The British Journal of Sociology 2013 Volume 64 Issue 4

Reconceptualizing resistance: sociology and the affective dimension of resistance1 Maria Hynes

Abstract This paper re-examines the sociological study of resistance in light of growing interest in the concept of affect. Recent claims that we are witness to an ‘affective turn’ and calls for a ‘new sociological empiricism’ sensitive to affect indicate an emerging paradigm shift in sociology. Yet, mainstream sociological study of resistance tends to have been largely unaffected by this shift. To this end, this paper presents a case for the significance of affect as a lens by which to approach the study of resistance. My claim is not simply that the forms of actions we would normally recognize as resistance have an affective dimension. Rather, it is that the theory of affect broadens ‘resistance’ beyond the purview of the two dominant modes of analysis in sociology; namely, the study of macropolitical forms, on the one hand, and the micropolitics of everyday resistance on the other. This broadened perspective challenges the persistent assumption that ideological forms of power and resistance are the most pertinent to the contemporary world, suggesting that much power and resistance today is of a more affective nature. In making this argument, it is a Deleuzian reading of affect that is pursued, which opens up to a level of analysis beyond the common understanding of affect as emotion. I argue that an affective approach to resistance would pay attention to those barely perceptible transitions in power and mobilizations of bodily potential that operate below the conscious perceptions and subjective emotions of social actors. These affective transitions constitute a new site at which both power and resistance operate. Keywords: Resistance; affect; embodiment; virtual; action; recognition

Introduction The concept of resistance has made prolific appearances in social science publications in recent decades and particularly in those with a cultural focus. While some scholars have identified this with the ‘cultural turn’ in sociology Hynes (School of Sociology, Australian National University) (Corresponding author email: [email protected]) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12038

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(Nash 2001) or linked it to the attempt to correct an earlier emphasis in sociology on structure (Hollander and Einwohner 2004), others have suggested that it signals a post-Cold War decline in the revolutionary imaginary and the need for a suitably post-hegemonic analysis of the complex articulations of power and liberty (Lash 2007). Whatever the case, the proliferation of references to resistance in recent decades has not necessarily been accompanied by consensus on its definition, as Hollander and Einwohner (2004) note in a frequently cited review of the status of the concept of resistance in the social sciences. Noting that the term ‘resistance’ is applied to contexts as varied as revolution and women’s hair styles, Hollander and Einwohner (2004: 538) nevertheless identify two ‘core elements’ of resistance, which ‘were common to nearly all uses of the term’ in their own vast survey of the sociological literature. Firstly, they find a general consensus that resistance involves action, which is to say that it is ‘not a quality of an actor or a state of being, but involves some active behaviour, whether verbal, cognitive or physical’ (Hollander and Einwohner 2004: 538). Secondly, resistance involves opposition; it ‘occurs in opposition to someone or something else’ (Hollander and Einwohner 2004: 539). If action and opposition are widely recognized features of resistance in sociology, there are also key points of contention. There is, for example, much debate around the question of recognition, concerning whether resistance needs to be ‘readily apparent to others’, recognized by them as resistance, to be deserving of the name (Hollander and Einwohner 2004: 542). Another persistent point of contention is whether the actor’s intention to resist is a crucial feature of determining action as resistance. While debate over the appropriate uses of the term seems to have quelled somewhat in recent years, the conceptual territory demarcated by the concept of resistance does not seem to have altered significantly since Hollander and Einwohner published their review in 2004. Yet, within this time, significant shifts have taken place in the sphere of cultural politics and at the level of abstract social theory that call for a re-conceptualization of what counts as resistance. The central aim of this paper is to undertake such a re-conceptualization and to indicate how it shifts the terms of analysis, altering the balance of consensus and debate that Hollander and Einwohner rightly identify with the sociological literature. Crucial to the emerging paradigm shift in the study of resistance that I am outlining here is the notion of affect. Often treated as a synonym for emotion (cf. Alexander 2011), some recent sociological mobilizations of the concept insist on its analytical autonomy from the idea of emotion, the latter being understood as a subjective capture of affect (Clough 2007; 2009; Gane 2009; Adkins and Lury 2009). This insistence on the irreducibility of affect to emotion is consistent with Gilles Deleuze’s (1988a) reading of the philosophy of Spinoza and has been a defining feature of many contemporary renderings © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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of Deleuzian thought. As I go on to explain, one of the key features of this interpretation of affect is that it cannot be reduced to a property of the subject, though affect is subjectively felt as a sense of freedom or potential that adds intensity to action and events. While subjective versions of affect are more familiar to sociology, my claim is that the sociology of resistance can be extended in fruitful directions by preserving the distinction between ‘affect’ and its more subjective manifestation as ‘emotion,’ though the two concepts are none the less closely related. In seeking to define a Spinozan interpretation of affect, there is undoubtedly a risk of circularity in the following definition of affect provided by Deleuze in his work with Guattari (1987: xvi): affect is ‘the capacity to affect and be affected’. The key point here, as I go on to argue, is that affect involves a transition in the capacity to affect or be affected, which gains at least an analytical autonomy from the subject’s experience of the variability of his/her power. It is notable that this