Subjectivity

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-020-00095-9

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow

of neo‑fascism

Couze Venn1

© Springer Nature Limited 2020

Structure
Three problematics:

1. The political situation today, marked by the rise of fascistic, fundamentalist con-
stituencies redefining the friend/enemy divide.
2. The exploration of the kind of subjectivities that are predisposed to authoritari-
anism and racism via a critical examination of (Adorno et al. 1950) study of the
authoritarian personality in the wake of the 2­ nd World War. Questions that arise
for the process of formation.
3. Developing a field theory of affect.
A. Locating such an approach in the light of theoretical advances in the last dec-
ades. (Changing the Subject (Henriques et al. 1984), psychoanalytic shifts,
relationality, Simondon and individuation (Simondon 2005) Ettinger (1995,
2006) affect theory, my Body and Society paper (Venn 2010)).
B. Elements of the new theory.
C. Implications. Role of media today as reconstituting the affective sensorium,
(Stiegler, plus Ettinger, plus capture of economy of desire)
4. Political and theoretical conclusions.

Concepts: Field theory of affect, affective field as a sensorium, how consti-

tuted: senses plus sense of being-in-the-world and being-with, chiasm (Merleau-
Ponty 1968), relationality, individuation as process involving a dynamics interac-
tion between the pre-individual and a transindividual dimension, the pre-individual
thought through concepts of the matrixial, attachment, bonding, holding, invest-
ments, affective charge, associated milieux, that establish the affective foundations

Couze Venn: deceased.

* Couze Venn
isabel.waidner@roehampton.ac.uk
1
University of London, London, UK

Vol.:(0123456789)
 C. Venn

of the psychical subject. Examine through case of defective sensorium (infants

raised in conditions of minimal interaction with carers, e.g. case of Chinese orphan-
age—what about outside the womb?), role of narrative in mutual entanglement of
subjects, carrying symbolic and imaginary elements that connect with the lifeworld,
authoritarian personality (reconsidered), authoritarian populism, neo-fascisms.

Introduction

Two broad developments lie in the background of my intervention. First, the fact of
convergent crises concerning the climate, diminishing critical resources due to the
plunder of the earth to feed growth and accumulation, an increasingly feral global
economy, growing inequalities and conflicts, and the subversion of democracy posed
by the rise of alt-right and neo-fascist mass movements in many parts of the world,
promoted by dark money and ‘black ops’. The situation has sown the seeds of fears
and insecurities across the social body that feed into the long-standing conflict
opposing emancipatory movements to conservative forces seeking to maintain exist-
ing relations of wealth and power. Whilst analyses on the left have targeted capital-
ism as the underlying cause of social, political, environmental and economic crises
(Moore 2015; Haraway 2015, 2016; Venn 2018), alt-right discourse has chosen to
blame migrants, refugees, the lazy, the deviant, and socialists for the ills of society.
Second, the sense that a new ecology of capital has emerged which seeks to encom-
pass every dimension of society such that nothing can escape its machinic logic
(Mbembe 2017). Increasingly, money-capital in its multiple forms—as derivatives,
assets, infrastructure, debt—penetrates and shapes all forms of life and practices across
the globe (Venn 2018). An important consequence of this dominance of financial capi-
talism has been the formation of a precariat of workers scratching a living on zero-hour
contracts, in the gig economy, and experiencing worsening employment conditions due
to pressures on corporations to maximise shareholder value in order to maintain their
market value (Chang 2010). Besides, countless workers in the global South are sub-
jected to forms of servitude as part of the cost-cutting logic of this strategy.
In the light these developments and the general disaffection that they produce,
the question that emerges is that of the constitution of subjectivities who are pre-
disposed to support an authoritarian populism allied to racism, nationalism, misogi-
nism, the violent suppression of dissent and difference.
The state of affairs suggests similarities with the conditions that gave rise to
fascism and totalitarian regimes in the 1930s. Then and now the polarisation is
between, on the one hand, a socialist solution whose goals are equality, social jus-
tice, the equitable distribution of wealth and, on the other hand, an authoritarian
populist politics that proceeds by the exclusion, expulsion or eradication of all those
considered a threat to the social order: ‘inferior races’, foreigners, migrants, alien
cultures, state bureaucrats.
But we should be wary of easy comparison. Much has changed since the 1930s
and in the post-war period, capitalism has mutated, dominated by the financial sector
that overdetermines activities on the global markets; technological transformations
have greatly impacted on social, cultural, economic and political life; enormous
Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow…

powers of persuasion, surveillance and capture wielded by media devices have trans-
formed the political culture and enabled a ‘society of control’, (Deleuze 1990, 1992)
to increasingly produce a docile and ignorant population, ripe for recruitment for
capital. When we add to this situation the fact that environmental and ecological cri-
ses now threaten such catastrophic changes to the planetary life support systems that
they are predicted to lead to mass extinctions, it is clear that the world has become a
more dangerous and unpredictable place.
For oppositional politics, and for theory, the questions concern both the need to
understand this new reality and to engage with the problem of significant changes in
the process of formation of the subjectivities which it has brought about. In particu-
lar, one needs to investigate the mechanisms, operating at both the pre-individuation
and trans-individuation levels that now produce individuals and groups who are pre-
disposed to support authoritarian and racist ‘ideologies’.
In the wake of Fascism and the 2nd World War, two significant studies, Adorno
et al.’s. The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950) and Leo Lowenthal and
Norbert Guterman’s Prophets of Deceit (Löwenthal and Guterman 1949) attempted
to answer similar questions. They provide an entry into the set of issues I am consid-
ering. I shall proceed by first developing a critical examination of these two studies,
now mostly neglected and admittedly flawed, yet that opened up a theoretical space
which I intend to reconstruct by foregrounding a number of theoretical advances
which have transformed the field of subjectivity studies since the 1970s.
As a central part of this, I will propose a theory of affect as a field to establish
a perspective that opens up a new way for reformulating the mechanisms involved
in the process of formation of subjects that can integrate the pre-individual and
trans-individual dimensions, that is, the psychic, familial, psycho-social, and socio-
cultural aspects of subjectivity within the same space of becoming. One important
implication will be the different theorisation of the role of new media technologies
in this process. For this, I will draw from the work of Simondon on the fundamen-
tally relational and technical character of being and his approach to the dynamics
binding the process of individuation and individualisation, the world of objects and
the world of technics. Stiegler’s research on the effects of media and language on the
symbolic world and on capturing libidinal energies and symbolic intensities for cap-
ital will provide further reflections on the main theoretical problem of the construc-
tion of subjects for forms of fascism. I will finally turn to a number of implications.

The Authoritarian Personality

The book was the result of collaboration involving many mostly exiled Jewish schol-
ars working in the USA, notably at the Institute for Social Research, with the partici-
pation also of Leo Lowenthal and Frederick Pollock. In many ways Lowenthal and
Guterman’s own study, The Prophets of Deceit (Löwenthal and Guterman 1949),
can be seen to be a companion work as it investigated related themes. (Adorno et al.
1950) aimed to establish the cluster of traits that in their combination predisposed
specific groups to support Fascism in the 1930s and 40s. The authors picked out
 C. Venn

