ANDERSON, 2006. Becoming and Being Hopeful. Towards A Theory of Affect

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2006, volume 24, pages 733 ^ 752
DOI:10.1068/d393t
Becoming and being hopeful: towards a theory of affect
Ben Anderson
Department of Geography, University of Durham, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham
DH1 3LE, England; e-mail: ben.anderson@durham.ac.uk
Received 13 October 2004; in revised form 1 March 2005
Abstract. In this paper I describe how hope takes place, in order to outline an explicit theory of the
more-than-rational or less-than rational in the context of the recent attunement to issues of
the affectual and emotional in social and cultural geography. In the first part of the paper I outline
an expansion of the more-than-rational or less-than-rational into three modalities: affect, feeling, and
emotion. From this basis I question an assumption in the literature on affect that the emergence
and movement of affect enable the multiplication of forms of life because they takes place ìn excess'.
In the second part of the paper I exemplify an alternative, more melancholy account through a
description of the emergence of hope and hopefulness in two cases in which recorded music is used
by individuals to `feel better'. Emergent from disruptions in various forms of diminishment, hopeful-
ness moves bodies into contact with an òutside'. Becoming and being hopeful raise a set of issues for
a theory of affect because of, rather than despite, the sense of tragedy that is intimate with how hope
heralds the affective and emotive as always `not-yet become'. The conclusion, therefore, draws the two
parts of the paper together by reflecting on the implications of thinking from hope for both a theory of
affect and an affective cultural politics.
``[H]ope ... dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place where entrance and, above all,
final content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy.''
Bloch (1998, page 341)
``[T]he uncertainty of the outcome remains ... danger and faith are the truth of hope,
in such a way that both are gathered in it.''
Bloch (1986, page 112)
1 Introduction: thinking hope through affect

In this paper I describe how hope takes place, in order to outline a vocabulary that
attunes to the multiple processes, and modalities, that make up the geographies of
affectual and emotional life. Hope, and hoping, are taken-for-granted parts of the
affective fabric of contemporary Western everyday life. The circulation, and distribu-
tion, of hope animates and dampens social ^ cultural life across numerous scales: from
the minutiae of hopes that pleat together everyday life to the larger scale flows of hope
that enact various collectivities. Yet, thinking through hope touches something that
remains elusive to an act of explanation or description. The social sciences and human-
ities have struggled when they have tried to bring hope to thought. Hope is easily
identified and its quantitative presence or absence highlighted, but the taking-place
of hope, its mode of operation, remains an aporia. Frequently likened to the immate-
rial-matter of air, or sensed in the prophetic figure of the horizon, hope anticipates
that something indeterminate has not-yet become. Bloch (1986, page 188), describing the
content of a range of hopes, attends to the relation between absence and presence that
is folded within a space ^ time of hope when he writes that, ``since all their contacts are
not-yet as such, even the glance at them is still merely preview, even the feeling that
they arouse, merely presentiment.'' There is, therefore, an intuitive understanding
that hope matters because it discloses the creation of potentiality or possibility and
734 B Anderson
thus involves, in Marcel's (1965, page 86) words, `à postulate that reality overflows all
possible reckonings''. Witness, for example, recent work that has argued that alternative
economic practices, such as credit unions or types of second hand exchange, enact
spaces of hope within the context of actually existing capitalism (Lee et al, 2003; see
also Harvey, 2000). The taking place of hope enacts the future as open to difference
but also reminds us that the here and now is `ùncentered, dispersed, plural and partial''
(Gibson-Graham, 1996, page 259).
In order to develop this intuition that hope matters, and thus open up an explicit
research focus on hope, I describe vignettes from two case studies drawn from research
on music consumption and the affective geographies of everyday life (see Anderson,
2004a; 2004b; 2005). My description of the geographies of hope revolves around an
attunement to how hope, and hopefulness, take place that supplements recent work on
other classes of emotion [see on fear Capital and Class (2003), on love Thien (2004),
on boredom Anderson (2004b), on confidence Koskela (2000), and on anxiety Davidson
(2003)]. This begins from a set of simple questions: what can a body do when it becomes
hopeful? What capacities, and capabilities, are enabled? The ethological frame in which
these questions are posed calls us to think through hope via the attunement to affect that
has recently emerged from the revaluation of Spinozist thought in the literatures gathered
under the name `nonrepresentational theory' (see explicitly on affect Anderson, 2004a;
Dewsbury, 2000; 2003; McCormack, 2002; 2003; Thrift, 2000; 2003a; 2004a; 2004b).
From these, and related poststructuralist literatures, a theoretical vocabulary specific
to affect is emerging that resonates with `à growing feeling within media, literary, and
art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information-and-image-
based late capitalist culture'' (Massumi, 2002a, page 27; compare Connolly, 1999; 2002;
Grossberg, 1992; 1997; Marks, 2000; O'Sullivan, 2001). The term àffect' is now,
however, a contested one that is used in divergent ways across different literatures.
Thrift (2004a, pages 60 ^ 64) has recently identified different articulations that emerge
from work animated by ideas of performance, the psychology of Tomkins, Deleuze's
ethological reworking of Spinoza, and neo-Darwinism. We could think of other tradi-
tions of thought that develop vocabularies of affect, post-Lacanian psychoanalysis
most notably (Brennon, 2004), but this is nevertheless a useful definitional exercise
that avoids the conceptual underdetermination that has marked work on emotional
geographies more broadly (Anderson and Smith, 2001). It does, however, leave the
differences between vocabularies intact rather than reworking them in relation to one
another. This is problematic as terms used to describe the more-than or less-than
rationalöincluding affect but also mood, passion, emotion, intensity, and feelingö
have frequently morphed into one another during the multiple engagements that the
social sciences and humanities have had with the topic (see Pugmire, 1998; Solomon,
1992).
In this paper I therefore aim to both outline an explicit theory of affect and open
up a research focus on the geographies of hope and hopefulness. In the next section
(section 2) I distinguish between affect, feeling, and emotion as three different modal-
ities enacted from heterogeneous processes of circulation, expression, and qualification.
Outlining a language of or for affect does, however, inevitably invite contestation.
In section 3 I open up a set of issues about the idea of the excess of affect. I argue
that work on affect has been animated by an understanding of excess as akin to a pure
gift, and stress the necessity of supplementing this equation with other figures of
excess. I then fold the theory of affect outlined in these two sections into a description
of how hope takes place, in order to exemplify an account that incorporates the multiple
types of excess built into the concept of the `not-yet'. I move through a narrative of
how bodies become hopeful when formed through both diminishing encounters and
Becoming and being hopeful: towards a theory of affect 735
disjunctures in broader flows of affect (section 4) and of how hope is enacted by a body
that senses and discloses an òutside' on the horizon of `what has become' (section 5).
Implicit throughout this paper, and the key to how the theoretical and empirical work
touch one another, is an argument for a postrationalist technique of thought based on
hope that ``meets affective modulation with affective modulation'' (Massumi, 2002b,
page 234). In the conclusion I turn to think the concept of affect through hope. Hope
therefore becomes both the object of the paper and exemplary for a theory of affect.
2 Affect, feeling, and emotion

