disposes the human body that it can be affected in a great many ways, or renders it capable of affecting external bodies in a great many ways, is useful to man [sic]” (Spinoza, 2001: 4–38). The expression ‘one’s power to be affected’ invokes an aspect of power that Spinoza terms potentia: “actually existing things have variable powers of acting (potentia agendi)” (Steinberg, 2018: loc 69). Spinoza uses of the word potestas to describe state power. Subjects may decide to invest in potestas in the interest of state stability and personal security without abdicating their ‘power to act’ (potentia) and using their power to act to influence how the state wields its potestas.

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conditions and optimises their ability to act. That is, put differently, their inability to do (as yet) maximises their ability to learn to do. As organisms mature, their ability to do things strengthens and their capacity to be moved diminishes. Comparatively, adults are better able to do things, and they are therefore also less inclined ‘to be moved’. And yet adults are no more than “the limit of the process of individuation”; meaning, no matter how “sclerotic and habitual” (Protevi, 2013: 189), adults are constituted in and of ongoing processes of individuation that involve transformation and impose change. The metabolic constitution of the body is evidence that organisms are undergoing massive transformations at least at some levels at any age, but unavoidably their metabolic potential changes. Likewise, being moved plays out differently going into adult life where a reduced learn-ability steers adults away from opportunities to be moved, no doubt to avoid excessively momentous transformations that risk individuals losing control and becoming undone. Here, choices balance on a knife-edge, as seen in Chapter 3, where excess experience may turn out to be potentiating (Frankl, 2006) or irreparably traumatising (Amery, 1980). My interest is the enigma of the life-engendering and potentiating effects of being moved to become (undone). Given all of us now “must change (y)our life” (Sloterdijk, 2013), and with the rising pressure exerted by earth pushing back at human forms of life (Latour, 2018), the challenges and opportunities of becoming (undone) warrant attention. My aim here is to delve into the multi-dimensional and prosocial dimensions of being moved, and I want to speculate about its transformational or metabolic complexity (Godfrey Smith, 2016). As a first way into the question about how/why being moved enhances our power to act, I open on the topic of prosociality as the apparent prerequisite for ‘being moved’. Prosociality has been argued to be integral to the evolution of Homo sapiens (Hare, 2017). Next, I discuss empathy as a more recent (as in the late nineteenth century) ‘structure of feeling’ (Benjamin, 1992 [1973]). I then draw on Spinoza to extricate the discussion from the notion that being moved is a dynamic that originates in and occurs between individuals and their emotions, moving towards a transformative or metabolic understanding of affectivity as a transindividual “storm of activity” (Godfrey Smith, 2016: 489).

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Prosociality Prosociality as the willingness to care for others presents us with a “seeming paradox of fitness-sacrificing behaviour” (Protevi, 2013: 80). Fitness-sacrificing may produce higher levels of in-group fitness, in which case the gamble of self-sacrifice and altruism may outweigh its cost. To a large extent, this gamble turns on whether we take others to be intrinsically aggressive and selfish or fundamentally peaceful and ‘pro-social’. I will not enter into debates about whether humans have more in common ancestrally with the peaceful bonobos than with the more aggressive chimpanzees. However, the bonobo side of the argument seems to be supported by the human inclination to support the weak2 and the human inhibition with regard to one-on-one killing, both suggesting humans embody a “proto-empathetic identification” (Protevi, 2013: 60).3 Evolutionally, prosociality made possible the sharing of the benefits of joint effort. For prosociality and the sharing of effort to become favoured, humans had to strengthen their cooperative communication and collaborative attentiveness. But these behaviours were contingent in turn on increased mutual tolerance among individuals and on their reduced emotional reactivity and mitigated behavioural reflexes or automaticity. The paradox here then is that prosociality, as the proximation among individuals in the interest of sharing in effort and in its benefits, demanded an internal distanciation from and a passivisation towards habituated reactions and automatised responses. I discussed passivity competence in Chapter 3 and framed it there, following Sloterdijk, as the paradox of humans inventing a broadened sensibility and greater receptiveness towards what might ordinarily be experienced as warranting fight or flight.

2 Darwin wrote: “The aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused” (Darwin, 1999 [1871]: ch. 5). 3 “I’ll criticize the thesis that the evolution of human prosociality – intellectual and

emotional commitment to social partners and patterns enabling altruism or other-directed action at a cost to the agent – is tied in with a deep-roots or continuist theory of human warfare, which sees war as falling under the category of “coalitionary violence” shared by us with the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes, as opposed to Pan paniscus, the bonobo)” (Protevi, 2019: 127).

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This idea of Homo sapiens broadening sensibility and receptiveness led Hare and Tomassello to articulate the ‘emotional reactivity hypothesis’. This hypothesis states that: human levels of cooperative communication were a result of an increase in social tolerance generated by a decrease in emotional reactivity. Without tolerance, advanced computational or social cognitive abilities would not be of much use because individuals could not share the benefits of joint effort. According to this hypothesis, an increase in tolerance in humans allowed inherited cognitive skills to be expressed in new social situations. Selection could then act directly on revealed variance in these newly expressed cognitive abilities. (Hare, 2017)

In a related piece, Hare and Tomasello restate this hypothesis as follows, framing novel problem-solving skills as a byproduct of altering temperaments. They further explain how humans’ passivity competence defining of these novel temperaments served to place them in innovative ‘adaptive spaces’: novel social problem-solving skills have commonly evolved as incidental byproducts of selection on social-emotional systems (e.g. selection on systems mediating fear and aggression). In this way animals with altered temperaments became motivated to apply inherited cognitive abilities to solve new social problems (i.e. previously they were too afraid, aggressive or disinterested even to participate in such interactions). Once this initial evolution occurred, placing the organism in a new ‘adaptive space’ in which old cognitive systems become useful in novel settings, selection can then act on any existing variance in these newly expressed abilities – potentially leading to further increases in flexibility and cognitive adaptation. (Hare & Tomasello, 2005: 465)

Hare and colleagues present evolutionary, neurobiological and paleoanthropological evidence for positing relationships among prosociality, ‘human mentalising abilities’, tolerance, and collaborative behaviours (summarised in Hare, 2017). Human mentalising abilities are those that engender self-control and tolerance. Hare regards these as at the crux of humankind’s progressive ‘self-domestication’ into passivity, tolerance, receptiveness, and collaboration. ‘Self-domestication’ of course risks invoking a progressive evolution of human nature framed as a “culturally-induced rational control of brutal, recalcitrant and at best tameable emotions” (Protevi, 2019: 134).

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Protevi is concerned to rescue the self-domestication thesis from such narrow ‘progressive’ conceptions of how human nature evolved, particularly those that portray it primarily as an intensification of affective selfand other-control. Teasing out the connections among prosocial tolerance, territoriality, and violence/warfare, Protevi concludes that “human nature is a multiplicity” that does not stake everything on prosociality, passivity and conviviality. He thereby retains a pragmatic view of human behaviour and cultural variability according to which “[p]rosociality means a primary orientation to sympathetic care and fair cooperation, which is nonetheless admitting of rational egoist-driven violence and competition under duress” (Protevi, 2019: 134). In Chapter 5, I revisit the human self-domestication thesis as a starting point from which to tackle not the behavioural multiplicity of human nature so much as its ‘anthropotechnic’ dimensions, where anthropotechnics refers to the interdependencies among human nature(s), human space(s) and human technologies.

Empathy A manifest example of prosociality is the capacity to be affected by others’ feelings and circumstances, or empathy. Empathy has been observed in the behaviour of various species (Preston & De Waal, 2002b). As concept, empathy is a relatively recent entrant into discourses about organisms’ sharing of emotions, intentions and cognitions (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). Pointing to an emergent structure of feeling around prosociality or ‘feeling into’ the subjectivity of the other, empathy underwent considerable conceptual and theoretical diversification from around the mid-nineteenth century. If Deleuze prioritised affect more generally as defining organisms’ becoming (Ansell-Pearson, 1999),4 I focus on empathy here as a mode of conviviality that permeates “the experience of even the simplest living beings” (Protevi, 2013: 182). Empathy now takes up a central role in contemporary neurobiological, anthropological, phenomenological and organisational-political thought and research. The roots of the concept empathy lie in the German term Einfühlung (Debes, 2015; Wispe, 1987). Einfühlung was coined by Robert Vischer 4 “Deleuze’s position is, ultimately, different from that of Merleau-Ponty, since it does not construe becomings-animal on the model of empathy but solely on the level of affect” (Ansell-Pearson, 1999: 210).

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(1847–1933) in 1873 and was elaborated by Theodor Lipps (1851– 1914) to suggest the possibility of projecting the self into the other. The German language significantly enabled theorists to expand the semantic space around Fühlung (feeling) thanks to the multiple prepositions to hand, making possible concepts, besides Einfühlung (‘feeling into’), such as Anfühlung (‘attentive feeling’), Nachfühlung (‘responsive feeling’), Zufühlung (‘immediate feeling’), and Mitfühlung (‘sympathy’) (Debes, 2015: 298). This multiplication of terms points to nineteenth-century scholarship’s concern to probe an interpersonal, socio-cultural and political novelty: the possibility and manifestation of feeling and connection that do not arise from people’s familial and geo-demographic origins, but from a transindividual and transcultural capacity that is brought on through rising mobility and unfamiliarity, and that ‘acts at/from a distance’. Einfühlung came to play a major role in the thought of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who saw our experience of the other in the first instance as a pre-cognitive feeling with/into their bodily movement: “in perceiving the other’s bodily activities I empathically recognise another conscious life” (Drummond, 2013: 124). Merleau-Ponty agreed, noting that “all zoology assumes from our side a methodical Einfühling into animal behaviour, with the participation of the animal in our perceptive life and the participation of our perceptive life in animality” (AnsellPearson, 1999: 211, citing; Merleau-Ponty, 1988: 165). For his part, Freud (1856–1939), drawing on Lipps’ work on Einfühling, first uses the term in 1905 to describe the subconscious nature of psychic transformation, mother-child attachment dynamics, therapeutic relationships and social relationships generally (Agosta, 2014). In contrast to these prosocially-oriented views, Heidegger construed empathy as a compensation for humans’ dominant unsociability: empathy “gets its motivation from unsociability of the dominant modes of Being-with” (Heidegger, 1962: 162/3).5 The English translation of Einfühlung as ‘empathy’ was coined by Edward Titchener (1867–1927) in 1909.6 Titchener interpreted the 5 “‘Empathy’ does not first constitute Being-with; only on the basis of Being-with does ‘empathy‘ become possible: it gets its motivation from the unsociability of the dominant modes of Being-with. … The special hermeneutic of empathy will have to show how Being-with-one-another and Dasein’s knowing of itself are led astray and obstructed … so that a genuine ‘understanding’ gets suppressed, and Dasein takes refuge in substitutes” (Heidegger, 1962: 162/3). 6 Strachey’s translation of Freud’s 1905 work into English never rendered Einfühling as ‘empathy’.

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more general term sympathy as ‘feeling together with another’, and defined empathy as the ‘tendency to feel oneself into the situation’. Wispe however finds it “hard to summarise exactly what Titchener meant by the term” (Wispe, 1987: 22). This tendency to feel oneself into the situation is called empathy; on the analogy of sympathy, which is feeling together with another; and empathetic ideas are interesting because they are the converse of perceptions; their core is imaginal, and their context is made up of sensations, the kinaesthetic and organic sensations that carry empathetic meaning. (Titchener cited in Wispe, 1987: 22)

Titchener saw imagination as playing a major role in empathy, leading him to regard empathy as a resource for ‘humanising our surroundings’. And yet he also appeared to see empathy as an explanation for strange experiences, including optical illusions (Wispe, 1987). By contrast, Cooley, another early twentieth-century scholar also interested in our ability to divine and share mental states, avoided the concept of empathy entirely. Cooley’s interest focused on sympathy, and he defined it as “denot[ing] the sharing of any mental state that can be communicated” (Cooley, 1998: 93). Sympathy7 arose for Cooley from the “contact with the minds of other men [sic]” sparking “a process of thought and sentiment similar to theirs and [this] enables us to understand them by sharing our states of mind” (Cooley, 1998: 111). This ‘sharing of states of mind’ is reminiscent of Mead’s ‘taking the roles of others’, which he saw as the basis for ‘social intelligence’ (Mead, 1967 [1934]). Interpersonal responsiveness was a matter now not merely of being attentive to rules and knowing etiquette, but of maintaining alertness and sensitivity towards unfamiliar others’ actions, thoughts, feelings and circumstances, including knowing how to respond to these ‘empathically’. What these considerations have in common is that they pertain not simply to in-group but particularly to out-group prosociality. In contrast to the more recent term empathy, the term sympathy has been dated back to the Greek word for ‘fellow feeling’ and the Latin ‘compassio’ (Schliesser, 2015). Schliesser suggests this extended genealogy 7 While not drawing on the concept of empathy, Cooley did distinguish sympathy as emotion from sympathy as communion: “Sympathy in the sense of compassion is a specific emotion or sentiment, and has nothing necessarily in common with sympathy in the sense of communion” (Cooley, 1998: 93).