the following in pursuit of their hypothesis that such a cluster existed to form a
‘syndrome’ shared by other fascistic minds: authoritarian submission, authoritarian
aggression, anti-intellectualism, stereotypy, anti-intraception (or anti reflexive imag-
ination), conventionalism, power ‘toughness’, destructiveness, cynicism, projectiv-
ity. Furthermore, a key concept proposed by Else Frenkel-Brunswick in her chapter
was that of intolerance of ambiguity; it is a concept I shall explore further.
The empirical data gathered in support of establishing the distribution of these
traits and their relative coherence to form a specific type of personality is generally
regarded as unreliable because of poor methodology. Nevertheless, intuitively one
can sense that a number of traits in the cluster appear to cohere into a specific sub-
jectivity or type (what they called personality). The authors suggested an F-scale (or
Fascist scale) as a measure of coherence binding together the elements of the cluster.
They also tried to explain the cluster by relating it to childhood experiences, draw-
ing from the Freudian developmental model of the infant. So, the emphasis was on
the effects of harsh or punitive parenting on the child and consequent fear of parental
disapproval that they thought lead to identification with authoritarian figures. They
argue that the ‘authoritarian personality’ was prone to support right wing ‘ideology’.
The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950) was ground-breaking in open-
ing up for investigation the problem of the formation of political subjects who were
likely to support violent forms of the exclusion or elimination of those they consid-
ered a threat to their way of life, security, and identity, that is, the violent policing of
the boundary between purity and danger. Yet, its location in studies in prejudice and
its reliance on Freudian developmental model and concepts have proved to be short-
comings (see Henriques’ critique of the concept of prejudice (Henriques 1984)).
Before examining this phase further, I will highlight a number of concepts in The
Prophets of Deceit (Löwenthal and Guterman 1949) that bring into view the socio-cul-
tural and economic context in which the ‘authoritarian personality’ emerges. A selec-
tion of chapter titles is explicit enough, namely, foregrounding conditions such as social
malaise, a hostile world, a ruthless enemy, the helpless enemy, the follower, the agitator,
a home for the homeless, the enemy as Jew. Social malaise for instance refers to a cata-
logue of typical grievances including economic, political, and moral dissatisfactions.
They produced an ‘emotional substratum’ that relates ‘certain emotional complexes’
amongst which they list dependence, distrust, anxiety (Löwenthal and Guterman 1949,
p. 13). What is common in this malaise is the ‘substitution of a personal enemy for an
objective condition’ (Löwenthal and Guterman 1949, p. 15). The enemy is presented
as ‘an alien body in society’, all those acting against the interests of the people. The
agitator exploits the ‘diffuse feelings of malaise’ (Löwenthal and Guterman 1949, p.
16) S/he stresses the ‘foreigner’s intrinsic differences from the native … (who) is essen-
tially unassimilable’ (Löwenthal and Guterman 1949, p. 49). The refugee is seen as the
exemplar of the parasite (Löwenthal and Guterman 1949, p. 50).
It is clear that these two studies need to be thought together, since the psychologi-
cal approach in the Authoritarian Personality is widened by the Prophets of Deceit to
take account of the socio-political elements that Adorno and colleagues recognised
as important but could not fully examine in their study. It is clear also that many
of the ‘personality’ traits and many enabling conditions identified in the studies
recall contemporary events such as the rise or resurgence of an intolerant and racist
Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow…

authoritarian populism on the right, discourses that target ‘enemies within’, such as
migrants socialists, and enemies at the gate, such as refugees. The important differ-
ences, as I noted earlier, concern the dominance of neoliberal doctrines, major trans-
formations in the global economy which have triggered economic, political and cul-
tural pressures that have produced a new precariat and insecure lives (Venn 2018).
They have generated new ‘malaises’ and disaffections, adding to the disrupting
effects of digital communications, cybernetic systems and ‘information ensembles’
(Simondon 1958, 1989). Simondon (1958) that penetrate every aspect of psycho-
social existence.
The more worrying consequences are the new fundamentalisms that the vio-
lences intrinsic to the intensification of exploitation by capital and of pauperisation
worldwide have produced. They profoundly undermine democracy (Brown 2015),
and have given rise to many despotic regimes. These are the pathologies of con-
temporary existential conditions. Of the many questions that emerge from the cur-
rent convergence of crises, I will focus on the effects for the constitution of political
subjectivities, developing a theory of affect as field in order to build on theoretical
innovations which have transformed our understanding of the process of subjectivity
since the 1960s.

Towards a theory of affect as a field

1. Psychoanalytic theory and the psycho-social dimension of being as relation.

Why affect? Over the last two decade or so this concept has become ubiquitous
in debates relating to rethinking of the domain of emotional life and the relationship
of humans to the living world generally (Massumi 2002, 2015; Clough 2007; Gregg
2011; Wetherell 2012).
Indeed, as a concept it runs the risk of often being counter-productive because of
the confusion of usage. I will not address this debate here, having done so elsewhere
(Venn 2010; Blackman and Venn 2010). My approach instead locates affect in a dif-
ferent corpus. But in order to do so, I want to summarise a number of advances in
theorising subjectivity that clears the ground for the perspective I am proposing.
There are several problematics that in their different ways have shifted the ter-
rain of analysis well beyond what Adorno and colleagues could draw upon for their
studies. Let us start with the decentring of the unitary, rational, autonomous, self-
referential subject that has been central in western philosophy since Descartes. It has
been a necessary step in order to approach the problem of affect from perspectives
that do not start with the privilege of the individual as model. Feminist, decolo-
nial and deconstructive critiques of the Cartesian subject have demonstrated how its
assumptions have historically provided support for patriarchal, racist, and occiden-
talist power, especially when we locate the emergence of that notion of the subject
in the context of already existing patriarchal power and already existing racialisation
of subjugated peoples in the colonies (Venn 2000). The centring of the subject as
egocentric rational agent at the heart of modern epistemology and history in these
particular circumstances has precisely been to reinforce and authorise logocentrism,
 C. Venn

phallocentrism and racism. It provided secular epistemological and ontological

grounds for these asymmetrical relations of power—though patriarchy and racism
have long found support equally in onto-theological and religious doctrines.
Amongst notable theoretical and political engagements with this subject, we can
refer to the following amongst a long list: (Henriques et al. 1984, 1998; Adlam et al.
1977; Heidegger 2010; Derrida n.d.; Irigary 1974; Irigaray 1977, 2003; Lloyds, n.d.;
Venn 2000; Walkerdine 1988), Foucault, Mental History and Personality (Foucault
1954, 1962, 1976a, b); Birth of the Clinic (Foucault 1963, 1973) History of Sexual-
ity (Foucault 1976a, b) Hermeneutics of the Subject (Foucault 2005), more recently
(Barad 2007).
My argument is that this decentring, and the implied rejection of an individualist
ontology, was a necessary step towards a focus instead on relations and relationality
when theorising individuation from the claim of being as being-with and as always-
already social being, inscribed in a culture and in an environment that’s technical
and objectal. A different notion of affect has a point of departure in this post-anthro-
pocentric ontology.
Another important and related series of departures concern psychoanalytic theory,
starting with Lacan’s Rome discourse (Lacan 1953, 1977) that emphasised the func-
tion and field of language and speech in psychoanalysis and marked the break with
orthodox psychoanalytic establishment (Lacan 1977, 1968; Venn in this issue). He
brought concepts from the fields of philosophy, anthropology, linguistics into the theo-
risation of the psyche. A notable formulation concerns the triune relationship between
the symbolic, the imaginary and the real that proposes complex linkages amongst
these domains of subjectivity that posit an intractable imbrication of subjects in cul-
ture, psyche and reality such that each refers to the others in their expression. It is part
of his elaboration of the mirror stage whereby the infant, or not-yet-subject, enters the
symbolic world as it acquires language through real interactions with significant oth-
ers, and undergoes a process of transformation that’s marked by a specular identifica-
tion with an image as in an imagined mirror whereby the I of identification emerges
through a recognition effect. Yet, the specular aspect of the process, since the forma-
tion of this image in the imaginary is the result of the gaze of the other as imagined by
the infant, means that for Lacan misrecognition is intrinsic to the process of recogni-
tion. The imaginary is constituted of the representatives of affect and of the real: it is a
chaotic yet structured flow of feelings, knowledges, sensations; it is the site of the tur-
bulence or discordance of the I. For Lacan, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary
are co-articulated dimensions of the psychic field. The relay between is the objet a and
everything which is inscrypted in it: lack, loss, plenitude, jouissance, the wish.
Concepts of lack and loss evoke a thematic that underlies the Lacanian problem-
atic which draws from the thought of the thrownness of being, its dehiscence or gap-
ing that refers to the idea of the insufficiency of being, and the intimation of finitude
(being-towards-death in Heidegger) (Heidegger 2010), and the consequent wish for
plenitude. There is a sense of an aloneness of being in this ontology that detaches
it from the world and so neglects the idea of being as being-with that we find in
Ettinger, Simondon or Merleau-Ponty. And so, the Lacanian theorisation, though it
breaks with Cartesianism, nevertheless appears to block or underplay the embod-
ied immersion of the subject-in-process in a sensory world of sound, touch, voice,
Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow…

