The figure of the globe appears to offer two ethical trajectories: on the one hand an attention to global interconnections and networks would expand responsibility and awareness beyond the figure of the isolated moral subject. Ethics may have to be considered beyond discursive, human and political modes (especially if one defines politics as the practice of a polity). On the other hand, the figure of the globe—considered as a figure—is intertwined with a tropology of interconnectedness, renewal, cyclic causality and organicism. This traditionally theological series of motifs, with the globe's circularity reflecting a divine intentionality, is maintained today in many of the most profound and seemingly secular ecological theses, including the Gaia hypothesis and the global brain.

It is the possibility of extinction or the end of human time that forces us to confront a new sense of the globe: far from being an unfortunate event that accidentally befalls the earth and humanity, the thought of the end of the anthropocene era is both at the heart of all the motifs of ecological ethics and the one idea that cannot be thought as long as the globe is considered in terms of its traditional and anthropocentric metaphors.

The word 'globalism' along with the word 'biopolitics' suffers from a curious double valence. As a descriptive term globalism can refer to the lost autonomy and destroyed difference among worlds: the formation of global media, markets and communications eliminated what was once a panorama of difference. Once upon a time the globe enjoyed divergent timelines and worldviews. Even if it was central to the colonialist imagination to romanticize the extent to which 'other' worlds were exotically untranslatable, mystical and embedded in a non-linear time, there is nevertheless a very real sense in which globalism has created an earth of a single time, single market and single polity. Globalism would be a mode of homogenization, disenchantment or rendering quantifiable that one could lament as having displaced an earlier world of distinct places for the sake of one quantifiable space. This reduction of distinction has significant material consequences; today, any particular country's environmental or wage policies will directly alter the day to day life of bodies elsewhere on the globe. But global inclusion and simultaneity also trigger a series of imaginary ramifications. In positive terms this has been described by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in terms of a new multitude. Liberated from nation states and physical locales there can now be a humanity as such, a self-creating living labor that has no body other than that which it gives itself through its own immaterial productive powers (Hardt and Negri 2004).

Thought less optimistically, one might say that the physical ability to occupy converging and synchronized worlds and times is coupled with a cognitive paralysis to think of any future that would not be one more chapter in a familiar collective narrative. This is evident in the terms that are used to describe the predicament of the globe. It is not only the case that events are materially and systemically linked, so that the volatile economies of even the smallest countries may precipitate global crises; it is also typical today to see all of financial history as similarly continuous and interconnected. This occurs both in short-term and long-term thinking; recent events have prompted the publication of a series of histories and genealogies, including the histories of debt, of money, of corporations, bonds and markets: all suggesting that the present is an expression and extension of a single history of something like 'the' globe (Ferguson 2008; Cashill 2010; Graeber 2011; Coggan 2012; Bakan 2005). Economic events are considered in relation to a past that we have been unable to think as anything other than differing by degree. Despite the new global conditions and linkages the 2008 cascade of economic crises were gauged to be either as bad as or worse than the great depression, while terms such as 'recovery,' 'recession,' 'depression,' and 'crisis' place the current state of play as a continuation of a past, a past that varies and recovers always in terms of one easily comprehended cycle. The lexicon deployed to assess and gauge the environment is similarly comforting in terms of its linear temporality and delimitation: Australia still refers to its condition as one of 'drought,' even when the period of insufficient rain and increasing desertification exceeds a decade; climate change policy refers to 'mitigation,' 'adaptation,' 'sustainability' and 'viability'—all of which enable one to think of management (however difficult) rather than cessation, rupture or incomprehension. One might say that the imaginary is, indeed, *global.* A literal globalism—the stark reality of there being no escape, no outside, nowhere else to flee now that the earth has been forced to yield ever more to the human desire for life—is coupled with an incompatible global figuration. Things will cycle back to recovery. The globe can be taken and assessed as an object and managed, saved, revived or given the respect and care that it deserves. If where we are is a *globe*, then it can be imagined as delimited, bounded, organically self-referring and unified.

Perhaps—given the advent of globalism as a concrete event where there can now be no time, place or body that can live outside a certain destructive force field of events (such as the possibility of viral, political, economic and climactic terrors)—now is the time to think non-globally. The usual figures of the bounded earth, the ideally-self-balancing cosmos, the interconnectedness of this great organic home of 'ours' are modes of narrative self-enclosure that have shielded us from confronting the forces of the present. It is not surprising that 'globalism' is at once a term of mourning, signaling a world economy and politics that has taken every space and timeline into its calculative, cynical and rigid systematic maw at the same time as it signals a redemptive potential. We are, so various environmental and ecological imperatives remind us, always interconnected across and through this one living globe, this living world that environs us. The maxim, 'act locally, think globally,' should be reversed: there can be no encompassing global thought, for insofar as we think we are fragmented by various locales, figures, lexicons, disciplines and desire, but we nevertheless are caught up in a globe of action where no intent or prediction will be enough to secure or predict the outcome of any action.

It was the great contribution of Lacanian psychoanalysis to point out that the visual figural unity of the human body—the bounded organism we see in the mirror—serves as a captivating lure that precludes us from confronting that ex-centric predicament of the speaking subject whose desire is never given in a living present but is articulated and dispersed in a time that is never that of a self-comprehending and self-affecting whole. Just as the spatial unity of the human body covers over the temporal dispersion of the speaking and desiring subject, so the delimited material object of the planet enables a misrecognition of the multiple systems, forces, timelines, planes and feedback loops that traverse what we imagine to be the single object of the globe. The advent of globalism—or the intensification of the world's various modes of systemic interconnectedness and hyper-volatility—should, if anything, have prompted a destruction of the figure of the globe. And yet the opposite appears to be the case: even in the genre that is apparently most devoted to global catastrophe—the disaster movie—the globe is strangely reinforced and consolidated. A typical instance is *Independence Day* of 1996, in which an invasion of earth is initially viewed from the contained space of a US government control room, as though we will be able to have advance vision of 'our' end and limit from the point of view of a single screen and panel of experts.

Perhaps today we might note that it is the physical image of the globe that serves as a reaction formation, precluding a thought of the consequences of globalism (if globalism remains the correct term for the increasingly evident and non-human complexities that are precluding any possibility of a global or comprehensive vision). If capitalism could once have been thought of as 'a' power imposed upon the globe then this is no longer the case. As the recent economic crises demonstrated capitalism is not a system, cannot be attributed to a body of interests, and is less a transcendent structure imposed upon organic life than it is just one of the many ways in which local, ill-considered, barely intentional forces of consumption and acquisition exceed the comprehension of any body (be that a physical, political, national or economic body).

Marxist theory's attempt to locate capitalism within history and within a theory of interests can be compared to a whole series of localizations and narrative therapies. Popular culture has for decades been giving a face and/or body to a series of diffuse and essentially 'unglobable' threats. Despite a series of calls for thinking in terms of distributed, de-centered and dispersed cognition, where we acknowledge that institutions, cultures and even organisms are not governed by a central organizing brain, the political imaginary remains wedded to organic figures. Popular culture has presented viral invasion more often than not in terms of an isolable and intruding body: conquering such threats can then be placed in a standard narrative of good and evil, self and other. Terrorism, too, is given a specific face in media culture (either the named Osama Bin Laden or an ethnically specified other). But it is not only popular culture that has been unable to confront a temporality and politics that is no longer that of contesting agents waging a war for the sake of a determined end.