The development of an explicit vocabulary of affect and emotion begins from the
assertion that the more-than or less-than rational cannot be reduced to a range of
discreet, internally coherent, emotions which are self-identical with the mind of an
individual. Empirical sociologies, and both mainstream and constructionist social
psychology, have oscillated between conceptualizing emotions as either ìnherent' or
`socially constructed' (see Lupton, 1998; Williams, 2001). By enacting the modernist
settlement of a subjective ìn here' and an objective òut there' different modalities are
reduced to `èither biological systems (aspects of extension) or cognitive, linguistic, and
social processes (aspects of thought)'' (Brown and Stenner, 2001, page 78). Thinking
through an expansion of the affectual and emotional begins from an alternative
attunement to affect as a transpersonal capacity which a body has to be affected
(through an affection) and to affect (as the result of modifications). These two capacities
go ``beyond the strength of those who undergo them ... affects are beings whose validity
lies in themselves and exceeds any lived'' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, page 164,
emphasis in original). `Being affected ^ affecting' are therefore two sides of the same
dynamic shift, or change, in the body as, ``when you affect something, you are at the
same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn'' (Massumi, 2002b, page 212).
The capacities to affect and to be affected that enact the life of everyday life do not,
however, simply emerge from the properties of the humans or nonhumans that exist
ìn' Euclidean space or ìn' linear timeöthat is, affect does not reside in a subject,
body, or sign as if it were an object possessed by a subject (Ahmed, 2001). Instead,
when taken together, they constitute what Deleuze (1978) named as `à kind of melodic
line of continuous variation'' bound to ``durations through which we pass to a greater
to lesser perfection'' (1988a, page 49). `Being affected ^ affecting' emerge from a pro-
cessual logic of transitions that take place during spatially and temporally distributed
encounters in which `èach transition is accompanied by a variation in capacity: a
change in which powers to affect and be affected are addressable by a next event and
how readily addressable they are'' (Masumi, 2002a, page 15). Hence the ethological
attunement to combinations, and connections, which follows Spinoza's declaration of
ignorance: ``we still do not know what a body can do'' [and the linked assumption that
a body is not limited to the form of the human (Thrift, 2003a)]. What is at stake is the
composition of harmonious or disharmonious relations amongst diverse collectivities
of humans and nonhumans that produce ``rises and falls, continuous variations of
power ... signs of increase and decrease, signs that are vectorial (of the joy ^ sadness
type) and no longer scalar like the affections, sensations or perceptions'' (Deleuze,
1998, page 139). The affectivities of different types of relation can be witnessed in the
qualitative differences that energetically enhance or deplete the living of space ^ times.
In spaces of sexual and romantic love, for example, ``you become energised when you
are with some loves or some friends. With others you are bored or drained, tired or
depressed'' (Brennon, 2004, page 6). Intimate spaces of care, to give another example,
are enacted from shared attunements by parents and children to ``those dynamic,
kinetic, qualities of feeling that distinguish animate from inanimate and that correspond
736 B Anderson
to momentary changes in feeling states involved in the organic process of being alive''
(Stern, 1983, page 156).
The emergence of affect from the relations between bodies, and from the encoun-
ters that those relations are entangled within, make the materialities of space ^ time
always-already affective. There is not, first, an èvent' and then, second, an affective
èffect' of such an èvent'. Instead, affect takes place before and after the distinctions of
subject ^ world or inside ^ outside as `à ceaselessly oscillating foreground/background
or, better, an immanent `plane' (i.e. this is an in-between with a consistency all of its
own)'' (Seigworth, 2000, page 232). The biggest difficulty in witnessing how affect
enacts space ^ time is, therefore, the tendency to reduce the movement of capacities
to affect and be affected back into a subject ^ object ontology. We commonly apportion
a share of affect to an attribute, or property, of an object and the remainder to a subject.
In Massumi's (2002a, page 219) words `àffective èxaggeration' is now contained. One
share has been functionalized, the remainder relegated to the tawdry status of a
private.'' To think through affect we must untie it from a subject or object and instead
attune to how affects inhabit the passage between contexts through various processes of
translocal movement. Massumi (2002a, page 217) stresses that `àffect is situational:
eventfully ingressive to context. Serially so: affect is trans-situational. As processional
as it is precessional, affect inhabits the passage. It is pre- and postcontextual, pre- and
postpersonal, an excess of continuity invested only in the ongoing its own.'' The
excessive movement of affect, which we could think through processes such as circula-
tion, flow, transmission, or contagion, is an event autonomous of specific determinations:
`à trajectory or line in continual variation with itself '' (Seigworth, 2000, page 230). There is
no a priori assumption here as to the scale effects of either the emergence or movement
of affect (despite the common assumption of the intimate, small-scale, geographies of
emotion). Witness, for example, how the transmission of excitement constitutes crowds
as defined entities that inhabit space with their own logic (Brennon, 2004). Or how the
circulation of fear has enacted the boundaries of the American nation after the event
of September 11 (Oè Tuathail, 2003).
The key point is rather to recognize the difference between affect and other modal-
ities that speak to how the emergence and movement of affect is expressed and
qualified as it performs, and disrupts, space ^ times of experience öthat is, the bifurca-
tion of an event into multiple registers. Movements of affect are expressed through
those proprioceptive and visceral shifts in the background habits, and postures, of a
body that are commonly described as `feelings': ``putting it simply, when I feel angry,
I feel the passage of anger through me'' (Brennon, 2004, page 5). Examples include
the blush of a body shamed (Probyn, 2000a), the heat of a body angered (Katz, 1999),
or the restless visceral tension of a body bored (Anderson, 2004b). Such background
bodily feelings correspond ``to the body state prevailing between emotions ... the back-
ground feeling is our image of the body landscape when it is not shaken by emotion''
(Damasio, 1994, pages 150 ^ 151). Forming a second-order ìmage' of a state of `the
body' feelings are expressions of ``that which happens to the mode, the modification of
the mode, the effects of modes on it. These affections are therefore images or corporeal
traces first of all'' (Deleuze, 1988a, page 48). Feelings always imply the presence of an
affecting body: an affection is therefore a literal impingement of the emergence and
movement of affect on the body (when the body can be anything). But the movement of
affect is not simply received by a blank body ìn' space or ìn' time. Feelings act as an
instantaneous assessment of affect that are dependent upon the affected body's existing
condition to be affected.
The emergence and movement of affect, and its corporeal expression in bodily
feelings, create the transpersonal sense of life that animates or dampens space ^ times
of experience. This is spatially and temporally distributed and stretched out into
various presences and absences. The affectual does, however, also come to be experi-
enced through those intimate, distinctly personal, ways of being that are retrospectively
named as emotions. Various processes of qualification multiply the movement of affect,
and the expression of feeling, to enact space ^ times that are enabling and constraining
of distinct subjectivities and identities (see Lupton, 1998). Therefore `àn emotion is a
subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which from
that point onward is defined as personal'' (Massumi, 2002a, page 28). Emotions are
formed through the qualification of affect into ``semantically and semiotically formed
progressions, into narrativizable action ^ reaction circuits, into function and meaning.
It is intensity owned and recognized'' (page 28). There is, though, a danger that in
postulating the qualification of affect in emotions as only ever a frictional process öa
capture or blockage to use the language of Massumiöthe role of emotions in making
space ^ time is passed over [see, in contrast, recent work on emotional geographies
(Social and Cultural Geography 2004)]. Emotions, as qualifications that fold into a set of
more extensive relations, can instead be described as artful types of corporeal intelligence-
in-action enacted from within a subtle choreography of rhetorical ^ responsive joint action
(see Katz, 1999).
3 Excess and affect