non-conscious visceral experience of other bodies and the physical world such that
a sensual envelope is constituted whereby I am an extension of the world and the
world is in me. I shall explore below how Ettinger’s (1995, 2004, 2006) develop-
ment of a post-Lacanian conceptualisation of individuation produces a non-reduc-
tive theorisation of the body-world relation that overcomes these limitations. (for a
fuller analysis of Lacan, see Venn, in this issue, and (Venn 2004).
Other approaches that emphasise the relational and the psycho-social domain,
predating Ettinger’s work, are obviously the psychoanalytic innovations of those like
Bowlby, Winnicott, Bion, Klein, Kristeva, and later (Ettinger 1995, 2006; see also
Venn 2004). This massive amount of post-Freudian research and practice has trans-
formed the field. The shifts have been towards recognising the importance of bond-
ing, holding, attachment, separation, containing, object relations, the embodied and
visceral process of becoming, group dynamics, the effects of trauma. What I want
to retain from these developments is the emergence of a problematic of relation-
ality informing the theorising of affect, which I will elaborate below by reference
to the work of Simondon, Ettinger, Andy Clark and Francisco Varela. Early analy-
ses of some of these innovations can be found in Changing the Subject (Henriques
et al. 1984, 1998; Hollway 1984, 1998; Urwin, 1984, 1998; Walkerdine, 1984, 1988;
Venn, 1984, 1998, 2010, 2018). Urwin’s research and clinical practice with blind
babies establishes the manner in which close bonding happens involving touch,
voice, co-action, holding, containing. It makes visible a different choreography of
learning to relate and respond to significant others that reveals the profound impor-
tance of the I-other couple in the emergence of a sense of self, e.g. Bion regarding
projective identification, countertransference and group dynamics, especially impli-
cations for the formation of the authoritarian personality and the group dynamics
involved in alt-right communities.
We can now turn to the work of the psychoanalyst and artist Bracha L. Ettinger
to open up a theoretical terrain that brings a trans-individual and pre-individual. Her
post-Freudian and post-Lacanian theorisation of becoming or individuation empha-
sises the mutually constitutive character of the I-not I, self-other relation and so
breaks with approaches that are founded in one way or another on phallocentrism
and an individualist ontology. Her innovations concern many dimensions, particu-
larly the re-inscription of the sensory world in the process of constitution of sub-
jectivity such that the body-world complex comes to occupy a determining place
reconnecting cognition with the experiential and affective. The key concept which
Ettinger proposes for this is the matrixial. She describes the matrixial as a ‘sub-
jectivizing stratum’, distinct from the phallic stratum. It relates to the intra-uterine
experience, which is a deeply embodied experience of being-with and being-in-the-
world that grounds affective economy. She says:
‘In order to posit another kind of objet a, a One-less, between-the-several rela-
tional kind, in the scopic zone, we must elaborate a psychic layer from which such
as objet a may emerge and in which it may dwell. I have called such a layer: the
matrixial stratum of subjectivization, and propose to see in a matrixial subjectiv-
ity-as-encounter a beyond-the-phallus feminine field, related to plural, partial and
shared unconscious desire (for both men and women) which has an imaginary and
a symbolic impact, and not only a real ex-istence. I have suggested that if we can
 C. Venn

conceive of traces and links and relations rather than of objects, from an angle in
which the co-emerging I and not-I is prior to the I versus others, a different kind of
passageway—suitable for links that are not taken for objects—that is due to particu-
lar kind of processes of transformation, arises. This different passage, that I have
called metramorphosis, draws a non-psychotic yet beyond-the-phallus connection
between the feminine and creation (Ettinger 1995, p. 22).
For her the conceptual apparatus she is developing means ‘rethinking desire and
the unconscious by reference instead to the transgressive encounter between I and
not-I grounded in the maternal womb/intra-uterine complex and a notion of affective
economy that avoids phallocentrism’ (Ettinger 2006, p. 218). This different affective
economy ‘opens up a non-psychotic connection between the feminine and creation,
and thus points to an artistic practice that reconnects with an enlarged symbolic in
which the feminine (neither male nor female) is fully active and informing knowl-
edge and the ethical realm’ (ibid.). Her own artistic practice explores the traces of
these trans-subjective and pre-subjective dimensions of individuation.
The matrixial also ‘designates ‘woman’ not as the Other but as co-emerging self
with m/Other, and link a rather than objet a’; so, not as lack but as borderlinking.
(ibid.). She extends the scope of the matrixial by arguing that it is ‘an aesthetical and
ethical compassionate environment which is, for each becoming-subject … the Cos-
mos. Primary modes of sense-giving depend on this resonant environment, modes in
which the very psychic emergence of the I depends on the particular capacity I have
named wit(h)nessing” (Ettinger 2006, p. 220). She adds that the ‘matrixial processes
continue to form, inform, ‘exform’ and transform us throughout life, though the
matrixial space–time is usually foreclosed on infolded inside more phallic dimen-
sions and ignored’” (Ettinger 2006, p. 220).
There are echoes of Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualisation of the body’s rela-
tion to the world here, expressed in the idea of compossibility, and in terms of the
chiasm binding the outside and inside such that it is a folding that preserves both,
expressed in the concepts of the touching-touched, seeing-seen, feeling-felt that can
be extended to the hearing-heard. His approach doubles the visibility and reality of
the world with an interior visibility and reality so that I come to know the world
according to perceptions that refer to the unpresentable trace of the world that one
experiences as dwelling. This view is elaborated in the concept of the flesh of the
world as the interior and exterior horizon of being; it relates to the recognition that
the visible exterior ‘has a prolongation in the enclosure of my body, which is part of
its being’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 271). The implications for thinking the affective
alongside the cognitive within a relational perspective reconnect body, world, oth-
ers, in terms not only of compossibility, but also in terms of trace as a transcendent
dimension participating in the process of individuation. Before exploring this fur-
ther, it is necessary to juxtapose the work of Simondon which explicitly keeps the
Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow…

psychic, the trans-individual and the technical in his account of individuation, with
clear implications about the place of the affective in the process.1

2. The Simondonian problematic of individuation and affect.

The work of Simondon has established a number of departures that complete the
decentring of the logocentric subject by shifting the terrain of analysis towards an
ontology that posits being as relation, as always more-than-one, thus emphasising
the primacy of relationality in the becoming of the subject. His conceptual apparatus
theorises the interconnections between the psychic and collective, the affective and
cognitive dimensions of individuation; it introduces concepts of the pre-individual
and the trans-individual as phases of that process, and it foregrounds the importance
of associated milieux that include the technical supports of individuation.
As I have elaborated the Simondonian apparatus elsewhere (Venn 2010) I shall
here highlight aspects of his problematic of individuation that provides points of
entry for a theory of affect as field, and for examining the effects of mediatised com-
munication on the formation of political subjects. In my exegesis I prefaced the
analysis of Simondon’s apparatus with a survey of approaches in the life sciences
(Lewontin 1983), ‘ecological psychology’ (Gibson 1977, 1979), psychosocial stud-
ies (Damasio 1994, 2000, 2006; Anzieu 1989, 1990; Stern 1985) studies of the co-
articulation of mind–body-world (Varela et al. 1993; Clark 2008), that already clear
the ground for the perspective I want to develop.
Amongst important advances across these fields, they draw attention to the ‘liv-
ing-thing-environment reciprocity’ (Gibson 1979) instantiated in the individual-
milieu coupling through attunement and symbiogenetic generation linking environ-
ment and organism (Venn 1984, 1998; Margulis and Sagan 2003; see Venn 2018).
For instance, Varela and colleagues develop an ‘enactive’ approach to embodied
cognition that presents the ‘mutual enfoldment view of life and world’, and asserts
the ‘co-implicative nature of organism and environment’ (Varela et al. 1993, p. 200).
They note Lewontin’s view that argues that ‘just as there is no organism without
an environment, so there is no environment without an organism (Lewontin 1983)
quoted in (Varela et  al. 1993, p. 198)). Complexity and metastability characterise
such systems such that here is ontogenesis but also homeostasis, epigenetic transfor-
mation as well as temporary stability. Interestingly, Susan Oyama’s analysis of the
ontogeny of information rejects the separation of form and matter and the privilege
of form, or hylemorphism, that relates to this duality. She argues that ontogenesis
applies ‘not only to bodies and minds, but to information, plans, and all the other
cognitive-causal entities … that supposedly regulate their development. Develop-
mental information itself … has a developmental history. It neither pre-exists its
operation nor arises from random disorder’ (Oyama 1985, 2000, p. 3).
Simondon’s problematic of individuation has deep resonances with the kind of
ontology and general ecology that we encounter in the corpus I have noted, notably