Lamenting the fall of modernity into a bio-politics that manages populations according to a general and quantifiable 'life,' Giorgio Agamben argues that it will be possible to arrive again at a genuine politics only by considering what Foucault failed to confront: the problem of sovereignty in modernity (Agamben 1998). That is, whereas Foucault was critical of the sovereign model of power, or power as an external and imposed body, Agamben's critical concept of bio-politics wants to resist a modernity of diffused or capillary power, focusing again on how power establishes itself *as a body.* Agamben refuses the notion of the political and the polity as a universal or a given; the polity is constituted in and through human potentiality's realization that it lacks any determined end. For Agamben, what needs to be recalled is the genesis or emergence of the political fold, the opening of something like a political space that then enables a distinction between that which is interior and that which is exterior to the polity. What counts *as political* is, for Agamben, itself not a political decision, and this is because 'the polity' or the opening of a space of what will become 'our' concern is an event, and one to which genuine thinking ought to (constantly) return. Today's losses of commonality, or the absence of something like a global community, should prompt us to address that the global community or horizon is neither given nor guaranteed, but is nevertheless urgently required if we are not to lose sight altogether of our potentiality *to be political, to open a political space.* What bio-politics and its terrors force us to acknowledge is that our defining potentiality—for speaking together and opening up a political space discloses itself most fully when it is not actualized. For bio-politics, too, bears the same double valence as globalism. It is precisely in the era of the bio-political, when all decisions regarding what we ought to do are grounded on maximizations of life that the passage from life to polity, and the political constitution of what counts as political life is forgotten. It is Auschwitz, modern hedonism, and the bio-political absence of a genuine political space of speech and decision that evidences the true nature of politics. Politics occurs not when bodies located in a world then decide to speak together, for politics is—through the event of speaking—the opening out of a world. Here, then, in this confrontation with a modern bio-politics that is criticized and lamented for being insufficiently political—insufficiently oriented to the opening and manifestation of a political space—Agamben gives the contemporary term 'bio-politics' a force that relates directly to the imaginary hyper-investment in the globe. Agamben, unlike the Foucault whom he criticizes for not confronting the relation between bare life and sovereignty, regards bio-politics in its various forms—both totalitarian managements of populations and democratic aims to increase a society's happiness—as a *loss of the political*. As long as politics is focused on bare life, or the calculation of a living substance we will have retreated from the question of the potentiality of the political: man is not born as a political animal but becomes one, and he does so by creating a political space through speaking, opening up a world that is always *his* world.

The Greek distinction between *bios* (or a life that is formed, bounded and oriented to what man might make of himself) and *zoe* (or mere bare life that, in modernity, becomes so much disposable waste *and* that increasingly becomes the subject of politics) is, for Agamben a difference that needs to be re-thought and re-inscribed. It is *bios—created, formed, bounded, delimited life—*that has been lost and that entails a loss of the political. How does this relate to globalism? Both Agamben's critique of biopolitics and the reaction against globalism express a traditional and theological mourning for a loss of form. Globalism's evils follow from its ravaging disrespect for limits and difference, its tendency to consume all previously distinct and specified nations and cultures into one vast calculative system without definition or limit. Not surprisingly the response to both globalism (seen as an inhuman, mindless and unbounded system) and to biopolitics (seen as a loss of the self-defining polity) has been the reaffirmation of the figure of the globe or bounded form. Agamben, for example, posits a series of positive manoeuvres that would ameliorate the biopolitical ravaging of the man of poiesis; these include a return to the active creation of man as a political living form as *bios* rather than *zoe,* as a being whose political nature has little or nothing to do with his mere life but requires creation. Not surprisingly, then, Agamben also wishes to retrieve a more authentic aesthetic encounter, where art is not passive spectatorship of an artist's private invention but an opening out or disclosure of a created world. Here, art as *poiesis* or putting into distinct form would not be disengaged from collective *praxis*.

Hardt and Negri, reacting more explicitly to a globalism that has precluded any active and intentional formation of a polity, call for the creation of a single, self-producing, self-aware and self-referring open whole of humanity: a single, continually re-productive body of man:

In addition to envisioning revolution in ethical and political terms, we also conceive of it in terms of deep anthropological modification: of *metissage* and continuous hybridization of populations, of biopolitical metamorphosis. The first terrain of struggle is, from this point of view, the universal right to move, work and learn over the entire surface of the globe. Thus revolution, as we see it, is not only within Empire but also *through* Empire. It is not something which is fought against some implausible Winter Palace, but something which extends against all the central and peripheral structures of power, in order to empty them and subtract the capacity of production from capital.  That is, the figure of the globe—the ideally bounded sphere in which each point is in accord with the whole, and in which the whole is a dynamic and self-maintaining unity—harbours an axiology that privileges *bios* over *zoe.* What must be asserted as dominant and proper is a whole or bounded form that has no external or transcendent principle, no ordering that is given from without or that would elevate one point or term above another.

Literal globalism, perceived as humanity's alienation from itself and its earth through dead technical systems (such as the market, mechanization, computerization and speculation), is to be cured by figural globalism. Life as *zoe,* the mere life that lives on without a sense of itself, without a world and without form, is to be combated by life as *bios*: a properly political life of self-formation and speaking in common. Politics ought to be of, by and for the polity: thus, the call to immanence, whereby a body is not deflected by any power other than that of its own making is yet one more refusal to consider the predicament of a palpably non-sovereign power. Recall that for Agamben Foucault failed to consider the relationship between biopolitics and sovereign power, between power as instituted law that creates the border between law and non-law, or between governable life and the merely living. For Agamben the problem with biopolitics is that it is insufficiently directed towards *bios*: both totalitarian governments and democracies focus on well-being and happiness rather than confronting the problem that mere life does not proceed without some sort of gap or decision towards its proper world and end. If one were to recall the Greek attention to *bios,* or formed life, one might be able to retrieve something of the proper political potentiality that is covered over in modernity.

Foucault, however, suggests an opposite path. The problem with biopolitics is not its inattention to bios or self-making but, rather, its maintenance of organic—or what I will refer to here as 'global'—thinking. One could be misled by reading Foucault's corpus backwards, concluding that his final thoughts on Greek and Hellenistic arts of the self would be the natural consequence of a theorization of biopolitics, leading to a retrieval of a poetics of the subject. But there are other possibilities indicated in his earliest criticisms of the concept of life. The problem with this concept, or more accurately this *problem*, is that its manner of folding an inside from an outside, or of producing a relation through which something like knowledge is possible, is—to use a Deleuzian term—its reactive reterritorializing quality. It is the concept of life as such, the life from which bounded beings emerge and against which they maintain themselves, that leads to a certain structure of ethics. Man becomes that being who is nothing more than a reflective structure, a being whose only law is that of giving a law to himself. The three concepts analyzed by Foucault that constitute the modern empirical-transcendental episteme are life, labour and language. It is because there is something in general called 'life' as a process of striving, self-production and self-maintenance that language and labor become the means through which man creates himself as an historical being.

On the one hand Foucault suggests that this is in quite a specific sense the consequence of a refigured globe: the pre-modern space of knowledge had distributed beings in relations of analogy, such that the universal order of things was reflected in each living being. In classicism this book of nature, or experience of the earth as possessing its own sense that could be unfolded in various ways in each living form, gives way to an order that appears in representation and tabulation. Man, in classical thought, is not yet that being produced through the act of speech and labour that forms him in relation to a life in general that is only known after the event of its formation. In modernity the globe is no longer the book of nature or scene of readable order, becoming a site of 'life' that is now known as the enigmatic progression through which organisms and systems emerge: life is a process that can be read after the event of its ongoing acts of formation. Critically, then, this would suggest that with the politics of life itself something of the globe is lost or occluded. And this, indeed, is how ecological and anti-globalist theory understands both biopolitics and globalism more generally. What is lost is any sense of the earth as a living whole, as bearing a life and temporality of its own, within which human beings are located and towards which they ought to pay due respect and care. Yet despite the sense that globalism as a political event has erased all traditional and enchanted senses of the globe as a living whole that harbors its own order, the appeals to the figure and normativity of englobed life have become more intense than ever. If Agamben seeks to retrieve a sense of the world as that which man gives himself through speaking in common, and if Hardt and Negri aim to catalyze the self-expressing multitude, then they do so in thorough accord with a tradition and spirit of the self-evident beauty and worth of the organic globe.

First, we can note the theological nature of this figure of the self-referring, self-creating living form that has no end or determination outside its own existence.3 Not only is this how the Christian God of monotheism was defined (as a potentiality that has no essence other being in pure act, never deflected from pure self-forming), it is also the case that theological poetics used the figure of the bounded sphere to express a divine intentionality of perfect accord, balance and (most importantly) self-reference. Such a form has its own temporality which is at once linear, organic and circular; it is a time of increasing creation and fruition, in which beings arrive at their proper form and in which the end concludes and discloses the reason of the whole. As an example we can think of Milton's frequent references to the pendant world or balanced globe, contrasted with the boundless, formless and time-deprived chaos. The divine meets the human in John Donne's frequent references to globes, circles, circumference and recovery, as though the earth's form is that of the soul:

Then, soul, to thy first pitch work up again; Know that all lines which circles do contain. For once that they the centre touch, do touch Twice the circumference, and be thou such (Donne 2000, 229).