understanding of affect has, to date, had far greater impact in disciplines such as media and cultural studies, philosophy and geography, than it has in sociology. Yet this is not a sign of its incompatibility with sociology’s disciplinary concerns. From Marx’s focus on superstructural forces, through to Foucault’s microphysics of power, sociology has had an enduring concern with forces that are known principally through their effects, yet which remain none the less real or analytically valid as a result. Consistent with these foundational concerns, an approach to affect that extends beyond the more subjective ideas of feeling or emotion enables an analysis of those dimensions of our social experience that are difficult to grasp, precisely because they provide its generative conditions. Certainly, the concept of affect is not new to sociology. Most notably, Patricia Clough’s (2007) announcement of the ‘affective turn’ in her collection of the same name heralded the importance for the social sciences of the shifts in thought that had been taking place in cultural studies since the mid-1990s. Beyond this, a Deleuzian reading of affect has been actively pursued in diverse sociological journals, particularly in those which are more theoretically focused.2 Yet, as Clough herself lamented in 2009, the concept of affect is far from having become mainstream sociology. No doubt, the irreducibility of affect to subjective experience makes it difficult to grasp methodologically, so that registering its effects requires an ‘expanded empiricism’ that extends beyond ‘human interpretation and meaning’ (Adkins and Lury 2009). As far as resistance is concerned, the largely unquestioned dominance of a more humanist, and specifically an ideological, approach to power has meant that, within the more disciplinary bounds of sociological journals especially, the affective dynamics of power and resistance are yet to find real analytical traction. It seems that there are then, within sociology, habits of apprehending resistance that may take some working through before the real difference of an British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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affective approach to resistance can be appreciated. The main objective of this paper, then, is to develop a conceptual framework that would allow the affective dimension of resistance its own autonomy, so to speak, within the sociological study of resistance. The point is not merely to show how affect is involved in the emergence of what we currently register as ‘resistance’. Rather, it is to expand that category to include a series of problems only recently introduced into the sociological purview. It is with this in mind that I, firstly, examine some of the ways in which sociology has conventionally approached the question of resistance. The shifting focus in recent decades toward everyday forms of resistance has certainly opened up some important new directions, though I argue that everyday resistance is largely figured as a miniature and often more individualist version of macropolitical struggles (cf. Scott 1985). In contrast, while affect has both micropolitical and macropolitical dimensions, it works across, or rather, between, the spheres of the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ as understood by sociology. Secondly, then, I argue that affect demands a new level of analysis, beneath the scales of the collective or the individual. To the extent that the ontology of affect is inseparable from transition and movement, it has a reality that is distinct from the collective forms and structures that sociology has analysed as the ‘macropolitics’ of resistance. Yet it also has a reality that exceeds the everyday social interactions between individuals that microsociology has analysed as the ‘micropolitics’ of resistance. While it is certainly expressed in both collective and individual forms, affect’s own reality, I argue, is not formal, so much as virtual; put differently, affect’s ontology is that of the middle or the in-between.3 Finally, I return to the problems of action, opposition, recognition and intent, which remain key problematics around which research into resistance is articulated, in order to indicate the impact of such a rendering of affect on their analysis.

The sociology of resistance: the qualitative difference of affect Within the sociological literature on resistance, two dominant modes of analysing resistance exist. On the one hand, there are macropolitical analyses of highly visible, collective struggles against structures of power. Here, more classical discourse on revolutionary upheavals at the level of class struggle has, over recent decades, been supplemented with a host of studies of the modes of resistance associated with ‘social movements’ and ‘identity politics’. On the other hand, there are the more microsociological analyses of resistance, which take seriously the smaller scale dynamics of power and resistance as they play out amongst individuals in the context of everyday life.4 This ‘micropolitics of everyday life’, as Collins and Munro (2010: 550) refer to it, while recognized to be somewhat different to ‘our ideal picture of the Left, or © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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of emancipation’, none the less acknowledges that ‘conflict can get mobilized in many different directions’. Sociology’s approach to the problem of resistance, then, has characteristically figured the difference between collective, macropolitical acts of resistance and the more micropolitical acts of individuals as a question of scale or quantity. This is perhaps especially notable in evaluations of the political efficacy of different types of resistance, the still prevalent assumption in much literature being that the everyday struggles of individuals, being only small scale, are necessarily of lesser significance than collective struggles aimed at structural change.5 In any case, the macro- and micro-politics of resistance are seen to be similar enough in kind (if not in scale) that one can trace the tools of micropolitical analysis from the categories long familiar to macrosociological study. One might, for example, focus on the everyday practices through which normative constructions of class or gender are transgressed through diverse cultural practices and individual actions, but the structural categories of class and gender remain the salient analytical orientation (cf. Pascale 2008; Rupp, Taylor and Shapiro 2010). As important as the study of macropolitical processes of collective action and of