1
  I first came across her work via one of my and Mike Featherstone’s PhD students who is Ettinger’s
cousin. She had some papers of hers that we found very original and interesting and decided to plan a
special section of Theory, Culture & Society on that work. We asked Griselda Pollock, (who knew her
work), to edit it.
 C. Venn

in his emphasises on the primacy of co-constitution and reciprocity in the process

whereby an individual emerges as ‘theatre and agent of a relation … as activity of
the relation, and not a term of the relation’ (Simondon 2005, p. 29). His project
is that of a general theory of the physico-biological genesis, or ontogenesis, of the
individual that applies to all organisms, placed under the conviction that ‘Being is
relation’ (Simondon 2005, pp. 62,63), it is fundamentally ‘more-than-one’ (Simon-
don 2005, p. 326). Being is not a pre-given substance but the product of a process of
becoming that all living entities undergo. For human beings, as opposed to non-liv-
ing entities, Simondon adds an affective sub-stratum (which all living things share)
and a symbolic and a technical world to the dynamics determining the process. An
historical, psycho-social and developmental dimension is thus introduced as a speci-
ficity characterising the human.
The crucial feature for the living is the ‘adaptive relation’ to the world, a world
which has a pre-individual and a trans-individual or collective dimension. This is
where the link to affectivity can be found: ‘affectivity and emotivity (constitute)
the resonance of being in relation to itself, and links the individual being to a pre-
individual reality which is associated to it’ (Simondon 2005, p. 31).The process
describes a relation to the inside and the outside which Simondon calls participa-
tion. One could note here that for (Stiegler 2005) participation is an aspect of the
economy of desire, though he relates it to the power to act (puissance) and thus to
potentiality and becoming. So, the relation between the pre-individual and the trans-
individual, or pre-subjective and trans-subjective in Ettinger’s vocabulary, is equally
the space of the economy of desire. The problematic of sexuality, beyond instinc-
tual drives, is clearly part of this perspective, as I will discuss later in relation to
affect as field. Desire, potentiality, becoming are the dimensions of being; however,
‘being does not have the unity of an identity … it has a transductive unity’ (Simon-
don 2005, p. 31). One could connect the problematic of sexuality, being instinctual
drives, with Simondon’s view that ‘The psyche is neither pure interiority nor pure
externality, but permanent differentiation and integration according to a regime of
associated causality and finality that we call transduction’ (Simondon 2005, p. 247).
One needs to understanding transduction as ‘… a physical, biological, mental,
social operation whereby an activity is gradually extended inside a domain, its dif-
fusion being based upon a structuration of the domain occurring from one part to
another: each region of constituted structure serves as principle of constitution for
the next region, such that a modification is thereby gradually extended at the same
time as the structurising operation’ (Simondon 2005, p. 32).
Transduction is a key concept in his work, providing an explanation of the pro-
cess of change as it occurs from the simplest organism to the most complex. One
aspect concerns the implications regarding the rejection of the dichotomy of form
and matter and its replacement by the concept of information understood outside the
cybernetic model, for ‘(B)eyond information as quantity or information as quality,
there is information as intensity’ (Simondon 2005, p. 242), that is, as potentiality
and indeterminate becoming. One must remember here that he relates psychic being
to a symbolic domain because of the ‘inherence of signification to being’ (Simon-
don 2005, p. 242) … ‘the individual is the being who appears when there is signi-
fication’ (Simondon 2005, p. 263). Signification and information play an absolutely
Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow…

central role on collective action, for ‘(T)he existence of the collective is necessary
for information to signify …signification exists … by way of beings …Signification
is a relation between beings, not a pure expression, signification is relational, collec-
tive, trans-individual’ (Simondon 2005, p. 307). I shall develop this when discussing
the formation of the authoritarian subject in the present, by reference to Stieglers’s
analysis and by reference to the range of post-Freudian conceptual apparatus I have
summarised earlier.
The other important concept to bring into the framework is that of the associ-
ated milieu, for the individual comes into being within an heterogenous and mobile
system in a state of constant differentiation involving exchange between the intrin-
sic and the extrinsic, internal resonances and the milieu. The relation to the milieu
occurs at the level of individuation and individualisation, though for the latter the
relation to the milieu takes place ‘through emotion’, and is inscribed in ‘being in its
particularity, through the property of familiar objects, regular customary happen-
ings, integrated into the rhythm of life’ (Simondon 2005, p. 266). It could be argued
that emotion in this sense appears as socialised affect if we understand this socialisa-
tion to refer to a doubling or transduction by way of the relation to the other and to
other objects and bodies. Simondon argues that ‘(E)motion implies the presence of
the subject to other subjects and to a world that problematises it as subject’ (Simon-
don 2005, p. 253). The problematic of affect and emotion which he develops con-
nects with the point of view of becoming when he says that ‘affectivity is far from
being simply about pleasure and pain; it is a way for the instantiated being to locate
itself according to a vaster becoming; affection is the index of becoming’ (Simon-
don 2005, p. 260).
The idea of vaster becoming makes explicit the pre- and trans-individual fram-
ing of individuation and brings into view the relation to the group and to belief,
thus also to the symbolic dimension of existence. These are aspects that I will recast
when examining the idea of affect as a field, and the implications for the formation
of the political subject. Furthermore, the association of the somatic with the psychic
and the symbolic recalls Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualisation of the body-mind-world
chiasm (I discussed this in (Venn 2009a, b)), thus once more foregrounding com-
plexity, metastability, relationality as defining features of individuation. We are far
from what Simondon calls the ‘subtantialist monism’ of Spinoza or the identity of
‘substance and individual’ in Leibniz (Simondon 2005, p. 326).
What we can retain from the Simondonian problematic are, first, the dynamics
between the affective, the symbolic, the psycho-social and the technical. Second, the
process of individuation as one involving a pre- and a trans-individual dimension
that establishes the socio-technical milieu wherein individuation and individualisa-
tion occur. So, we do not start with the subject as given as in subject-centred ontolo-
gies, but as a relation within this web of exchanges of information and the mak-
ing of meaning in which the I-other(s) dyad is foregrounded. As Haraway argued,
‘Through their reaching into each other, through their ‘prehensions’ or grasping,
beings constitute each other and themselves. Beings do not pre-exist their relating’
(Haraway 2003, p. 6). We are ‘neither wholes nor parts’ (Haraway 2003, p. 8), but
exist as but one amongst the cohorts of other beings and objects of the world, as
 C. Venn

always-more-than-one. Third, the pre-individual, the trans-individual and the milieu

must include all other living forms, namely, non-human animals, plants, insects,
bacteria.
Fourth, the historicity of the symbolic, technical and psychic milieu can be
regarded as conjoined assemblages, in which power operates to limit particular sub-
jectivities and ways of life. There are implications here for the effects of technics,
particularly new communication technologies, in the process of formation of subjec-
tivities, that introduce more complex circuits of information that penetrate and shape
the domain of the symbolic and the iconic, with effects at the level of the imagi-
nary and the psychic, and thus on individualisation and the economy of desire, for
instance regarding how sexuality and gender are lived. The domain of the symbolic
with respect to libidinal capture by media is more explicitly developed in Stiegler’s
work than in Simondon’s mechanology. Let us look at this.