Second, this divine, organic and perfectly bounded form of immanent self reference can take the form of philosophy itself: that activity through which human reason refers back to, and redeems, itself by circling back and recognizing its own constitutive conditions. One could include here Heidegger's hermeneutic circle, Hegel's philosophy of absolute self-reference, and more recent and supposedly scientific claims for 'human' understanding, such as Robert Wright's recent claim that the monotheistic figure of God will, organically, evolve to become nothing more than that of human nature understanding itself as the origin of all the figures to which it was once enslaved (2010).

Third, and finally, when current ecological theorists continue to refer to the environment—as that which environs or encloses—or call for a due reverence to an earth that bears its own balance and self-ordering, it is once again a figure of bounded form or *bios* that is maintained against a life that would be a force without sense of itself, a time without disclosure of fruition.

The problem with this anti-globalization global tropology is twofold. First, it is inefficacious when one considers the nature of modern power. The twenty-first century is marked by an intensification of diffuse and destructive forces. The cold war and its threat of nuclear annihilation had already troubled the motif of life as a war of interests among bodies, for it was clearly possible that the trajectory of man for survival and dominance was the same path that would lead to his disappearance. The subsequent wave of annihilation threats, from the AIDS awareness of the 1980s, followed by increasing anxieties about global warming, food shortages, viral panics (SARS, bird flu, swine flu), terrorist organizations that no longer concerned themselves with a worldly survival, and then economic crises that exposed an absence of any centered or commanding viewpoint: all these serve to show that the image of the globe, of an interconnected whole, is a lure and an alibi. We have perhaps always lived in a time of divergent, disrupted and diffuse systems of forces, in which the role of human decisions and perceptions is a contributing factor at best. Far from being resolved by returning to the figure of the bounded globe or subject of bios rather than zoe, all those features that one might wish to criticize in the bio-political global era can only be confronted by a nonglobal temporality and counter-ethics.

Second, it follows that far from being an ecological figure that will save us from the ravages of globalism, subjectivism and bio-politics, it is the image of the globe that lies at the center of an anthropocentric imaginary that is intrinsically suicidal. Of course, extinction and annihilation lie at the heart of all life. But accelerated and self-witnessing extinction can only be achieved by a global animal, a 'man' whose desire for survival and mastery is so frenzied that he consumes his own milieu. And he does so because his milieu is a globe. If, as recent 'returns' to phenomenology insist, the thinking and living being always has a world, and if that world is always a world of meaning—defined in terms of potentialities and the organism's timeline—then we are truly global. We are bounded by our own living form, with a world of our own folded around our sensory-motor apparatus (Thomson 2007). But does not the phenomenon of a violent, life-annihilating and globe-destroying globalism present us with another possibility? Perhaps what we need is a zoopolitics: not a lament for the ways in which politics has taken hold of human populations as mere life, but a critique of the ways in which political thinking remains human all too human—repressing the utter contingency of life by insisting on the meaning and form of bios. Rather than criticize biopolitical modernity for rendering mere life as formless, calculative, and void of meaning and mindful creativity, we should cast *both* bios and zoe on the side of figural lures, and strive to think beyond all forms of life.  That is, bio-politics ought to be criticized *not* for seizing upon bare or mere life—*not* for forgetting the human forming power that enables politics, not for regarding man as bios rather than zoe. Rather, the biopolitics that is hysterically and morally regarded as destructive of well-bounded life would still be captured by bios, by the good form of self-producing man and would be better directed towards forces beyond the human, beyond the organism and beyond the globe. The globe or earth as the planet that was blessed with the contingency of life, including the human species whose global imagination has done so much to create destructive systems beyond its own power and comprehension, cannot be saved. Insofar as it is imagined as a globe or living whole with its own order and proper potentiality that might be restored, the earth will continue to be sacrificed to the blindness of an organic thinking that can only insist upon its own self-evident value.

One final feature of globalism that needs to be noted, and that might suggest a new counter-global temporality is that of information. There is no public sphere, no bordered polis in which circulating data may be reflected upon, and incorporated; there is no transcendental and procedural ideal of consensus that would emerge as an aspect of an all encompassing life-world. According to Habermas, and other theorists of discourse theory, insofar as one speaks or even insofar as one claims to know, an intersubjective claim is presupposed (Habermas 1991, 378); it would be a performative contradiction to say something that one did not also claim to be true (Apel 2001, 47). Insofar as one speaks one is already with an ideal domain of recognition that is procedurally, if not actually, intersubjective and global. But the actual fact of globalism destroys global inclusion, consensus and recognition. There is a glut of speech and a deficit of both recognition and the demand for recognition. The more global citizens seek and demand inclusion the less attention and media space becomes available: every tweet, blog, Facebook post and text message places more and more pressure on the bloated domain of available consumable information. Individual speech acts are not fragments of one grand communicating globe; rather, the excess of production is utterly destructive of any possibility of (even ideal) reception. Indeed, it is the surfeit of information, especially information regarding the limits of the globe (such as data about global warming, resource depletion, new speeds of viral mutation, terrorist cells without traceable command centers) that requires a micro-politics (if that term could be freed from the notion of a polis) and demands some mode of schizo-analysis. The latter would refer to a tracking of splits in forces, of divergent systems and incongruous fields. One may never free oneself from the figure of the globe, or even the globe as the notion of *figure—*the notion that 'we' give a world to ourselves through our own recuperating imagination. But if the present has the capacity to teach us anything it may be this: only a shattering of the globe, with an attention to forces that resist recuperation, incorporation and comprehension—forces that operate beyond intentionality and synthesis—only this radical destruction can save us from ourselves.

#### *Notes*

#### *Chapter 4*

# **Earth Felt the Wound: The Affective Divide**

We are suffering, today—here and now—from hyper-hypo-affective disorder. We appear to be consuming nothing other than affects; even the supposed material needs of life—food, sex, sociality—are now marketed affectively. Branding relies on irrational attachments or 'lovemarks,'1 while politics trades in terror and resentment. Affects themselves are marketed: one can purchase games of horror or disgust, and even the purchase of a cup of coffee is perhaps undertaken less for the sake of the caffeine stimulant and more for the Starbucks affect.2 This is what led Michael Hardt to theorize a new era of affective labor.3 But this over-consumption and boom of marketable affects is accompanied by affect fatigue, as though there were an inverse relation between the wider and wider *extension* of affective influx and the ever-diminishing *intensity* of affect. It is not surprising then that cultural diagnoses of the present observe two seemingly incompatible catastrophic tendencies: a loss of cognitive or analytic apparatuses in the face of a culture of affective immediacy, and yet a certain deadening of the human organism (ranging from Walter Benjamin's observation of an absence of experience in an information age to Fredric Jameson's claim for a 'waning of affect' in a world of over-stimulation, in which there is no longer a distinction between experiencing subject and external object, no other person, for whom one might feel empathy4 ).