the micropolitics of everyday resistance have been, to imagine that they exhaust the sociological analysis of resistance would be to the detriment of that research field. The study of resistance, I suggest, would do well to exploit the growing interest in the concept of affect within the discipline in order to open up to a dimension of resistance that the dominant frames of reference cannot capture – and in doing so, to refigure the very meaning of what ‘resistance’ can be. In further pursuing the argument that the concept of affect contributes provocatively to the analysis of resistance, I would want, from the outset, to signal the importance of three broad key conceptual shifts arising from an attention to affect. Firstly, as I have already intimated, debate in the sociology of resistance can be productively shifted through insisting on an analytical distinction between affect and emotion. Certainly much important work has been produced on the notion of affect that does not make this distinction as sharply as I am. Yet, by tethering affect to the logic of the subject potentially productive ways of approaching the empirical reality of ‘resistance’ will not be given their due. The point is certainly not that sociology has been naively individualist in its study of the emotional dimensions of resistance. Clearly, sociology has done much to go beyond a psychological reading of emotion, emphasizing above all its social character (Barbalet 2002; Collins 2004). Moreover, as Berezin (2002: 33) notes, sociologists increasingly recognize ‘that emotions are as constitutive of macro-level social processes as they are of individual psychology’. Nevertheless, the idea of emotion, as it has been conventionally mobilized in sociology, is something that belongs to, and inheres in, subjects, even if it has a British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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thoroughly social character. According to Barbalet (2002: 1), for example, ‘emotion simply indicates what might be called an experience of involvement’, not the thoughts we might have about that experience, nor the ‘language of self-explanation’ arising from it, ‘but that immediate contact with the world the self has through involvement’.6 For some, this might represent a still too individual view of the matter. Collins (in Collins and Munro 2010: 561) for example, stresses that it is possible to give sociological meaning to Wittgenstein’s claim that there is ‘no such thing as a private emotion’, since ‘people get caught up in other people’s rhythms and their bodily expressions, and that is largely where the emotion is’. Collins can speak of shared ‘emotional energy’, then, in so far as the sociologist can witness its distribution amongst subjects who share a social context. Yet even with this emphasis on emotion as what is transmitted between social subjects in the production of solidarity amongst them, the starting point from which emotion is understood remains the subject and its social relations. Beyond this understanding of affect as a subjective (if social) feeling or emotion, the kind of Deleuzian approach to affect that I am advancing emphasizes that there are pre-personal forces, which can only be analytically approached (if not grasped) by allowing them a certain autonomy from the subjects who experience them. These pre-personal forces are certainly not, as Massumi (2002a: 9) has stressed, ‘pre-social’ but are, rather, ‘open-endedly social’, which is to say that they are social ‘in a manner “prior to” the separating out of individuals.’ As Zembylas (2006: 310) expresses it, ‘emotion belongs to the terrain of the subject but affect exceeds it’. Thus where the sociology of emotions has traditionally addressed the social nature of the emotions experienced by socially situated subjects, a less subjectively oriented theory of affect would seek to account for pre-personal intensities and associated transitions in capacities for action. These intensive forces may well give rise to different emotional states, but they are, strictly speaking, irreducible to them. There is a crucial distinction here between the way that the sociology of emotions has understood the ‘affective’ dimension of social experience and the understanding that I am advancing here. From the point of view of the sociology of emotions, the word ‘affect’ names a dimension of subjective and social experience; ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ are effectively synonymous terms. Yet, understood in terms of pre-personal forces, it is less that affect is a dimension of the subject, than that the subject is a dimension of affect; this dimension is called ‘emotion’.What is at issue here is more than mere conceptual pedantry. It is, rather, a rethinking of the basis of sociological empiricism that is required. If Deleuze (1994) accuses the ‘dogmatic model of thought’ of raising the empirical experience a subject has of the world to a transcendental level, thinking otherwise requires, as sociologists are recently recognizing, a ‘new sociological empiricism’ that extends beyond the confines of a human-centred perspective (see especially Gane 2009; Adkins and Lury 2009; Gane 2009). © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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There is a second important conceptual shift that this approach to affect brings about. This pre-personal understanding of affect has a crucial implication: namely, a concern with affective transitions, rather than states. Indeed, we can speak of an emotional state in so far as emotions represent the capture of affect in a subjective form; affect is hypostatized in the subject as emotion. In this respect, Deleuze (1978) insists that affect is more than the state produced when bodies are acted upon, involving, beyond this, a continuous diminution or increase in ‘our power of acting or force of existing’.7 From the point of view of the subjective state known by the subject as emotion, then, there is always something excessive about affect. If emotions are typically conscious – what the subject knows him or herself to feel – affect, being ‘prior to the individual’ is also ‘in excess of conscious perception’ (Adkins and Lury 2009: 9). As I will explore further below, it is precisely because bodies carry with them a potential or charge that is only vaguely felt and rarely recognized as such that contemporary power, and indeed resistance, can exploit affect so effectively. Thirdly, and relatedly, these unstructured and unformed affective relations may not be immediately empirically graspable, but they do have a virtual