The assumption that the spacing and timing of affect takes place in the in-between of
the relation, and that the movement of affect happens alongside processes of expres-
sion and qualification that construct space ^ times of experience, avoids expanding the
category of emotion so it becomes only an unspecified index of everything that is not
rational. Two linked caveats are, however, vital at this point. First, the relation between the
three modalities is not one of a movement from affect through feelings to emotionsöthat
is, it has no a priori direction or causality. Through the processes of enactment hinted at
above (movement, expression, and qualification) the three modalities slide into and out of
one another to disrupt their neat analytic distinction. Diverse feedforward and feedback
loops take place to create such hybrids as àffectively imbued thoughts' and `thought
imbued intensities' (Connolly, 2002). Second, and following from the presumption that
these processes are nonlinear, the distinctions do not correspond to a nature ^ culture
division between the indeterminate, unmediated, natural and the determinate, mediated
social. Talk of affect is frequently read as `àn appeal to a prereflexive, romantically raw
domain of primitive experiential richness'' (Massumi, 2002a, page 29). Ahmed (2004a,
page 39), for example, argues that distinguishing between modalities can risk equating
affect with immediate corporeal sensations and can thus create `à distinction between
conscious recognition and `direct' feeling, which negates how what is not consciously
experienced may still be mediated by past experiences.'' Unlike social-constructionist
accounts, which are implicitly based on an undifferentiated realm of visceral arousal
that is then discursively constructed (see Sedgwick and Frank, 1995), a Spinozist
account of multiple processes, and modalities, is not distinguishable on the basis of
a continuum of immediate ^ mediated. Each modality is radically relational: a passing
determination of different types of relation that is never self-contained, or fully self-present
in an individual body existing ìn' space or ìn' time.
It is the specific conceptualization that affect exceeds its expression or qualification
in feelings or emotions that has, however, enabled the production of a theoretical ^
conceptual hope for a different figure of èveryday life'. Beginning from specific
encounters in which complex bodies take form öa process that is bound up with the
indeterminate movement of spacing and timingöties affect to the presence of virtualities
that are folded into what has become actual: in which the virtual as the Being of beings
738 B Anderson
``creates its own lines of actualization in positive acts'' (Deleuze, 1991, page 97). The key
distinction between the three modalities is therefore not one of mediation ^ nonmediation
but that emotions and feelings are produced through actualizations and can never coincide
with the totality of potential affective expression. Movements of affect are always accom-
panied by a real but virtual knot of tendencies and latencies that generate differences
and divergences in what becomes actual. This equation, affect = virtualities = excess,
has recently folded into an experimentation with postcritical techniques that follow the
Spinozist point that an affect can be changed only through the energetic creation of
another affect: specifically the ethical cultivation of capacities that change visible conduct
(Brennon, 2004; McCormack, 2003; Thrift, 2003b) and a practice of tending to belonging-
as-such that creates new potentialities by enacting `good encounters' (Massumi, 2002a;
Thrift, 2004a). Both styles of affective modulation, which fold into ethical techniques that
aim to produce generosity (Diprose, 2002) or enchantment (Bennett, 2001), are drawn
together by the assumption that through affect we are able to open onto the diverse
presences within èveryday life' of something akin to a ``qualitative excess of liveliness
overspilling every determinate expression'' (Massumi, 2002a, page 253). The expansion
of the political, and the practice of politics, is therefore underpinned by an understanding
that affect takes place as ``something more, a more to come'' (Massumi, 2002b, page 215),
which enables a point of view on ``the edge of the virtual, where it leaks into the actual''
(2002a, page 43).
The link between excess and change that animates the emergence of a vocabulary
of affect is, however, far from unique and has frequently reoccurred as a demand to
attune to the `life' of everyday life. Indeed, it has been integral to a range of other
political practices that engage with everyday life as a realm in which the extraordinary
emerges from the banal. The Surrealists and the Situationalists, for example, both
enacted practices of engaging with the city that found `ìn the minutiae of everyday
life ... a polysemy of gestures and symbols the very banality of which is worth savour-
ing'' (Gardiner, 2000, pages 15 ^ 16). There has also been a series of changes in the
equation of the category of èveryday life' with the idea of an ìrreducible remainder'
(see Roberts, 1999). Seigworth (2000, page 257), drawing on de Certeau and Lefebvre,
has most explicitly developed this trajectory by describing how the `living' of èveryday
life' always exceeds closure and thus creates a constant transversal `more': an excess of
pure process that begins from the assumption that ``living exceeds, always exceeds'' (see
Amin and Thrift, 2002). If intimate with the different articulations of the politics of
everyday life the idea of excess also has a long and complex genealogy that folds
into both contemporary thought around the more-than-human (Whatmore, 2002)
and the negative valuation of emotion in the gendered figure of the hysterical women
or the classed image of the irrational crowd (Brennon, 2004). It is, therefore, important
to specify precisely how the idea of excess folds out of the equation between affect and
the virtual in order to think through the effects of remembering, and reinventing, the
demand to think the affective as a realm of `processual excess'.
Thinking the virtuality of affect stands in a family resemblance to a potentially
infinite set of terms which attune to an excess that grounds a radical affirmation
of difference: including ``will to power, diffërance, Lack, (non-)being or ?-being, the
body without organs, the ùnsayable something', the differend, the feminine'' (Widder,
2000, page 117). The literature that follows Deleuze is, however, now internally differ-
entiated around the link between the virtual and affect [compare DeLanda (2002)
with Ansell Pearson (1999)]. Work on affect in geography has drawn most explicitly
on Massumi's (2002a; 2002b; 2002c) account of the emergence of affect from the
groundless ground of the virtual (see McCormack, 2003; Thrift, 2004a). The excess
of affect is, for Massumi, the pure tendency of an unconditional escape that at the
moment of movement between contexts is without either origin or destination. This