On the one hand there is a widespread consensus and diagnosis that the human sensory motor apparatus has departed from an informationalcognitive or even image-based mode of immaterial consumption to one of affect. (Such a turn to affect has been both lamented and celebrated, seen either as a retreat from judgment *or* as a liberation from overly calculative modes of reason.) N. Katherine Hayles has referred to a shift from deep attention to hyper attention (2007). Bernard Stiegler, working critically from Hayles, has diagnosed a widespread cultural attention deficit disorder. He rejects Hayles's suggestion that this shift or loss might be ameliorated by different pedagogic strategies; more is required than—as Hayles proposes—simply intertwining Faulkner with computer games. Stiegler places the turn to mere stimulus within a broader *fault* or potential deficit of the human brain, which has always required (and yet been threatened by) inscriptive technologies that extend its range beyond its organic boundaries. For Stiegler, the loss of deep attention is also an atrophy of trans-individual networks: the script technologies that had always supplemented the brain's power and had also always threatened to weaken that power through externalization and alienation reach new levels of risk. Without extended circuits connecting the reading-writing brain to logics not its own we face the perils of a new infantilism (Stiegler 2009). *Techne*, for Stiegler, no longer opens the brain onto broader circuits but produces short-circuits. Flickering screens now leave the eyebrain within itself. In a more popular mode, closer to the more panicked tones of Nicholas Carr's *In the Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains* (2010), Susan Greenfield (2008) argues that we are no longer developing the neural networks or habits that allow us to read with a connecting grammar. We are more oriented to the flashing stimuli of detached intensities, not so much meaning as sensation. In a contrasting celebratory mode Mark Hansen, whose signature maneuver has been one of returning texts to lived bodies ('correcting' Deleuze by way of Bergson, 'correcting' Stiegler by way of Husserl), argues that digital media's simulation of faces has the direct affect of re-engaging the viewer—consumer's emotive responses thereby redeeming art history and 'high theory' from the errors of its inhuman ways:

 Insofar as the confrontation with the DFI functions by triggering affectivity as, precisely, a faculty of embodied heterogenesis, it operates a transfer of affective power from the image to the body. Instead of a static dimension or element intrinsic to the image, affectivity thereby becomes the very medium of interface with the image. What this means is that affectivity actualizes the potential of the image at the same time as it virtualizes the body: the crucial element is neither image nor body alone, but the dynamical interaction between them. As the digital artworks discussed at the end of this article propose, if we can allow the computer to impact our embodied affectivity directly, our communication and our coevolution with the computer—and along with it visual culture more generally—will enter a truly new, 'post-imagistic' phase.5

Before we launch into too simplistic a notion of a historical break or fall into a myopic culture of affect we need to note that there has always been an affective component of cultural production, and that this has always been acknowledged and theorized (going back to the 'doctrine of affects' [Lenneberg 1958]). It would be more accurate to say that we are witnessing a shift in the cultural dominant. Just as the affective component of cultural production has always been present, so has a suspicion or denigration of the *merely* felt. The anxiety regarding a dominance of the merely affective or visually captivating in the face of a weakening of cognition has often been tied to a concern regarding the externality of technological and mnemonic devices that supposedly deflect the brain from its proper potentiality. There have always been fears regarding the capacity for technology to weaken cognition, reducing the brain to mere automaton of stimulus interface. This is why Stiegler's reading of the history of techne as *pharmacological* is so important: he neither simply adopts Derrida's history of metaphysics in which writing technologies have always been unjustifiably purged as parasitic, nor celebrates a posthuman digital culture in which illusions of the brain's autonomy would have been overcome. For Stiegler, any brain-extending system, including the brain's own mnemic networks, at once enables more complex relations *and* precludes the brain from ever having a law or propriety of its own. What Stiegler laments is not alienation, technology and loss of internal integrity per se, but the historical loss of *individuation* where systems would not be general and mechanistic but would enable 'a' singular time to be read for all time. It is not technology's takeover Stiegler laments so much as its reduction to localized stimuli at the expense of broader and more complex circuits, not so much the liberation or tyranny of digital culture as its over-simplification. To read Plato's dialogues, Stiegler argues, requires a highly sophisticated writing-reading system that enables a sense to be intuited that is not that of my present world, and that also allows something like 'a' Plato to be reactivated by future generations (generations who can nevertheless read a past time for the present). What the present threatens to do is break those very individuating modes of reading that have created the circuits that have taken individuals beyond the range of their own isolated psyches. This is why, perhaps, Stiegler attributes an individuating potential to social networking sites, such as *Facebook* (Stiegler 2010, 134)*. Here,* the screen I encounter is not a simply stimulating prompt for rule-bound response but an opening to other speeds and networks.

So while it would be too simplistic to create a pure divide between cognition and affect, and similarly inadequate to posit a straightforward historical break between an early era of slow reading and a present of immediate reactions, it is possible to notice within *any* artwork two tendencies or temporal economies: the connective delays of cognition versus the immediacy of affective stimulus. There is nevertheless, today, a contraction or weakening of grammars and syntaxes of cognition in the face of the instant gratification of affects. Computer games, and the cinematic and tele-visual cultural products that are inflected by game culture may have narrative and teleological components, but the dominant experience is that of intensities. A culture of shock and awe allows us to sit before a screen and enjoy the affects of horror, terror, mourning, desire, disgust, fear and excitement without *sense.* This has been one of the long running criticisms of the visual temporality of pornography, in which bodies and movements are displayed without any narrative framing, and certainly without the individuating temporal circuits of care that Stiegler regards as crucial for modes of becoming that would not weaken the human psychic apparatus. The distinction between cognitive-semantic and affective-stimulant aesthetic modes is not purely historical and operates in any recognition of an artwork *as art* or any text as true. Approaching a text as art requires that it become detached from its functional or communicational mode, at the very least allowed to survive in part as some sort of material monument. *The Prelude,* while perfectly capable of being translated can nevertheless never be fully translated without remainder. By contrast, a formal equation *if true* can be true only if its sense can be circulated regardless of its mode of inscription or articulation. If a text were to offer itself as 'pure' truth then its affective dimension, though possibly present, would (or should) be immaterial; by contrast, if one grants an object the status of *art* then one attributes some monumental quality to its materiality, some sense of an affective component that is that of the art object itself.

This dependence of artworks on an autonomous materiality that is essential to the work (whereas pure cognition or logic would aim to be 'substrate neutral') would still apply to digital or mass-produced media, for it is digital culture that manages to create an infinitely divisible matter*.* The digital codes that enable the continual repetition of a materiality, such as a sound, color or text generated by codes, may be purely formal and substrate neutral, but the outcome of digitalization is the capacity to reproduce matters without any loss or division of the original. It is the clarity of color, sound or resolution that gives digital culture its force, intensifying the capacity to experience sensible qualities in the way that it was once able to transfer semantic content alone. Digital culture could therefore be *either* purely formal and cognitive, with the manipulation of digits and empty variables, *or* predominantly affective with digital technologies enabling the simulation of stimulating matters. What is significant is digital culture's tendency towards a far more strict retraction to the digit or the circulating unit: even when visual culture is not digital in the sense of being digitally rendered into codes for computer replication, there can be a restriction of attention to the already established digits or units of communication. If one laments the waning of a culture of reading and the loss of deep attention in favor of hyper-attention then this may also count as a mourning for analog modes of reading, whereby there was not a direct passage or translation between stimulus and response but a delay in assessing what counted as a unit of information or input. The very history and possibility of reading relies on a complex relation between digital and analog. All reading operates by way of digitalization, or—as Bergson noted—a capacity to reduce differential complexity to already established units of recognition; without that reduction of differential complexity perception would be paralyzed precisely because the influx of intensity would be too complex to master or recognize (Bergson 1912). Concepts enable generality and reduce the experienced world to recognizable form to enable action: the simpler the digit, the higher the speed, and therefore the greater the efficiency. What appears to be operating today is a high degree of digital distinction and accuracy, precluding the need for interpretive delays. Digital culture would include not only computer digitalization in the narrow sense, but a culture of speeds whereby stimulus circulates without translation or transfer, where there is a single circuit of relay. This would begin to explain why attention deficit is actually the need for *more* stimulus—precisely because there is increasingly less delay or depth that requires decoding. We are at one and the same time constantly bombarded with new intensities, and yet the simplicity of the codings enables quick consumption, and then the demand for more.

The various diagnoses of attention deficit, which descry an over-consumption of affect, often rely upon a historical narrative regarding the dialectic between cognition (or reading *as*) and affective pleasure (or stimulant vision). The eye-brain is abandoning or self-extinguishing one of its evolved powers, and one sees this exhaustion of the power of *sense* and the hypertrophy of sensation not just in the proliferation of new media but in the invasion of new media speeds into traditional media.