3. Stiegler
To come.

4. Rethinking ontology, ethics and politics

Finally, we can turn to the rethinking of ontology, ethics and politics in the light
of the different account of the process of formation of subjects which I have sum-
marised so far. In particular, as I have argued elsewhere (Venn 2010, 2018) the
standpoint of co-constitution and co-vulnerabilities implies an ethics of generosity,
of welcoming the other, of responsibility for the other, and ontological indebted-
ness that can inform a non-self-interested politics. ‘The relation to the other is eth-
ics’, says Derrida (possibly (Derrida 1992), an ethics that inscribes the idea of jus-
tice, or dike, irreducible to the law. Nancy too expresses a similar, though rather
over-comprehensive thought, when he argues that ‘Being cannot be but being-with-
one-another, circulating with the with and as the with of this singularly plural exist-
ence … But this circulation goes in all directions at once … opened by presence:
all things, all beings, all entities, everything past and future, alive, dead, inanimate,
stones, plants, nails, gods,—and ‘humans’, all those who expose sharing and circu-
lation by saying ‘we’ (Nancy 2000, p. 3). Whilst such arguments are clearly post-
anthropocentric, the problem is about this question of the ‘we’ and what is invested
in it, not just belonging, identity, ontological security, agency, but also the underly-
ing psychical apparatus in which the cognitive-affective stratum is embedded.
In some ways, it is not clear how the Simondonian theoretical framework pro-
vides concepts that mediate the experiential reality of affect as lived. The analysis
of information and signification thus requires further work on the cognitive-affective
ensemble, taking into account primary processes relating to psycho-somatic activ-
ity in the early years of development. For example, the exploration of the effects of
trauma, or of disturbed infant-mother or parent interaction on the process of attach-
ment, bonding, holding and so on reveals how affect becomes concretised in the
form of embodied and embedded patterns and routines of interaction and behaviour
(See for example the clinical work of Amanda Jones (Jones 2006). It reveals also the
communicative role of the gaze, facework, touch, play, places, cathected objects in
Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow…

the co-constitutive dynamics between infant and parent or carer (See for example
the clinical work of Cathy Urwin and Janine Sternberg (Urwin and Sternberg 2012).

5. A theory of affect as a field.

The emphasis on relationality and the thesis of the co-implication and co-con-
stitution of organisms: as I have been explaining it implies the problematisation
of substantialist notions of affect, say as a capacity to affect or be affected, or as a
pre-existing quality, or as ungrounded relation, an abstract machine, or indeed as
an occult force. In proposing the point of view of affect as a field, I analogically
draw from theoretical physics to propose an a non-substantialist theory of affect.
For instance, Einstein’s theory of gravity in his general theory of relativity (Einstein
1915) equally rejected the substantialist concept of gravity that imagines it as a thing
that could act at a distance. He saw it instead as a field in much the same way as
electromagnetism is a field. Basically, when a massive object enters a space–time
continuum it causes warping that produces gravity (Hawking 2018). In the Stand-
ard Model today, it is regarded as one of the four fundamental interactions in the
universe (the others being the strong and the weak nuclear interaction or force, and
electromagnetism). The analogy with the magnetic field may be more helpful than
the gravitational one, for as we know, when a piece of iron placed in a magnetic field
is instantly magnetised. Simondon uses that example when explaining metastability
and relationality (Simondon 2005, p. 538). Very speculatively, one could imagine
that the affective field is a fifth fundamental force affecting bodies in a specific way.
It might explain quantum entanglement, as well as empathy.
With regard to human and non-human animals, we assume the effect of the affec-
tive field on such living beings to be dependent on their openness to affect as a fun-
damental dimension of their ontological state as living beings. As we saw, in the
work of Simondon, affect needs to be thought within a more general theory of the
process of individuation and individualisation encompassing all living things. In a
sense there is an ecology of affect. An individual comes into an already constituted
world which has both pre-individual and trans-individual dimensions. Its arrival
alters the field of relations, in the same way as the insertion of a magnet into an
already constituted magnetic field changes the field.
Affect as field both pre-exists the individual and is produced or altered when more
than one individual inhabits the field. It pre-exists since it is inscribed or embedded
in the lifeworld and its material existence and it is produced in encounters with the
other(s). So, we can imagine the affective field as a mobile and dynamic force or
energetic system (different from the thermodynamic model that Freud used, or the
model of affect as intensities understood as capabilities and potentialities or power
to act of which a body is capable (cf Deleuze and Guattari, (Merleau-Ponty 1968,
pp. 258–261), and my critical footnote below—(we could not find the footnote, ed).
But how do we think the concept of energy in relation to the concept of affect as a
field? Is it a form of force, expressed as intensity, or charge? Yet, it would clearly
have developmental and epigenetic aspects, conditioned by interactions amongst
individuals whereby the field becomes invested with affective charge or potentiali-
ties. Perhaps it is productive to think of the accumulation of affect in a person, a
culture, an icon, an object, or specific narratives, in analogy with the electric charge.
 C. Venn

Both imply potentiality in terms of effects. Furthermore, the analogy with energy
allows us to think of stored-up affect in the form of symbols, sense of place, icons,
milieux and cathected objects of all kinds in which such energies have become
invested, and collective memories in narratives of the family or of the nation. We
can then imagine a relational matrix that arises from the co-articulation of internal
and external states, interiorisation and externalisation, psychic state and the psycho-
social complex. In effect, the field acts as a sensorium in which all living entities
dwell. It is a complex of psychic, psychosomatic, and psycho-social energies that
traverse emotional life. For each individual, there is a symbiosis of the pre-individ-
ual, notably via the matrixial substratum, and the trans-individual or trans-subjective
level of symbolisation and relationality. The senses, whether conscious, liminal or
nonconscious, would play an important role in the process of the mutual attunement
of human and non-human bodies within the field.
But what are the mechanisms of metastability in the case of living entities?
One could posit simultaneous processes describing the dynamics operating in the
autopoiesis/homeostasis couple, that is, the processes of becoming or change and
temporary stability that characterise complex systems. These processes would be
subject to transductive passages from one state to another, namely, from in-the-
world experiences to the symbolic and imaginary domains, it being understood that
the process happens all at once such that the ‘real’ is always-already mediated by
the symbolic and imaginary, and is thus not raw data (except perhaps for the neo-
nate before symbolisation, or as ‘immediate data’ (Bergson 1889)). It means that the
effects of the psycho-social, psychosomatic and the psychic are inseparable when we
think of the connectedness involved in the ecology of affect.
For example, a black man encountered in a street by a white man or by another
black person enters and recalibrates an affective field that triggers a whole range of
feelings, depending on attitudes and expectations already interiorised in the people
in the encounter. For instance, a racist will experience animosity, aggressiveness,
disgust, expressed in body language, the gaze, or a shouted insult. Or the response
could otherwise be an expression of empathy or solidarity in the case of non-rac-
ist. In both situations, the individual experiences and senses the real through a gaze
that’s already symbolically and psychically marked, that is, filtered through the
trans-individual, psycho-social dimension (in which tertiary memory, hypomnema-
tas are intricate, (cf Stiegler on Tertiary Memory), and through the psychosomatic
individualised level of experience.
We could try to approach the problem by rethinking the psychic, psychosomatic
and psycho-social dimensions of individuation within the framework of affect as
a field by turning to early infant development. Concepts like attachment, bonding,
cathexis or investment, would need to be reworked outside the Freudian problematic
of the Oedipal complex and sexuality, but within an economy of desire where the
libido is not reduced to drive or sexuality, but ‘opens onto the symbolic register …
the construction of desire is precisely what will allow a being to defer drives, and
transform them into symbolization’ (Venn et  al. 2007, p. 337). Stiegler links this
process to the Simondonian concept of individuation, and the emergence of singu-
larity, presumably as the I of Lacan, or what I prefer to call the ‘who’ of action (see
Arendt in Venn 2009a, b).
Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow…