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accords sympathy with a much broader semantic remit than just ‘being affected by someone else’s feelings’. Schliesser explains that sympathy was used to describe not just co-affective bonds between people, but also the harmonious vibrations among musical strings, as well as the spread of contagious diseases, and the co-occurrence among events, actions and disasters. In essence, sympathy captured the much broader and more general idea of ‘action at a distance’. Shakespeare, writing in the seventeenth century, can therefore still speak about agreement as “sympathy in choice”, and about likeness as “sympathy in years, manners, and beauties” (cited in Cooley, 1998: 94). Generally, sympathy was applied to cases where the causes of actions and reactions remained mysterious and unexplained (Schliesser, 2015). Sympathy was a concept that emphasised likeness, but beyond that was unable to provide a grip on prosocial feeling as ‘action at a distance’. Descartes saw the use of sympathy therefore as a marker of the speaker’s ignorance, and as a sign that they do not as yet have a rational explanation for the actions, causes and relationships operating ‘at a distance’ that they are wanting to describe (Schliesser, 2015). In contrast, Spinoza insisted that not fully understanding or not being able to explain ‘action at a distance’ was an inevitable feature of life: “nobody as yet has determined the limits of the body’s capabilities: that is, nobody as yet has learned from experience what the body can and cannot do” (cited in Schliesser, 2015: 13). Spinoza’s acknowledgement stands in stark contrast to Descartes’ expectation that all shall be explained. In granting sympathy a legitimate role in how we deal with ‘action at a distance’, Spinoza “reopens the door to … sympathy as not merely a placeholder for our ignorance of the world’s causal nexus when confronted by apparent action at a distance but as a potential explanation of existing phenomena” (Schliesser, 2015: 13). Worrying however was the potential for spontaneous sympathetic action at a distance to grow with the expansion of gatherings into crowds (Borch, 2013). With unfamiliar others converging into growing masses, the scale, reach and turn-over of communities’ behavioural registers and people’s interactive repertoires escalates. A major imperative therefore now becomes “the organisation of imitativeness” (Tarde, 1962 [1890]: 70) as a means to contain unfamiliar but proximate individuals’ “direct inheritance of an affective state”. This phenomenon was indeed already a concern for Spinoza two centuries earlier when he recognised that …

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… not only are humans capable of inheriting the affects of other humans, they necessarily will do so when they are acted upon by like beings, other things being equal. The way that the affective state of a like being will be de re registered is in terms of the direct inheritance of this very state. (Steinberg, 2013: 396)

A ‘direct inheritance of an affective state’ cuts out the subject and her deference to conventional conducts as control valves, and if not retethered elsewhere, control dissipates. In early warfare, it was precisely this ‘direct inheritance of an affective state’ that meant warriors’ could give themselves over to a ‘de-subjectifying rage’ (Protevi, 2013); a capacity that guaranteed ‘superhuman’ results. Here, affective receptivity leads to affective contagion, serving those for whom combat involving harming and killing might not be feasible without the blindness supplied by contagious rage. This contagion was deliberately amplified through dancing, singing and shouting to unite individuals at the necessary levels of excitement and commitment. Contagion elicits “human bonding in terms of collective resonating movement provoking the entrainment of asubjective physiological processes supporting emotional attachment” (Protevi, 2013: 56). Protevi cites McNeill for whom “dancing, together with marching and singing or shouting rhythmically” are at once rousing and community forming.8 Given its de-subjectifying effects, the direct inheritance of affective states thus harbours considerable unpredictability. Nineteenth-century crowd theorists, including Tarde, were concerned to prevent crowd gatherings from spinning out of control through impulsivity climaxing into violence, rage, fear and panic, or ‘mass irrationality’ (Drury & Stott, 2011). For them, crowds’ affective contagion could so overheat as to convert imitativeness from generating social alignment into producing antisocial chaos (Barry & Thrift, 2007). This risk arises particularly when the “splintering of a group into individuals driven entirely by their own needs (‘every man for himself’) [leads to] a loss of esprit de corps as when panic sets in among a crowd” (Gibbs, 2008: 132).

8 McNeil goes so far as to regard emotional contagion as “a capability that marks humans off from all other forms of life [providing the] critical prerequisites for the emergence of humanity” (McNeill, 1995: 13).

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Panic presents this paradox: on the one hand it shatters any esprit de corps because it produces a situation of ‘each one for him/herself, while on the other hand it represents the greatest moment of sensory receptivity of the human body to others – for in it, sympathetic or affective contagion is at its height. (Gibbs, 2008: 133)9

Imitativeness and contagion through ‘sensory receptivity’ are thus twoedged swords: they maximise affective responsiveness and thereby accomplish mass alignment (good for warring, schooling, training), but they may also degenerate into confusion, frenzy and disarray. The latter, instead of providing the conditions for scaling up purpose, application and energy, threatens the social order to the point of generating “the very affective tendency that imperils the state” (Steinberg, 2018: loc 101).10 In this line-up, empathy appears defined as being less susceptible than sympathy and imitation/imitativeness to affective excess. To flesh out this distinction between sympathy and empathy, Debes suggests that “sympathy = empathy + care” (Debes, 2015: 299). This frames empathy as “imaginative perspective-taking” (Debes, 2015: 300). In this formulation, empathy refers to a mental simulation or a representation of others’ experiences and feelings, something which is essentially “unburdened by any motivational care for or interest in the other or her experiences” (Debes, 2015: 300). This reserves the concept empathy for more conscious operations involving meanings and representations, and credits sympathy with a pre-discursive, biophysiological, immediated, sensory, receptive and thus more affective scope. In effect, Debes’ schema differentiates empathy as ‘strategic (conscious) response’ (e.g. pity, help, consolation) from sympathy as ‘state-matching (preconscious) response’ (your sadness becomes my sadness). De Vignemont and Singer favour a similarly limiting definition of empathy. They exclude emotional contagion from empathy, for the reason that it “does not meet the condition of self-other distinction” 9 The effect of extreme emotions is differentiated. Panic for Gibbs shatters a crowd’s ‘esprit de corps’ and disperses individuals, while rage has a ‘de-subjectifying’ effect that connects individuals to a crowd-enhanced and -intensified affect (Protevi, 2013). Sloterdijk (2012) regards rage also as a resource for concentrating and rallying socio-political impulse. 10 Steinberg cites Matheron (1990: 264) who writes “Il faut admettre que l’indignation engendre l’Etat de la meme facon, exactement, qu’elle cause les revolutions” (Steinberg, 2018: loc 131).

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which they regard as criterial for empathy (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006: 435). They further exclude ‘cognitive perspective taking’ because it suggests the person can accomplish this without actually being “in an affective state” (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006: 435). In contrast, the ethologists Preston and De Waal (2002b) set store by a ‘broad theory’ of empathy, a view that is based on commonalities observed in affective behaviour across species. They conclude from their animal studies that the attribute of empathy applies to “any process where the attended perception of the object’s state generates a state in the subject that is more applicable to the object’s state or situation than to the subject’s own prior state or situation” (Preston & De Waal, 2002b: 4). Indeed, Preston and De Waal’s more encompassing perspective caters to any “affective response that stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another’s emotional state or condition” (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Spinrad, 2006: 671). It thereby enables us to explore empathy as “a relatively simple mechanism that provides an observer (the ‘subject’) with access to the subjective state of another (the ‘object’) through the subject’s own neural and bodily representations”: … at the core of the empathic capacity is a relatively simple mechanism that provides an observer (the ‘subject’) with access to the subjective state of another (the ‘object’) through the subject’s own neural and bodily representations. When the subject attends to the object’s state, the subject’s neural representations of similar states are automatically activated. The closer and more similar subject and object, the more perceiving the object will activate matching peripheral motor and autonomic responses in the subject (e.g. changes in heart rate, skin conductance, facial expression, body posture). This activation allows the subject to get ‘under the skin’ of the object, sharing its feelings and needs, which in turn foster sympathy, compassion, and helping. (de Waal, 2007: 59)

This broad theory effectively frames empathy as encompassing response processes as varied in nature and social in effect as emotional contagion, parental caring, interpersonal sympathy, and altruism (itself ranging from pastoral concern to activism).11 This broad perspective effectively

11 One consequence of de Waal’s broad theory of empathy is that it condones if not indeed encourages rather than that it reduces the “cacophony of opinions in the field of empathy research” (Preston & De Waal, 2002b: 49).

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accommodates an affective spectrum ranging from greater to lesser immediacy.12 [there are] reports of empathy as a prosocial response to the needs of others that develops in childhood […], as an innate ability for emotional resonance that exists across species […], as a conditioned response that develops through experience […], and as a high-level, [and a] cognitive process that relies on perspective-taking abilities reserved for a certain level of human development and a limited taxonomic group of animals. (Preston & De Waal, 2002a: 49)

Preston and De Waal explain that the more individuals share familiarity, similarity, learning, past experience and salience (Preston & De Waal, 2002b: 3), the higher their degree of (in-group) empathy, and the more likely their empathy manifests ‘automatically’ or ‘immediately’. Such automatised-immediated sensory responsiveness (‘involuntary empathy’) has by some been construed to occur at a ‘mirror neuronal’ level, where mirroring instantiates a preconscious immediacy.13 Here, others’ conducts and emotions are ‘imitated’ neuronally bypassing higherorder cognitive processing (Braten, 2007; di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, & Rizzolatti, 1992). Others however contest the mirror neuron thesis on the ground that the complexity of processing, information and sensation that comes into play with affective responsiveness and sensory receptivity exceeds what might be possible at the level of isolated (or even a specific set of) neurons. Such complexity always already invokes and activates multiple, distributed and integrated neuronal (see, e.g. the papers in Pascolo, 2013), visceral (Gallese, Keysers, & Rizzolatti, 2004) and endocrinal operations (Damasio, 2018). The affective complexity that is at issue here may be better appreciated by first diversifying ‘feeling’ and recognising its essential multiplicity:

12 The phrase ‘neural representations’ in this quote reduces the gap between neuralbiophysiological processes and semiosis, as it attributes an informational-semiotic dimension to such processes (viz. ‘neural representations’). This is not surprising, given semiosis originates in biophysiology, phylogenically (the level of human evolution), ontogenically (the level of individual becoming), and sociogenically (the level of social unfolding). 13 It has been suggested that biting into a lemon in full view of a brass band in action is difficult for empathetic musicians to ignore and stick to their score.

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The typical content of our feelings is governed by the degree to which the operations of the viscera … are smooth and uncomplicated or else laboured and erratic. To make matters more complex, all of these varied organ states are the result of the action of chemical molecules — circulating in the blood or arising in nerve terminals distributed throughout the viscera — for example, cortisol, serotonin, dopamine, endogenous opioids, oxytocin. Some of these potions and elixirs are so powerful that their results are instantaneous. Last, the degree of tension or relaxation of the voluntary muscles … also contributes to the content of feelings. Examples include the patterns of muscular activation of the face. (Damasio, 2018: 103)

While Damasio’s account details the sub-subjective dimensions of feeling, an ‘ethological’ analysis of ‘what bodies can do’ in situ (Deleuze, 2005) reveals yet further complexity at the micrological level of pre-personal and inter-bodily dynamics (Thibault, 2011). Thibault describes these as “synchronized interindividual bodily dynamics [manifesting] on very short, rapid timescales of the order of fractions of seconds to milliseconds” (Thibault, 2011: 214). He notes that these “[b]odily dynamics [draw] on the inherent tendencies of the dynamics as well as the functional capacities of bodies to affect other bodies and be affected by them (to move and to be moved)” (Thibault, 2011: 216). These bodily dynamics are by some taken to be contingent on a “proto-empathetic identification” (Protevi, 2013: 60) that prevails among living beings. Reminiscent of Husserl’s Einfühlung , this protoempathetic identification makes possible the inchoate choreography of affective moves that undergird the development of joint attention (Stern, 1977; Trevarthen, 1980), and which in turn is the condition of possibility for the emergence of semiotic (‘symbolic’) exchange. Fleshing out this logic, Braten and Trevarthen (2007) propose a schema of human development that distinguishes the following ontogenetic transformations that are effected em/sympathetically: ‘primary intersubjectivity’ during the first few months of life where a “direct sympathy with actual others’ expressions of feelings in intimate reciprocal subject-subject contact entail[s] dance-like proto-conversation”; ‘secondary intersubjectivity’ (from around 9 months old) where “objects of joint attention and emotional referencing are brought into play within trusting relations of companionship sometimes inviting object-oriented imitative learning”, and ‘tertiary intersubjectivity’ that is based in “symbolic conversation with actual and virtual companions” (Braten & Trevarthen, 2007: 24/6).

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Ontogenetically then, individuation occurs thanks to and passes through what Halliday has referred to as the ‘interpersonal gateway’: an affective ‘dance-like proto-relation’ that rhythmically14 binds and bonds individuals (Halliday, 1975; Trevarthen, 1980). As Halliday explains in Learning How To Mean, meaning emerges from interactively negotiated and co-performed affective energies, and it relies on this complex inter/intrapersonal dynamic for individuals’ capacity to mean (linguistically) to develop. It is not the case that we begin life as observing, representing beings who then become through receptivity. Rather, in the beginning is a dynamic and world-oriented receptivity from which organized cognition, and the sense of the self as subject or man [sic] emerges. It is from a primary openness to the world, a primarily sensed world, that there emerges the sense of one who sees. (Colebrook, 2014: 20)

These considerations highlight that the dichotomy opposing immediation (affect, energy) and mediation (meaning, symbolisation) lacks delicacy, as it conceals the dynamic complexity and rhythmic unfolding of coenergising (or de-energising) exchange. As I will argue, the complexity of this unfolding is such that we need to construe affective-energetic and semiotic-communicative processes and resources not just as metastable but as meta-bolic (Landecker, 2013); I say this because their mutual ‘processing’ goes well beyond the point of parallel systems being structured by iterative input-output regimens: mutual processing here refers to radical affective-semiotic reconfigurations. For now, I’ll just note that the foregoing problematises the positions advanced by Wetherell, Leys, Martin and Mazzarella as set out in Chapter 2. Their claim was that all affect is always already meaningful, social and political, ‘all the way down’. I concluded Chapter 2 by noting that affect (apprehended as sense) and meaning/semiosis are entangled in a metastable dynamic that remains vulnerable to experiential excess leaching out from relational ruptures and precarious situations. Sense and meaning cannot be tightly coupled since affective excess will spin experiences and behaviours out of (neurobiological, socio-semiotic, political)

14 Prosocial behaviour tends to be anticipated by ‘rhythm entrainment’, or the convergence of rhythms of speech (recurring acoustic events) produced by and among interlocutors (Polyanskaya et al., 2019).

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orbit, leaving those affected without compass for how to go on (Beckett, 1953). Now, Spinoza saw that our being spun out of orbit was not a sign of weakness and of having lost direction, but a sign of ‘our power to be affected’.