reality. Affect is virtual in so far as it is transitional. It cannot be captured as an empirically observable state, but pertains rather to the transitions and passages between states and to the openness that characterizes such passages. Again, this emphasis on the virtual represents an insistence on distinguishing between affect and emotion, with emotion being not only a contracted form of affect, but the actualization in a state of affairs of forces which are themselves virtual. Though the commonsense use of the word virtual implies that which is not quite real, Deleuze (1988b) has done much to insist on the reality of those virtual forces that, while not yet actualized, nevertheless exist as potentials and incipient tendencies.8 Emphasizing the openness and potentiality of affect, as distinct from its actualization as emotion, is thus consistent with Deleuze’s enduring preoccupation throughout his work with the idea of the virtual and with the potential of forces not yet captured in the personal form. Yet it is not merely a question of maintaining fidelity to Deleuze’s oeuvre, a task which may not be the principal concern for sociology. It is a question, rather, of appreciating the distinctly sociological importance, for the study of resistance, of this more virtual and less personal approach to affect; namely, that it points the way toward a new understanding of change and of the potentially transformative effects of forces not yet captured in subjective forms. In disciplines such as cultural studies, philosophy and geography, the idea of the virtual has played an important role in challenging the dominance of the representational tradition, which deems that only that which is essential and unchanging (paradigmatically, the Platonic forms) has reality.9 More recently, sociologists have begun to recognize the importance of attending to those virtual forces that, while not yet actual, are, however, real. The call for a renewed sociological empiricism, then, represents a recognition that there is an British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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indeterminancy that inheres as a potential in all matter and which operates at the limits of human phenomenal experience (Clough 2009). According to Fraser (2009: 75), the sociological imagination has always been devoted ‘to a “beyond” actual-states-of-affairs’, this being how ‘much of the magic of sociology is generated’. While ‘methodological positivism’ (Clough 2009) may have become the dominant approach in sociology, ‘the best of sociology’, according to Fraser, demonstrates ‘the ability to move through and across different dimensions’ and indeed sociological explanation might be understood as ‘an actual solution; a temporary and contingent solution to a virtual problem.’ Gane (2009) goes further than this ‘in claiming not simply that sociology may have something to gain from putting the virtual to work as an experiment, but that Deleuze’s writings are in fact already beginning to inspire a new empiricism in the social sciences’ that has resonances with sociology’s more classical concerns (Adkins and Lury 2009: 11). Clearly, and as those sociologists who are sensitive to these ideas know too well, there is a certain unwieldiness to this Deleuzian approach to affect (Adkins and Lury 2009). Yet the broadness of the concept, as I demonstrate below with respect to the analysis of resistance, does not mean that it is without sociological precision or meaning. I will suggest that, after Deleuze, what ‘affect’ names is a qualitatively different approach to the sociological study of resistance. It is not another scale at which we might employ familiar concepts and frames in order to study ‘resistance’ as we know it. Affect works between the forms long familiar to the sociology of resistance – namely, the individual and the collective – and to this extent it sheds new light on what resistance is. With this very general introduction to the concept of affect in mind, then, the remainder of the paper outlines the potential impact of an affective perspective on resistance. Given the potential scope of such an exercise, I focus the remainder of the discussion by indicating how affect re-inflects the central problematics of action, opposition, recognition and intention.

Rethinking the key problematics: action, opposition, recognition, intention Action In approaching the problem of action through the lens of affect, it is worth recalling the presumption that Hollander and Einwohner (2004: 538) rightly find in the sociological literature that resistance is ‘not a quality of an actor or a state of being, but involves some active behaviour, whether verbal, cognitive or physical’. This definition of action and its centrality to resistance is certainly a solid one, though I would suggest that there is much to be gained by extending the sociological lens beyond the actuality of action to the virtual forces that produce its emergence, as well as a possibly politically significant remainder. © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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As Clough (2009) suggests, affect is not an action but a capacity to affect and be affected. It is, then, a capacitating dimension of action, though it is more than the emotional investment or ‘experience of involvement’ that enables action (cf. Barbalet 2002). Clearly action is not an all or nothing business, but involves a process of capacitation and a preparedness of the body, a mobilization of bodily potentials. ‘My decisions’ to act are never purely cognitive decisions, nor even a result of cognition’s supplementation by emotional investment (Smith 2007). In addition to the cognitive and emotional processes that goad us into action are imperceptible bodily transitions, which, while working largely below the level of conscious perception and our awareness of our emotional states, remain an important a dimension of ‘what happens’, alongside the actual event that we recognize as action. While the notions of ‘process’, ‘becoming’ and, to a lesser extent, affect, are increasingly familiar in sociology, our appreciation of resistance rarely accounts for these more virtual dimensions of what we call action. This is most notable in the habitual ways that theorists of resistance persevere in describing action in terms of mobilizing of the body, as though it were a question of consciousness commanding of the body that it act for the cause. Activists and analysts alike habitually speak of ‘getting bodies on streets’, of mobilizing the body for direct action tactics and the like (Klein 2000; Kingsnorth 