For example, we can consider the case of sex and gender according to individu-
ation and individualisation. Sex is at first pre-individual, a matter of biology, DNA,
genetics, male and female, whilst gender is trans-individual, thus psychic and social.
But biology is ever socialised (Riley 1978) thus politicised, such that sexual differ-
ence is lived as masculinity or femininity or ‘queer’. Politics and power enter into its
enactment. Nevertheless, at the level of the who, or of a particular person, male and
female biological reality, inseparable as they are from the bodily experience of hor-
mones, desires, pregnancy, childbirth, period pains, menopause, the experience of
sex, and so on, is differently lived. Different economies of desire are at work at the
level of the psychosomatic and the psycho-social; they are not transferable.
To explore this further, we can think of the effects of trauma in infancy on the
mother-infant dyad, and the consequences for individuation and individualisation.
Let us take the case of unwanted babies left in orphanages in China. In some of
those orphanages, contact with an adult or carer is reduced to negligible, including
at feeding times when milk is delivered by a mechanism attached to the cot. There is
no attempt to hold the baby, interact with it physically or at an emotional level. It has
been found that in many cases when such babies are eventually adopted by adoptees
from the West, the children avoid physical and eye contact, and are unable to form
strong bonds with their new parents or indeed with siblings. Cognitive development
is affected too. It is a complicated situation since many factors have to be consid-
ered. Yet, we can surmise that psychical damage has resulted from the traumatic
experience of the sudden splitting of the mother/infant dyad, and the failure of a
good enough replacement at a crucial stage of development of the psychical appara-
tus, lived as incomprehensible loss and lack, affecting the economy of desire.
There are other cases of this splitting in infancy, for example in the case of pre-
mature babies who have to be kept in incubators. Studies have examined instances
of mothers who have found it difficult to properly bond with their child in these
circumstances (Jones 2006). What appears to be missing are the multitude instances
of contact and co-action relating to what Ettinger calls the ‘matrixial stratum of sub-
jectivization’, tied the process of a ‘matrixial subjectivity-as-encounter’ whereby a
‘co-emerging I and not-I’ can emerge (Ettinger 1995).
This analysis has implications for working out the effects of new media technolo-
gies and internet platforms as mechanisms affecting the process of individuation,
and thus of circumscribing specific subjectivities, or ‘personalities’, for example
regarding the notion of the ‘authoritarian personality’.
WHERE IT’S GOING. Sketch. Details yet to come. And theory.
Media alters the affective field (Stiegler). Alt-right reconstitutes a narrative that
re-inscribes a closed space of belonging. It does not admit the other, the stranger,
or difference. To expand re closeness/openness, intolerance/intolerance, narratives
of self and other (Venn in this issue). It is a negative/ psychotic womb experience
instead of Ettinger’s matrixial experience. Psychotic as opposed to non- psychotic
matrixial experience of withness (Ettinger 1995) that predispose being to welcom-
ing the other. Relationality too (Simondon). An inclusive cosmopolitanism. Shared
commonality.
In psychotic subject formation, closed space of identification reiterates or re-
inscribes racist, xenophobic, nationalistic, or intolerant religious world view. Often
 C. Venn

this cluster of traits and sense of self cohere or solidify into a specific subjectivity,
predisposed to fundamentalism. It is nostalgic, melancholic, (Gilroy 2004) wish-
ing a return to what is fantasised as good times, but that in fact was never so. It is
driven by loss (of the ’thing’, of what has been placed in the ’oubliette’ (Lacan).
Oubliette as place where loss of the thing is kept in the unconscious, but it sends
proxies. And motivates the wish in the economy of desire. Losses in the real world:
ontological security, status, respect as a person, agency, and thus to the economy of
desire as understood in post-Freudian discourse. Role of participation in Stiegler.
And implications re media capture of libidinal energies. Return to (Adorno et  al.
1950) to reframe in light of current neoliberal conditions. Cite Esposito’s argument
in Persons and Things (Esposito 2015, pp. 24–25) who links the reduction of per-
sons to things to the possession of things. Possession signals power relations. Link
to those forced into debt (Deleuze, ‘indebted man in Society of control (Deleuze
1990) (Deleuze 1992), cite from Venn 2018) in what I have called the debt society
(Venn 2018), alongside neoliberal values legitimating the abnegation of responsibil-
ity for the other (Venn, Derrida, Levinas). Differential power and possession create
this objectified category of humans.
The new ’malaise’ reflects a profoundly psychopathological condition.
Challenge to property regime as part of politics of commons, building new con-
vivialities and solidarities could stand a chance of overcoming these pathologies,
and find solutions for remaking a liveable world threatened with climate change, and
devastation.
Psychotic as opposed to non- psychotic matrixial experience of withness (Ettinger
1995) that predispose being to welcoming the other. Relationality too (Simondon).
An inclusive cosmopolitanism. Shared commonality.
Oubliette (in Lacan) (Lacan 2018) as place where loss of the thing is kept in the
unconscious, but it sends proxies. And motivates the wish in the economy of desire.
Psychosomatic experience of affective sensorium created by trans-subjective,
trans-individual media. Lived in the bone, excludes specific despised, dangerous,
othered bodies.
Must recognise that the question of exclusion or alienness is dynamic, it takes
two or more communities. E.g, close Muslim communities that do not mix with the
host community or adopt values and aspects of that community but pursue values
that breach fundamental human rights e.g. Sharia laws, misogyny, FGM. Separate
schooling reinforces this exclusivity, makes incommensurable ontologies, world-
views, cosmologies.
Any practice or value that breaches fundamental human rights falls into barbarity.

New psychoanalytic theory of the subject

Title for Paper could be: For a post capitalist politics of hope.
IGNORE ALL BELOW. THEY ARE ROUGH NOTES TO BE TRANS-
FORMED INTO PROPER TEXT.
BITS ARE REPETITIONS OF ALREADY INCORPORATED STUFF. (note
ed: although the reader is asked ot ignore all below, we have included this because
Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow…

despite the repetition, there are new aspects and examples given that would doubt-
less have been developed had Couze lived, so we include them for the use of those
scholars who come after him).
The affectivo-emotional field is of formation.
Stiegler, Simondon leading to my theory, relationality Simondon, Stiegler,
Homeostasis and autopoiesis are twinned properties of complex, metastable, autoca-
takinetic ststems. Such as life forms.
Affect section Structures of feelings inscribe or better encrypt, dispositions to act
in certain ways or to believe in certain values, or regimes of truth.
From notes.
Intolerance of ambiguity. Context. Rise of fundamentalisms: religious, ethnic,
capitalist fixation on eliminating socialism seen as threat to economic prosperity and
good social order. The situation has not been helped by the fact that in many places,
the experience of a mixed economy has been uneven. It left in place an elite of the
more affluent and powerful who could afford better education and take up opportu-
nities for further enrichment. It left in place class divisions and related inbuilt disad-
vantages, in spite of a degree of mobility in the postwar period. The bureaucratisa-
tion of the apparatuses of welfare did not help. Nor the failure to properly establish
egalitarian and adequate educational, health and housing provisions, infrastructures
to meet everyone’s essential needs; they undermined the very idea of a socialist
project.
Globalisation from the 1970s, and the dominance of financial capitalism have
undermined local economies, e.g. through outsourcing in ‘developing’ countries,
and have added pressures on the welfare state through schemes to avoid corporate
tax routed in tax havens. The consequences have been a rise in equality, the pre-
carisation of labour and lives, an increase in feelings of insecurity and incipient
fears amongst an increasingly large number of the ‘losers’ in the neoliberal eco-
nomic order (Harvey 2003; Harvey 2005, 2010; Stiglitz 2001, 2002, 2010, 2013;
Stiglitz et al. 2011; Roubini and Mihm 2010; Klein 2008, Klein 2014; Hochschild
1983, 2003, 2012; Hochschild 2016a, b; examined in Venn 2018). The patholo-
gies of capitalism, including the institutionalisation of corruption, have thus
generated socio-political pathologies projected onto the enemies within and the
‘aliens; at the gate. They feed into fundamentalisms and proto-fascism, inciting
new intolerance of ambiguity. The effects have been clear in places that are or
have undergone rapid, widespread and disruptive transformations, surprisingly
in those countries promoted as the new fast developing economies, the BRICS,
namely Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. One could add weak states
such as many in Eastern Europe to the list of politically unstable states that are
tempted by fascism.
It is important to address all this at the level of subjective lived experience.
One needs to take account of the extent to which dormant fears and racial animos-
ity can be triggered by visible signs of an ‘alien’ culture or body, or by the arrival
into the space of established community spaces of large numbers of migrants and
refugees, experienced as an invasion (see Amin 2012; Venn 2000). The level of
animosity would be heightened in situations where ways of life are already van-
ishing due to the stressors I have noted above regarding the global reorganisation
 C. Venn