The Power to Be Affected Let me now return to my original concern, which is to understand how our ‘power to be affected enhances our power to act’. I set out by inquiring into empathy and sympathy as prosocial realisations of ‘sensory responsiveness’ (Wispe, 1987: 20). The discussion touched on how the individual’s ontogenesis moves through the ‘interpersonal gateway’ of affective connection initiated through shared rhythms. Human ontogenesis is structured by neoteny (our species’ retention over time of juvenile features). Neoteny produces young life that can’t do (yet) and is therefore obliged to be ‘done to’: it learns by and as it is being moved. Being moved is the precondition of ontogeny underpinning the interpersonal gateway thesis: the more we are affected/moved, the greater our capability to ‘be affected’ through and by our increasingly ‘wide and intense’ (see below) connections to others, and the greater (the likelihood of growth in) our power to act. But ontogenesis does not stop after childhood. The Greek care for the self (Foucault, 1986) was but one early move in an otherwise extensive sociogenic programme (Elias, 1982a, 1982b) rendering sensory responsiveness central to the intensification of human sociality. Throughout evolution, sociogenesis effectively produced ‘self-domesticating’ humans capable of a new division of labour between those specialised in violence (usually males) protecting others (females and the young). This yielded a novel, shielded reproductive clearing: a socio-experimental sphere where different modes of living became possible (Sloterdijk, 2016). This sphere at once enabled and obliged the protected to initiate uncommon behaviours and socialities (Sloterdijk, 2016) through relational experiments (Protevi, 2019). The common threads among these newly protected (Sloterdijk prefers ‘pampered’) behaviours were “increased self-control [and] a unique form of human tolerance” (Hare, 2017: 157). Within this (protected, pampered) human sphere, individuals’ experiments with ‘being moved’ provided the means for accelerating self-domestication into a rich socio-cultural, religious and technological diversity (Sloterdijk, 2016).

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Self-domestication and sociogenesis again accelerated during the Enlightenment. Thus, Spinoza regarded “imitating the affects of others [as] essential to one’s sociality” (Steinberg, 2013: 384). Conformity to others’ affects meant sharing their values: “the imitation of affects encourages social conformity, as we seek to avoid shame and to garner esteem” (Steinberg, 2018: loc 97). Conversely, a lack of affective responsiveness was now not just a personal or historical idiosyncrasy but a sociopolitical risk betraying ‘a lack of humanness’ (Steinberg, 2013: loc 383). Lambert van Velthuysen, Spinoza’s friend and contemporary, declared in 1680 that decency and shame were critical for ensuring the preservation of the social self (Steinberg, 2018: loc 98). He argued against behaviours common in his day: public nudity, public urination, and so forth, and promoted an interiorisation of constraint as imperative to realising affective responsiveness.15 Collectively, these exhortations created a “pressure for foresight and self-constraint” (Elias, 1982b: 379). Elias’ descriptions of the subtle changes in everyday mores through the ages reveal the rising pressures of self-domestication, and particularly the role of personal adaptability as the means with which to manage the excesses of fate and fortune (‘foresight’), and mental interiority as the guarantor for personal reflection (‘self-constraint’). As Steinberg (2018) points out, foresight was already an important focus of Machiavelli’s The Prince (Machiavelli, 1532). Advocating a “malleable prudence” (Steinberg, 2018: loc 330), Machiavelli (1469–1527) articulated a pragmatic, if not indeed opportunistic stance towards fate: “it will be found that something which looks like virtue, if followed, would be [one’s] ruin; whilst something else, which looks like vice, yet followed, brings [one] security and prosperity” (Machiavelli, 1532: 93). In a similar vein, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) regarded “circumstantial adaptability as the key to shaping fortune and inflexibility

15 Among other things, what made this new interpersonal-interactive sphere possible was the apology. The apology was retooled into reparative technique, modulating the seriousness of transgressions and mitigating the impact of missteps. The word ‘apology’ in its current sense arose in the late sixteenth century: “In earlier times, an apology referred to a defense, justification or excuse. Its modern meaning and usage have shifted so that now an apology begins where these former rhetorical and essentially self-serving forms leave off” (Tavuchis, 1991). The apology served the transaction of interpersonal affairs among unfamiliar others caught amidst intensifying behavioural difference, discrepancy and deviation.

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as its greatest impediment” (Steinberg, 2018: loc 334). Personal flexibility and circumstantial adaptability require that our ‘affects are turned towards others’: this is a pedagogy instructing our strivings to be sensitive and rapidly responsive to the affects of others, and to be amenable to being refracted through others’ actions and aspirations.

Being Moved as Sociopolitical Priority Self-domestication was granted a prominent position in Spinoza’s work. Placing his trust in the overall augmentation of human affects, Spinoza (1632–1677) saw (religious) toleration and mutual sympathy as the ultimate bases for sociability and community. He described misericordia (pity, mercy, or sympathy) as “love, in so far as it induces a man to feel pleasure at another’s good fortune, and pain at another’s evil fortune” (Spinoza, 2001: XXIV). He also regarded “toleration as necessary for individual virtue and freedom, and [thus] for political stability” (Frank & Waller, 2016: 108). In all, Spinoza prioritised ‘being affected’ as the starting point for mitigating social, cultural and personal differences. For him, ‘being affected’ represented the answer to the (sociopolitical) question of his day: “How do individuals enter into composition with one another in order to form a higher individual [i.e. the new nation state], ad infinitum?” (Deleuze, 2005: 60). Uniquely, for Spinoza, sensory responsiveness was not the key to social obedience induced by amplified fear (as it was for Hobbes16 ), nor the springboard for foresight as pragmatic prudence, nor the route into stoic indifference in the face of suffering and adversity. Instead, he saw responsiveness as the basis for how to rework personal, political and cultural differences into a new and, you could say, a ‘wider and more intense’ conviviality. Only through being mutually affected and moved are people able to create and inhabit, if we invoke Deleuze’s summation of Spinoza’s stance, “a world that is increasingly wide and intense”. How can a being take another being into its world, while preserving and respecting the other’s own relations and world? … What is the difference between the society of human beings and the community of rational

16 Hobbes claimed in De Cive (1642) that “the original of great and lasting societies consisted not in mutual good will men had toward each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other” (cited in Corey, 2006: 31).

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beings? Now we are concerned … with a symphony of Nature, the composition of a world that is increasingly wide and intense. (Deleuze, 2005: 60)

Spinoza’s interest thus lay in “determining which beings are capable of forming larger ethical and political communities with us and are thereby capable of aiding our power of acting” (Steinberg, 2013: 384). A world in which beings are capable of forming communities that are increasingly large in size and vertical in aspiration, or ‘wide and intense’, is a world where individuals’ striving, their conatus, culminates in acts of self- and other-governance based in common, or at least communicable and negotiable, stances and practices. Such stances and practices align and multiply people’s efforts rather than detracting from their freedom and power through disagreement and conflict: “the ethico-political ‘parallel’ of this knowledge of common notions will come about when the greatest number of ‘individuals’ cooperate in an act of self-government that multiplies collective freedom and power” (Williams, 2007: 364). It is worth noting at this point that Spinoza’s family left Portugal and “went to Holland [before he was born] as a result of [their] difficulties with [Portuguese] Jewish religious authorities” (Caputo, 1986: 98). Born in a more liberally-inclined Amsterdam, Spinoza came “into contact there with the pantheistic Jewish caballa” (Caputo, 1986: 98). Spinoza’s unique take on ‘pantheism’ (a contested attribution [Parkinson, 1977]) was that he framed affects as “follow[ing] from the same necessity and force of nature as the other particular things”: Nothing comes to pass in nature, which can be set down to a flaw therein; for nature is always the same, and everywhere one and the same in her efficacy and power of action; that is, nature’s laws and ordinances, whereby all things come to pass and change from one form to another, are everywhere and always the same; so that there should be one and the same method of understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, namely, through nature’s universal laws and rules. Thus the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from this same necessity and efficacy of nature …. (Spinoza, 2001: Part III—On the origin and nature of the emotions)

Spinoza’s ‘proof’ for the assertion stating that ‘all is Nature’ is as follows: Proof.—All the modes, in which any given body is affected, follow from the nature of the body affected, and also from the nature of the affecting

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body … wherefore their idea also necessarily … involves the nature of both bodies; therefore, the idea of every mode, in which the human body is affected by external bodies, involves the nature of the human body and of the external body. (Spinoza, 2001: XVI)

This proof posits that being affected in whatever way is contingent on the nature (‘that which is’, not ‘that which is claimed to be’) of interacting bodies. Spinoza’s anchoring of how bodies affect one another to their (shared and inherent) nature, and not to some social, religious or political principle, claim or category, renders his perspective anti-hierarchical, and indeed anarchic (Deleuze, 1978–1981: 33): [His] is anti-hierarchical thinking. In the final analysis, this is a type of anarchy. There is an anarchy of beings in existence. This is the basic intuition in [Spinoza’s] ontology: all beings are equally valued. The stone, the insensate, the reasonable, the animal, from a certain point of view, from the point of view of existence, they all have the same value. Every existing entity is valued for being an entity in existence, and existence applies equally to a stone as to a human, the mad person, or the reasoned person. This is a very beautiful idea. It views the world as very wild/savage. (Deleuze, 1978–1981: 33)17

Where for Hobbes the political contract bound together those who command and those who are fearful enough to obey, for Spinoza the essence and aim of political life rested on the realisation and optimisation of everyone’s power to become: that is, on their ‘becoming more’ (Deleuze, 1978–1981; Steinberg, 2018). Rooted not in fear and domination but in verticalities such as growth, learning and self-optimisation, Spinoza’s politics sought to realise everyone’s opportunity to achieve their optimal mode of being, saying and doing: “la société toute entière est pensée comme ceci: l’ensemble des conditions sous lesquelles l’homme peut effectuer sa puissance de la meilleure façon” [the whole of society is thought of as follows: the totality of conditions under which humankind

17 My translation. The original reads: “C’est la pensée anti-hiérarchique. À la limite, c’est

une espèce d’anarchie. Il y a une anarchie des étants dans l’être. C’est l’intuition de base de l’ontologie: tous les êtres se valent. La pierre, l’insensé, le raisonnable, l’animal, d’un certain point de vue, du point de vue de l’être, ils se valent. Chacun est autant qu’il est en lui, et l’être se dit en un seul et même sens de la pierre de l’homme, du fou, du raisonnable. C’est une très belle idée. C’est une espèce de monde très sauvage.”

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can realise their unique power in the best possible way] (Deleuze, 1978–1981: 33). It is remarkable that Spinoza’s radical anti-hierarchical stance toughened rather than slackened following the public lynching of his political allies and protectors, the moderate brothers de Witt, in 1672. These murders effectively ended the Netherlands’ republican regime, jeopardising Spinoza’s personal situation. This event severely impacted his thinking: “Les frères De Witt ont été assassinés, il n’y a plus de compromis possible” [the brothers de Witt have been assassinated [and now] there was no more possibility of a compromise] (Deleuze, 1978–1981: 32). Here, Deleuze diagnoses Spinoza’s dual refusal: his principled refusal to respond to the force of murder and disarray and to abandon his basic philosophical premise that verticality must be the principal aim of self/other-governance, and his anti-hierarchical refusal to accord the individual any right to claim personal, social, religious or political substance, priority or legitimacy, and use such a claim to avoid, or limit, ‘being affected’. This dynamic definition of individuality opens up to another crucial aspect that is inherent in Spinoza’s view of existence as ‘all of Nature’. Bringing all of nature together as Nature, Spinoza’s relational ontology denies the human any claim to uniqueness, or separateness from the rest of life: humankind is not imperium in imperio. With this, Spinoza “calls into question the existence of boundaries between individuals” (Williams, 2007: 354). There can be no view of the individual as imperium in imperio (a kingdom within a kingdom), as somehow independent of nature … . Instead, the individual must be conceived as ‘part of nature’, as part of a social body upon which it depends and by which it is continually affected. (Williams, 2007: 354)

The foregoing—individuals’ continuity with Nature, and the absence of substantive or pre-determined hierarchical, intellectual, social or biological boundaries between individuals18 —makes clear that our ‘power to be affected’ was never simply about energetic influences of one body on another, or affect exchanges and communicative transactions among 18 Steinberg reminds us however that Spinoza regarded the subordination of women as ‘natural’ (Steinberg, 2018: loc 133).

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discrete individuals. Instead, the ‘power to be affected’ is a feature—an energy, a vitalism, a metabole—of an inevitably and always already dynamic entanglement. Here, Plato’s speculation about metabolé—a great or sudden transformation—as a break in time (Strobach, 1998) connects us to the contemporary philosophy of metabolism (Landecker, 2013) and to recent views on metabolism as a life-defining metaphor or “trancendental aesthetic” (Protevi, 2013: 155/6). To describe phenomena as metabolic involves acknowledging that metabolisms are not constituted in stable structures or components that are engaged in well-defined and stable iterativeproductive activities. Rather, metabolisms are “storm-like collection(s) of random walks influenced by friction, charge, and thermal effects [and are therefore] non-mechanistic” (Godfrey Smith, 2016: 486). Metabolisms are shaped through evolutionary processes. This involves a role for reproduction as opposed to mere persistence; a metabolic system that can multiply its instances can evolve in ways that a non-reproducing system cannot, as the proliferation of any improvement creates many independent platforms on which further innovation can occur. Among metabolising systems, then, those that can reproduce will become more complex and orderly as well as more common. Reproduction requires control of energy somewhere in the system, though not always direct control by the reproducer itself. (Godfrey Smith, 2016: 485)

Construing our ‘power to be affected’ as metabolic has two consequences. First, this power is effectively and fundamentally an attribute not of me or of you, but defines the energies and impulses that animate (or drain away from) our entanglements. Second, this power is transformative thanks to its embodying a ‘storm of activity’, a whirlwind of influences that do not operate according to a fully pre-designed plan. Our power to be affected is effectively a networked quantum of activity and movement that we are privileged to experience and that our relations are able to evoke, accommodate, grow and sustain.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have investigated the personal and sociopolitical dimensions of this idea: the power to be affected determines our power to act. We are affected thanks to a sensory responsiveness or empathy that gains

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ontogenetic traction as ‘interpersonal proto-dance’ that we conduct with (significant) others. This proto-dance becomes the condition of possibility for subsequent and more complex entanglements whose affective depth feeds semiotic (‘unthought’ and thought) capacity and density. The foundational principle here is that, at every ontogenetic step of the way, ‘we cannot make a move without being moved’. Moving (acting, becoming) as such is contingent on being moved (being acted on, being affected): the (proto)dance is what makes us and what acts us. This principle was shown to embody significant sociopolitical dimensions, insofar that the intensification of existential changeability incurs, and demands, greater affective and sensory responsiveness; hence, sociogenesis or self-domestication. Responsiveness is what attunes us to and enables us to operate as part of “the planetary cognitive ecology as it continues to transform, grow and flourish” (Hayley, 2017: 64). Becoming is inscribed into the dynamics that move us and that enable us to move. This linked to Spinoza’s anarchic perspective on life which levelled the significance of claimed differences among subjects. His dictum that ‘all is nature’ denies our escape into fixed categories, classifications and reasonings with which we seek to halt life, fix selves and stall all chances for becoming different, or undone. Seen from the perspective that ‘all is nature’, affectivity is neither autonomous nor semiotic but metabolic, since it actualises as a ‘storm’ of possibilities and effects. In the next chapter, Chapter 5, I explore how human becoming may be construed and s(t)imulated by initiating ‘storms’ that may occasion our becoming as a mode of (re)potentiation.

