Affect and reason in divided societies: entanglement, conflict, possibility

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the special issue on affect and reason in deeply divided societies. Common to all essays in the special issue is a shared belief that political and social theory need a new framework for analyzing the relationship between affect and reason. This goes especially for societies marked by ever-growing cleavages, ethnic diversity, ideological struggles, and deep political pluralism. The purpose of this introductory essay is to outline – and substantiate – the reasons behind this belief. The essay provides an overview of the current debate on affect and reason, highlighting both contributions and limitations. The essay then proceeds to outline the specifics of the alternative framework developed in the ensuing 10 essays.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• conflict
• pluralism
• reason
• Merleau-Ponty
• entanglement
• critique

1. Introduction

The essays included in this special issue stem from a series of workshops sponsored by the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS). The workshops took place from January 2017 to December 2018 and included meetings at University of Agder, University of Copenhagen, and Uppsala University.¹ Several of the essays included below were presented at these workshops as works-in-progress, while others were added at a later stage. Common to all essays is a shared belief that political and social theory need a new framework for analyzing the relationship between affect and reason. This goes especially for societies marked by ever-growing cleavages, ethnic diversity, ideological struggles, and deep political pluralism. The purpose of this introduction is to outline – and substantiate – the reasons behind this belief. I begin with an overview of the current debate on affect and reason, highlighting both contributions and limitations (section 2). I then turn to the specifics of the alternative framework underpinning the ensuing discussions (section 3). I conclude with a brief outline of each of the 10 essays included the special issue (section 4).

2. Affect and reason in political and social theory

Let us begin by noticing the ubiquity of affect and reason in public debate. In a Nordic context, which was the original starting point for this special issue, we only have to recall the debates around some of the most controversial events, including the terror attacks in 2011 (Oslo and Utøya) and 2015 (Copenhagen) (cf. Vetlesen 2018; Sinclair 2015), as well as the reemergence of nationalistic movements in Finland, Sweden, and elsewhere (Hellström, Nilsson, and Stotlz 2012; Alpuro 1988), to realize how much the relationship between affect and reason structures the way in which conflicts and disagreements unfold in contemporary democratic societies. Something similar goes for debates elsewhere around the globe, including debates about the right to free speech in France (Dawes 2015), the emergence of populism in Argentina and Brazil (Grigera 2017), and the struggle against climate change in Australia and elsewhere (Schlosberg and Coles 2016). Across these otherwise quite different debates, each structured by its own logics and historical narratives, it is possible to detect one shared tendency: the drive to simultaneously reserve ‘reason’ for one’s own beliefs and criticize the opponent for being ‘irrational,’ ‘unreasonable,’ and/or driven by ‘fear’ and other modes of affective experience. In some cases, it even becomes nearly impossible to see which is which, leading outside observers to wonder whether concepts like ‘affect’ and ‘reason’ have lost their meaning altogether (see also Tønder 2011).

Given this nature of public debate, it is no surprise that the very relationship between affect and reason has become such an important issue in contemporary political and social theory.² Along one trajectory, we thus find a host of theories and research programmes, which draw on various Enlightenment philosophies to posit reason as a shared human faculty that transcends historical and social differences and therefore can be expressed independently of religion, culture, and/or ethnicity. Typically associated with thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, this argument has become a mainstay in normative debates about citizenship (Liveriero 2020), deliberative processes (Rostbøll 2008), multiculturalism (Cohen-Almagor 2021), and political rights (Freeman 2020). More recently, the argument appears to have culminated in what Rainer Forst calls ‘the right to justification’, by which he means the right of all citizens to have public policies justified according to principles of generality and reciprocity (for an overview, see Forst 2014b). According to Forst, this right to justification emerges by way of reason itself, which recognizes that it only can maintain its superior mode of legitimacy by subjecting itself to procedures that stand out as ‘reasonable’ pure and simple (Forst 2014b, chapter 1). From this purging of affect follows two other insights. First, all public debates must be understood to operate within a ‘space of reason’ that delimits the manner in which citizens can (and ought to) debate with each other. Second, citizens are recognized as citizens – and, hence, as free and equal – through the dignity that reason bestows on each and every one of them: that is, every reasonable person holds ‘a basic moral right to justification’, which presents itself as ‘the true ground for the claim of having one’s dignity respected’ (Forst 2011, 965).