2003). Yet while we may conceive of the body as an object in the social field or examine it as a cultural object, it is always more than this. For the body is never merely a marker of social position, a bearer of cultural values or medium of ideology, but is also always sensate, moving matter. It is because of the ‘illusions of consciousness’, to quote Spinoza (2002), that we imagine that consciousness is master of this matter, as is assumed by our habitual attribution of the causal power for action to consciousness, in relation to which the body would appear to be a mere tool. The point is not that affect is ‘unconscious’ in the merely negative sense of being outside the subject’s knowledge and in this respect a Deleuzian sense of affect can be distinguished from some more commonly encountered terms in sociology.10 Rather, it is that consciousness is a contraction with respect to the virtuality – the openness – of bodies in continuous variation and relation. As such, the emergence of action is never a mere realization of a preceding set of possibilities but reflects a dynamic and open situation and it is this that contemporary power, as well as resistance, increasingly exploits.11 Opposition Seen with an eye to the affective dimensions of action, it may be premature to assume that resistance is principally a form of opposition. Certainly resistance may be an act of saying no to an existing state of affairs. When activists claim their opposition to globalization or to war, they address themselves to an British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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existing situation, elements of which they refuse. Such oppositional resistance works within the bounds of representation, necessarily speaking within the parameters that a representational politics sets. Yet, as much work of recent decades has insisted, there are dimensions of political resistance for which this representational element is not the crucial one (Lazzarato 2003; Thrift 2008). Sociology’s attention in recent years to the performative dimensions of political action, for example, recognizes the importance of those gestures of resistance that operate more within the realm of production than representation.12 A performative approach to resistance recognizes that it is not simply, and perhaps not even primarily, a question of subjects identifying and voicing or enacting their opposition to power, since subjectivity is itself an effect or production of power. Yet to the extent that a performative approach to resistance judges transgressive gestures in terms of their counter-ideological value, resistance remains tethered to an ultimately oppositional model. While adherence to this oppositional model of resistance has, as Einwohner and Hollander note, been largely uncontroversial in sociology, this is less the case in some other disciplines. In geography, for example, Rose (2002) has argued that the habit of opposing resistance to ideological or grossly systemic structures has so marred the concept of resistance with an oppositional, reactive and ultimately toothless conception of action as to render it redundant. Yet, against such an easy dismissal of the idea of resistance as an analytical tool, I would stress the importance of exploiting the pliability of the concept. For it may simply be – and here we come into the problem of recognition – that those forms of resistance that react against existing values and practices are the more likely to be recognized as resistance, though they do not exhaust the idea of resistance per se. Recognition I would argue, then, that it is not necessarily the case that resistance as such is negative or oppositional, but that resistance that is easily recognizable is more likely to be of this form. In making this claim I am not suggesting that the affective dimension of resistance is merely too small (too individual) to really register as resistance, nor that it needs to be hidden, as may be the case with everyday resistance. Rather, I am suggesting that the affective dimension of resistance does not speak within and, indeed, it may well shift, existing frames of reference and for this reason may not be readily recognized by others. It is macropolitical struggles that are most clearly, even necessarily, based on what Deleuze (1994) would call a ‘recognition model’, which is to say that they must make their claims within the ambit of recognized ways of thinking and doing politics. When activists vocalize their claims, we recognize them as forms of resistance precisely because they operate within the domain of the recognizable. Anti-war activists, in voicing their refusal of the political choices © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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of governments, must appeal to a recognizable state of affairs, just as critics of dictatorial governance present to the world their representation of the world in which they find themselves and their refusal of that state of affairs. While these highly visible struggles are clearly important, they necessarily work within a universe of available representations.As Rolnik (2006: n.p.) puts it, we are dealing here with a particular ‘capacity of the sensible’, ‘with what allows us to preserve the map of reigning representations’ so that we can address its inadequacies. Yet these same events will also have a less readily visible, not easily recognizable, dimension, consisting of transitions felt differently by the diverse bodies united by the affective event that we call ‘a protest’. This dimension of the event will be less concerned with preserving a given ‘capacity of the sensible’, than with experimenting with and possibly enlarging affective capacities. The sociological analysis of affective resistance thus demands a fresh examination of events and practices, in order to discern, sometimes alongside the more recognizable dimensions of events, less readily perceptible modes of transformation and resistance. Elsewhere, in an examination of the relationship between the highly visible, collective struggles of the antiglobalization movement and the less readily recognizable dimensions of the same events, I have argued that the mass protests of the anti-globalization movement are not merely, and perhaps not even primarily, a forum for the claims of representational politics (Hynes and Sharpe 2009). While they certainly involve an articulated opposition to the mechanisms of global governance, they are also shared affective events. To suggest that these are ‘shared affective events’ is not, however, to imply merely that they generate