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Borch, C. (2013). Crowd theory and the management of crowds: A controversial relationship. Current Sociology, 61(5–6), 584–601. Braten, S. (Ed.). (2007). On being moved: From mirror neurons to empathy. Benjamins: Amsterdam and Philadelphia. Braten, S., & Trevarthen, C. (2007). Prologue: From infant intersubjectivity and participant movements to simulation and conversation in cultural common sense. On being moved: From mirror neurons to empathy (pp. 21–34). Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins. Caputo, J. D. (1986). The mystical element in Heidegger’s thought. New York: Fordham University Press. Colebrook, C. (2014). Death of the posthuman: Essays on Extinction (Vol. 1). Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press—Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan Library). Cooley, C. H. (1998). On self and social organisation (H. J. Schubert, Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Corey, R. (2006). Fear: The history of a political idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Damasio, A. (2018). The strange order of things: Life, feeling, and the making of cultures. London: Penguin. Darwin, C. (1999 [1871]). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. Project Gutenberg. de Vignemont, F., & Singer, T. (2006). The empathic brain: how, when and why? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(10), 435–441. de Waal, F. (2007). The ‘Russian Doll’ model of empathy and imitation. In S. Braten (Ed.), On being moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy (pp. 49–73). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Debes, R. (2015). From Einfühlung to empathy. In E. Schliesser (Ed.), Sympathy: A history (pp. 287–322). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deleuze, G. (1978–1981). Lecture Transcripts. Retrieved from https://www.web deleuze.com/. Deleuze, G. (2005). Ethology: Spinoza and us. In M. Fraser & M. Greco (Eds.), The body: A reader (pp. 58–61). London: Routledge. di Pellegrino, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V., & Rizzolatti, G. (1992). Understanding motor events: A neurophysiological study. Experimental Brain Research, 91(1992), 176–180. Drummond, J. (2013). Imagination and appresentation, sympathy and empathy in Smith and Husserl. In C. Fricke & D. Follesdal (Eds.), Intersubjectivity and objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl (pp. 117–137). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Drury, J., & Stott, C. (2011). Contextualising the crowd in contemporary social science. Contemporary Social Science: Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences, 6(3), 275–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2011.625626.

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Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R. A., & Spinrad, T. L. (2006). Prosocial behavior. In N. Eisenberg, W. Damon, & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology Vol. 3: Social, emotional, and personality development (6th ed., pp. 646–718). New York: Wiley. Elias, N. (1982a). The civilising process (Vol. 1): The history of manners (E. Jephcott, Trans.). New York: Pantheon. Elias, N. (1982b). The civilising process (Vol. 2): State formation and civilisation. Oxford: Blackwell. Foucault, M. (1986). The care of the self: The history of sexuality (Vol. III). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Frank, D., & Waller, J. (2016). Spinoza on politics. London and New York: Routledge. Frankl, V. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Boston: Beacon Press. Gallese, V., Keysers, C., & Rizzolatti, G. (2004). A unifying view of the basis of social cognition. Trends in Cognitive Science, 8(9), 396–403. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.07.002. Gibbs, A. (2008). Panic! Affect contagion, mimesis and suggestion in the social field. Cultural Studies Review, 14(2), 130–145. Godfrey Smith, P. (2016). Mind, matter and metabolism. Journal of Philosophy, 113(10), 481–506. Halliday, M. A. K. (1975). Learning how to mean. London: Edward Arnold. Hare, B. (2017). Survival of the friendliest: Homo sapiens evolved via selection for prosociality. Annual Review of Psychology, 68(2017), 155–186. Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2005). The emotional reactivity hypothesis and cognitive evolution: Reply to Miklosi and Topal. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9(2005), 464–465. Hayley, K. (2017). Unthought: The power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. Canterbury: SCM Press. Landecker, H. (2013). The metabolism of philosophy, in three parts. In B. Malkmus & I. Cooper (Eds.), Dialectic and paradox: Configurations of the third in modernity (pp. 193–224). Bern: Peter Lang. Latour, B. (2018). Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. Oxford: Polity. Machiavelli, N. (1532). The Prince. Free EBooks. McNeill, W. H. (1995). Keeping together in time: Dance and drill in human history. Boston: Harvard University Press. Mead, G. H. (1967 [1934]). Mind, self and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviourist. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1988). In praise of philosophy and other essays (J. Wild & J. M. Edie, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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Parkinson, G. H. R. (1977). Hegel, Pantheism and Spinoza. Journal of the History of Ideas, 38(3), 449–459. Pascolo, P. B. (2013). Mirror neurons: Still an open question? Progress in Neuroscience, 1(1–4), 25–82. Polyanskaya, L., Samuel, A. G., & Ordin, M. (2019). Speech rhythm convergence as a social coalition signal. Evolutionary Psychology, 1–11. https://doi. org/10.1177/1474704919879335. Preston, S., & De Waal, F. (2002a). Empathy: Each is in the right—Hopefully, not all in the wrong (Authors’ response). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25(1), 49–58. Preston, S., & De Waal, F. (2002b). Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25(1), 1–20. Protevi, J. (2013). Life, war, earth: Deleuze and the sciences. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Protevi, J. (2019). States of nature: Geographical aspects of current theories of human evolution. Political Geography, 70(2019), 127–136. Schliesser, E. (2015). Introduction: sympathy. In E. Schliesser (Ed.), Sympathy: A history (pp. 1–14). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2012). Rage and time. New York: Columbia University Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2013). You must change your life (W. Hoban, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2016). The domestication of being. Not saved: Essays after Heidegger (pp. 89–148). Cambridge: Polity Press. Spinoza, B. (2001). Ethics (W. H. White & A. H. Stirling, Trans.). Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Steinberg, J. (2013). Imitation, representation, and humanity in Spinoza’s ethics. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 51(3), 383–407. Steinberg, J. (2018). Spinoza’s political psychology: The taming of fortune and fear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, D. (1977). The first relationship: Infant and mother. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Strobach, N. (1998). The moment of change: A systematic history in the philosophy of space and time. Dordrecht: Springer. Tarde, G. (1962 [1890]). The laws of imitation. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publishers. Tavuchis, N. (1991). Mea Culpa: A sociology of apology and reconciliation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Thibault, P. (2011). First-order languaging dynamics and second-order language: The distributed language view. Ecological Psychology, 23(3), 210–245. Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(2005), 675–691.

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Trevarthen, C. (1980). The foundations of intersubjectivity: Development of interpersonal and cooperative understanding in infants. In D. R. Olson (Ed.), The social foundations of language and thought: Essays in honour of Jerome S. Bruner (pp. 317–342). New York: W. W. Norton. Williams, C. (2007). Thinking the political in the wake of Spinoza: Power, affect and imagination in the ethics. Contemporary Political Theory, 6(2007), 349– 369. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300298. Wispe, L. (1987). History of the concept of empathy. In N. Eisenberg & J. Strayer (Eds.), Empathy and its development (pp. 17–37). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Potentiation

Abstract This chapter discusses how being moved may engender ecstasis, or ‘standing outside’. It reviews the evolutionary anthropotechnics that made possible such ecstasis. The chapter then asks the question: if becoming is inscribed into life, and if this renders becoming undone likely if not inevitable (before or as death), how are we to understand the connection between becoming and learning? In answering this question, the chapter explores learning and showback as means to engendering deliberations through which people may come to simulate and experience ecstasis. Keywords Ecstasis · Spherogenics · Showback · Ingenium · Slow science

Introduction What can now be the sense of life after everything has changed, disappeared, shown itself to be larger than and different from anything John ever imagined? Meaning of life is reduced to a sense of life—a sense that life hangs on that which is larger than anything it ever has been, and a patience with these larger things. Life is now a movement of things that feel at once entirely alien and

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entirely natural. At times these things gather into a storm with its own inscrutable logic, a meta-bolism, where nothing is immune to change and into which he can now finally recline without panic. Sense now means patience, as it, and not imagination, anticipation, or hope, or thought, dictates the terms for and ground upon which life proceeds. But why then still this effort to articulate, speak, think, as if meaning can and will persist on the other side of itself, beyond the inversion of his urge to mean?

Chapter 3 asked, what does it mean to become undone?, and concluded that becoming undone is a breaking up of closed figures of life, and a moving towards and into becoming different or undone. For its part, Chapter 4 asked, what does it mean to say that our power to act is enhanced by our power to be affected?, and concluded that the ‘power’ emerging from ‘being affected’ lies in ‘being affected’ renewing and expanding our connections into common life. Instead of being affected (and becoming undone) necessarily equating to a loss of agency and a downturn in fitness, it may connect us to unacknowledged organic (among living things) and anorganic (cosmic) dynamics and energies. In the preceding chapter, I concluded that these dynamics and energies were not merely metastable but metabolic (Landecker, 2013), since they can feel like a “storm” (Godfrey Smith, 2016: 486) that respects nothing and affects everything. Appropriately, the term metabolism describes how “organisms persist by converting the world into themselves” (Landecker, 2013: 194).1 Since Chapter 3 explored being moved from the angle of loss as a form of degeneracy (i.e. the shedding of seemingly critical features in favour of survival2 ), and Chapter 4 explored being moved from the angle of

1 In ancient philosophy, the word metabolé (mεταβoλη) ´ meant revolution or grand transformation (Gonzalez, 2019). In biology, metabolé came to define metabolism as that which reinvents itself as it goes about its business, given its processes are defined not merely by its own striving to persist, but also its needing to adapt in order to reproduce into adaptive offspring (Godfrey Smith, 2016). Metabolism thus refers not to a linear momentum that converts input into output leaving its processing mechanism and its operations unaltered, but to a multidimensional charge (a ‘storm’) that affects all of its own dimensions and processes. 2 Degeneracy equates with robustness: “… robustness (also referred to as degeneracy) … gives evolved complex systems … the ability to survive in an environment with changing

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passivity, the present chapter will explore being moved from the angle of the metabolé or grand transformation. The question I pose to guide this chapter is, if becoming is inscribed into life rendering becoming undone likely if not inevitable (before or as death), does it make sense to conceive of and bring about (grand) transformations through purposively invoking becoming? Put differently, to what extent can passivity competence as anthropotechnic accomplishment (Elias, 1982a, 1982b; Foucault, 1977; Sloterdijk, 2013; and see Chapter 4), be mobilised in the service of social and practical change? To address these questions, I will begin with exploring being moved as mode that was integral to early human self-domestication. I then address how educational practices have experimented with learning as a means for intervening in human becoming, effectively aiming to instigate a ‘becoming of becoming’. I finish by transposing these consideration into a pragmatic (research) register where becoming is s(t)imulated through a community-formation and shared-purpose endeavour referred to as ‘spherogenics’ (Iedema & Carroll, 2015). Spherogenics fashions ‘interpersonal gateways’ (see Chapter 4) opening up to an atmosphere within which a loosening of tight couplings can occur among assumptions and habituations (as taken-as-given ways of doing, being and saying) through the realisation of passivity competent relations and responses.

Being Moved: A Proximity that Requires Distance I described being moved as a complex dynamic that meshes openness towards prosocial proximity with the capacity or competence to yield (i.e. gain distance from) fixed positions, closed conceptions and automatised responses. Of course, no life is static and unchanging, but being moved, particularly being moved by non-in-group individuals and extraordinary events, presupposes an expanding bandwidth of receptivity, flexibility and

internal and external conditions” (Mitchell, 2009: 70–72). “Degeneracy is seen at many levels of biological organization, ranging from properties of cells up to those of language. A good example is the genetic code: each triplet of bases in DNA specifies a particular one of the 20 amino acids that go to make up proteins. Since there are 4 chemically different bases, there are 64 possible triplets. However, since there are [in reality] only 20 different amino acids, the code must be degenerate” (Edelman, 2006: 33).