Contrast this argument with another trajectory in contemporary political and social theory – commonly referred to as ‘affect theory’. This second trajectory criticizes the first trajectory in two ways: for disavowing the role of affects in public life and for failing to appreciate the hidden (and often messy) dimensions of socio-political subjectivities, including their dependency on power and privilege. Affect theory uses both lines of critique to motivate a different framework that replaces the demand for abstract reason with an immersion into what William Connolly, Talal Asad, Romand Coles, and others call the ‘micropolitics’ of late modern life – defined as the power struggles surrounding the discrete and often imperceptible movements that lead groups and individuals to experience and understand the world the way they do.³ Politically speaking, the idea seems be the following. Rather than insisting on a common universal principle that most likely does not exist, it may be more productive to expand society’s existing pluralism in whatever way possible. Not only can such an expansion enable new modes of being to emerge – it may also relieve some of the suffering that marginalized groups experience, and that prevent them from participating in public debates on equal footing with everyone else (cf. Connolly 2002, chapter 4). At least that seems to be the argument.

Behind this argument lies a deeper assumption about affect and its way of informing both experience in general and decision-making in particular. At a general level, affect designates in this context a degree of intensity, which enables the body – human and nonhuman – to move in a particular manner with a particular subset of possibilities embedded in it.⁴ Whereas ‘sadness’, for example, limits the body’s connection with the world, thereby diminishing its ability to make a difference on its own, ‘joy’ entails an openness that enables the affected body to affect and be affected by other bodies in ways that are equally empowering and creative. According to Connolly, this dynamic is crucial to understanding decision-making below the threshold of explicit consciousness. Affect, says Connolly, designates the very substratum of experience that connects one thought with another, and that allows the body to make decisions even when its rational faculties are unable to process all the sensory information they receive through looking, hearing, smelling, and so on.⁵

Brian Massumi, in his seminal work on affective experience, makes an even stronger version of this argument, suggesting that affect designates an independent power that works autonomously from all other modes of experience. This even includes modes of experience that we normally associate with consciousness, reason, and reason-giving. On Massumi’s view, affect obtains this autonomy because it follows a significantly different logic compared to all the other ones (cf. Massumi 2003, chapter 1). First, it shuns any assumption of a deeper truth waiting to be disclosed, staying – as it were – ‘on the surface’. Second, it does not operate in a judgmental mode delimited by categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ but instead follows a logic of becoming based on potentialities, transitory movements, and degrees of ‘less’ and ‘more’ (and everything in between). The upshot is a very different political outlook, which in turn feeds into the micropolitical framework mentioned above. Rather than looking for stable institutions and fixed procedures, as in the case of with the first trajectory, affect theory favours a politics of becoming and an ethos of pluralization. Or, as Massumi puts it, ‘Escape is not a negation: it is an alternative affirmation of the world’s potential, spilling out from its bare-active overfullness with forms of life not yet fully emerged’ (Massumi 2015, 244).

If the essays included in this special issue are reluctant to accept a statement like this one, it is not because they wish to deny the empowering dimensions of affective experience, nor is it because they agree with neo-Kantian enlightenment philosophy, including (and perhaps especially) Forst’s noumenal-nonaffective appeal to reason and reason-giving. Quite the opposite, in fact! The goal is not to suggest that one side of the affect-reason relationship is more important than the other; rather, the goal is (1) to show how current ways of framing the relationship between affect and reason rely on a division of labour that (2) is both analytically unsatisfying and an impediment to how we might address the challenges characterizing political and social life in the present. If contemporary societies remain deeply divided due to social cleavages, ethnic diversity, ideological struggles, and deep political pluralism – and if these divisions are fuelled in equal measure by affective experiences and claims to reason and reasonableness – then why choose between them? Why insist that one is more important than the other? Why not instead acknowledge (and perhaps even expand) their variegated and historically situated entanglements?