of capital coupled to the neoliberal abnegation of responsibility for the poor and
vulnerable that underlies the idea of the welfare state. One needs to recognise
these feelings and responses, and counter them with appropriate information
and exchanges to explain the problem, and action that eliminates its root cause,
namely, the pathologies of global capital. It is thus about changes in the political
culture, and changes at the psycho-social levels.
Here one can examine if the psycho-social space of the family, and the homog-
enous community acts as a defensive container re-inscribing the integrity and iden-
tity of the self as a folding of the private sphere into that of the social to form a safe
place, or whether that space is open to the welcoming of the other. The imaginary
consistent with the former is usually conservative and nostalgic, whilst that of the
non-defensive position would be closer to Ettinger’s account. Describe: severality,
jointness, withnessing, transgressive corporality, com-passion, proto-ethical.
The concept of associated milieu is crucial as part of the analysis of the stability
and degree of coherence of mechanisms at work. The associated milieu can be piv-
oted as dwelling in the Heideggerian sense (Heidegger 1993); it creates a sense of
place (refs). It is perceived threats to this psychosomatic dimension of being that the
prophets of deceits exploit. E.g. the promise of a home for the white/Hindu/Jewish,
etc./‘race’.
New communication technology captures libidinal energies and redirects them.
Has effects on political culture (Stiegler). It also captures time. Time is monetised
via internet stratagems and devices of capture. Historical time is compressed into
a now time, a distortion of the community, in particular the memory of struggle for
alternative ways of being.
Stiegler. Time inscribed or archived in memory devices, mnemotechnics. Dura-
tion, Heidegger. Bergson, from Occidentalism.
Ricoeur on narrative and time. Narrative identity. We are entangled in stories, cf
paper in issue.
Memory devices: pen, book, printing press, typewriter, computer as recording
devices. Vast heterogenous archive including places, monuments.
What are media doing to time, duration, the sense of the past. Distorts percep-
tion. Argue re instrumentalisation of time and its monetisation. Capture libido and
redirect it into fantasies of consumption, greatness or purity of the nation. Latter
presented as safe holding place, a container of belonging and of the psychic and psy-
chosomatic affective field where imagined identity is reiterated or confirmed. Sym-
bolisation of walls, borders, as bulwark against the uncertainties of precarious lives,
fear of the other, the alien enemy. New divisions of us and them, inside/outside,
interior/exterior.
The politics of commons as alternative vision and strategy for recreating commu-
nity, conviviality, cosmopolitan belonging, new subjectivities.
Examine the gift of time, outside the economy of exchange, freely given as response
to the existential vulnerability of the other. Given also in the building of community,
enacting the being-withness of social being which is immanent in the affective field.(see
Derrida for an economic analysis of the gift (Derrida 1996)). This giving has a libidinal
and affective charge.
Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow…

Time, however, is stolen by wage labour in situations of unequal exchange or exploi-

tation where one’s time is appropriated by employers. Internet devices supporting social
media waste one’s time, reducing the time one has for creative, imaginative play, the
cultivation of the soul.
Continued.? Loss, play of absence/presence. The lost object is tied to splitting in
the course of individualisation and the emergence of the I as singularity (Stiegler re
singularity?). It is interiorised in the imaginary and integrated into the economy of
desire; it motivates the search for safe holding place acting as womblike container,
projected into the homogenous community, the constancy of sense of place.
How to account for racist, authoritarian personality/ subjectivity given the ana-
lytical apparatus.
Two interrelated levels. Subjective, regarding the effects of disruptions of the
community arising from the recomposition of capital and its effects on flows of
labour, money, goods, information, experienced as loss of one kind or another. This
is compounded by the pressures from the neoliberalisation of work that puts a pre-
mium on the idea of the ‘enterprising individual’ who is called to identify them-
selves with the language of corporate culture with its emphasis on toughness, resil-
ience, the maximisation of return on personal investments. (Foucault (McNay 2009,
2015), Hochschild). They alter the psychosocial dimension in which each subject
inhabits, triggering insecurities, anxieties, resentments, anger, and emotions similar
to mourning. They drive many to seek security with the family, the ‘authentic’ com-
munity, personal life.
Shifts in values that disturb conventions, educational system that trains minds
to avoid ambiguity, reproduce conventional knowledge, and discourage critique,
though the latter is paramount for the democratic process. Cf Kant’s use of free
reason.
The trans-individual dimension. Here one must bring into the account the his-
torical dimension of the formation of a culture. In particular ethnocentric narratives
of the nation or the ‘race’, constructed in the course of conquest and servitudes to
legitimate exploitations and oppressions remain immanent in the culture as a his-
torical memory. It forms a living archive of attitudes, values, stereotypes, and events
that characterise a racist culture in which narratives of identity as white, Hindu, Jew-
ish, Islamic, and so on. This trans-individual dimension is interiorised during the
process of individuation, expressed and enacted in the sense one has of self, and
self-identity; it participates in individuation at the level of affect.
The mechanism in question relates to the fact that the trans-individual stratum is
coupled to the affective sensorium through the psychic and psychosocial elements
interiorised in the subject in the course of individuation. The sensorium is built over
time. It is historical, inscribing the community’s experiences over generations, kept
as a memory in narratives of the people and significant events. Those who inhabit
the sensorium and its affective field share in sentiments about a number of basic
values and views about the world that’s taken for granted as undisputed. It is part
of what constitutes the strength and coherence of the community. Church belong-
ing for instance reinforces the solidarity and values, through a process of reitera-
tion/repetition. The relationalities at work can bind the psychic, the embodied and
 C. Venn

psychosocial dimensions of subjectivity into a closed space of belonging. This is