Non-digital forms of production are altered, now, by digital speeds; 'high-brow' novels (such as David Mitchell's *Cloud Atlas*) are composed from bite-sized chunks assembled to yield multiple and dispersed viewpoints. Even seemingly slow and manifestly human-centered cultural productions, such as the unstructured reality television events of *Big Brother* or *Jersey Shore,* rely not on plotting and character development so much as the capacity to pick up or leave the screen at any point. Such works are unsigned or devoid of sense precisely insofar as they are less events of production, created to stand alone or possess a certain force, as events of consumptive immediacy: the camera simply takes up whatever is there to be passed on and viewed. It would be too easy and inaccurate to align cinema and television with immediacy and stimulus, and reading with grammar and deep attention. Cinema and visual culture can be both narrative-semantic and stimulant-affective, just as literary forms can start to emphasize episodic affects rather than narrative coherence. Perhaps the success of *Fifty Shades of Grey* lies both in its claim to be erotica, offering sexual stimulus, and in its repetitive and episodic form—small chapters that repeat phrases and described affects. (There is, of course a distinction between stimulus and affect: the former is neutral and presemantic, and could either be read as information or merely felt. But affect is often associated with the merely, solely or simply felt as though it were only stimulus; this conflation is at the heart of hyper-hypo affective disorder. For if affect could be distinguished from cognition and yet still have a non-informational or non-semantic sense then one might find a way of overcoming the deep mourning for a culture of meaning and deep attention without celebrating the brain's self-extinction. That is, there might be something like affect that would *not* be feeling, and that would not be reducible to the organism's stimulation. Something of this isolation of affect is being sought, I would suggest, in Deleuze and Guattari's (1994) idea of art as the production of affects that stand alone.)

Any historical divide or paradigm break can be intuited only by distinguishing tendencies within mixtures; there are no hard and fast lines, but there are dominants and distinct inflections. The capacity to reflect upon the relation between felt stimulus and conceptual order was long ago placed within the artwork in Kant's aesthetic: one feels the influx of sensation but not as bodily pathos. Rather, it is because the sensations are not yet conceptualized, and yet conducive to conceptualization or thinking, that the subject feels her own forming power. This feeling is not pathological—not a bodily sensation, and not emotion—but the feeling of the relation between the world that is given in sensations, and the subject's capacity to synthesize sensations. Lyotard, writing on Kant, referred to this process as tautegorical: it is not the imposition of the subject's categories, but the subject feeling itself feeling: 'Tautegorical: this is judged absolutely great because the thought that judges this feels itself to be great absolutely' (Lyotard 1994, 81). The feeling is not individual, but individuating, for it gives me a sense of myself as a forming power, as capable of being a subject. The experience of beauty is the experience of that which ought to find its way to some communicable sense, not the sense of what this object *is,* but a sense of how this sensation *would feel—sensus communis.* The Kantian concept of *sensus communis* anticipates what Stiegler (following Simondon) refers to as trans-individuation: technologies create networks that allow the reading-viewing brain to be invaded and constituted by signatures and speeds not its own. For Stiegler selves develop through the memory systems that at once expand circuits of thought beyond any individual brain and body, even though those very same technologies that inscribe a supra-individual circuit of thinking and reflecting may—as in the case of modern media technologies—become short-circuited, reducing the cognitive and affective range of the embodied brain. What is important in Stiegler's critique of current media technologies is that he regards media in all its sense not so much as mediation, or the means through which thought is communicated, but as constitution: selves thing, live, feel and remember through the inscriptive and affective networks of their time and milieu. For Stiegler affective force and range is diminished the more bodies are turned back and inward upon sensation and stimulus.

Closer to the Kantian legacy there has been an art-critical tradition of considering affect not as bodily feeling but as the sense of a work, where sense is an orientation prompted by perceived relations. What this implies is that viewed objects, or relations of viewing, have distinct promissory temporalities: reflective judgment, enabled by art, offers the sense of a feeling of humanity in general, what 'one' would feel. It is in this tradition that Deleuze draws upon Worringer's (1953) art-historical work to place the relation between cognition and affect within art history: early art is geometrically abstract, giving order to the world; but this is superseded by empathy or the depiction of organic forms that one might perceive and feel. Deleuze then places this historical problem *within* the work of Francis Bacon: how can one paint the body not as an organism one *feels* but as a figure emerging from forces not its own?  The eye becomes organized as a reading and memory machine:

the voice no longer sings but dictates, decrees; the graphy no longer dances, it ceases to animate bodies, but is set into writing on tablets, stones, and books; the eye sets itself to reading. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 223)

This formation of the reading eye occurs also as the organization of the body, which becomes an organism in which seeing, hearing, speaking and touching all fold in on the private body who can now view the world as a single matter determined from 'a' point of order. (This organization is an event of deterritorialization, for a term outside the system of relations now determines relations from some privileged point).

With that Deleuzo-Guattarian work in the background it is not surprising that there has been a celebration of affect, as though affect would release us from the 'despotism of the signifier' (or, more broadly, the tyranny of Cartesian and computational paradigms). And yet it is the event of privatization, with forces or pure predicates being referred back to the single organizing living body that is celebrated by the 'affective turn.' Much of what passes as Deleuzian inflected theory champions precisely what Deleuze and Guattari's projected future would go beyond. While Deleuze and Guattari chart the genesis of the organized body from affects, and then describe the organization of those affects (now as lived) by way of the unified organism of the man of reason, this does not imply that they want to return to the site of genesis, return to the embodied lived affect that has been alienated by the axiomatics of the single system of capital. On the contrary, the problem of affect—the *truth of affect, which would be something like force as such—*cannot be retrieved by a return to the body. Rather, for Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is not axiomatic enough, not inhuman enough. It suffers from an anthropomorphism that can also be tied to contemporary hyper-hypo-affective disorder. Capitalism, if pushed to its maximum potential or 'nth' power, would open the relations among forces to produce multiple differential quantities. As long as everything is organized according to consumption and production (in terms of the digits of the private organism) the potential for forces to be produced—such as affects—will always be grounded upon affections. The visual production of the affect of horror or terror will be oriented to horrifying or terrorizing (as in many horror films or political campaigns). As long as affects are confused with affections, or feelings of the lived body, then nothing will ever be felt; the body will only re-live itself.

An element that has always been present in any work—the degree of lived bodily stimulus—has now become the focus not only of consumption and production but also of criticism and 'theory.' The 'affective turn' accounts for the emergence of language, music, morality and art in general by referring to the lived body's desire for self-maintenance. (In a similar manner the ethical turn was also a turn *back* to social relations, feelings and duties: and we might ask why this turn back occurs just as humanity is facing a world where there may be an *un-lived*?) Deleuze and Guattari offer a complex history of the relation between brain, body, intellect and affect, and follow Bergson in arguing for a history of thought's different powers, with technologies of concepts and artistic methods allowing at once for organic *unity* (the sensory motor apparatus that reduced all to efficiency) *and* for another tendency to think time as such or difference as such. Concepts, for example, reduce complex differences to generalities so that thinking can proceed efficiently, in the service of action. But there could also be concepts that destroyed expediency and action—such as the concepts of justice, democracy, humanity—but that opened thinking to a future. What might justice be? The same might be said of affects: it would only be by destroying affections the ready and easy responses craved by our habituated bodies—that one might enable affects. If Deleuze's work has seemed to license a return to lived and bodily affections this should alert us to the constant tendency for relapse and re-territorialization in the brain's relation to its world. Deleuze and Guattari were critical of a historical tendency of paranoid capitalism: the tendency to read all events through the scheme of the individual set over and against of world of differences that can be felt and lived as his own. Any supposed private affection, they argued—including parental love—opens up to all of history, and ultimately the 'intense germinal influx.' We need to turn back from organized units and feelings, not to the lived body, but to the quantities and relations of forces from which identifiable bodies and sentiments emerge. The mother arrives as already organized, racialized and historicized, and (similarly) the love between any couple carries all of history and politics with it. In the beginning, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is not the body and its affections, but the affect. There is the force of knife and flesh, or the dazzling light of the screen; bodies become organisms through the affections composed from these potentialities.

So what can we say about both the 'affective turn' in theory, and the addiction to affections at the expense of affect, especially if we do not want to fall too easily into a joyful historical break or mournful nostalgia?