Notwithstanding the rhetorical nature of these questions, let me spell out the thinking behind them before I go on to outline the alternative. First of all, we should note how the division of labour creates an all too simplified image of how socio-political subjectivities are constructed, and how these constructions lead to different perceptions of disagreement, respect, and tolerance. The latter, I believe, goes to the very heart of what it means to grapple with conflicts like the ones mentioned in the above. If we prioritize affect, we may lose out on how reason’s demand for justification – as well as its ability to transcend a given context in more or less creative ways – can change how affects are felt and mobilized in this or that situation. Similarly, if we prioritize reason, we risk supporting a belief in rational self-sufficiency that flies in the face of most evidence.⁶ The likelihood of both outcomes makes it fair to say that the current division of labour diminishes the complexity that defines most conflicts today, and that this in turn prevents us from relaxing the political deadlock present across the globe. Or, to put it differently, once we allow our frameworks to prioritize one register over the other, we end up accepting a caricature of how both works. The result is not only analytically but also politically unsatisfying.

I hasten to add that this does not mean that neither side of the debate in contemporary political and social theory recognizes elements emphasized by the other. Connolly, for example, is careful to recognize that conscious thinking infuses political and social life ‘with interacting levels of complexity’ (Connolly 2002, 75) – just as Forst, for his part, acknowledges how fear and other affective experiences can get in the way of reason and reason-giving, noticing that what ‘gives people reasons to act in a certain way at that precise moment is a complicated issue’ (Forst 2015, 114). The problem, however, lies with the way in which the two sides arrive at these insights. Rather than beginning with the very imbrication of affect and reason – that is, with the entanglements that enable specific modes of affect and reason to emerge alongside each other, preventing them from ever existing in any pure form – the debate tends to define each dimension from the perspective of the other. That is, either reason is seen from the perspective of affect, or the other way around. Such an approach may offer some satisfaction in a scholarly war of positions, but it gets us off the wrong foot because it forces us to give priority to one or the other. What we get – simply put – is a false choice between two dimensions that ultimately support and amplify each in ways that are either empowering or disempowering (or both).

The essays included in this special issue provide plenty of evidence supporting this concern. Bjørn Schiermer, for example, shows how newspaper cartoonists, in their daily work commenting on the events of the day, rely on culturally and historically specific modes of resonance interlaced with both affect and reason. A similar point appears in Liv Sunnercrantz’ contribution, which examines how Swedish neoliberalism came into being through discursive appeals working at the intersection of subdued affective experiences and more explicit modes of reason and reason-giving. In neither of these cases (nor in any of the other analyses included below) is it possible – analytically or politically – to distinguish between affect and reason in any categorical manner. The reason for this is quite simply that it is the entanglement – not the separation or rupture – that defines what each register of lived experience – affect and reason – does and means. The entanglement seems even so pronounced that it may be appropriate to recall an insight that long has been important to the phenomenological tradition and that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was particularly fond of emphasizing: ‘All consciousness is consciousness of something’, and, furthermore, we should not ‘choose between sensation and thought, as if … deciding between chaos and order’ (Merleau-Ponty 2007, 64 & 73).⁷

Without pretending to have settled the issue once and for all, these remarks support the intuition that addressing affect and reason in divided societies requires a different analytical framework than the ones currently on offer. The point is not to reject the existing frameworks tout court but to identify their underlying concerns and assumptions. As already indicated, the way to this framework goes through the acknowledgement that affect and reason are intrinsically entangled and, in that sense, must be seen as mutually constitutive. The question now facing us is not ‘if’ but ‘how’ to turn this acknowledgement into a workable analytical framework.