what some social scientists have called ‘communities of feeling’ (cf. Berezin 2002) or ‘emotional communities’ (Rosenwein 2002). Certainly, an act of resistance may generate shared sentiment or may ‘intensify emotional identification’ (Berezin 2002: 39). Yet, seen from the point of view of the ‘new sociological empiricism’ (Gane 2009: 95) and with a sensitivity to the virtuality of affect, events will also involve singular and diverse actualizations of affect, ‘many rhythms of bodily priming’ that generate, above and beyond the sharing of feeling, an undetermined ‘reservoir of political potential’ (Massumi 2008: 6) As Massumi (2008: 6) emphasizes, this potential is ‘an active part of the constitution of that situation, that hasn’t been fully capacitated for unfolding.’13 These mass protest events, then, may generate a sense of potential, not merely because of the consciousness of participants that ‘another world is possible’ (to use the well-worn slogan) and the kinds of representational claims and politics that that cry might open up. Rather, at the level of affect, they may quite literally expand affective capacities, adding intensity to the claim that another world is possible. Affect is, as Shouse (2005: n.p.) puts it, ‘the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance’ and it involves the addition of ‘a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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an experience’. If language inadequately captures this ‘something extra’, it may none the less elude to it, as when activists struggle to describe the felt fluctuations in their capacity to act in their diverse encounters with other activists, with police and the public – fluctuations that cannot be fully grasped within the more psychological, phenomenological or even sociological language of emotion (Hynes and Sharpe 2009). We have difficulty recognizing the affective dimension of events as ‘resistance’ to the extent that we expect resistance to be oppositional – to be defined by an act of saying no to an existing state of affairs. But the challenge is, as Revel (2008) notes, to understand resistance as something other than what is left after power has staked its claims. Evoking the language of the kind of microphysics of power familiar to sociology through Foucauldian theory, Revel (2008: n.p.) writes that it is a question of appreciating that ‘it is power that is a reaction to freedom, rather than resistance to power’.The challenge, then, is to theorize the often confusing proximity of power and resistance in contemporary society, a challenge to which, as I argue below, the theory of affect is especially suited. Intention In his examination of the contribution of post-structuralist theories to the analysis of resistance, Hoy (2004: 11) considers the provocative claim that resistance may ‘make explicit through the outcome what the motives and grounds’ for action were, with agents finding out ‘what is possible by seeing what their resistance opens up.’ As he himself notes, this image of the relationship between intention and resistance is a far cry from the rationalist demand that agents ‘articulate the principles that would legitimate the envisioned social change before actually taking social or political action’ (Hoy 2004: 11). Sociological analyses of resistance have long challenged the image of a subject whose actions are equivalent to his/her conscious intentions. Yet debate has largely operated at the border between knowledge and non-knowledge. That is to say, the problem of the place of intention in resistance has largely hinged on the issue of whether the actor is aware or unaware of resistant intent, presenting somewhat limited analytical options for the politics of resistance: either one holds to a rationalist account of resistance, emphasizing conscious intent and often the power of will, or one falls into an irrationalism that risks assigning the possibility of social change to the mere accidents of history. Between these poles of necessity and accident, a Spinozan approach to affect refuses the ‘illusions of consciousness’ that would place bodies at the behest of conscious intent, without thereby falling into the supposition of irrationalism. It is no longer the knowing or unknowing subject that is the starting point of the analysis. There is, in a Spinozan theory of affect, no ‘already given subjects that are preconstituted, or a pregiven structure of subject positions ready for subjects to occupy’ (Massumi 2008: 3–4). With © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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affect, rather, it is always a question of forces, which have a virtual reality in excess of their actualization in subjects and objects. It is the work of Bourdieu that is commonly seen to contribute to the sociological study of resistance a sense of the embodied, non-conscious elements of resistance, which is said to avoid this very opposition between awareness and non-awareness of intent. As Lawler (2004: 111) suggests, the concept of habitus ‘cuts across conventional distinctions between conscious and unconscious since much of its force derives from non-conscious elements’. While clearly an exceptionally important concept in the history of sociological thinking, the notion of habitus, I would argue, only goes so far as an analytical tool for understanding contemporary resistance. It is significant that in analysing this non-conscious element of social identity and its mobilization through diverse forms of resistance, the emphasis for Bourdieu is very much on struggles at the level of ‘who you are’, since this is the level at which, according to Bourdieu, power principally operates (Lawler 2004: 112, original emphasis). It is also notable that the forms of contestation most visible to the Bourdieuian lens are those that involve the negotiation by agents of the structural inequalities incorporated and, to some extent, realized at the level of identity.This does not represent a reduction of social actors to the embodiment of ‘social structures’, but is a recognition of the ‘corporeal, cognitive, evaluative, appreciative’ and other habits that the embodied subject adopts and adapts to social context (Lahire and Fernbach 2011: 176). What is clear is that there is an inherent tie in Bourdieu’s thinking between the body and identity. As he puts it, ‘what is ‘learned by the body’ is not something one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is’ (Bourdieu 1990: 73, original emphasis). Yet some very convincing arguments have been made that contemporary power works not at the level of ‘who we are’ (our identity) but