eruptive movement becomes vital to the definition of `life':
`Ìf there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe
would be without potential, pure entropy, death. Actually existing, structured things
live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of
affect'' (Massumi, 2002a, page 35).
Massumi stresses that the `more' of affect constitutes a line that always èscapes' as
it `goes on'. The terms `surplus' and òverspill' are also used in addition to èscape' to
disclose the presence of the movement out of context of a continued `more'. Thinking
of the escape, or overflowing, of affect is faithful to the Deleuzian stress on eruptions
that come about through an outward movement as the virtual actualizes ``disjoined
singularities'' (Widder, 2000, page 127). This then folds into an assumption that the
expression and qualification of affect are frictional processes of `capture' and `closure':
`àffect 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, 2002a, page 35).
The overspill, and remainder, of affect constitute an opening to an affirmation of
pure difference that is present in the affective background ^ foreground of any situation.
Massumi (2002a, page 217) stresses the transversal qualities of affect that mean it
`ìs situational: eventfully ingressive to context. Serially so: affect is trans-situational.''
Folded into what becomes actual is always a qualitative remainder of newness that
exists outside of specific determinations: ``the remainder of ingressive potential too
ongoing to be exhausted by any particular expression of it'' (page 248). The eruptive
overspill of affect therefore enables an ingression that `ruptures' or `disturbs' that which
is àctually existing'.
The double escape and ingression of affect (or eruption and disruption) take place,
as outlined by Massumi, according to an implicit model of a pure gift: an anonymous,
impersonal donation of potential that animates because the expression and qualifica-
tion of affect (in feelings or emotion) never coincide with the totality of affect and
therefore neither the recipient nor the donor are aware of giving or receiving. Instead,
because affect provides a point of view on the explosiveness of those virtualities that
have been held in check but are carried within what has become actual, life is given
``the unseen possibility of other strange possibilities'' (Rajchman, 1988 cited in O'Sullivan,
2001, page 133). The movement of affect gives life through what Caillë (2001), commenting
on the idea of the pure gift, terms àn inconceivability': a nonreciprocal sense of `freedom'
to a body ènlivened'. So, writing of the qualification of the excess of affect, Massumi
(2002a, page 36) argues that, ``when the continuity of affective escape is put into words,
it tends to take on positive connotations. For it is nothing less than the perception of
one's own vitality, one's sense of aliveness, of changeability (often signified as `free-
dom')''. He goes on to stress that it is confidence, rather than shame, hate, or any other
named emotion, that is the effect of the gift of the excess of affect: ``the emotional
translation of affect as capturable life potential; it is a particular emotional expression
and becoming conscious of one's side-perceived sense of vitality''(page 41).
Thinking of the excess of being as a pure gift enables an attunement to the move-
ment of affect as a translocal process that potentializes difference within space ^ time
by making real but not actual `à population or swarm of potential ways of affecting or
being affected that follows along as we move through life'' (Massumi, 2002b, page 214).
The ontological equation between affect and excess around the idea of the virtual ^
actual has subsequently functioned as the a priori foundation, or ground, that guarantees
the postrationalist political practices mentioned above (see, for example, Spinks, 2001).
740 B Anderson
Emergent work on affect has, by drawing on this equation between affect and the gift of
ingression ^ eruption, developed a series of careful attunements to how the movement, and
qualification, of affect is intimate with the multiplication of life: an animation of space ^
time that follows the vitalist demand to be sensitive to the indeterminacy, and complexity,
of life (see Dewsbury, 2000; 2003; Latham, 2003; McCormack, 2003; Thrift, 2003a). This
has been worked up into a broader articulation of space ^ time as a sphere of plentitude
animated by the presence of a continued `more' (see Thrift, 2004b). Latham (2003,
page 1902), in the introduction to a special issue on performance and drawing on Massumi
in the context of a discussion of event-ness, summarizes this act of faith: ``we inhabit a
world where the actual is always haunted by possibility, by the virtualities folded within its
emergence.''
There is a risk here that if we assume that an attunement to affect necessarily
discloses a constant `more to life' then those types of relation that enact forms of
suffering, or misery, are erased in favour of an affirmative account of the social and
cultural that forgets how forms of nonlife traverse life. Think, for example, of the
multiple types of suffering that course through everyday life: to suffer, in Connolly's
(1999, page 47, emphasis in original) terms, `ìs to bear, endure, or undergo; to submit
to something injurious; to become disorganized. Suffering resides on the underside
of agency, mastery, wholeness, joy, and comfort.'' The ubiquity of suffering does not,
I want to stress, detract from an expansion of the definition of the political and of the
sphere of being political into affect. It is, rather, what makes a positive metaphysics
that moves, and inspires, a necessity in order to cultivate a politics of becoming that
can `òpen up a new line of flight from culturally induced suffering'' (Connolly, 1999,
page 51); Because, as Connolly (1999, page 57) goes on to argue, acceptance of an
obligation to respond to suffering does not simply happen, instead it ``grows out of a
protean care for the world that precedes it''. Expressions and qualifications of affect
that diminish and destroy are, therefore, beginning to be attuned to in the literature on
affect [see Thrift (2004a) on violence and the city]. But it does mean that the literature
on affect can be supplemented with other figures of excess that enable us to disclose the
multiplicity of affective and emotive life. Indeed, there is an implicit sense of alternatives
to the equation between affect and the pure gift in the uncertain, but hopeful, ethic that
has animated recent in-depth empirical work around affect. McCormack (2003), to give
one notable example, describes how creative interventions in the embodied practices of
dance movement therapy foster diverse capacities to affect and be affected. Through his
exemplary practice of observant participation, and via an affirmative ethos of generosity
towards the world, he hints at the uncertainty of an event-full world by describing how
the creation of something better is a provisional, hesitant process.
This sense of hesitancy, the lack of guarantee thinking which affect demands,
contrasts with more programmatic theoretical statements that the actual is necessary
haunted by possibility or potentiality. To develop this ethos, and supplement an equa-
tion between excess and the pure gift, other accounts of the excess of affect can be
drawn out of recent feminist-inspired and Marxist-inspired work on the affectivities of
everyday life. Probyn (2000a, pages 139 ^ 141) describes how the transmission of shame
in pride movements produces a ``back-and-forth movement of distancing'' between
bodies that translates into `à heightened awareness of what one's body is and does''.
The body that is shamed is marked by an awareness that one has trespassed proximity
and so ``loses any pristine sense of its boundaries: it is bespattered and besmirched by
its own actions'' (page 140). One specific movement of affect here emerges from
disruptive relations of antagonism and contestation that distribute bodies into hierar-
chies of interest and obligation. In this movement an affect exceeds, and gives bodies
different capacities to affect and be affected, but it is both that which is marginalized
as outside the measure of the proper and that which is redundant in the context of
the functional [see also Ahmed (2004b) on disgust and types of disconnection]. The
emergence and movement of shame, in this example, call us to think multiple types of
excess that move beyond the surplus ^ remainder couplet in order to remember that
differences in intensity are formed from different types of relations. If we supplement
this work with an emerging Marxist literature on the affectivities of different types of
labour then we can see that not only does the movement of affect take place through
different types of excess but the expression and qualification of excess-as-surplus vary
as affect folds into types of relations that diminish and destroy. In the performance of
different types of bodily labour, such as certain types of emotional labour in the family
or certain types of manual labour, a surplus does not automatically open up a virtual
``vague sense of potential'' (Massumi, 2002b, page 214). Instead, the creation of excess-
as-surplus is qualified in exploitative and/or oppressive relations that enact various
forms of ill-being (see Fraad, 2000).
4 Becoming hopeful
These two examples of the movement, and qualification ^ expression, of affect each
question in different ways Massumi's conceptualization of excess as eruption ^ ingres-
sion and the frictional, but enlivening, expression ^ qualification of the pure gift of
affect. Taken together they highlight the need to experiment with other articulations
of excess that think of the gift of affect as always-already tied to networks of obligation
between bodies and which thus bring into question an assumption of abundance. Even
as we retain the assumption that affect is an open system emergent from relations, and
that the expression and qualification of affect in space ^ times of experience do not
exhaust the totality of affective expression, there is also a need to remain open about
the exact relation between the movement of affect and an ìn excess' of being. The
problem is not, however, invoking excess per se but that the idea of excess itself cannot
function as a stable signifier because it overflows any qualification in an affirmation
of the world. Witness, for example, the plentitude of Bataille's (1985) focus on types of
excess that both supplement and diminish life (eroticism, war, sacrifice, waste, festivities,
and destruction).
In order to exemplify one trajectory towards an alternative account that remains
open about the excess of affect I want to turn to engage with hope as a type of relation
emergent from particular encounters. How hope takes place, and therefore enacts
space ^ time, will be discussed through vignettes from two case studies of music use:
Steve listening to music in the context of despair and Emma listening to music in the
context of grief. Both cases are drawn from wider research on music and everyday life
with seventeen households, which used a series of methods, including observant par-
ticipation, repeat individual and group interviews, periods of `listening with' and diary
work, to attune to how music functioned in relation to the domestic geographies of
affect, feeling, and emotion (Anderson, 2004a; 2004b). My focus throughout the dis-
cussion of the two cases is on how the materialities of music are bound to the routine
and rhythms of everyday life through changes in capacities to affect and be affected. In
order to open up simultaneously a broader research focus on hope the empirical
material from the research on music is supplemented by other examples of the taking
place of hope. Underpinning my attunement to the geographies of hope are three sets
of interconnected research foci that follow the distinctions outlined in section 2: first,
flows of hope that take place as transindividual affectivities which move between
bodies; second, hopefulness as a constellation of specific bodily background feelings
emergent from the expression of affect; third, actual hopes that emerge through
processes of qualification and are distinguished by possessing a determinate object.
742 B Anderson
Each exceeds the common assumption that hope is an intentional act directed towards
the future, in which it is only the content of what is hoped for that is `socially
constructed' (see Nunn, 1996; Waterworth, 2003).
Thinking of the different relations that we call hope immediately returns us to
the demand to think of the excess of affect responded to in the previous section. The
presence of hope has long been thought to herald a more-to-come, an excessive over-
spilling of life, that draws bodies into an intensified connection with an absent ^ present
theistic or non-theistic horizon because being and becoming hopeful embody a ``radical
refusal to reckon possibilities'' (Marcel, 1965, page 86); (see also Marcel, 1967; Pieper,
1994). From the research encounters, however, a gradual attunement to the taking
place of hope emerged from an aporia: a body that became hopeful inevitably held
``the condition of defeat precariously within itself '' (Bloch, 1998, page 341). Hope was a
vanishing point emergent only from within the presence of various forms of ill-being
that diminished the `èphemeral, transient, incorporeal, and inorganic aspects of every-
day life'' (Seigworth, 2000, page 257). Through discussion of these two cases I therefore
want to exemplify how the taking place of hope enacts additional figurations of excess
based on the uncertainty, the hazard, embedded in the Blochian (1986) figure of the
`not-yet'.
It is a point of hazard in between the vectors of joy and sadness, or enhancement
and diminishment, that I want to attend to through the discussion of the two cases. The
first case refers to Steve who is 29, lives alone, and had just been made redundant from
a job of two years with a manufacturing firm that has relocated out of the area in
which he still lives. We talk about his hopelessness in the context of his job loss.
Steve: ``... just been a bit bored and lonely ... everything's closed around here ... I'm
not doing anything at the moment.''
Ben: ``... Yeah.''
Steve: ``... Sometimes I don't have the energy to do much else ... just sit here ... sit
here too much and watch the world go past and see how shit the neighbourhood
has become ... too many boarded up houses ... or go out and it's the same.''
We then talk, and listen together, to music as the interview progresses. He plays an
album by Radiohead in the context of a discussion about hope.
Steve: ``... I listen to this album ... in the morning and err ... if I'm feeling ... you
know, like if I'm a bit low ... this'll cheer me up ... get me a bit more hopeful again.
I don't know, it's quite melancholy ... but it's really beautiful ... and it stirs up
emotion ... and I find it quite difficult to cry as well, and you need to at time to
time ... so ... I ... this helps, so if I'm a bit low ... or I'm just lying here ... this is the
song to put on _ umm.''
Ben: ``Have you any other songs like this?''
Steve: ``Mayonnaise by the Smashing Pumpkins which is a very, very beautiful song
... even though it's called Mayonnaise (laughter) ... a sad song called Mayonnaise ...
what about you have you got?''
Ben: `Ì don't know ... Radiohead Creep was always one ... .''
Steve: ``Radiohead is just much more, MUCH more ... just self loathing, which is ...
I always find it ... a solace ... to know someone else is feeling the same ... which
is great. I listened to this album yesterday morning when I'd been feeling down _
it helps because I know I'm no way as bad as Thom Yorke but he kind of feels the
same ... it let me get on with it a bit.''
Until the final words hope is a trace here: a fleeting presence that moves in and out
of our conversation, occasionally animating the talk. Witnessed instead are a set of
diminishments within the present that take place through a series of bodily affections
(bored, lonely, no energy). Steve discloses the injustice of unemployment as he is bound
to a movement of transnational capital through changes in the capacities to affect and