3. Entanglements: toward a new framework of analysis

To begin this work, it behoves us to think more carefully about entanglement itself. What does it mean to say that registers of affect and reason are entangled? Does it mean that the registers merge and become identical or is something else at stake? According to Merleau-Ponty, any answer to this question must begin with a relational difference that connects rather than separates – what Merleau-Ponty himself calls ‘chiasm’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 139). The primary example of such a chiasm is ‘touch’ because both parts are simultaneously active (touching) and passive (touched), and because the result is an experience of connectedness across difference. Thus, we must say that the left hand only becomes the ‘left hand’ when it touches the ‘right hand’, inaugurating an entanglement that bestows each with their unique place and role in the world (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 141). Karen Barad, in her work, extends this argument and suggests that entanglement designates the very mode of production for any kind of experience, including nonhuman ones. Entanglement does so – not because its work always yields the same result (it doesn’t!) – but because ‘space, time, and matter do not exist prior to the intra-actions that reconstitute entanglements’ (Barad 2007, 74). By this Barad means to say every experience or thing that exists, consists of multiple components, which bump up against each other through a series of diffractive displacements, which in turn lead to new modes of existence defined by an alternative set of coordinates of space, time, and matter. Without entanglement there would quite simply be no movement – and thus no world whatsoever.

Even though the essays collected in this special issue do not necessarily use this terminology, it is nonetheless possible to detect some of its elements in their analyses of affect and reason. In the case of Hartman’s and Poe’s contributions, for example, the entanglement of affect and reason appear in how prophesy and enthusiasm sustain specific forms of government, which in turn enable some (but not all) modes of coexistence to develop across time and space. In the case of Lehtonen’s, Näsström’s, and Slothuus’ contributions, moreover, the entanglement of affect and reason seeps deep into the pillars of political and social life only to surface whenever a conflict about the limits (and future) of democracy breaks out. Finally, in the case Carleheden’s, Lysaker’s and Vogler’s contributions, the entanglement becomes a conceptual conjecture subsisting within texts and traditions that we typically associate with just one side of the debate but in reality only become meaningful once we subject them to other, more nuanced readings and engagements. Common to all of these contributions is an insistence on seeing affect and reason the way Merleau-Ponty and Barad encourage us to see them – as entangled registers that only become what they are by touching each other through diffractive displacement. Moreover, the study of these entangled registers does not fit one model alone, but require, as Merleau-Ponty and Barad also anticipated, each in their own way, an array of apparatuses, concepts, methods, strategies, and evaluation-criteria.

It is worthwhile, I think, to emphasize this last point. Given the diffractive nature of any given entanglement – and given the way in which each and every entanglement can lead to a host of other entanglements – it is imperative that our analytical framework operates on multiple levels at one and the same time. While registers of affect and reason are entangled through-and-through, they also come in multiple and often divergent ways, requiring us to use several modes of inquiry in order to piece together their specific importance for – an impact on – political and social life. Beginning with the entanglement itself, we must also be able to trace how each side of the relationship develops through mutual imbrications and self-amplifying resonances. To support this work, it may be helpful to create an analytical framework around the following three steps.

1. Radical empiricism. The first step concerns the very starting point of analysis. Rather than pretending to capture affect and reason in their own right, it is more productive to begin the analysis by trying to meet them up close – where they bump up against each other and where they are so entangled that it is almost impossible to tell which is which. To achieve this kind of empathetic closeness is helpful to centre the analysis on a conflict or an event that intensifies both sides of the relationship and, in that sense, generates the shifts and displacements needed to delimit the analysis itself. Moreover, while the traditional methods for the work encouraged by this starting point typically would be ethnography, discourse analysis, phenomenology, action research, and genealogy (or some combination thereof), the starting point itself would reflect a commitment to what William James, anticipating the work of Merleau-Ponty and Barad, calls ‘radical empiricism’ (James 2019). A commitment to this kind of empiricism is important because it avoids privileging one substratum of the empirical world over all the other ones – as if the chosen one somehow is the only one that provides us with anything ‘factual’ – and because it instead encourages us to track the emergence of affect and reason across the many layers of experience (such as it is). Not only does a starting point informed by radical empiricism allow us to accept affect and reason’s entangled relationship; it brings us closer to the diffractive displacements that enable them to develop over time in ways that are both self-organizing and self-amplifying.