It is not new to diagnose an epoch. Freud placed modernity at the neurotic end of the spectrum, suggesting that an over-fixation on symptomatic displacements needed some release. Our desires, he suggested, did require some form of social organization for the sake of civilization, but with the stringent requirement to love all of humanity it would not be surprising if aggression would then be unleashed in the form of total war. For Freud, culture had become overly neurotic, investing unreasonably in what (for Freud at least) was a dispassionate (inhuman or overly ideal) figure of humanity. Today, we might think the pathology of collective desire differently. Perhaps we have swung towards psychosis—not so much tied to libidinal containment and repression as lacking all sense of order, generality, universality or transcendence. If Deleuze and Guattari appealed to schizophrenia they did so against what they saw as the paranoia of modern capitalism—the over-attachment to a single system in which any event or affect would be the sign *of* one single system of life, a life that becomes nothing other than the interaction and exchange of quantifiable force (a simple digitalism of a single axiomatic). Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis would split or de-synthesize forces, not reducing all flows to a single system of exchange. And this splitting would give force a 'stand-alone' quantity, creating it neither as felt-stimulus *nor* recognized generality. It would short-circuit hyper-hypo affective disorder: the over-stimulated appetite for consuming affects alongside the hypertrophy of the capacity to think affectively. Whereas affect-empathy and abstraction-cognition have been noted as opposing historical and formal tendencies, the present's diagnosed retreat into affect-sensation evidences not a tipping into one of these modes or the other but their indistinction; it is as though there can be no abstract conceptual thinking that is not confused by 'feelings,' and no experiencing of affects that is not already generalized or pre-marketed and 'branded.' So we need to note first that there is a growing market in pre-packaged, already-consumedconsumable affections. And yet it is for this reason that there is no affect.

We need, I would suggest, a far more nuanced understanding of affect that distinguishes it from affections. If art and art theory have always had some orientation or sense of affect this was never that of a simple bodily response or lived feeling; what was attended to was not an affection but a force that *would yield* an affection. Affects would be 'stand alone' powers, possessing a certain autonomy. One would need to distinguish affect such as the terror of tragedy—from the affection of being terrified, and these tendencies would have different temporalities. Affect would have to do with the artwork's capacity to create circuits of force beyond the viewer's own organic networks.

The notion of the autonomy of affect—or affect being corporeal but non-cognitive—was theorized by Brian Massumi, who argued for a range of bodily responses that bypassed conceptual or emotional sense (Massumi 1995). Antonio Damasio (2000) also argues that there is, in addition to the feeling of what happens in the body, another dimension of the organism's response that is not attended to. For Damasio this unattended proto-self is the ground and condition for the more conscious self, while for Massumi this non-cognitive dimension has a political force that needs to be considered today precisely because it is barely registered. But we might, given the contradictory celebratory turn to affect, alongside the mourning of the human loss of more sophisticated responses, want to ask about the contemporary specificity of this range of the non-cognitive affective body. If we are suffering from hyper-affective disorder this is because a potentiality of the body for undergoing stimulus but without conceptuality and attention is now no longer a background condition but accounts for the desiring structures of contemporary culture *tout court*. The social and political organization of bodies does not occur by way of ideas or beliefs—the imposition of semantic content or structure—but by way of affective addiction, either to the diverting stimuli of personal screens and headphones, or to the bodily stimulants of caffeine, sugar, tobacco or other widely ingested and publicly legitimated substances. If the constitutive human condition was once deemed to be *Angst*—a sense *that* there might be some event, without any fleshing out of just *what* that event would be—or if the dominant mode of politico-economic affect was once that of speculation (a paranoid control of all events into a single system [Colebrook 2012B]), then we can observe a new and possibly posthuman affective order. Rather than *Angst,* or the channeling of attention and investment into an overly mapped and determined future, we have perhaps become psychotically detached from any object domain, 'experiencing' the immediacy of affects without any sense that we are being affected by a world of which sensations would be signs. We may well be in an era of a new self-enclosed narcissism, each 'individual' being nothing more than a privatized bubble of instantaneous intensities.

Or, more accurately, rather than lamenting a narcissistic enclosure, what might be wanting would be narcissism: we are no longer entranced or motivated by a better image of ourselves. There is an absence of selfimage, a supposed liberation from the figure of myself as a beautiful or worthy 'member of humanity;' yet it is just such an image that would release me from being driven by the immediacy of sensations. (Is not the popular refusal of stereotypes, along with a certain academic critique of normativity as repressively normalizing, indicative of a refusal of anything other than the self as pure performance, an affirmation of active immediacy and a horror of any element that would not be included in the dynamism of life that is always already the self 's own?) Many of the celebrations of affect today, directed as they are against the linguistic paradigm or intellectualist or Cartesian accounts of the self, valorize a model of life in which the self is not really a self at all. There is not an enclosed individual who then represents the world; in the beginning is the relation or affect, from which some relatively stable responsive center emerges. Jeremy Rivkin argues not only that we are presently driven by affect and that affective bonds precede the formation of individuals and competitive aggression but that empathy is the human civilizing drive *tout court* (2009)*.* Antonio Damasio, along with Joseph LeDoux (1996) and Maturana and Varela (1987)—and many supposed Deleuzians continuing their emphasis on embodiment and living systems—have turned theory and analysis away from the cognitive, conceptual or reflective dimensions of experience towards embodied, distributed and autopoietic selves. Damasio argues that the background self is largely unnoticed, and that 'Descartes' error' consisted in taking the fragment of the responsive self that came to attention as some sort of center or representing 'theatre.' Maturana and Varela, insisting on the embodied nature of the mind, reject the notion of 'a' world that would then be pictured or known by a distinct self. There is no world in general, no subject in itself; the world is always given *for* this or that living system and *as* this domain or horizon of possible affects to which bodies would respond. The Cartesian subject is not only a philosophical error; it is embedded in a tradition of Western individualism in which minds are set over against a world that they quantify and master. A more mindful tradition, closer to Buddhist models of selflessness, would not only be more correct, but may help us in domains as diverse as artificial intelligence and management studies (Flanagan 2007).

All these turns in theory are, I would suggest, *both* expressive of and reactions against hyper-hypo affective disorder. That is, it is precisely at the point at which we have become glutted with affect—so consuming of affects in a blind and frenzied manner—that theory insists upon the intelligence and profundity of affect. This complex reaction formation is similar to the three sides of the obesity epidemic: we stuff ourselves full of food at indiscriminate speeds, cannot taste or discern anything outside its pre-branding (for we have to be alerted to a food being 'chicken-flavored') and yet all this is accompanied by a new genre of food porn: master chef competitions, the spectacle of celebrity chefs, restaurant menus that require literary criticism and the migration of artful food depictions from the genre of still life to advertising. Similarly, we gorge on affections yet cannot get the sense of any affect, and all the while live in an age of theory that wallows in the autonomy of affect. Whether we regard the predominantly affective self as a loss of a subject whose identity would yield greater social responsibility and awareness (mourning cognition and grammar in the widespread loss of attention), or whether we see the Cartesian tradition as something better left behind, there seems to be agreement that there has been some affective turn (Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Clough and Halley 2007). This occurs not only at the level of theory, where we recognize the error of the linguistic paradigm or the cognitive or computational models of the self; it also occurs in a widespread shift in perceptual mechanisms and relations.