be affected that inhabit him. Hinted at is one specific set of diminishments that express
the flows of hopelessness, and despair, that are frequently set in motion by unemploy-
ment. He enacts, poignantly, the frustration that marks simple practices of looking out
of his window or of walking through his neighbourhood after a period of economic
change that mean his body is composed to disclose and express ``feelings of indepen-
dently flowing, provocative forces'' (Katz, 1999, page 309). A palpable relation of
dysphoria dominates the charge of affect and comes to act as an imperative that orders
Steve's relations with the world around him. We therefore begin with the first point of
divergence within different practices of hope: the varieties of diminishment that call
forth an imperative to hope but which also, in their differences, indicate that neither
the need to hope nor the capacity to cultivate different types of hopefulness and hope
are evenly distributed (see Hage, 2003). Steve's case resonates with, but is not equiva-
lent to, the unequal distributions of hope that mark the affective geographies of
suffering more broadly. To give an intensified example, Lasch (1991, page 81) describes
the persistence of hope for emancipation during the period of slavery in the American
south despite grave suffering. In the context of the specific affectivities of injustice
bound up with slavery, hope existed as a counter ``belief in justice: a conviction that
the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right'' [see Kumar (2000) on hope
and the Zapatista's struggle in Mexico].
There is, therefore, a point of danger, or hazard, folded into becoming hopeful that
indicates that a good way of being has `still not become': in the sense that the present is
haunted by the fact that the something good that exceeds it has yet to take place and
that ``the conditions that make it possible to hope are strictly the same as those that
make it possible to despair'' (Marcel, 1965, page 101). It is always from the context of
specific diminishments that becoming hopeful emerges: hence, perhaps, the sense that
hoping abandons the existent, and the fact that some types of hope can also feed back
to continue relations that diminish even as we are attached to them (see Potamianou,
1997). The transitions that Steve describes at the end of our conversation provide an
alternative case in which becoming hopeful momentarily folds into a better way of
being (see, for other transitions, Terkel, 2004). It involves the expression of a movement
of affect that counters a set of feelings [``cheer(s) me up'', ``get(s) me a bit more hopeful
again''] through the capacities of the materialities of music to smooth over despair and
induce the affective presence of something better (``to know someone else is feeling
the same''). The lyrics and tone of Radiohead offer a hope that thereafter folds into the
being together of corporealities to disrupt, momentarily, the circulation of despair
through the ingression of the tragedy of an-other (`ìt's quite melancholy ... but it's
really beautiful ... and it stirs up emotion'').
Induced by the transmission of hope between Steve and the music, and then
between him and his environment, is a corporeal disposition of hopefulness felt in a
renewed animation of the proprioceptive and visceral senses (rather than the determi-
nate content of a particular hope). This is a repeated set of background feelings that
enacts a good way of being which forms a hopeful site of experience. Hage (2003)
invents the term `conatic hope' to describe the specific constellations of background
feelings that take place in addition to the emotion of hope. Hage argues that certain
types of hopefulness are akin to a sort of will to live as witnessed in Spinoza's (1910)
description of a finite-modes endeavour to persist in being. For Spinoza the `conatus' is
not the property, or essence, of a thing but a characteristic way of connecting and
disconnecting that enables finite bodies to repeat across processes of emergence.
Gatens and Lloyd (1999, page 27) draw on the idea of conatus to think through how
a body is formed through transindividual lines of force that augment or diminish:
744 B Anderson
``Bodies and minds, as finite individuals, struggle, of their very nature, to persist in
being. Our bodies are not just passively moved by external forces. They have their
own momentumötheir own characteristic force for existing. But this is not some-
thing that individuals exert of their own power alone. For an individual to preserve
itself in existence, as we have seen, is precisely for it to act and be acted upon in a
multitude of ways. The more complex an individual body, the more ways in which it
can affect and be affected by other things.''
When thought through this relational account of the bodies' capacities and capa-
bilities, types of hopefulness can be characterized as a continuation of good relations
that enable an individual to `àct and be acted upon in a multitude of ways'' (page 27).
Hopefulness, therefore, exemplifies a disposition that provides a dynamic imperative
to action in that it enables bodies to go on. As a positive change in the passage of affect
it opens the space ^ time that it emerges from to a renewed feeling of possibility: this is
a translation into the body of the affects that move between people in processes of
intersubjective transmission to make a `space of hope'. Feeling hopeful, in this case,
is characterized by a yearning to live and to experiment as part of the tendency without
end that is set in motion as one effect of what Bloch (1986) terms a transpersonal `hope
that hopes'. In Steve's case it facilitates the possibility of him being able to `get on with it
a bit'. It is therefore the effect of hopefulness that is the second point of differentiation
that makes different space ^ times of hope. We can witness the animating effect of
different dispositions of hopefulness when hope takes place to enliven bodies in the
context of different forms of suffering [see Parse (1999) on illness and hope or Terkel
(2004) on activism and hope].
5 Trust and an òutside'