2. Immanent critique and the many worlds. The second step concerns the knowledge produced by the analysis of affect and reason. On the one hand, it should be obvious that the analysis will not produce just one result but instead is likely to uncover a wide (if not infinite) range of possible entanglements, forcing us to acknowledge the existence of many historically defined and contingently situated worlds – what James himself calls ‘pluriverse’ (a point that Merleau-Ponty and Barad also confirm, each in their own way).⁸ On the other hand, it should also be obvious that the existence of these many worlds does not mean that we should suspend the possibility of critique altogether, including the kind of critique that both identifies and justifies the normative content of any given society. A conclusion like this would indeed underestimate the kind of work that reason continues to do even after we have accepted its many entanglements with affect. What it does mean, however, is that critique as such works in multiple registers, and that each register has an important role to play whenever we, as engaged and embodied observers-analysts, appeal to something like ‘critique’ and ‘critical knowledge’. A critique is thus not only about justifying a law or a policy with reference to principles of reciprocity and generality but also about finding ways of empowering groups and individuals at the affective level, enabling each and every body to affect and to be affected in multiple ways. The specifics of this kind of critique will vary depending on the actual context, which is why critique only is possible immanently – from within the entanglements of affect and reason (see also Kompridis 2006).

3. Theoretical imaginations. The third step concerns the aftermath of the analysis – specifically how its insights continue to live on in theories that may or may not contribute to the development of society. Given everything we have seen so far, it should be clear that the turn to radical empiricism and immanent critique in no way is a turn away from theory as such. What the turn does imply, however, is a different account of what it means do theory, one in which the very practice of theorization happens in the midst of a pluriverse that is always-already changing. Thus, on the account suggested here, we should not expect theory to offer some kind of detachment or neutrality, nor can we say that is a matter of eradicating uncertainties and/or achieving the most simplified version of whatever problem or theme we hope to analyze. Different from these ambitions, theory and theorization are better understood as untimely reflections that – not unlike artistic creativity and aesthetic imagination – reshuffles the boundaries between past, present, and future, creating new pathways for thinking and acting where there were few or none before. Another way of saying this is that any theory of affect and reason itself is a product of a specific subset of affective experiences and practices of reason and reason-giving. To theorize affect and reason is to endow these experiences and practices with a certain level of consistency, however specific to space and time, allowing them to resonate with concerns and issues in the present. While the result may be closer to the imagination than to some kind of definitive statement about the world, it is precisely this ability to resonate that allows any given analysis of affect and reason to live on in the groups and individuals subject to its methods and interventions.

Taken together, these steps provide the basis for an analytical framework that not only acknowledges but also expands the entanglements of affect and reason, offering us a real chance to trace how each side of the relationship develops through mutual imbrications and self-amplifying resonances. I hasten to add that all three steps need not be present at the same time – and with the same degree or weight – before we can accept the analysis’ contributions (this is certainly not the case with the essays included in this special issue, most of which prioritize one or two steps over the remaining ones). The goal is not to strive for total completion but to ensure that whatever step gets prioritized, there is room for input from the other two. Only by ensuring this kind of openness can we hope to break some of the deadlock present both in public debate and in many quarters of contemporary political and social theory.