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creativity,3 that is, a deepening passivity competence. Once this bandwidth is expanding, it may, through being expanded, expand again, capitalising on positive (self-amplifying) feedback (Hare, 2017). Thus identifying a dynamic that is fundamental to engendering self-amplifying effects, being moved by external forces does not refer to an increasingly passive malleability, but to a transformed and transforming affective responsiveness that acts on the world by ‘acting on itself’. By exposing themselves to the effects of others’ ability to act, [humans] appropriate a form of passivity that implies a roundabout or deferred way of acting on themselves. The expanded passivity competence of the moderns expresses itself in the willingness to have oneself operated on in one’s own interests. (Sloterdijk, 2013: loc 374)

Being (able to be) moved instigates a novel distance towards life through ‘appropriating a form of passivity that makes possible a roundabout way of acting on ourselves’. This dynamic is an intensifying deferral of and withdrawal from taken-as-given actualisations of agency in favour of exposing ourselves to the unrehearsed ‘effects (on us) of others’ ability to act’ (on us). Preceding these unrehearsed effects is a gathering of unallocated (deferred or delayed) energy: this is essentially energy that engenders energy, or what may be termed ‘energenesis’. Energenesis is produced by the delay required for ‘being operated on in one’s own interests’. In short, being (able to be) moved, or being operated on by unmanaged forces and opening up to unrehearsed effects, is not just about being carried, but about gathering momentum towards still more energyaccumulating delays. Framed thus, being moved instills the behavioural delays that are the crux of human self-domestication. If human self-domestication can be framed as an energy capable of energenesis, it is thanks to a number of phylogenic adaptations. One was humans’ distancing from their animal environment or Umwelt.4 3 Cf. Engeström’s work on ‘expansive learning’ (Engeström, 1999). 4 Uexküll defined Umwelt in 1909 as “the space peculiar to each animal [which] can

be compared to a soap bubble which completely surrounds the creature …. The extended soap bubble constitutes the limit of what is finite for the animal and therewith the limit of its world; what lies behind that is hidden in infinity” (Uexkull cited in Buchanan, 2008: 23). Heidegger writes about the dissolution of animal environment (Umwelt) as follows, marking ‘language’ as the agency that liberates /expels /distances humans from their given animal Umwelt rendering them ‘worldless’: “at any given moment, plants and

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The animal Umwelt had “the ontological quality of a cage” until a refashioning of it became possible (note the non-attribution of agency to humans) rendering the fixed animal Umwelt into an openended clearing. In a single move, the clearing opened the environment up as world and demanded answers to where and how its inhabitants find shelter (dwellings, language, etc.). Now finding themselves in this “cageless” clearing, humans’ relation to their environment turned ‘ec-static’ (‘standing outside’), “because in [humans] the bars of poverty and restraint that enclose the animal within limits are lacking” (Sloterdijk, 2017: loc 103). The uncaged human experienced the open clearing as a freeing from not just environmental but also organismic constraints, and as an opening out to novel landscapes and horizons. Ecstasy came to define humans’ indeterminate experience of ‘being inside as if being outside’ and of ‘being outside as if being inside’. The emergence of the clearing as ‘outside that is inside/inside that is outside’ is itself hypothesised to be due to a range of factors. One is humans’ ‘insulation from selective pressure’, or the organised protection (‘greenhousing’) by males of females and offspring. This “produc[ed] the effect of a living wall on the inner side of which a climatic advantage emerges for the individuals … that habitually keep to the centre” (Sloterdijk, 2017: loc 111). This climatic advantage afforded experimental living conditions for and among those ‘at the centre’: their sheltered lives amplifying opportunities for novel caring and evolving interactive behaviours. In the course of phylogenic time, these experiments and behaviours began to favour neoteny, or the persistence of juvenile (and increasingly energetic and change-capable) features in human offspring (Gould, 1972).5 animals remain bound to their environment, but are never liberated in light of being (and the “world” is only in light of being), for that reason language does not matter to them. Nor, however, do they therefore hover, worldless, in their environment because language is denied them. But in this word ‘environment’ is condensed all that is puzzling about animate nature. In essence, language is not what comes out of an organism; neither is it what comes out of a living thing. For that reason, it can also never be thought in an essentially correct way when reduced to symbolic expressions or even to semantics. Language is an illuminating that is itself at the same time an obscuring of what is to come of being itself” (Heidegger, 2000 [1946]). 5 Gould cites Julius Kollmann who defined this 1885 neologism as follows: “We have neoteny when an animal, in becoming adult, retains certain infantile characters” (Gould, 1972: 227). Childhood and adolescence are identified as neotenous life stages: “The human childhood and adolescent stages of life history were defined as novel periods in human development, not shared by any non-human primates” (Bogin, Varea,

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Another phylogenic factor is “the deactivation of the body” through the compounding of ability and technique between the body, tools and fire. As proto/pyrotechnics, tools and fire began to make novel kinds of distance and fracturing possible by “relieving the body of contact with presences in the environment” (Sloterdijk, 2017: loc 114). They afforded further concomitant evolution by the body servicing (e.g. the hand) and benefiting from (e.g. teeth) those resources. In an exposition reminiscent of Rossi-Landi’s semiotic theory (Rossi-Landi, 1992 [1979]), Sloterdijk points to a parallel between the practical achievements of throwing and igniting, and signing and languaging: “The successful blow is the prototype of the proposition” (Sloterdijk, 2017: loc 115). Here, signing and languaging are attempts to capture, retain and replay practical effectiveness and success, but their emergence also exploits the widening neotenous interstice between youths’ in(ter)activity and adults’ productivity. Neoteny can be described as a metabolic inversion of the principle of competition for survival from size, strength and aggression, into youthful (or ‘larval’) energy, playful technogenic experimentation and innovation, and ecstatic apprehension of transformation. That is, the emergence of neoteny within and thanks to the human clearing served to contain competition within and transduce it into an acceleration of collaborative, innovative, distributive (e.g. division of labour) and affective (e.g. mutual grooming) conducts and practices. Later developments of course repeated this principle: resource productivity shifted from nomadism to organised agricultural settlement; domesticity entered the ‘dwelling’ as a site for multi-species and multi-specialty niche formation, and rule emerged as elites asserted hierarchised control over geographic boundaries, productivity surplus and the means of authority and violence (Protevi, 2019). In each of these spheres and throughout these transformations, Homo sapiens appeared set on a trajectory towards “reactive aggression control” as if always already gifted with “a default setting of prosociality” (Protevi, 2019: 127/8).

Hermanussen, & Scheffler, 2018: 839). Gould comments that neoteny arose in protected environments ensuring “stable, favourable and ‘crowded’ situations” (Gould, 1972: 303) where the main survival pressures issued not from resource scarcity but from speciesinternal competition. Given the young have “higher metabolic rates” (Gould, 1972: 293) than adults, they have higher levels of competitive energy and therefore a greater competitive advantage.

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Prosociality assisted socialisation through the refinement of sedentary skills (e.g. agriculture, animal keeping), stationary clearings (e.g. dwellings, settlements) and group control mechanisms (e.g. rule, ritual). Keeping in mind that I am not talking about a linear unfolding but a complex mix of factors,6 each of these phenomena pushed humans towards intensifying psychological, interactive-communicative and technological relations and practices. Noteworthy in all of this is that humans’ came to inhabit what was in effect an immobilised mode of relocation: a being moved amidst passivity. Reactions made room for experiences. Being (able to be) moved now extends to the unrehearsed effects produced by deferred responses in the face of unmanaged forces. It is in this sense that being moved is now at the heart of a grand transformation, the metabolé that is human self-domestication. Self-domestication, in this context, refers not to a linear logic of human evolutionary becoming, but to an ongoing cost-benefit calculus gauging the effects of prosociality (the acceptance of external differences), passivity (the de-automatisation of reflexes), collaboration (shared effort with the possibility of shared benefit) and creativity (competitive innovation) in the context of regular violent disruptions and persistent aggressive challenges (Protevi, 2019). What remains to be explored now is the question about the functionality and potential of this novel self-domesticating trope of ‘being moved amidst passivity’ for occasioning learning, or a ‘becoming of becoming’. Such becoming of becoming is a purposeful re-apprehension of life not (in the first instance at least) to objectify it in rules or knowledge. Instead, its purpose is to engender open-endedness through s(t)imulating ‘standing outside’. Learning now can be appreciated as a “separation [through which] the human [...] discovers itself as the animal that is split, mirrored and placed beside itself, unable to remain as it was” (Sloterdijk, 2013: 191).7 6 DeLanda reminds us that “the idea that these social forms followed each other in time has been replaced by the study of their coexistence in space: an archaic state may have formed the core of a large region dominating a few complex chiefdoms, with simple chiefdoms and agricultural villages forming an exploited periphery. The concept of a linear evolution usually leads to models in which a single entity, “society as a whole,” develops from one “stage of development” to another. But once we replace that conception with one involving the coexistence and complex interaction of agricultural communities, chiefly lineages, and institutional organizations, we need several models” (DeLanda, 2012: 167). 7 The English translation of Sloterdijk’s book has “the animal that is split, mirrored and placed beside itself, that cannot remain as it was”. I think a better translation is:

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The Ecstasy of Standing Outside Hominisation involved humans re-apprehending their Umwelt—the environmental and resource conditions that caged their pre-human life—from novel angles. As shown, and among other things, this was achieved through ‘greenhousing’ the reproductive members and their offspring within a protective zone sheltering them from ‘the outside’. This sheltering became genetically transformed into and evolutionally embedded as neoteny, producing the human as furless, defenceless larval unusuality. Neoteny subjugated and still subjugates human biophysiology to the exigency of mutual care and protection, and to a reliance on youthful readiness, energy and adaptability for novel types and levels of competition, continued playfulness, and intensified experimentation. Neoteny confirmed the abandonment of original ways of being, demanding a wholesale refashioning of human sociality, productivity, domesticity and interactivity. Here, bodily involution8 embedded a transforming clearing and ongoing technogenesis into novel anatomical (e.g. skin), behavioural (e.g. language), as well as neurological singularities. Neurologically, the opportunity to collect energy from being moved amidst passivity, and the pressure to accommodate and resource its unrehearsed effects enabled the pre-human brain to link circuits that produce similar output, a process that is referred to as “re-entry mapping” (Edelman, 2006: 33). Re-entry mapping is an associative dynamic enacted by “brain circuits under selection” (Edelman, 2006: 33), resulting in a rewriting of such associations by or as a re-mapping, abstracting and synthesising brain activity into alternative (‘representing’) brain activity. As such, re-entry mapping is defining of how human brains (began to) gather, re-present and reshape their own ‘brain behaviour’ (Deacon, “the animal that is split, mirrored and placed beside itself, unable to remain as it was”. Hoban’s translation of Sloterdijk’s book is a general disappointment. The rush with which this book was translated is evident from parts of some of the German sentences not making it into the translation. Of the many instances, just one example is the omission of the name Rilke from the first paragraph on p. 19 of the translation, while this name does appear in the original German. Another is the rendering of this sentence: “uns einer nicht versklavenden Form von Autorität, einer nicht repressiven Erfahrung von Rangdifferenz auszusetzen” (p. 37 of the German version) as ‘simply’ “a non-enslaving form of rank differences” (p. 19). In addition to these omissions, much of the poetics of Sloterdijk’s writing is lost. The translation is so awkward that it may well generate a negative rather than a positive effect on the Anglo-American reception of Sloterdijk’s work. 8 Involution refers to the shrinking of an organ.

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1997; Edelman, 2006). The synthesis produced by this brain-internal reapprehension or mapping has been argued to form the seed for higher human consciousness and ground its capacity for grammar and language (Halliday, 2004). But these observations still do not explain the ontological leap into humanness that must have originated as or from this plasticity. As far as evolution theory is concerned, Darwin confirms the leap into human life to be the linear outcome of a gradual progression into growing complexity: “It is … highly probable that with mankind the intellectual faculties have been mainly and gradually perfected through natural selection” (Darwin, 1999 [1871]: 358). Darwin’s linear trajectory into ‘perfection’ emphasises human complexity as the logical and explainable outcome of the steady march forward of evolution. His linear narrative is called into question however by the finding that even single-cell organisms embody complex metabolisms: the assumption that life must start from “simple beginnings” (in Charles Darwin’s phrase) is often accepted, but [it] is probably not true that present-day metabolisms evolved from very simple ones. There probably never were any metabolisms that were simple in the way that older models of the origins of life are simple. Those older models assumed that a few crucial reactions made a first form of life possible. The newer picture holds that the transition at the origin of life went not from simple to complex, but from disorderly to orderly. (Godfrey Smith, 2016: 486)

Here, Godfrey Smith rejects Darwin’s view that evolution uniquely involves shifts from simple into complex systems. Instead, he distinguishes between disorderly and orderly phenomena, that is, between the chaotic (entirely lacking in order) and the complex (straining towards order). For the chaotic to become complex, it must submit to at least some order in the form of non-stable regularities or ‘attractors’. Discussing the relation between simian and human ‘societies’, Latour makes a related point by explaining that, contrary to popular belief, simian relations are infinitely more complex than human ones. Human relations are ‘merely complicated’ thanks to humans’ capacity for bracketing situations and events off from one another. Since each [simian]’s every action is interfered with by others, and since succeeding in one’s aims is mediated by continual negotiation, one can talk of this in terms of complexity - that is to say in terms of the obligation

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to take into account a large number of variables at the same time. As described by primatologists, the state of social feverishness, the constant attention to others’ actions, the painstaking sociability, Machiavellianism and stress all indicate, then, an already complex sociality in the ‘state of nature’. (Latour, 1996: 228/9)

Humans’ stepping into and inhabiting the clearing, therefore, required them to separate some things off from other things using energenetic means such as affective deferral, and anthropotechnic means such as dwellings, rituals and hierarchies. These energenetic and anthropotechnic means served/serve as attractors or dividers that disrupt, delay and structure actions, responses and events that might otherwise lapse into excessive complexity, if not chaos. Darwin’s linear narrative was contested also by Heidegger, among others, who saw humans’ entry into the human clearing as arising from a uniquely human event, a ‘moment of vision’; indeed, an ecstasis .9 Heidegger saw humans as having become and as (potentially still) being ecstatically (‘standing outside’) human: “[t]hat Present which is held in authentic temporality and which thus is authentic itself, we call the moment of vision. This term must be understood in the active sense as an ecstasis ” (Heidegger, 1962: 387; italics in original). This originary accident of uncovering the clearing now incurs another accident; the ecstasy of distance obliges Homo sapiens to recover their way back to (‘reframe’, ‘re-present’) their world. Posing the human with the challenge of having to ‘come [back] to the world’ following ecstatically having ‘stood outside’, Heidegger’s original construal of ecstasis is as a poetic vision or

9 Heidegger’s emphasis on ecstasis as a moment of intense energy and explosive change anticipates ‘symbiosis scholarship’ whose interest focuses on ‘metabolic-energetic networks’ rather than information exchange and communication: “Symbiosis scholarship, most prevalent in feminist science studies, provides an account of change that undermines the dominant Darwinian story of small variations, random mutation, long time scales, natural selection, fitness and incremental development. This is because evidence in bacteriology increasingly found that that new organisms were often not discrete, but rather stemmed from profound and prolonged symbiotic relationships that have proven difficult to analyse …. In such instances traits were inherited outside of sexual dissemination (i.e. through digestion, infection, donation, other complex forms of partnering) – processes which called forth vast, amorphous and phylogenetically-mixed symbiotic complexes, or ‘consortia’, as opposed to anatomically bounded objects or ‘organisms’. These biotic meshes are metabolic, energetic networks rather than systems of information and exchange” (Campbell, Dunne, & Ennis, 2019: 131; my italics).