There are, it should be noted, multiple intersecting dispositions of hopefulness that
emerge from different moments of diminishment and produce different space ^ times of
experience. This has been hinted at by the traces of additional cases in which hope is
called forth from, and enacts, very different space ^ times (political struggle, illness,
etc). Hope, therefore, has a contradictory place in relation to everyday life. The dis-
illusionment that provides a kind of affective imperative to welcome, and be open to, a
good future is itself called forth from how a space ^ time of experience emerges from
the movement and qualification of affect. The absence, or desperation, that is part of
hope is not merely a possession of the individual but is a question of how the
emergence, movement, expression, and qualification of despair enact an individual.
But the subsequent production of a disposition of hopefulness begins from a disconti-
nuity that paradoxically enables the enactment of good tendencies and latencies which
fold into those relations that diminish. Becoming hopeful is marked, therefore, not by a
simple act of transcendence in favour of a good elsewhere or elsewhen but by an act
of establishing new relations that disclose a point of contingency within a present
space ^ time.
I want to discuss the second case to consider this point of contingency. Emma is 33
and married with two children. In the period during which we met and talked Emma
had traced her biological father. Two days before the second interview she had learnt
he had died a year previously. We are talking about the effects of this event when she
describes taking her son to the home of the parents who adopted her:
Emma: In that depression there's a sort of flatness and a sort of ... lack of
animation ... and a lack of any sort of sharp feelings ... and, and ... so ... and music
is something, it always ... it has a sharpness for me, yeah (Ben: yeah) and there
was just no place for it ... this week ... in that dullness (Ben: yeah) ... and every now
and again it just breaks through ... like ... so anyway ... Monday about eight thirty
taking Noel to my Mum and Dad's and he was badgering me ... he'd been
badgering me on Sunday for cheerful music, and umm ... I felt that I could bear
it and might actually take me mind off it ... so I put the usual tape on ... you know
Gina G, and Hot Stuff by Donna Summer ... I totally disengaged from it, I put it
on for Noel, and it was really brilliant to see him dancing along but it made me feel
... quite sad ... cos I couldn't feel anything with it ... I felt like there was this huge
glass wall, or glass ... glass ears ... or _ that I couldn't engage with him at all ... it
just felt ... dead ... I couldn't engage with him at all _ so anyway got back home ...
flicking through the channels and I got some soul music, and I don't know ... what
it was ... something I didn't know ... proper old soul ... and it cheered me up, it was
brilliant _ I felt better. I felt instantly better because of that ... as I had been sort
of weeping on my way to dropping off Noel when ... like ... Hot Stuff had been on
... but this ... it reminds me of friends and dancing and home and my other family
_ so ... you know I'm not going to feel like this always.
In this case, and in Steve's case, a renewed feeling of other tendencies and latencies
emerges from a disruption, or opening up of difference, in the pattern of broader
affective flows that feed back to change the sense of space ^ time. Emma describes a
similar set of transitions in feeling, and emotion, to Steve. The hopefulness she
describes opens up around a point of diminishment that emerges from relations with
both her child and her biological father to make the car a site enacted by the circula-
tion of grief. The grief, and flatness of depression, that is transmitted in the event
of her biological father's death feeds into a momentary interruption of her relation
with her son that means she finds it hard to attune to him in the context of his day-to-
day affective fluctuations. Music induces, and escalates, this diminishment so it frames
her relation with the world by enacting a set of distinct feelings (`ìt made me feel ...
quite sad ... cos I couldn't feel anything with it ... I had been sort of weeping on my
way to dropping off Noel'' ). Later, after she has returned home, soul music slowly
comes to induce and amplify a disposition of hopefulness through a disruption of the
transmission of grief. Emma remembers a time and space that is still forthcoming by
reliving the intensities of a past set of events: the materialities of music induce a not-yet
source of hope by placing her home into contact with its affective past (`ìt reminds me
of friends and dancing and home and my other family'').
The third point of divergence that creates different space ^ times of hope is there-
fore a moment of discontinuity in which a threshold is crossed through the creation of
an intensified connection with life (the `glimmer' or `spark' of hope). From a context
of potential diminishment, where that diminishment is still intimate, something happens
to enable bodies to go on with a renewed openness to a ``palpable sense of reality''
(James, 1982). Benjamin (1969) provides us with an intensified sense of this moment of
transition in the allegory of the electrifying `spark of hope' that holds the capacity to
draw past and future together in the explosive disruption of `now time'. Hoping is not
here dependent on the exercise of an individual faculty ``but is carried under the
intrusion of an outside'' (Deleuze, 1988b, page 87). There is a transindividual beginning
again that reanimates the present in response to the transmission of despair and grief.
To speak of hope is therefore to speak of not-yet-become ``seeds of change, connections
in the making that might not be activated or obvious at the moment'' (Massumi,
2002b, page 221). The affectivities of the opening up of hope, a movement that always
surprises thought, are ignored or considered to be illusory in the argument that hope
indicates the absence of joyful passions (Nietzsche, 1986). It is, however, the ingression
that this moment registers that has long been heralded as the mystery of hope by
secular writers who value an ethic of hope. Lingis (2002), for example, has talked of
it in relation to an act of forgetting the past. Hope, to quote Lingis (2002, page 23),
746 B Anderson
`àrises from a break with the past. There is a kind of cut and the past is let go of.''
Bloch (1986, page 174), slightly differently, thinks of it as a response to the differential
imperatives of the future. Hope, to quote Bloch, discloses ``dawnings on the front of the
process.''
The disposition of hopefulness, or more precisely how new connections are estab-
lished that disrupt a diminishing organization of space ^ time, opens the present to
transformation by disclosing a topologically complex space ^ time of the not-yet that
is on the horizon of what has already become in èveryday life'. This emerges from a
body comported to become more affected by already-existing tendencies and latencies
in a process that results in the disclosure of space ^ time as a sphere of heterogeneities
and pluralitiesöthat is, to follow Taussig (2002) hope can be thought of as akin to a
kind of sense. Emma, for example, names a future good that is desired, and discloses,
importantly, the source of help by which one can attain it. The outside is named as
a set of tangible connections to old friends and family that, when induced through
soul music, disrupts the affective trajectories that dominate her life and enable her
momentarily to trust that her depression will be overcome in a time and space that
is forthcoming. For Steve there are other people out there, including Thom Yorke
and perhaps me, who sense the despair he does and enable him to name not being
depressed as a hope that changes, again momentarily, how he orientates around
his home and neighbourhood. The results are nonsynchronous sites of experience
animated by flashes of ànticipatory illumination' which disclose that ``the world itself,
just as it is in a mess, is also in a state of unfinishedness and in experimental process
out of that mess'' (Bloch, 1986, page 221). The disclosure of that which is not-yetöan
intimation of what, following Benjamin (1969), we could term `messianic space ^
time'öis a point of differentiation between practices of hope (in that the identity of
the outside varies), but it is also that which enables hope to be spoken of as a specific
constellation based on an affective relation to an open not-yet elsewhere or elsewhen.
In both cases the effect of this performative moment, this calling forth of an
outside, is an intensive colouring of ongoing experience that induces an escalation of
the disposition of hopefulness, from which the naming of a hope emerges and into
which such a naming of a hope feeds back. This process of affective contagion is
attuned to when people describe the atmosphere of a space or time as hopeful or as
hopeless as felt through their own disposition yet existing independently of it. In the
cases of Steve and Emma hope has, however, simultaneously crossed over a threshold
of indeterminacy to be felt personally as an emotion. The beyond moves through a
process of concrescence from being an absolute impossibility to being an outside that is
relative to a body disposed to sense and assimilate it. Otherwise it is impossible to say
what is not-yet because it is without content or form: a ``surplus always exterior''
(Levinas quoted in Bourassa, 2002, page 72). Through a process of resemblance and
limitation the full range of available potentialities is curtailed by the ability to think
and name a hope (Deleuze, 1991). It is, therefore, in this process of concrescence that
the emotion of hope becomes fixed in the determinations of the already become
through the taking place of specific spatially and temporally distributed narratives of
hope. We should note, for example, how capitalism is marked by hopes of upward
social mobility and how consumer culture functions as a machine for generating, and
circulating, hope by working on spatially and temporally variable definitions of what
can be hoped for (Hage, 2003). Relations that diminish and destroy are, however, still
present and are actualized in feelings of loss when the object of hope fades away or in
feelings of disappointment when the object of hope passes unrealized. The frequency of
such a counter movement of affect heralds the openness of hope to the hazard of that
which is not-yet: the extent to which becoming and being hopeful involve a relation of
trust in, and for, a life that is felt affectively to be infused by something that is,
however, not-yet `here and now' [see Lasch (1991) on the differences with optimism].
Through a relation of trust the affective register of space ^ time is drawn into contact
with what is ``given as not in my control to bring about [but] sustains me in my
openness and my becoming'' (Stenbock, 2003, page 8). The resulting lack of guarantee,
a hoped body's openness to something better, is brought forth in the context of illness,
for example, when trust is enacted against the evidence of present corporeal suffering
(Lingis, 2002) or in protest cultures animated by a belief in the possibility of an
alternative world despite deep and lasting inequalities (Parker, 2002). In each case
an imperative to hope emerges ``from a situation that invites us to despair and to
give way to a pessimistic fatalism, a mistrust, which sees reality as uninterested in
effecting our good or any absolute good, as something in which we put no credit''
(Cain, 1963, page 68, emphasis in original).
6 Concluding comments: thinking from hope