This, then, is how the study of affect and reason in deeply divided societies presents itself: as two intimately entangled registers of lived experience that emerge simultaneously and, in that sense, must be seen as mutually constitutive. Simply put, there is no real way of imagining (let alone conceptualizing or analyzing) how either exists without the other, in some kind of separate or otherwise autonomous way. Each colours the other the same way a particular shade of one colour makes another colour seem more or less bright, more or less dominant – say a particular shade of green next to a bright yellow or a dark blue. It is this of kind of co-dependency that makes it crucial to study both of them simultaneously under the same analytical umbrella. While we may lose some of their specificity by studying them together, we gain a better perspective of the work each of them does, including how they help to provoke, sustain, and/or alter conflicts in societies characterized by ever-growing cleavages, ethnic diversity, ideological struggles, and deep political pluralism. A concluding overview of the 10 essays included in this special issue may help to underscore this point.

4. Overview of the special issue

The first cluster of essays approaches the affect-reason nexus in a strictly philosophical-theoretical key. Gisli Vogler, in his essay ‘Bridging the gap between affect and reason’, sets out by engaging the work of Brian Massumi, showing how Massumi’s thesis of the ‘autonomy of affect’ may produce the opposite of what is intended – a reversal rather than a refutation of the classical Cartesian mind/body-dualism. To avoid this impasse, Vogler turns to the work of Margaret Archer whose explorations of ‘reflexivity’ provides a more fruitful way of analyzing the entanglements of affect and reason. To help underscore this move, the essay by Odin Lysaker, entitled ‘Bodily felt integrity’, explores some of the lesser-known aspects of Habermas’ theory of communicative action and deliberative democracy. Rather than seeing this theory as defined by a strict allegiance to reason alone, Lysaker shows how Habermas’ writings harbour the resources for a more nuanced concept of the ongoing interplay between affect and reason. Lysaker explicates and develops these resources through a new reading of Habermas based on the right to say no and the implied anarchic core of communication and democracy. This reading – and its implications for Frankfurt school of critical theory – is further supported by Mikael Carleheden’s essay ‘How to criticize?’ which rounds up this special issue’s first cluster of essays. According to Carleheden, the goal of the social sciences is not value neutrality but rather, in the vein of Axel Honneth’s conception of critical theory, a unique kind of normative reasoning attentive to the historical specificities of social struggles and the fight for freedom and recognition. As Carleheden sees it, this kind of reasoning does not require a strong notion of reason (as is often argued); instead, it requires a pluralistic methodology that goes beyond any dichotomy of affect and reason.

The second cluster of essays moves the discussion to a more distinctively political level. The essays in this cluster focus on concepts and issues such as prophecy, hegemony, fanaticism, and democratic self-defense. Jonathan Harmat kicks it off with an essay titled ‘Governing between affect and reason’. The essay returns us to the work of Baruch de Spinoza, a key reference point in contemporary debates about affect and reason. Harmat is particularly interested in exploring how Spinoza uses the practice of prophecy to envision a mode of governance that operates – or, perhaps better, oscillates – between affective experiences and appeals to reason. Exploring how this might be case, Harmat suggests, entails greater attention to how governments use imaginative means to reach rationally expedient ends. A similar insight underpins Lukas Slothuus’ essay ‘Faith between reason and affect’. This essay takes up the work of Antonio Gramsci, with a particular focus on his secular-political and materialist conception of faith. According to Slothuus, this conception, rarely studied in Gramsci scholarship, provides us with useful resources for conceptualizing how politics, even in its most hegemonic forms, straddles the dichotomy between justificatory practices and emotionally laden experiences of community and belonging. Similar to Harmat, the result is a messier (but also more nuanced) analysis of socio-political struggles for emancipation.