It is possible to say that that we are indulging in affective over-consumption and that cinematic and marketing devices have responded by remaining constantly innovative: the genre of 'torture porn' both reflects and reflects upon this hyper-affective addiction trend. On the other hand, if it is possible to note a deterioration of the traditionally bounded and individuated subject, alongside an atrophy of the narrative or novelistic imagination of a life lived as a trajectory towards wholeness, recognition and social meaning—whereby I consider myself from the point of view of the better self I would like others to see me as being—it is also possible to note a contrary tendency towards waning of affect. I would, though, want to give this notion of affective hypertrophy a different inflection from Fredric Jameson's criticism of a postmodern subject who, deprived of historical connectedness and any broad political sense, becomes nothing more than a schizoid field of intensities, caring little about social trajectories or class consciousness ( Jameson 1991). In many respects hypo-affective disorder occurs alongside a strongly informational, if not narrative, attentiveness. There is no shortage of information about the dire threats posed not only to the future of the human species, but also to the current financial, ecological, political and bureaucratic systems upon which present generations rely in order to survive. Predictions regarding catastrophic economic disorder, imminent resource depletion, viral devastation, chemical warfare, bio-terrorism, rogue states in possession of nuclear weapons or unforeseen disasters brought about by various genetic technologies seem to have had little effect on behavior and decision making *despite* their widespread narration and imaginative rehearsal. In addition to explicit thought experiments such as Alan Weisman's *World Without Us* or the television series *Life Without Humans,*  or one-off documentaries such as *Aftermath,* cinema of the last decade has intensified and multiplied a long-standing tradition of disaster epics entertaining the possibility of the annihilation of the species. Whereas these were once imagined as exogenous events (usually the invasion of alien species), climate change and viral threats now dominate the cinematic imaginary. Novels such as McCarthy's *The Road* or Atwood's *Oryx and Crake* begin in a world in which devastation has occurred; just what event led to such a situation can quite easily remain unstated precisely because the idea of a near-posthuman world is today utterly plausible. To call such novels or films post-apocalyptic misses their significance, for there is not only no apocalyptic revelation or dramatic disclosure, there is also no real sense that there need be a radical intrusion or disturbance for such worlds of depletion and posthumanity to appear. Yet, despite all this information and narrative entertainment regarding humanity's probable end, there is neither panic nor any apparent affective comportment that would indicate that anyone really feels or fears the sense of the end. Climate change denial is one thing, and possibly more rational than climate change awareness coupled with minor delusory negotiations (such as cap and trade, mitigation, adaptation or any of the other bargaining strategies).

The affective turn is not then a solely academic or theoretical correction to the supposed linguistic paradigm of high theory; it is also a pathology of the populace (which is certainly not a polity, for it has nothing to do with bodies assembling to speak, deliberate and communicate in common). There is a passion for affective consumption that is *extensive*—more affective input please!!!—but inversely devoid of *intensity*. There is nothing effective or affective about affections; and this includes the fact that we constantly remind ourselves of the primacy of the affective and insist that in the beginning is the emotive attachment, and then proceed to act as if the same old cognitive rules applied. We recognize our affective core, repair our theory and then proceed with argument as usual. Our response tends to be pharmaceutical rather than pharmakological: that is, just as we deal with ADD by providing the brain with chemical stimulus (because ADD sufferers fail to focus because nothing is stimulating enough) so we have dealt with our affective hypertrophy (our inability to sense) by over-consuming and over-producing affects.

How then might we assess the seeming dominance of or addiction to the intensities of affect—including the direct marketing of affects in 'feel good' experiences or the horrors of torture porn—alongside the no less apparent atrophy of affective response to an overload of information regarding genuine threats to organic life? Perhaps the way in which affect itself has been theorized might indicate a peculiar structure that would go some way to accounting for this divide.

What if the *concept* of affect were potentially a formation that would shatter the organism's emotive enclosure?

It is possible to see affect as a *concept* in Deleuze and Guattari's sense: it would not be extensive—referring to an already lived and actualized set of phenomena—but would be intensive, creating new relations and lines of thought, opening different mappings or potentials among what is, what is lived, and what might be thought. Affect can be thought of *not*  as the influx of sensation that prompts response or engagement, for it is in the *not acting*, or in the receptivity without responsiveness or relation that affect occurs. Affect becomes a genuine concept when it poses the possibility of thinking the delay or interval between the organism as a sensory-motor apparatus and the world that is (at least intellectually) mapped according to its own measure. If we do tend to conflate affect with emotion—if we do not mark a distinction between the feeling of what happens and a whole domain of pulsations and fluxes beyond the perceptions of the organism—then this is symptomatic of the tendency to reduce the force of concepts to the lived. And is it surprising that the concept of affect with its potential for thinking of forces detached from the lived, from the organism's responses, from feeling and from emotion would be reduced to an association with thoroughly humanized notions of meaning?

Such problems are particularly important today when the distinction between affect and emotion may go some way to allowing us to envisage life beyond the organism. For it is life beyond the organism—both an actual world in which organic life has been extinguished and a virtual world of potentialities that are not lived—that has become increasingly unthinkable. Such a world may exist (dimly) at the level of affect but not at the level of feeling and the lived. On the contrary, what is presented as potential affect (a world without us) is reduced to affections—feelings of horror that are resolved ultimately as redemption narratives. That is, there is an industry today built on the affective lure of humanity's and possibly life's non-existence: this would include high culture installation pieces that feature machines, mechanized robotic humanoids, lost objects and automated sound productions (something like Thomas Mann's camera without person at the end of *Death in Venice*) to popular visions of a life without humans, such as the sublime opening scene of Danny Boyle's *28 Days Later* of 2002 (or the conclusion of Matt Reeve's *Cloverfield* (2008) (where a supposed department of defense filming of the last humans to have suffered from a violent viral intrusion plays out to the film's end)*.*  There is a widespread circulation of the image of life without life, of witnessing without vision. Or, at least, one might begin to note that there is a disjunction between affect and the lived and that what might at first appear to be differences in degree—such that affect would be a response in the body's systems that would only partly be lived or felt—might eventually become a difference in kind, such that there would be affects that 'stand alone.' Now might be the time to begin considering affect not as the base or ground from which cognition has been abstracted, nor as a primarily embodied and *barely lived* near phenomenon, differing in its intensity from fully fledged and conceptualized experience, but as a power or force with a tendency to persist or endure.

When Brian Massumi wrote about the autonomy of affect he was referring to somatic responses that not only exceeded the cognitive but also the level of feeling and emotion. (His examples included a melting snowman and President Reagan. Images of both produced bodily responses that could not be mapped onto cognitive values of affirmation or negation, and were not felt as emotions that would then prompt action or belief. In the case of the melting snowman, the children who reported on their felt responses were at odds with their bodily responses; what they described as memorable and pleasant was—when measured physiologically by heart-rate and galvanic skin activity—of a certain intensity rather than to do with content).

[T]he primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between *content* and *effect:* it would appear that the strength or duration of an image's effect is not logically connected to the content in any straightforward way. This is not to say that there is no connection and no logic. What is meant here by the content of the image is its indexing to conventional meanings in an intersubjective context, its socio-linguistic qualification. This indexing fixes the *quality* of the image; the strength or duration of the image's effect could be called its *intensity.*  What comes out here is that there is no correspondence or conformity between quality and intensity. If there is a relation, it is of another nature. (Massumi 1995, 84-85)

The disjunction between quality and intensity may, in the case I would like to conclude by considering, be one of disjunction or reaction formation. That is, the higher the degree of threat to the organism, the more the quality of affect is that of terror or sublime annihilation, the more disengaged the intensity appears to be. 'We' late near-extinction humans appear to be addicted to witnessing annihilation, to the *feeling* of near-death or posthuman existence, and yet have no intensity: it does not prompt us either to action or to any sense of what a posthuman world would be. On the contrary, the more evidence, imagery, feeling and 'experience' of a world without humans is displayed, the less affect or intensity occurs.

In fact, both theory and experience become increasingly organic: with thinkers ranging from Maturana and Varela, to philosophers such as Evan Thompson and Andy Clark insisting that the world we are given is exhausted by the world as felt or lived (Clark 2003; Thompson 2007). 'We' are now living a world of popular, academic and 'high' culture in which scenes of human and organic annihilation are repeatedly and obsessively lived, and yet at the cognitive level we continue to affirm the primacy of the world for the embodied, emotional and living organism. Man is no longer *homo economicus* or *homo faber*, defined by enterprising activity or production, but by feeling. What is occluded is the *unlived*, that which occurs both at the level of somatic responses that fail to be registered (other than by their negation at the level of reaction formation, with the shrill affirmation of emotion). What is also occluded is what Deleuze and Guattari theorized in *What is Philosophy?* as the definitive capacity of art—an art that occurs outside the human and beyond the organism: affects stand alone, exist in themselves and cannot be reduced to the lived.

On the one hand this appears to be an example of a privilege accorded to high modernist aesthetics, in the assumption of an art object that breaks with the bourgeois banalities of consumption and enjoyment. On the other hand, though, there is a sense in which Deleuze and Guattari's distinction among art, philosophy and science—and, in turn, their geneses of these potentialities outside the organism—also breaks with the high modernist aesthetic of art as cultural revivification. That is, if modernism separated the art object from feeling and emotion in order to break with social codes and conventions of consumption, it nevertheless re-humanized or re-vitalized affect: that is, art restored *thinking to life and returned life to thinking*. There was a sense that critical art might return thinking to the sense of *its* own emergence. A debased form of this aesthetic occurs today with many of the wars on the banality of images (including the myriad of denunciations of the internet or mass media as dehumanizing—for such denunciations seek to restore individual perception, autonomy and feeling).