``But the ideal here is not to shed all affect. Rather, it is to transform those affects
which are passions into different affects.''
Lloyd (1996, page 99)
``the worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for. Their trust in life would not
be worth much if it had not survived disappointments in the past, which the
knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrates the continuing
need for hope.''
Lasch (1991, page 81)
Hope is entangled in the circulation, and displacement, of other affects and emotions.
The result is that actual hopes possess different qualities of durability and mobility and
slide into and out of broader movements of hope and dispositions of hopefulness:
witness how, for example, the disappointment of hope can deplete space ^ time just as
the realization of a hope can reanimate space ^ time. I have, nevertheless, aimed to
describe how hope emerges from a set of qualitatively distinct relations between bodies
and therefore from specific types of encounters. The disposition of hope is best defined
as a relation of suspension that discloses the future as open whilst enabling a seemingly
paradoxical capacity to dwell more intensely in points of divergence within encounters
that diminish. Becoming hopeful is therefore different from becoming optimistic. It
involves a more attuned ability to affect and be affected by a processual world because
it is called forth from the disruptions that coax space ^ times of change into being
within that world. Compare becoming hopeful with becoming bored, a similar move-
ment of suspension but one that stills and slows space ^ time to diminish the quality of
experience through the production of meaninglessness and indifference (Anderson,
2004b). Moments of divergence are, however, integral to the processes by which
space ^ times become consecrated as hopeful or hopeless: diminishment, disjuncture,
hopefulness, the creation of an outside, the enaction of trust and dependence, the crea-
tion of a specific determinate hope, the feedback of hope into life, and the movement
of hope into other intensities.
By attending to hope I have aimed in this paper to open up a broader research focus on
how the circulation, and presence ^ absence, of hope is spaced and timed. Underpinning
my more circumspect focus on two cases in this paper has been an exemplification of
how different modalitiesöaffect, feeling, and emotionöenliven or dampen space ^ time.
Developing the beginnings of a vocabulary of the more-than-rational or less-than-rational
counters the argument that a focus on the nonrepresentational has served to initiate a
return to a ``generic and celebratory notion of the embodied nature of human existence''
(Nash, 2000, page 655). Attuning to the differences between modalities makes impossible
748 B Anderson
a celebration of human existence per se by producing a renewed specificity about what