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spiritual experience of pure Being. Being condemned to, again and again, and unsuccessfully, ‘come to the world’, humankind is ‘displaced from the mere environment both inwardly and outwardly’. With this, Heidegger declared the distancing transition that led the pre-human to break through the limits of its Umwelt/cage to be not a linear-gradual evolutionary development that may, in time, extend to other members of the animal kingdom. Instead, he saw this break as an explosive and energy-amplified/ing transformation of life whose accidental appearance is unique to Homo sapiens, and not transferable to other species. But whereas Heidegger construes this leap as a visitation of spiritual ecstasy, Sloterdijk sees it as humans’ own anthropotechnic achievement. [Homo sapiens’ ] cageless relation to the world turns out to be ecstatic … [but] this openness must be attributed to the human organism as its own accomplishment. A world-forming being of the human kind cannot possible be thought along the lines of animal development because animals are at most born or ‘hatched’ but do not ‘come to the world’. The site of the human being is displaced from the mere environment both inwardly and outwardly. (Sloterdijk, 2017: loc 103)

Heidegger regards ecstasis as pure Being, and as opposed to the mundane order and brutal impact of technology which he takes to obscure if not negate Being. While still current today (e.g. Zuboff, 2019), this view of technology as negating a more natural and less brutal existence rather than as life’s complement and ‘natural’ extension is now being challenged by a variety of post-human theories (cf. Braidotti & Fuller, 2019). These latter theories acknowledge technology as a complex reassertion of life rather than its repudiation and negation. In the spirit of such post-human thought, Sloterdijk repositions Heidegger’s portrayal of ecstasis from an explosion of ontological difference resulting from a consciousness experiencing a poetic-spiritual ‘state of exception’, into an anthropotechnic unfolding of life’s essential openness: “it is possible to read the ecstatic position of the human being in the world, interpreted in Heideggerian terms, as a technogenic situation” (Sloterdijk, 2017: loc 222). Here, Heidegger’s “existential imperative for consciousness to be nothing other than its perceptual relation to the world, a pure process without reifying ground” (Colebrook, 2014: 19), and his “free-wheeling

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Being-attentive that is elevated to the status of releasement [Gelassenheit ]” (Sloterdijk, 2017: loc 249), are recast from psycho-ecstatic spirituality into an anthropotechnic ‘unconcealing’ of life’s technologising open-endedness. “If there is man [sic], then that is because a technology has made him evolve out of the pre-human” (Sloterdijk, 2014: 16). With this, the clearing can now be conceived as a space of ‘active interventions and an offensive creation of distance’, rather than as aesthetic-meditative effect of an expanding consciousness. The inceptual clearing … is already in itself the space of success in which technological approaches to things become observable: as a window onto observations of success it is initially thrust open solely by active interventions and an offensive creation of distance—before it invites aesthetic and meditative perspectives. (Sloterdijk, 2017: loc 249)

Sloterdijk’s clearing emerges not as a function of or thanks to an ecstatic consciousness in a state of spiritual intensity or trance, but as extemporised holding bay for compounding the growing array of prototechnological, neurobiophysiological and sociobehavioural affordances and consequences of human ecstasis into pragmatic decisions and technologising actions. According to this alternative anthropotechnic perspective on the clearing, human living is navigating and manipulating the variations in practical effect and life potential produced by its ‘active interventions’ and its ‘offensive creation of distance’. This new-found open-endedness renders “living a medial, pre-subjective and pre-objective affair” (van Tuinen, 2011: 57). Life is therefore about constantly “translating the ecstasis [‘standing outside’] into enstasis [‘standing inside’]”. Seen in these terms, living is inevitably ‘para-natural’ or technogenic since ecstasis could never arise without (proto)technological assistance, “in mere nature”. … the human being, both as a species-being and as a matrix of opportunities for individualization, is a magnitude that can never exist in mere nature and that was able to first form itself only under the retroactive effect of spontaneous proto-technologies and in ‘living communities’ with things and animals—in protracted processes of formation in which a para-natural tendency can be observed early on. (Sloterdijk, 2017: 96)

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A Becoming of Becoming: Potentiation In Chapter 4, I discussed Colebrook’s hypothesis about life’s openness inviting if not necessitating conjecturing about (human) extinction. Colebrook’s guiding star was a Deleuzian ‘dark other’ indifferent to organic survival and well-being, and which no amount of learning, environmentalism and political decisiveness would be able to overcome or withstand.10 Hypothesising about human origins rather than about human extinction, Sloterdijk performs a similar “fantastical reconstructivism” (Sloterdijk, 2017: loc 223) by conceiving of the human clearing as technogenic incubator that led and still leads the human astray towards abandoning (stepping out from) its Umwelt and taking its world to the brink of destruction. Yet unlike Colebrook, he discerns a glimpse of redemption when opining that “[t]he enormous increases in knowledge and ability of modern mankind force the question of whether the diagnosis of astrayness can apply to them in the same manner today as to the times before the development of modern [technological] potential” (Sloterdijk, 2014: 19). This final section of the chapter is motivated to expand this glimpse into a world where the diagnosis of astrayness may not apply as forcefully or comprehensively it did at the time of the emergence of the clearing. While uncovering (by stepping outside) the clearing may have been an accident, stepping outside our own ecstasy and traumas is now practised using various techniques. What these techniques have in common is their tackling of ‘closed figures of life’ by exploring how to step outside of the ways in which they define and constrain life. This process has recently been referred to as potentiation (Andersen & Stenner, 2019). Potentiation capitalises on life’s openness and on the energy-engendering aspects of stepping outside. Put technically, and in contrast to more common forms of learning, potentiation is an ‘energenesis’ effected by tackling the limits and edges of normalised and naturalised ways of being, seeing and doing. 10 Colebrook’s steadfast refusal of human redemption weakens in resolve right at the end of her 2010 book when she writes about life affording “a fleeting and fragile perception that at once gets caught up in territories and recognition, only to break down again when life is blessed with enough violent power to overcome self-maintenance” (Colebrook, 2010: 166). And again here: “This bounded life is not necessarily a subject of trauma, but it is only after trauma – after the self has experienced what is other than itself as an alien infraction – that it can have a sense of life beyond trauma” (Colebrook, 2010: 176).

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This now clarifies the task that remains for this section as follows: to specify in what sense becoming, ceasing to be, and potentiation may be brought together in not just philosophic thought, but in experimental praxis. Philosophy prides itself on thinking beyond the established parameters of thought and life, to the point of even abandoning the project of furthering human well-being in preference of imagining the contours of humanless and lifeless thought (Colebrook, 2010, 2014). Ironically, Colebrook’s precision of expression and delicacy of thought that scaffold her dark arguments nevertheless betray an investment in more than merely dispassionate constatations about an inevitably impending ending. In fact, they confirm a staunch belief in the ongoing differentiation and refinement of articulate achievement, perhaps for its own sake, if not indeed for the more pragmatic sake of improved apprehension. This anchors Colebrook’s philosophy firmly to the principle of energenesis, malgré soi. That is, behind its determination to exorcise organic nostalgia and vitalist hopes from thought still lurks her philosophy’s defining commitment to the furtherance of norms within human culture, to the progress of principled argumentation, and to a consideration of the consequences of thought for life. That aside, here I want to take up the idea that the clearing emerges through “active interventions and an offensive creation of distance” (Sloterdijk, 2017: loc 249). I will assume that these principles apply to the present as they did to the evolutionary past. Of course, calls for change interventions have become more ubiquitous and clamourous ever since the Enlightenment removed God as foundational principle, explanation and legitimation for life as it was, replacing Him with myriad competing rationales, arguments and evidence for living otherwise. Now in the twenty-first century, social change reaches a dizzying intensity and an increasingly accelerating pace. Lifelong learning and continuous quality improvement are at opposite ends of a spectrum that ensnares people everywhere in Rilke’s imperative, You must change your life (Sloterdijk, 2013). The potentiation I want to discuss here relates to the potential of visualised feedback to engender ecstasy—a ‘standing outside’—in and for those able to recognise—say, ‘re-entry map’—what they are shown. What is visualised and then shown back are the everyday practices and conducts of people themselves in life or at work. As they go about their business, people are taken up and taken in by their activity—by its tasks, roles, identities, relations, routines, procedures, goals and systems. Rarely

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wanting or being able to ask profound questions about taken-as-given activity, people inhabit those tasks, roles, identities, routines, procedures, goals and systems as if these constitute an and unchangeable Umwelt. My hypothesis is that visualising this Umwelt de-objectifies its taken-as-given structures and systems and de-subjectifies the assumptions, expectations and perspectives brought to bear by those observing it (Massumi, 2002). Potentiation occurs at the intersection of these de-objectifying and de-subjectifying dynamics. Here, potentiation is provoked using the visualisation of everyday activity and its showback to those enacting it.11 Indeed, showback acts as a kind of ‘irritation’. Showback ‘irritates’ as it obliges its recipient-consumers to ‘move outside’ of the tasks, roles, identities, routines, procedures, goals and systems with which they are (visually) confronted. Showing no more (and often less) than is already and normally the case, showback is circular and artificial. It is “always a construct of the system itself [and therefore it is] always selfirritation” (Luhmann, 2012: 67). However, irritated, the viewer-actor’s gaze is released from its original, tranquillised position, now no longer taking in the habitual contours of bodies and movements and unable now to impose normalised and naturalised parameters on vision and experience. Instead, the viewer-actor’s gaze is confronted with the subjection of those bodies and movements to radically novel contours and parameters, making visible different distances, relations, connections and logics. At this point, she/he may be moved to be moved beyond the parameters—the Umwelt—of their world and self. My use of the term Umwelt to describe aspects of human environments is justified here insofar as Umwelt is defined as the totality of its inhabitants’ stabilised resources, set activities, standardised significances and predictable relevancies. “Each Umwelt forms a closed unit in itself, which is governed, in all its parts, by the meaning it has for the subject” (Uexkull 1909, cited in Buchanan, 2008: 25). ‘Meaning’ in this sentence would have been more appropriately worded as ‘significance and relevance’ to underscore its narrow, limited and preconscious, no-longer-conscious or never-to-be-conscious operations. Umwelt is thus the cage; the space

11 This process is referred to as ‘video-reflexive ethnography’ (Iedema, 2020; Iedema et al., 2019; Iedema, Mesman, & Carroll, 2013).

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of limited movement, saturated with the ready-to-hand12 and taken-asgiven. Undoing this tranquil saturation, not by fantastical thought and philosophical imagination, but by a visualised showback of Umwelt as it unfolds in time for its inhabitants serves to irritate those present by inviting if not imposing an inversion in seeing and experiencing. Showback draws on footage whose editing approach respects in situ activities’ intrinsic duration rather than imposing diegetic13 shifts to satisfy narrative priorities. Showback levels or equalises agency, reasoning and consciousness with other dimensions of life that have tranquillised into an ‘Umwelt’ of taken-as-given ‘fidelities and customs’. It renders all these amenable to being apprehended ec-statically. Showback is thus a technopragmatic means to elicit ecstasis. Beyond this, showback may elicit ecstasis to a degree where its energy is generative of a more general and persistent striving to ‘step outside’. At this point, showback becomes generative of potentiation. In short, showback prioritises neither change nor formal understanding. On the contrary, it poses ecstasis as foundational rationale, as defining criterion, as technologically-situationally induced effect, and as metabolic affect that stirs up and re-humanises organic life. This metabolic affect derives its intensity from being moved by shownback footage as it “both enlarges and diminishes” life (MacDougall, 2006: 3). Such footage enlarges … by foregrounding particular events or perspectives on events at the expense of others, [and] by intensifying one’s appreciation of what has thus far remained in the background. … The visual [footage] brings these

12 Heidegger defines ready-to-hand as follows: “The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort of thing that circumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme. The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically” (Heidegger, 1962: 99). 13 Diegetic means: answering to the structure of a narrative rather than to the structure of actual time. Christian Metz adopted the term ‘diegesis’ from Etienne Souriau (Metz, 1974: 98; also see Nichols, 1981: 81) to highlight the difference between what cine-film editing implies happened in ‘real’ time, and what the footage in fact shows. In cine-film, what the footage shows is generally less than and different from that which imputedly went on in ‘real’ time. Most cine-films compress time and space, or, in Metz’ words, “[in] the chain of images the number of units liable to occur is limited” (Metz, 1974: 99). An exception to Metz’ rule is Andy Warhol’s Empire, an 8-hour ‘real time’ filmed capture of night engulfing the Empire State building.