at the level of who or what we are not yet (our becoming) (Hardt and Negri 2000; Massumi 2002b). Capitalism, for example, increasingly intervenes at the level of our indeterminate sociality, which is to say, at the level of our affective capacities, our relationships, connections and ways of life in the making. Massumi (2002b: 225) cites the examples of viral marketing, the purchase of capacities to do things through a diversity of technologies (software that purchases ‘wordprocessing capacities, image-capture and processing capacities, printing capacities, calculation capacities’) and customer loyalty programmes (fly-buys, points-rewards systems et cetera) which establish relationships with capitalism, all of which involve the intervention of power at the level of our vital potential. Such interventions may open up capacities, in so far as ‘you’re basically buying the right to be able to do things, ways of affecting and being affected’, but they also entangle us in forms of power, so that our sense of freedom and power become increasingly proximal (Massumi 2002b). An important implication of this increasing proximity of power and resistance is that calculations of what enhances and what threatens our freedom British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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may be more complicated than an earlier, more Marxist sociological imaginary held them to be. Sociological thought of recent decades, especially, I would suggest, in its Bourdieusian and Foucauldian versions, has done much to appreciate the complexity of this problem. But there remains the question of how we might grasp the operations of power and resistance at the more indeterminate level of sociality corresponding to bodies and their affective capacities. To the extent that ideological power in its various guises continues to be assumed as the proper object of resistance, we risk reproducing the historical privileging of consciousness over matter (Blackman 2008), treating the body as little more than the template on which culture and power inscribe their force. Moreover, to assume that the most valid form of resistance will be one that raises consciousness may be to miss the affective level at which power now operates so effectively. The challenge is not so much to call on ‘resistance’ as a reaction to a state of affairs – a situation in which an ever more insidious power operates at deeper or more minute levels. We should be wary of those analyses that too easily oppose to the insidious workings of affective power the positive re-mobilization of affect toward more laudable aims (cf. Hardt and Negri 2004). It is not simply that affect is not ‘ours’ to utilize with the confidence that our actions will be progressive, but also because this is to restate the priority of power over resistance, in relation to which the latter would only ever be a reaction. An attention to the affective dynamics of power and resistance, then, may make us more sensitive to the role that bodies might play as barometers of the miniscule, moment-to-moment transitions in our capacities, which we sense, and fiercely defend as our ‘freedom’, a freedom that is always more than what is left after power has had its way.

Conclusion Given the attention that the idea of affect is beginning to receive in sociology, it seems an apt time to analyse its potential impact on the sociological study of resistance. I have argued that resistance today is more than a form of reaction through which mass movements challenge existing structures of power. Yet it is also more than a strategic response of individuals to the workings of systemic structures in everyday contexts. With its interest in social relations, in what connects and lies in between individuals, sociology has had an enduring preoccupation with the forces and processes that give form to our social existence. However it has tended to focus on those aspects of our sociality that can be most readily empirically grasped as structures of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and so on, and the identification of a growing list of structural categories remains a key signature of a ‘sociological’ approach. Yet, by remaining in this way within the domain of familiar categories, the problem is that we may miss less readily perceivable forms of power and the potentials for resistance © London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

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associated with them. The point is not that the mass struggles of collectives and the everyday actions of individuals are not important interventions into power or objects of knowledge in the sociology of resistance. Rather, it is that that viewing resistance from these more familiar macropolitical or micropolitical perspectives should not be considered exhaustive. I have suggested that resistance also has an affective dimension that operates beneath and between both individual and collective struggles – a morethan-reactive, barely recognizable, less-than-conscious mobilization of bodily potentials, which is an exploitation of the margins of openness in every situation, an activation of new capacities of bodies and an interruption of our more determinant modes of sociality. Certainly, questions of political agency remain important, but an attention to the virtuality of affect adds to more conventional ways of addressing agency the recognition that ‘political alternatives to present domination are not there, simply waiting to be chosen, possible but not yet real’ (Grosz 2004: 261).14 Once the openness of affective relations is brought to the fore, the challenge is no longer one of planning for the future but of inventing it. In speaking in such tones, my point is not to celebrate the potential of affective resistance; as I have suggested, the co-implication of power and resistance makes such celebrations appear naive. But affect does present sociology with an important analytical challenge and confronts resistance with a new terrain of practical opportunities and limitations. As the literature on immaterial and affective labour has expertly demonstrated (Lazzarato 1996; Hardt and Negri 2004), affect is today subject to an increasing diversity of modifications and manipulations. Affective power may certainly involve the modulation, entrainment and appropriation of bodily capacities, through the capitalist production of desire, the extraction of value through affective labour and so on (Thrift 2005). And mass protests are clearly also cultural events, which themselves become caught up in the capitalist modulation of affect, just as everyday forms of resistance may themselves be practices of cultural consumption (Weitz 2001). Yet we should keep at the forefront of any analysis of resistance a sense of the excessive nature of affect. For there will be, in excess of any captures of affect, mutations in the sensible texture of the world and our relation to it that our available representations cannot capture, but which can be both felt and thought. Affect’s excessive character makes it irreducible to the kinds of mass or epochal diagnoses that would capture its dynamics in a state of affairs (the Empire, ‘late capitalism’, the era of immaterial labour, and so on). As I have insisted, affect is not a state but a transition, which implies that it has, immanent to it, an openness and an excessiveness, which both power and resistance may exploit (Bertelsen and Murphie 2010; Bissell 2008; Hynes, Sharpe and Fagan 2007). (Date accepted: January 2013) British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