Andrew Poe, in his essay ‘Un-represent’, extends this insight by challenging the traditional view of political fanaticism as irrational and dangerous to society writ large. Such a view, Poe shows, is itself dangerous because it reifies established categories of identity and difference, and thus restricts the space of contestation and pluralization. To avoid this impasse, Poe suggests that we reverse our traditional viewpoint and instead approach fanaticism as an attempt – sometimes successful, sometimes not – at disrupting the very process of representation. Sofia Näsström, in ‘Democratic self-defense’, concludes this discussion by taking up the crucial question of how democracy might defend itself against authoritarian populism and other nondemocratic forces in society. According to Näsström, the answer to this question is not to impose legal or political limits, but rather to recognize that democracy as such hinges on a series of social conditions without which political freedom and equality are unattainable. For this very reason, it is not only unwise but also impossible to fight democracy’s enemies by way of either affect or reason alone; rather, since the fight occurs at the level of the social, it is imperative that we address the struggle through the many and diverse entanglements that the other essays in this special issue highlight as crucial to democratic government.

The third and final cluster of essays concludes the special issue by looking at specific instances in which the entanglements of affect and reason define historically embedded conditions for political agency and social belonging. Liv Sunnercrantz, in her essay ‘Which side are you on – Mr. Westerberg?’ – expands the usual discourse analysis framework to examine how affective experiences, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, defined and supported the emergence of neoliberalism in a country like Sweden. Particularly significant in this regard is how the eschewing of passion by conventional, mainstream media and hegemonic actors, made it possible for advocates of neoliberal policies to establish inroads into the Swedish political and economic establishment. Bjørn Schiermer, in his article ‘Creative affects’, brings us even closer to the entanglements of affect and reason by using a series of qualitative interviews with Danish newspaper cartoonists to develop a novel account of what he calls ‘creative agency’. Schiermer shows how this kind of agency entails a unique combination of mastery and contingency, which in turn relies on a subtle set of affect-induced resonances between the artist, the audience, and the object-matter of the cartoon itself. Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen and Olli Pyyhtinen closes off the special issue with an essay on the practice of dumpster diving, its affective dimensions, and its implications for contestation and rational critique (the essay is entitled ‘Living on the margins’).

Together, then, the essays included in this special issue show how political and social theory might approach politics in deeply divided societies without assuming a strict dichotomy between affect and reason. The essays, each in their own way, suggest that these two registers of lived experience are deeply entangled and therefore must be studied alongside each other. As already suggested, this kind of study encourages us to honour the analytical virtues of radical empiricism, immanent critique, and theoretical imagination. These virtues may not offer us a simple and picture-perfect view of the issues at hand, but they do lead us closer to how affect and reason bounce off each in a messy world saturated by conflict, contingency, and emergent modes of becoming.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) [grant number 2016-00265/NOS-HS].

Notes on contributors

Lars Tønder

Lars Tønder is professor with special responsibilities in the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. His current research focuses on democracy, pluralism, and climate change.

Notes

1 A big thank you to everyone who participated in these workshops, including our distinguished guest speakers: Arne Johan Vetlesen, Henrik Syse, Cathrine Holst, Nils Holtug, Jonas Toubøl, David Owen, and Rahel Jaeggi.

2 Apart from the works cited below, see also Seigworth and Gregg (2009), Clough and Halley (2007), Turner and Gaus (2019), and Forst (2014a).

3 This idea and argument go back to the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987, chapter 9). For a recent overview of the concept of micropolitics, including its history and role in contemporary theory, see also Gilliam (2018).

4 Affect theory draws here on several arguments and insights developed by Baruch Spinoza in Books 3 and 4 of Ethics (Spinoza 2002).

5 Connolly (2002, 91): ‘The conceptual connections formed in conscious thinking are notoriously irreducible to causal explanation, and the rapid, parallel systems that both affect judgment directly and project thought-imbued intensities into consciousness may to be too fast and variable in intensity to submit to close, situational computation as well. Affect is a wild card in the layered game of thinking’.

6 In addition to Connolly, see also evidence from the new neurosciences, such as Damasio (2003) and Asma and Gabriel (2019).

7 Apart from a series of philosophical investigations, Merleau-Ponty draws heavily on the work of the French painter Paul Cézanne whose depictions of landscapes and figures remained a steady source of inspiration for Merleau-Ponty’s own thinking.

8 See also Savransky (2021) and Connolly (2005, chapter 3).