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backgrounded aspects of practice to the fore and invests them with immediacy. [This] brings the lifeworld closer by revealing or ‘presencing’ it in a new way. (Carroll, Iedema, & Kerridge, 2008: 387)

Footage at the same time diminishes life by reducing it to a twodimensional (moving) picture. This renders it different, making “questions possible about [its] assumed inevitability … and about the ‘structures of feeling’ that define [it]” (Carroll et al., 2008: 387). This questioning … might lead to new practical and affective opportunities, or a new ‘structure of attention.’ Alongside visual framing acting as a presencing device, then, it also has the effect of distancing and unhinging the viewer from their thus-far taken-as-given lifeworld. (Carroll et al., 2008: 387)

Effectively, “[s]howing becomes a way of saying the unsayable” (MacDougall, 2006: 5) about how humans are in the world. The most significant effect of visualisation and showback is that it, by ‘saying the unsayable’, re-orders life. Saying the unsayable undoes life’s tranquillised familiarity and allied tendency to drift into ‘Umwelt’. Umwelt (as ‘caged environment’) is now a metaphor that invokes a certainty and closedness that preclude any need to ‘come to the world’, because I am already unquestionably and certainly there where I must be in a (Um)world that is only as it must be. A de-tranquillisation of these certitudes results from visualised showback foregrounding what is ordinarily in the background and vice versa. It renders what is ordinarily a figure as ground, and renders what is ground into the figure. During showback, the taken-as-given contexts and ready-to-hand resources (the ground) with(in) which people go about their business (the figure) take on eerily palpable and animated traits: corridor walls like all other spaces turn out to decisively constrain or amenably enable what goes on; prior situations choreograph what is said now and done next; distant systems weave their norms and standards into the slightest of encounters, and neglected habits animate every person’s step and turn. Visualisation foregrounds these forgotten or never-apprehended vitalities, unappreciated connections and unrecognised significances. It injects ordinarily tranquil comprehensions and routine enactments with an acutely energising sense: a sense of the ecological and dynamic connectedness among decisions, things, conducts, people and spaces.

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In effect, the viewer of footage in which they are represented does not merely witness a “mere idle mirroring of pre-existent acts” (Dewey, 1922: 55) to which they might say, oh yes, I know all that, I’ve been there and done all that. Quite the opposite: their fascination with what is shown attests to the fact that showback is far from … … a mere idle mirroring of pre-existent acts. [On the contrary,] It is an additional event having its own career. It sets up a heightened emotional appreciation and provides a new motive for fidelities previously blind. It sets up an attitude of criticism, of inquiry, and makes men [sic] sensitive to the brutalities and extravagances of customs. (Dewey, 1922: 55)

Being moved (by what is shown) to ‘stand outside’ their taken-as-given Umwelt, viewers may witness, in Dewey’s exquisite formulation, ‘fidelities previously blind’ and discern ‘the brutalities and extravagances of custom’. The emotional impact of being moved in this way can indeed be intense. People are alerted to and thereby untied from ‘fidelities and customs’—constraints they never thought to single out for observation and reflection, let alone doubt, criticism or change. Apprehending life in this way—life that seemed so overwhelmingly self-contained, self-evident and self-consistent—means seeing it squeezed into the narrow confines of a screen, depicted from peculiar angles and unfamiliar distances, flattened from three into two dimensions, and stretched like a thick-oiled canvass encrusted with ecological continuities, historical connections and age-old habituations. For these reasons, it is not surprising that showback of even the most mundane aspects of life evokes fascination, wonder, if not indeed ecstasis 14 : the feeling of now having experienced a way out from life as self-contained and always already circumscribed totality. In sum, ecstasis grounds potentiation as affective appreciation of and striving towards ‘standing outside’. Ecstasis is therefore not circumscribed by the novel insights or realisations it affords, and neither is ecstasis reducible to a mental event or an individual’s realisation. Ecstasis is not learning, and neither is it a solipsistic experience. Instead, it is the energy

14 I retain the term ‘ecstasis ’ rather than using the term ecstasy to emphasise that the ecstatic experience of ‘standing outside’ a taken-as-given life is a technologically-enabled and pragmatically-situated affect and not a spiritual-mental serendipity.

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that begets energy: ecstasis is energenetic. As such, it produces potentiation, or the striving to ‘step outside’, where Potentiation is the expansion of our ‘power to be affected’, the power to be moved. The greater our power to be affected… the greater our power to act [and] every increase of the power to act and think corresponds to an increased power to be affected - the increased autonomy of the subject, in other words, always corresponds to its increased receptivity. (Hardt, 2007: x)

As noted, potentiation is at the heart of the “play/game intelligence that defines all people living in the contemporary networked world, where we cannot make a move without also being moved” (Sloterdijk, 2009: 594).15 While it was already an issue for Dewey in the early twentieth century, potentiation is all the more urgent in the contemporary networked world where conventional approaches to learning and habit formation may no longer be able to adjust life effectively to emerging conditions.16 The modern world, in other words, demands new ‘structures of feeling’, new kinds and levels of affective susceptibility, or, to adopt another term from Spinoza, new ingenia.

What Keeps Us: The Ingenium Given this book revolves around principles many of which are core to Spinoza’s psychological and political thinking, let me close this discussion with reference to another of his thoughts: our affective condition or make-up can be described as our ingenium. The notion ingenium is defined by Spinoza scholars as capturing “the affective vulnerability and natural sociability of human beings” (Dahlbeck & Dahlbeck De Lucia, 2020: 8). It provides a gauge for “the extent to which one’s striving is determined by one’s social environment” (Steinberg, 2018: loc 13). In 15 My translation. The original reads: “[Ein] Spielintelligenz von Menschen in einer entfalteten Netzwelt, in der man keinen eigenen Zug machen kann, wenn man nicht zugleich mit sich spielen läßt.” 16 “The ordinary process of habit formation can no longer be trusted for adjusting to

new conditions because it is so slow, unsystematic and uncertain… Given the rapid rate of contemporary change, even if we are lucky enough to develop a good habit unreflectively, it could easily be rendered obsolete by the time it is successfully achieved … We thus need a systematic method for the intelligent reconstruction of habit” (Shusterman, 2008: 93).

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seeking to formulate a political affectivity, ingenium straddles personal experience and ‘encounters’ that have political impact: “By ingenium we should understand … a memory whose form has been determined by the individual’s life experience and by his various encounters” (Balibar, 1998: 29). Early use of the term ingenium is attributed to Juan Luis Vives (1492/3–540) who sought to link the proclivity towards learning on the part of students to the specific teaching approach needed to key into their ingenium. Here, we witness the emergence of pedagogy as strategising to optimise the relationship and the educational transmission between student and teacher as people with unique affective features and cultural backgrounds. This pedagogy was what interested Spinoza: “Spinoza thinks that in order to influence people, one must study their ingenia and adapt one’s modes of persuasion so as to suit this audience” (Steinberg, 2020: 165). Steinberg referred to this in his 2018 book as Spinoza’s ‘Principle of Accommodation’ (Steinberg, 2018). Now, this ‘accommodationism’ means that, when teaching others, “we yield as much to their [students’] understanding as we can” (Steinberg, 2020: 165).17 In other words, our approach to teaching should key into learners’ ingenia, their affective inclinations and dispositions. As should be clear from the preceding section, the principle of ‘accommodationism’ is at the heart of showback and the deliberations it elicits. Showback posits the participant and their socio-cultural group and practices as its point of departure. In doing so, showback extends the logic of participatory enquiry in an important way. Initiating and operationalising enquiry at the levels of the practical, the visual, the social and the participatory, showback places participants in unfamiliar situations (observation) with regard to that which is familiar (their own conduct and practice). Such showback to participants of their own real-time practices unsettles whatever they may have seen, thought and said to date about themselves and their activities. Showback thus intensifies participants’ sense of otherwise taken-as-given practices and understandings. It does so by reaching into a “more primitive [type] of experience” (Whitehead, 1960: 113), that is, an experience that is sensed, even if for a moment, as outrunning meaning, representation. 17 Steinberg explains that the ingenium played an important role in Hobbes’ De Cive, albeit as a means to underwrite his understanding of education as civic indoctrination (Steinberg, 2020).

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The accommodationism that defines the showback process is anchored in the dynamics that arise from this sensed, pre-representational, receptive experience. Participants’ sense-reception generates impulse from which and thanks to which deliberation and questioning proceed in an affective register. Remember that for Dewey, “impulses were the pivots upon which the re-organization of activities turn, they are agencies of deviation, for giving new directions to old habits and changing their quality” (Dewey, 1922: 93). For Dewey, learning was about affective impulse, not appropriation. Harnessing impulse, showback intensifies people’s sense of otherwise taken-as-given practices and relationships. Addressing and engaging participants in an unconventional register (vision), showback lures ideas, claims and judgments into a moment of abeyance, thereby implicating and putting at risk participants’ ingenium. Putting one’s ingenium at risk is increasingly prized in the contemporary world (Virno, 2004): “[t]he expanded passivity competence of the moderns expresses itself in the willingness to have oneself operated on in one’s own interests” (Sloterdijk, 2013: loc 374). If our ingenium is indeed defined by ‘our willingness to be operated on in our own interests’, and if such operations are not merely surgical, nutritional, logistic or bureaucratic, they may also include ones that issue from the reflexive deliberation about our ways of being, saying and doing in the world—this time not practised in the form of solipsistic philosophical thought, but as collectively negotiated endeavour targeting real-time, in situ conducts; not as an imagining of hypothetical future consequences, but as a hereand-now intervention into how we understand and enact how we are and go on together. With the modern ingenium becoming more amenable to ‘being operated on’, showback is a mode of potentiation that is on the way to moving out from its specialised zones (viz. the reflexivity practised in sports, music, singing, dance and the like) into other spheres of life that are as yet governed by scientific-bureaucratic procedures, regulations and rigidities. Hence, when Stengers speaks about slowing down science (Stengers, 2018), this is what she must have in mind: the expansion of a practice that delays how we go on through complexifying the familiar, self-evident and taken-as-given, inviting us to sense again, to become personally and collectively undone in order for different lives, different ingenia, to become possible.

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Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Metz, C. (1974). Film language: A semiotics of cinema (M. Taylor, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, S. (2009). Unsimple truths: Science, complexity and policy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Nichols, B. (1981). Ideology and the image. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Protevi, J. (2019). States of nature: Geographical aspects of current theories of human evolution. Political Geography, 70(2019), 127–136. Rossi-Landi, F. (1992 [1979]). Between signs and non-signs. In S. Petrilli (Ed.), Volume 10 of “critical theory: Interdisciplinary approaches to language, discourse and ideology”. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Shusterman, R. (2008). Body consciousness: A philosophy of mindfulness and somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Du muβt dein Leben ändern: Über Anthropotechnik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Sloterdijk, P. (2013). You must change your life (W. Hoban, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2014). Anthropo-Technology. New Perspectives Quarterly, 31(1), 12–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/npqu.11419. Sloterdijk, P. (2017). The domestication of being: The clarification of the clearing. In P. Sloterdijk (Ed.), Not Saved: Essays after Heidegger (pp. 90– 148). Cambridge: Polity Press. Steinberg, J. (2018). Spinoza’s political psychology: The taming of fortune and fear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinberg, J. (2020). Politics as a model of pedagogy in Spinoza. Ethics & Education, 15(2), 158–172. Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science (S. Muecke, Trans.). Oxford: Polity Press. van Tuinen, S. (2011). “Transgenous philosophy”: Posthumanism, anthropotechnics and the poetics of natal difference. In W. Schinkel & L. Noordegraaf-Elens (Eds.), In medias res (pp. 43–66). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Virno, P. (2004). The grammar of the multitude. New York: Semiotext(e). Whitehead, A. N. (1960). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology. New York: Harper Row. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. London: Profile Books.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Abstract This last chapter offers a brief conclusion to the book, emphasising that becoming undone comes about through submitting to that which is bigger than us. COVID-19 and the Australian bush fires are events that are bigger than us, and that will have the effect of engendering a more widespread realisation of becoming undone and a greater sense of life as precarious dynamic. This brings the book full circle: COVID19 and the megafires have been attributed to environmental degradation due to industrial and urban expansion. It is not just that these crises have already brought about (through the immobilisation of populations), but they also necessitate (given these crises don’t appear to be tameable), another radical ecstasis, one potentially comparable to the impact of our original creation of the human clearing. Keywords Ecstasis · Redemption · COVID-19 · Bushfires

Looking Back and Looking Forward This book has journeyed through a thoughtscape seeded by scholarship and steered by perturbations wrought by becoming undone. My aim in this book has not been to construct an expertocratic model of how and what life is, how it should be seen and understood, why and how it may

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survive impending destruction, or why it is on a trajectory towards extinction or redemption. I have done little more than explore what life is and does when it becomes undone, the affective intensity this generates, and the sense we have, could have and should have, of life not as taken-asgiven Umwelt of certainties and routines that are waiting to become undone, but as complex dynamic whose becoming (undone) demands concern for the effects and implications of how and who we are. Focusing on becoming (different, or undone) as an inevitable and defining characteristic of existence, my aim has been to delve into affect as the manifestation of being moved by these things, and as condition for being potentiated. My investigation foregrounded the significance of affect as topic (Chapter 2), of becoming undone or ceasing to be (Chapter 3), of being/feeling enabled by being moved (Chapter 4), and of experimenting with ceasing to be how and who we are as the route through passivity and ecstasis into potentiation (Chapter 5). What now still needs to be said? Becoming (undone) is a figure of thought that strains towards the unnameability of life as it constantly ceases to be what it is. This thought figure takes us beyond the human and beyond human agency as the principal parameters of existence. It is not unimportant that I’m writing this book during the COVID-19 lockdown, from a place right on the Pacific Ocean where I got stranded when the crisis hit and my airline cancelled my return flight to London. I arrived here mid-March, and two weeks later (when I was due to fly back to London) planes stopped flying, people were locked in cities and houses, the sick were filling up hospitals and the dead morgues, and political leaders were made to feel the full impact of their own politics as their claims and decisions suddenly took on a rarely experienced immediacy and magnitude, blasting from TV appearances into casualty rates across both near and far-flung communities. COVID-19 has shown itself to date to be more powerful than us, exceeding (to date) what humans can do, never mind all our attempts at immobilising life and halting the virus. Here we are, collectively becoming undone by something bigger than us that is at the same time infinitely smaller than us. Everyday forms of life have stopped in their tracks; common assumptions have imploded; the frenzy of mobility and energy consumption has calmed; the air has improved and the noise subsided, the economy has frozen solid, and humans have had to reinvent their ways of being on earth.