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Notes 1. I am very grateful to David Bissell for his support for this paper throughout its progress and for Scott Sharpe for his insightful comments. 2. The notion of affect has been productively employed in journals such as Theory, Culture and Society and Body and Society for some years now. More recently, the 2009 special issue of European Journal of Social Theory has deployed the related notions of the virtual and affect toward a rethinking the empirical (See European Journal of Social Theory 12(1)). 3. To this extent I would agree with Stengers (2008) suggestion that the notion of ‘mesopolitics’ is the one best suited to the politics of affect. Certainly, references to the ‘micropolitics of affect’ are somewhat confusing, given that the prefix ‘micro’ does indeed invoke the idea of smallness (cf. Massumi 2008). Beyond this, I believe the specific legacy of the micropolitical in sociology would render the use of the term ‘micropolitics’ in this context inappropriate. 4. Certainly there are analyses of resistance that cross over, or at least complicate, the distinction between the macro and the micro levels; Bourdieusian enquiries into the forms of resistance enabled and constrained by one’s habitus are notable in this regard. Yet, as I go on to argue, an affective lens opens up research into resistance in interesting directions beyond what these more conventional sociological frameworks allow. 5. In much sociological literature it is a common assumption that everyday resistance represents action born of necessity rather than freedom. See, for example, Maher (2010), Shih and Pyke (2010) and Kamete (2010). Even amongst those sympathetic to its political potentials, everyday resistance is commonly conceived as small acts of resistance that are useful in so far as they keep alive the possibility of more systemic change (cf. Sarmento 2009). 6. Underlying the ‘hot cognition’ hypothesis is a similar sense that reasoned judg© London School of Economics and Political Science 2013

ments are permeated with an emotional element, or, as Lodge and Taber (2005: 456) put it, ‘feelings become information.’ Lodge and Taber’s (2005: 455) claim that ‘the affective charge’ that attaches to ‘sociopolitical concepts’ in the evaluation of political leaders, groups and issues is activated ‘appreciably faster than conscious appraisal of the object’ does not in any sense go beyond the ontology of subjective experience. Affect, in this use, has a distinctly personal meaning. 7. In this respect, Deleuze (1978) insists on the importance of the distinction between the terms ‘affectus’ and ‘affectio’, which he suggests are erroneously translated by a single term. 8. Deleuze (1988b), following Bergson, considers it a prejudice of the representational tradition that our understanding of the real is habitually traced back to a preformed possibility that determines it. Again following Bergson, he adopts the term ‘virtual’ to attribute reality to that potential which, while not yet actual, is not merely waiting to be made real but is granted reality as potential. On this, his differentiation between the ‘virtual/actual’ opposition and the more representational ‘possible/real’ dichotomy is especially important (Deleuze 1988b). 9. In human geography, for example, ‘non-representational’ theory, following the work of Nigel Thrift, has given a central role to the idea of the virtual. For an outline of the relationship between the notion of the virtual and affect in non-representational theory, see Lorimer (2008). 10. The idea of emotional tone, for example, tends to suggest something that can be consciously manipulated through the presentation of self (cf. Johnson 2008; McCallister-Groves 1995). Similarly, recent sociological writings on the idea of mood do not attend to the virtual dimension of affect that I am emphasizing here; while implying something more diffuse than emotion, the idea of mood still suggests a distinctly British Journal of Sociology 64(4)

Reconceptualizing resistance 575 ‘phenomenal experience’ (Siemer 2009: 256) and in this respect differs sharply from the much less human-centred sense of affect that we find in Deleuze. It is this more posthumanist orientation that also distinguishes affective capacities from ‘capabilities’, in the sense in which Nussbaum (2003) uses that term. While certainly prior to action, capabilities remain very much oriented to the metaphysics of the human individual, hence the mobilization of the theory of capacities to ground human rights discourse (cf. Nussbaum 2003). 11. Not surprisingly, theorists of affect have found the non-linear dynamics of selforganized systems a useful way of understanding the emergence of action from affect. See for example Ducey (2007). 12. Mobilizations of Judith Butler’s work on performativity but also Foucauldian dis-

cursive power/resistance have played an especially important role here. 13. Where the kind of study of crowd psychology made famous by le Bon (1947) focuses on the barely perceptible forces that give the crowd a ‘single being’ and a ‘mental unity’ (cf. also Collins 2004 on the contagion of emotions), the focus here is on the divergent actualizations in bodies and minds produced by a shared affective event (in this case, the event now famously marked ‘Seattle’ – see Hynes and Sharpe 2009). 14. The move beyond a merely human centred approach to agency is important here and in this respect the direction taken by affect theory (see for example, Blackman 2008) diverges from more conventional and even many revisionist approaches to agency (cf. Clegg 2006).

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