nonrepresentational styles of thinking and feeling aim to sense and disclose as part of a
replacement of the idea of `culture' with a more expansive notion of èveryday life' (see
Seigworth and Gardiner, 2004). The taking place of hope has not only been the object of
the paper but has also, more radically, functioned to exemplify the beginnings of a theory
of affect based around the multiple articulations of excess embedded in the category of the
`not-yet'. I am not arguing here that hope should be identified as a basic emotion from
which others are derivative: this is a will to reduce that has driven many accounts of the
more-than-rational, from Spinoza's (1910) distinction between joy and sorrow to Tomkins's
(1995) identification of eight, and later nine, core affects. Instead, attuning to how hope
takes place, how it attaches and moves bodies, calls us to question how we attend to the
more-than-rational or less-than-rational. Moreover, because of the absurd singularity of
beginning from just one constellation of relations, making the taking place of hope
exemplary invites a necessary deconstruction of any subsequent vocabulary of affect.
I therefore want to conclude by thinking through how hope, like enchantment (Bennett,
2001), joy (Thrift, 2004b), shame (Proybn, 2000b) or wonder (Game and Metcalfe, 2002),
provokes a set of issues for a theory of affect and for how to be political affectively.
In the literature currently emerging around nonrepresentational theories the move-
ment of affect has been grounded in a specific idea of a surplus, or extra, that moves
between contexts. There has been a corresponding sense that, rather than being hostile
to the form of the human, affect is akin to a gift of virtuality. This equation has come
to act as a guarantee that makes everyday life political again after a recognition of the
limits of a representational politics. To begin from hope, in contrast to, say, Massumi's
(2002a) discussion of confidence or Bennett's (2001) discussion of enchantment, is to
supplement this understanding of excess by incorporating a sense of the tragic öone of
the multiple meanings of the excess of the not-yetöinto our attunement to the affectiv-
ities of everyday life. Becoming hopeful takes place from within specific encounters
that diminish or destroy and therefore although it senses the ``front of processes'' it
also, simultaneously, holds ``the condition of defeat precariously within itself '' (Bloch,
1998, page 341). How, then, can we be a little more melancholy about the movements
and countermovements of affect? One alternative would be to attune to the general
economies of expenditure and disposal that mark the circulatory dynamics of partic-
ular affects (Ahmed, 2004b). The attunement to how the circulation of affect performs,
and is effected by, spatial and temporal distribution offers a means of sensitizing us to
the inequalities at the heart of affective economies: inequalities that make ever thinking
of the transmission, and contagion, of affect as a pure gift impossible. How, thereafter,
can we think the expression and qualification of bodily background feelings and
emotions without assuming the animating feed forward, and feedback, of affect into
the life of space ^ time? One relatively unexplored theoretical direction is the rich
phenomenology of feeling and emotion found in the work of Tomkins. Tomkins argues
that the affects analogically amplify a separate drive system, therefore `àny affect
may have any object ... affective amplification is indifferent to means ^ end difference.
It is enjoyable to enjoy. It is exciting to be excited ... . Affect is self-validating with
or without any further referent'' (Tomkins, 1995; cited in Sedgwick and Frank, 1995,
page 7). This could be supplemented by an engagement with certain branches of
contemporary neuroscience that describe how emotions emerge from specific, relation-
ally constructed states of the body (Damasio, 2003). The benefit of these two literatures
is that they refuse to equate the biological with the essential and thus open up, rather
than reduce the social to, a huge neuropolitical domain consisting of actants such as
hormones and brain synapses (see Brennon, 2004; Connolly, 2002). However, if social
science work is to avoid the very real risks of either tying the less-than-rational and
more-than-rational to the individual, or colluding with the contemporary project of

neuroreductionism, there is a need to combine this work with a vocabulary that can
conceptualize how feelings and emotions move through intersubjective processes of
`èxpression, communication, escalation, and control'' (Tomkins, 1995, page 145).
We can now move to hint at the shape of an affective cultural politics that aims to
tend to, and enact, different capacities to affect and be affected rather than correct
types of representation (Probyn, 2004). If we think from how hope takes place, a
politics of affect begins from the assumption that life is an intersecting multiplicity of
harmonious and disharmonious relations. Being political affectively must therefore
involve building a protest against the affectivities of suffering into a set of techniques
that also aim to cultivate `good encounters' and anticipate `something better'. How,
though, can we engage with the vectors of diminishment that form the still not, the
ground that haunts an imperative to hope, without reproducing the lifeless rhetoric of
doom that marks too much critical engagement with the world? One response is to
learn from the affective fluctuations of everyday life and foster certain types of hope
and hopefulness because of, rather than despite, the tragedy and injustice of suffering
each emerges from. I think there are two reasons why the type of relation we name as
hope could become a contestable regulative ideal in addition to enchantment (Bennett,
2001) and joy (Thrift, 2004b) or emotional liberty (Reddy, 2001) and equality or solid-
arity of feeling (Smith, 2002). First, certain types of becoming hopeful pose the ques-
tion of what will come to be by dimly outlining the contours of something better and
therefore enacting potentialities and possibilities, whilst, at the same time, being
``something that does not, in spite of all, make peace with the existing world'' (Bloch,
1998, page 341). Such types of becoming can animate an ethos of engagement in which
the world ``just as it is in a mess, is also in a state of unfinishedness and in experi-
mental process out of that mess'' (1986, page 221). Second, certain types of becoming
hopeful result in a specific type of mutuality based on a trust for life. New alliances at
the level of affect and emotion can be produced in the present that question the easy
equation between transcendence and a future elsewhen or elsewhere in favour of an
immanent transcendence from within vectors of diminishment.
My argument is, therefore, that becoming and being hopeful can, when enacted as
a certain type of relation, exemplify a change in being affect ^ affected that expresses
the emergence of a set of arrangements that are, in Nietzsche's (1986) terms, `life
enhancing'. Two caveats are necessary at this point to remind us that hope is not
good per se and that an immanent evaluation of hope must take place in relation to
empirical work that focuses on the different modalities, and processes, outlined in
section 2. First, certain types of hope can be brought into question according to the
basis of the disposition of the body that is enacted and the relation with the world that
is expressed as well as the content of what is hoped for. For Spinoza, and following
him Nietzsche, certain types of hope are little more than a means to delay, perhaps
indefinitely, the ethical task of replacing relations of sadness with the composition of
joyous encounters. Second, and following on from this note of caution, there are
numerous occasions when the enactment of hope catalyzes relations of injustice.
Witness, for example, how hope is part of the processes, and practices, that make up
contemporary neoconservatism. George Bush, speaking during Òperation Iraqi Free-
dom', stressed, for example, that ``we are bringing aid to the long suffering people of
Iraq, and we are bringing something more: we are bringing hope'' (president's radio
address, 5 April 2003). Here the act of bringing hope, in the context of contemporary
geopolitics, enacts a division between the hopeful and hopeless that ties the hopeless
into a network of obligation. These two caveats point to the lack of guarantee bound up
with becoming and being hopeful. Nevertheless, to be able to foster a technique of
750 B Anderson
affective modulation, it is imperative to hope that although life ``holds the conditions of
defeat precariously within itself '' it still ``dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place
where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy''
(Bloch, 1998, page 341).
Acknowledgements. Thanks to Steve, Emma (both pseudonyms), and the other research participants
for talking to me about music and hope. A large number of friends and colleagues commented
on earlier drafts of this paper. Even though I did not take all their advice, thanks go to:
Dave Featherstone, Katrin Ho«rschelmann, Louisa Cadman, Deborah Thien, Arun Saldanha,
Mark Paterson, and Susan Smith. The paper also owes much to the generous comments of two
referees and the supportive and stimulating environment of the Social/Spatial Theory research
cluster at Durham. Special thanks, as ever, to Rachel Colls.
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Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2006, volume 24, pages 733 ^ 752

Becoming and being hopeful: towards a theory of affect

1 Introduction: thinking hope through affect

2 Affect, feeling, and emotion

3 Excess and affect

moment of movement between contexts is without either origin or destination. This

to a movement of transnational capital through changes in the capacities to affect and

5 Trust and an `outside'

6 Concluding comments: thinking from hope

a celebration of human existence per se by producing a renewed specificity about what

more-than-rational to the individual, or colluding with the contemporary project of

ß 2006 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain

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