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For a while now, people have been talking about not wanting to go back to how things were. And for a while now, some reports about new cycle paths and more work-from-home meetings aside, it’s been clear that restoring life to the way things were is nevertheless most people’s primary priority. Regarding what is happening as the destruction of what was good is a common response to the experience of becoming undone. Even if what was not good, people will defend it as what was good and what should be retrieved, restored, repaired and resurrected. The severity of the experience of becoming undone is worse than what was, however bad. It explains people’s fury at how life is changing, anger at those who are taken to be the agents of change, and protest at the measures that attempt to bridge the way things were, the way things are, and the way things are desired to be. Others are distressed at losses heretofore unimaginable, the loss of close others, the loss of contact, or the loss of mobility and the diminution of resources (notably, not food but toilet paper— an apt metaphor for our paradoxical responses to what is happening: to divert ourselves, we worry about precisely that which has the least bit of relevance for and impact on what is happening. Indeed, these responses are prime examples of the destructive reversals of perspective and interpretation which Tournier labelled ‘inversions maligne’ (Tournier, 1975): sleights of hand that reconfigure the impact and significance of the original experience. Most responses serve to anthropomorphise causes and effects, locating the reasons for what is happening in specific people or decisions, without acknowledging that our ways of life, the ways we run our institutions and design our social systems would inevitably and always already have heralded what is happening now, setting us systemically and collectively up for failure. Anger and distress deafen life and prevent life from offering up alternatives, because life has not yet unravelled sufficiently for anger and distress to become pointless. Emotions still dominate because life has not yet been stretched far enough to reach its own potential for passivity. Alternatives that are proposed to what is happening in the present tend therefore to remain framed within pre-existing parameters. They reassert prior forms of life that may no longer prove viable. Maybe Colebrook is right after all: to believe that as humans we are able to pull ourselves up by our own hair out of the present, avoid destroying our planet, and negotiate a better life, is an organic-vitalist myth and a naive utopia (Colebrook, 2010). She may be right to say that such redemptive narratives

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are misleading. Maybe we are per definition unable to change our ways, we fail to respect that which is bigger than us, and we will never overhaul our ways of living. This means we should just stick with thought and our ‘fantastical reconstructions’ producing both more improbable inversions (e.g. contemporary popular cultural fascination with outer space) and dystopian prognostications (post-human philosophy). Are we really left with nothing but repressing or imagining our own path into extinction? Can we not continue to experiment at the level of thought and that of praxis? The previous chapter (5) suggested that, if anthropotechnics and not some mystic spirituality underpins how we overcame the chaotic unpredictability of our pre-human beginnings, it may be possible to harness ‘becoming-undone anthropotechniques’ to the conduct and scrutiny of contemporary life. Many such techniques are already in common use: counselling, therapy, coaching, and the like. Some such techniques are more specialised: simulation, virtual reality, real play, and the like. What these techniques have in common are the ways in which assumptions, experiences and information about reality are subjected to hypothetical decisions as well as trial actions (DeLanda, 2012). But Chapter 5 did not propose just more simulation, reflection, preplanning and strategising. The simulation using the visualisation of in situ practices and relations and their showback discussed there prioritises not individuals’ particular views and understandings articulated in response to personal footage, nor did it bank on their personal enlightenment. The core of Chapter 5 was the elicitation of emergent group dynamics (with showback merely as the means to enable people to say and do new and different things together). These dynamics involve those ordinarily engaged in taken-as-given practices in experimental ways: confronting them with unfamiliar representations of who and how they are. This makes it possible for them to ‘stand outside’ of who, where and how they are: ecstasis as disruptive anthropotechnics. On this view, showback is not so much about mirroring the individual’s consciousness to bare and intervene in its person-unique constraints, as much as about involving groups and collectives to refract taken-as-given ways of being, doing and saying. The reason people come to see “fidelities previously blind” and realise “the brutalities and extravagances of customs” (Dewey, 1922: 55) is that they are seeing the taken-for-granted from different (camera) angles and hearing others express unfamiliar

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thoughts and questions about it. The deliberative basis of their conversations invokes registers that open up the not-yet-said and not-yet-thought (Iedema, 2020). This makes showback into an anthropotechnique that exploits humans’ capacity for enhancing their collective competence (Boreham, 2004) and their distributed intelligence (Hutchins, 1995; Weick, 2002). Together, showback and deliberation create ‘clear’ spaces where people can experiment with delay, deferral and distance. Noting that “agents [should be] capable of monitoring the execution of their own tasks”, DeLanda refers to ‘overseeing’ as a technique that assembles delay, deferral and distance to progress the coordination and improvement of practices.1 And indeed, overseeing is the re-apprehension, reassessment and re-presentation of what is; it is in effect an ecstasis, a standing-outside, and a re-entry mapping through which we gather and defer/delay the energies that are inherent in and defining of what is going on. Overseeing is emblematic of anthropotechnics: it is a stepping away or a separation from what is going on, an observation of what is going on from a novel angle, a taking in of the broader context that may remain hidden from those embroiled in what is going on, and perhaps instilling an alternative perspective on what is going on in those engaged in it. This overseeing is not in the first instance to do with imposing change; rather, it is to do with observing current states of affairs. Consider Sloterdijk’s description of human self-domestication discussed in Chapter 5. His reconstruction of this trajectory suggested that hominid males may have started to create a protective space within which to shield females and their young from danger (Sloterdijk, 2016). Sloterdijk does not provide a definite reason for this division of labour to have become defining of human self-domestication, other than to intimate that such protective behaviour would have had evolutionary advantages. It seems evident however that males’ shielding behaviour must have involved a stepping away from and an overseeing that likely emerged in response to crisis. Stepping away from must have provided

1 “Through a process like this an organization can learn to improve coordinating mech-

anisms but only at the level of its teams. That is, once a correct diagnosis is made modifications to coordination rules will be applied only locally. This approach, on the other hand, can be extended to the entire hierarchy by applying it to all the different ranks. Historically, one of the first organizational roles to differentiate between a chief and his followers must have been that of overseer” (DeLanda, 2012: 181).

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the advantage of oversight and is likely to have been motivated or necessitated by crisis. The word crisis derives from the Greek κρ´ινειν or krinein, meaning to judge, to separate. For hominids, crisis likely instilled not just a sense of forces that annihilate, that render undone, and that necessitate a separation from what is going on, or a stepping (standing) outside. Crisis also instilled a sense of proactive stepping in the direction of what could turn into a crisis, as the first step towards mitigating or averting crisis.

Reprise Preceding COVID-19 by a month, the Australian bushfires were another event that was bigger than us. The fires burnt 185,000 km2 . England covers 130,000 km2 . The Australian bush fires burnt to a cinder everything in an area that is almost 1.5 times the size of England. The Centre for Disaster Philanthropy website reports that “3,500 homes and thousands of other buildings were lost and 34 people died in thousands of fires between June 2019 and March 2020” (The Centre for Disaster Philantropy, 2020). A billion animals died. Over a billion US$ in insurance claims were lodged. Months later, communities still live in caravans and tents (Simon, 2020). The fires raged to within 500 metres from the house where I am currently writing this. The fires were pushed along by the westerlies that blew the flames and the embers straight towards us at the ocean Headland. Then, on New Year’s Eve, about 10/20 minutes out from the Headland burning down, the wind changed and a southerly blew the fire front north, changing its direction by 90 degrees. For a short while, the westerlies and the southerly winds fought a fierce battle out over the ocean, churning up the waves and the clouds of smoke and soot into a smoggy, black mess. The southerly won, saving the Headland village, driving the fire north where it destroyed several other villages. Latour describes contemporary environmental disasters in terms of ‘the earth pushing back’ (Latour, 2018). The earth is becoming a force that turns out to be bigger than us. The crises earth is wreaking on us may yet undo us, as Colebrook suggests. They already force us outside of our taken-as-given ways of being, doing and saying.2 Think of all the 2 Perhaps not surprisingly, the ‘stepping out’ literature has been doing a roaring business (Brown, 2012; Doyle, 2020).

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airlines cancelling flights, previously unthinkable government decisions about lockdowns, quarantines and curfews, empty city streets, people at home with their families for months, homeschooling, clinicians dressed up as extraterrestrials, loved ones getting sick and dying—all these are signs that we have already stepped away from how, where and who we are and were. In that sense, recent crises have begun to enforce yet another and a more radical ecstasis. This time it can’t be a recuperation of what was, nor a settling into survival plots and redemptive narratives. But neither should diremptive thoughts have the final say. It seems our task now is to experiment with a standing outside that matches the intensity of our original ecstasis, the one we sensed upon discovering/creating/entering the first-ever human clearing. This book is but one attempt to formulate what a renewed clearing of the clearing might mean, and what a cleared clearing might look and feel like.

References Boreham, N. (2004). A theory of collective competence: Challenging the neoliberal individualisation of performance at work. British Journal of Educational Studies, 52(2), 5–17. Brown, B. (2012). The power of vulnerability. Louisville, CO: Sounds True. Colebrook, C. (2010). Deleuze and the meaning of life. London: Continuum. DeLanda, M. (2012). Philosophy and Simulation: The emergence of synthetic reasoning. London, UK: Continuum Publishing Corporation. Dewey, J. (1922). Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology. New York: H. Holt & Company. Doyle, G. (2020). Untamed. New York: The Dial Press. Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge: MIT Press. Iedema, R. (2020). Video-reflexive ethnography as potentiation technology: What about investigative quality? Qualitative Research in Psychology. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2020.1794087. Latour, B. (2018). Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. Oxford: Polity Press. Simon, M. (2020). The Terrible Consequences of Australia’s Uber-Bushfires. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/the-terrible-consequen ces-of-australias-uber-bushfires/. Sloterdijk, P. (2016). The domestication of being. In Not saved: Essays after Heidegger (pp. 89–148). Cambridge: Polity Press. The Centre for Disaster Philanthropy. (2020). 2019–2020 Australian Bushfires. Retrieved from https://disasterphilanthropy.org/disaster/2019-australian-wil dfires/.

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Tournier, M. (1975). Le roi des aulnes. Paris: Gallimard. Weick, K. (2002). The reduction of medical errors through mindful interdependence. In M. Rosenthal & K. Sutcliffe (Eds.), Medical Error: What do we know? What do we do? (pp. 177–199). San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass.

Index

A Affect, 6, 17–19, 27–29, 31–38, 47, 48, 57, 64, 65, 74, 79, 82, 83, 88, 89, 112, 114, 122 Affectio, 17, 18 Affective practice, 27, 28, 35–37, 59 Affective receptivity, 78 Affective scripts, 34 Affectus, 17, 18 Anthropotechnics, vii, 66, 74, 107, 108, 124, 125 Anti-intentionalism, 28 Australian bushfires, 126 Autonomy (of affect), 19, 41

B Behavioural surplus, 5 Bristol Royal Infirmary, 11

C Clinical incidents, 10–12 Cognitivism, 28, 29

Complexity, 6, 13, 15, 28, 66, 71, 81–83, 105 Conation, 63 Contagion, 78–80 COVID-19, 122, 126

D Degeneracy, vi, 98, 99 Degradation ceremonies, 7 Difference, 30, 31, 38, 40, 57, 59, 86, 91, 103, 107, 112 Dwellings, 47, 102, 103, 106

E Ecstasis, 106–108, 112, 114, 115, 124, 125, 127 Einfühlung , 74, 75, 82 Empathy, 5, 66, 69, 71, 74–76, 79–81, 84, 90 Energenesis, 100, 109, 110 Enstasis , 108 Excess, 19, 27, 37, 47, 54, 55, 62, 65, 79, 83

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Iedema, Affected, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62736-2

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INDEX

F Falling into they, 53, 60

G Gelassenheit, 108

H Hierarchies, 106

I Imitativeness, 77–79 Immediation, 59, 83 Inauthenticity, 53, 54 Incident disclosure, 12 Ingenium, 18, 115–117 Interpersonal gateway, 32, 83, 84, 99 Involution, 104

L Loss, v, 50, 51, 54, 64, 65, 123

M Mass irrationality, 78 Mediation, 19, 38, 46, 47, 59, 83 Metabole, 90 Mirror neuron thesis, 81 Misconduct (academic), 6, 7, 9 Monstrosity, 15, 16, 19

N Neoteny, 61, 84, 102, 104

P Panic, 78, 79, 98 Passivity, 57, 64–66, 73, 74, 99, 100, 103, 104, 122, 123

Passivity competence, 64–66, 72, 73, 99, 100, 117 Potentiation, 19, 109–112, 114, 115, 117, 122 Primary intersubjectivity, 82 Prosociality, 71–74, 76, 103 Proto-empathetic identification, 72, 82

R Re-entry mapping, 104, 125 Research integrity, 8, 9 Rhythm, 41, 47, 48, 83, 84 Ritornello, 48 Rituals, 103, 106

S Secondary intersubjectivity, 82 Self-domestication, 33, 73, 74, 84–86, 91, 99, 100, 103, 125 Self-effacement, 60–64 Sense, v, 17, 30–32, 34, 38, 39, 41, 48–57, 60, 65, 76, 83, 85, 97–99, 106, 109, 110, 113, 117, 122, 126, 127 Sensory receptivity, 79, 81 Sociogenesis, 84, 85, 91 Spherogenics, vii, 33, 99 Surveillance capitalism, 5 Sympathy, 66, 69, 72, 75–77, 79, 80, 84, 86

T Tensegrity, 52, 55 Tertiary intersubjectivity, 82 Tranquillisation, 54, 113 Transduction, 54, 55

INDEX

U Umwelt, 100, 104, 107, 109, 111–114, 122 Uncanny, 27, 28, 34, 36

Vitalism (active/passive), 31, 66 Volatility, 53, 54

V Violence, 15, 50, 74, 78, 102

W Warfare, 72, 74, 78

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