clearest in the case of religious cults, or in fundamentalist organisations.
The problem that arises concern the techniques for Lieux de mémoire.
In the context of the disruptive effects of globalisation, precarious employment,
the debt economy, migration, and the loss of sense of community, those unable to
cope and those who experience the changes as loss or threats or social status are
tempted by promises of renewal through the exclusion or elimination of the enemy
within. The dynamic connection between the subjective and the trans-individual
can induce some groups and individuals, particularly those who still harbour the
colonialist dream of the great, or pure nation, to hallucinate a nostalgic past that
cannot exist in the prevailing conditions. (see Gilroy on postcolonial melancholia,
2004 (Gilroy 2004)). Both the subjective experience and disruptions of the trans-
individual affective milieu produce socio and psychopathology fed by authoritarian
populist rhetoric. Witness the discourse of today’s prophets of deceit (notably, Steve
Bannon, Jordan Henderson, the LePen, Modi, Nigel Farage) who reiterate the view
of the world propounded in the 1930s and 40s by the fascists.
Existing Social and economic differences and inequalities that have historically
favoured one group, as in the case of white supremacy during European colonialism,
or the case of the caste system, and that are now subject to change because of adverse
conditions (effects of globalisation, precarious employment, migration, unemploy-
ment, effects of a debt economy, pressures arising from struggles for equality, secu-
rity, the protection of vulnerable categories of people, struggles for recognition.
Magical thinking (Hochschild 2016a, b) promoted by masters of deceit. People
are led to hallucinate a state of affairs that cannot exist in the prevailing conditions.
A child hallucinating the breast, or an addict ? The ’followers’ or recruits hallucinate
the making America/UK/India/Israel great or pure again. E.g, Fake news is integral
to both magical thinking and the deceitful propaganda of leaders.
Who are the recruits? Look at culture, fundamentalist values, evangelicals, reli-
gious fundamentalists whose dogmatic beliefs cannot tolerate ambiguity or dif-
ference, and see it as threat to the coherence of self identity. Look also at familial
relations, e.g. authority figures, especially the father in patriarchal society. maybe
Adorno et  al. were right about that factor. But other factors too need to be taken
into consideration. E.g displacement onto a scapegoat, usually a weaker group, or a
minority, the outsider, migrants, black, Muslims in India, Tutsi in Rwanda—reduced
to vermin and source of danger—cockroaches in Rwanda.
Work of masters of deceit who have other well disguised interests, e.g. some
superrich individuals who are committed to a capitalist worldview, particular corpo-
rations defending their interests, the role of nationalist, religious, racist ideologies.
Instrumentalisation of education and monetisation of knowledge have reduced
suppressed, squeezed out critical skills and habits of challenging received opinions.
Fundamentalist religious creeds promote intolerance of ambiguity and difference.
Heretical Social media encourages horde behaviour, empowers the intolerant and
those keen to suppress dissent.
Lieux de mémoire.
Counter. Critical discourse. Political culture that challenges conventions, born
of resistance to oppressions. solidarities that have been built and transmiitted along
Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow…

with affective charge invested in specific values, norms, feelings regarding particular
behaviours or attitudes, whether expressed within the group or those outside.
In postwar period, this political culture on the left, that took commitment to
socialism for granted, and promoted a cosmopolitan vision, grounded in clear prin-
ciples of equality, liberty, freedom from subjugations and exploitations, has eroded
due to the attractions of consumer culture, failures of socialist projects, or their vio-
lent suppression by the forces of imperial and capitalist interests, as has happened in
many postcolonies. Incipient patriarchal or racist values and power undermined this
political culture and led to feminist and anti-racist projects that sometimes gradually
became single issue change projects. A new political culture, new solidarities need
now to be forged in the face of the threat fascist barbarity to come.
Human Being as technical being. Leroi-Gourhan on hominisation (Leroi-Gourhan
1993). Emphasise essential rrole of technics in the process of hominisation. Feet (for
displacement), hands (for manipulation), face (for language, communicatn). Simon-
don has elaborated the conceptual apparatus, adding associative milieux, affect, etc.
Stiegler builds on Simondon to argue for a different econ of desire, and its subver-
sion or capture by teletechnologies working for capitalist ends (Stiegler 2011). One
way communication. Addressee does not participate in deciding ends. In political
realm, mix of propaganda, disinformation, dumbing down, withholding knowledge
but mass media and political parties has produced mob effects who blindly follow
leaders/new prophets of deceit. (Cf Curtis Idiotism (Curtis 2012). Without proper
information and open debate democratic process is easily subverted. It opens the
way for new authoritarian populisms on the right that rule by exclusion, expulsion,
hostility towards those perceived as enemies within and threats to the new order.
Implications for political subjectivities. How to counter this discreditation of reli-
able knowledge, expertise? Left must challenge media disinformation, and work to
disseminate public of correct situation, persuade through campaigns. E.g countering
all the lies about the EU and Brexit, e.g. sovereignty, trade, etc.

Notes towards Part Two

These notes were collected in various notebooks in which Couze was still work-
ing until the end of his life. He wanted us to have them, schematic as they are.
They were transcribed by us—any mistakes are ours. Ed.

Subjectivity / Steigler from the teleology of the snail (crap title).

Symbolic associative milieu.
Emergence of teletech, implications for a teleology/ philosophy of ends.
Stakes concern constitution of.

1. new psychological milieu? collective individualisation as important as writing.

2. ‘Rule of Ends’ equals social organization of collective desire as system of care
and remedies
3. A new libidinal economy
 C. Venn

Telos is the to-come and the distant instrumentalization of communication

(language) through telecommunication that tends to place addresse at a distance,
thus resulting in one way communication, not dialogue (central for democracy)
so “telecracy” undermines democracy. Steighler’s explanation too abstract re this
(Stiegler 2008) (Stiegler 2010a, b, c). “Telecrecy” both makes possible democ-
racy yet threatens it. Language is a symbolic milieu. Speaking it. ‘The life of
language is interlocution.’ (Stiegler 2010a, b, c, p. 82).
Saussure 1974 (Saussure 1974) circuit of speech, those who receive or return
speech participate (another word?) in trans. of language. Language is concrete of
transindividual (cf Simondon 1989 [1958]).
‘Subversive destruction of language’ form ‘disassociation of milieus in which I
am addressee without being addressor.’ Short circuits.
[end of page 4].

Steigler continued

Process of collective indiv./ transindiv.

Analyse teletech here. Refer to J H Barthelemy regarding info and meaning/ sig-
nification (Barthélémy 2012, 2015).
And his view that Simondon’s ontology can be described as informational. Infor-
mation means genesis in Simondon but a non-hylomorphic taking form (111) site
the quote form JHB pp 4–5. {Jean-Pierre Faye Theorie du Recite 1976} (Faye 1976).
Two lines of thought Zinstein’s concept of field (Einstein 1915) that echoes the
view that “at the beginning there is info (110).
Also Simondon technical object supports etc. Steigler extends Simondon’s posi-
tion. Note pharmokon—cure/ poison. (Derrida 1981; Stiegler 2010a, b, c, 2012) At
end BS [Steigler?] talks of the new industrial age and new psychotherapy [?].
(1) ‘Individual overloaded with prosthetics and hist. traces.
Me umbit [?] be met: poison and cure. Depend on who owns control.
AI ditto. All a matter of ownership (ie ends determined by intensions of (1)
capital or by radical democratic or (2) emancipatory) politics. 1 and 2 mutually
exclusive.
{check if intensions capital or emancipatory politics are in Faye}.
Add S’s point re teleology/ as earlier.
Move towards Changing the Subject (Henriques et al. 1984, 1998) and the poli-
tics of commons.
Key points for Steigler section.

1 Symbolic associated milieu (added to Simondon’s psychological and psychosocial

associated milieu).
  [end of page 5]
2 Simondon associated milieu tied to language and writing because has key role in
individuation becoming. It is part of transindividual domain. Me. (Venn 2010)
3 Teletechnology today as important as writing, discussed in terms of teleology
(question of ends). His argument is that teletechnology can be both cure and
poison. Discussed mainly in terms of language and communication require dia-
Affective field and political subjectivities in the shadow…

logue ie addressor and andresse. But new communication often short circuits
this, bypassing/ ignoring the addressee. So, distorted communication. (Me to add
monolingualism point ref Derrida 1998).

Steigler doesn’t say much re power relations inscribed in ‘distorted communica-

tion.’ Me to add key point is the implication for the philosophy of ends.
My argument:

1 Role of technical milieu in the formation of subjectivity (ie process of individu-

ation and individualisation as already described).
2 The transindividal domain inscribed—history [?]
3 Passed on in process of narrative identity Ricoeur (1991) (explain a bit). Impor-
tant role of narration/ stories. So notes ref SS 53 [?]
4 Associated milieu and their effects as previously analysed. Closed vs. open. Who
determines today, ends. Ownership of
5 Media, reinforcing existing power relations. Left failure to invent a counter cul-
ture, a radical political culture in [?] places. The rise of affect is the consequence.
(Ref motherhoff [?])

End of page 6.

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