What Deleuze and Guattari suggest in all three of their potentialities for thinking—creation of concepts in philosophy, of functions in science, and affects and percepts in art—is a locus of production outside the organism and outside the lived. Brian Massumi, separating intensity from quality, nevertheless located affect entirely within the living system:

Both levels, qualification and intensity, are immediately embodied. Intensity is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin-at the surface of the body, at its interface with things. Depth reactions belong more to the form/content (qualification) level, even though they also involve autonomic functions such as heartbeat and breathing. The reason may be that they are associated with expectation, which depends on consciously positioning oneself in a line of narrative continuity.' (Massumi 1995, 85)

For Massumi affect occurs as the *event* or disruption into social coding of the newness of a (not-yet narrated or linear) disturbance.

Deleuze and Guattari, in their chapter on affects and percepts, give a relatively clear instance of the autonomy of percepts—prior not only to human, but also to animal life. They describe the stagemaker bird, organizing coloured leaves to assemble a territory. The bird is only able to move and self-organize because there are expressive matters that enable processes of assembling: in the beginning is neither the doer nor the deed but the matters to be dealt with (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 184). The coloured matters precede and are followed by the bird, with the bird becoming a functional and defined organism through this assemblage of autonomous sensory qualities. When art captures sensations that stand alone—as though the perceptions of organisms would only be possible because of these autonomous potentialities of percepts—then this is relatively easy to understand, as though a Mondrian or Cezanne drew upon, rather than produced, the vibrations of colour. But how could we say the same of affects, render them autonomous, inhuman and inorganic, in a way that would render them distinct from affections?

There is some indication in Deleuze's book on Francis Bacon of how art might capture affect in its autonomy—not simply its distinction from symbolic orders and cognition (as in Massumi) but in its inorganic or incorporeal moment. Deleuze refers to Bacon's painting of the scream not the feeling of horror, felt by the body, but a depiction through the body of the forces that seize it:. Unlike a viewing of *A Nightmare on Elm Street,* the viewer is not horrified—the work does not cause horror—but we are capable, supposedly, of witnessing affect, not as felt or lived but as force beyond the organism and its meaningful responsiveness:

If we scream, it is always as victims of invisible and insensible forces that scramble every spectacle, and that even lie beyond pain and feeling. … Bacon creates the painting of the scream because he establishes a relationship between the visibility of the scream (the open mouth as a shadowy abyss) and invisible forces, which are nothing other than the forces of the future (Deleuze 2005: 43)

But are these forces really affects, or the forces from which affects are composed? And is their depiction by Bacon, via the screaming body, really akin to the pure sensory qualities that we can think of in the use of colours or expressive matters? Some provocation is given by Deleuze's phrase, 'forces of the future,' for it is here that we might think affects beyond the era of humanity, both in traditional modes of literary expression and in recent genre shifts. How are affects created by art if they are not expressions of some artist's or character's psycho-physical organism? How could affects possess that stand-alone inhuman inorganic quality that percepts seem to do when they provide potentials for assemblages (rather than being derived from them)? There would be no easy answers to this problem; it should not be easy to distinguish between art that makes us feel joyous—tapping into our sensory motor apparatus—and art that *is joyous*, that intimates a joy outside humanity and organisms. (What, for example, is trance music: a drugging sound that detaches us from meaning and the traditional temporal lines of chord progression and development, or a physical pulsation that operates directly at the level of sensory motor response rather than thought?)

Canonical literature gives us some indication of an autonomy of created affects that are not those of the organism, as though art could give body to that which exceeds the lived. Adjectives such as Kafka-esque, Dickensian or Lawrentian and Orwellian refer to affective assemblages that are not those of characters. Nor do such affective complexes prompt us to *feel* absurd bureaucratic torpor, oppressive urban paternalism, phallic atavistic passion or nightmarish social surveillance: it as though these worlds offered affects as such, there *to be lived,* as if they existed as potentialities for all time, even if captured through the depiction of a certain time. Such expressions pass into common parlance and refer not to a style of writing so much as the potentiality of that writing to seize on forces that it manages to assemble. If we travel through middle America we might view certain scenes *as if* captured by a David Lynch or Raymond Carver. Beyond canonized art there are today many attempts to capture affects beyond the lived and humanity: books (and television series) such as Alan Weisman's *The World Without Us* or cinematic scenes such as the opening of *28 Days Later,* along with a vast range of unremarkable nature documentaries do not only depict worlds and life beyond humans, but can also suggest (perhaps) a melancholy or joy of a world without living witness. It would be telling, then, in the face of this tendency to imagine or contemplate joys, depressions, horrors and screams outside the lived—and right at the moment of possible human self-annihilation—if *theory* were unable to think affects beyond the lived world of the bounded organism.

#### *Notes*

inward feeling. Fredric Jameson, *Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism* (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) 438.

5. Mark B.N. Hansen, 'Affect as Medium, or the `Digital-Facial-Image'' *Journal of Visual Culture* 2.2 (2003): 205-228, 208.

#### *Chapter 5*

# **Destroying Cosmopolitanism for the Sake of the Cosmos**

What would the value of cosmopolitanism as a concept be? How might it work and what problems might it resolve or transform? Today the term intersects with globalism, offering itself as a mode of connection or collective resistance that would enable a thought of some political totality or 'open whole' irreducible to the forces of the market. The problem appears to be posed, from Kant to the present, as a way of thinking beyond human to human conflict—seeking a higher order beyond interests of individuals and polities.

Cosmopolitanism appears to be a self-evident good: is not the very concept of the good oriented towards that which would be or could be a good for all? Insofar as we rationally will anything at all we seem not only to be claiming something for ourselves as particular persons, but also to be appealing to some ideal or idea as such that could be agreed to by any subject whatever. Cosmopolitanism is at once in line with a purely formal or procedural liberalism, but also has the benefit of appealing not only to that which 'we' here and now agree to be good, but beyond that to some virtual humanity not yet present: 'Cosmopolitanism … starts with what is human in humanity' (Appiah 2006,134). If cosmopolitanism is a universalism that is also *not* the assertion of one's actual goals as the goals of all, but indicates an ideal of maximal inclusion and self-critique, who would assert the contrary? And what would the contrary thesis be? That we are all, inevitably, bound up with local attachments incapable of truly transcending the particular? No, even that suggestion is already incorporated in a good cosmopolitanism. We are all culturally embedded, and cosmopolitanism cannot be a naïve or violent assertion of a single and uniform humanity. Cosmopolitanism is not the reduction of all difference to a single model of citizenship; it is, rather, an *Idea* of a polity a gathering of bodies for discussion, decision and determination—that would not be that of this or that nation but of the cosmos. We might say that the cosmos is an Idea in the Kantian sense: we require the notion of the cosmos in order to think the relations among different localities, and this Idea generates a task for future thinking, but such an Idea can never be fully actualized or presented. Perhaps, today, this cosmopolitan idea is more urgent and more possible than ever. Surely it is the advent of (increasingly evident) threats to this cosmos—resource depletion, rising sea levels, global heating, desertification, species extinction, viral apocalypse, violent fundamentalisms, bio-weapons—that impel us to free the polis from the nation state and imagine a greater cosmos.

For is it possible to say any more that politics occurs at the level of the state or nation? If decisions are made in the name of national polities, such as recent decisions to put environmental policy on hold in the face of economic imperatives, or of the compromise of claims for rights to life and universal health care because of a need to sustain fiscal responsibility and corporate structures, then what one appears to lose is not only the space of the cosmos but also a certain modality of the future. Decisions based on polities of the nation state are enslaved to a temporality of competing interests, whether that be the political terms of opposed parties or—if one is dealing with nation to nation negotiations—calculations regarding markets, future flows of capital and investment and *Realpolitik.*  A cosmopolitical imperative would not only expand horizons spatially to think beyond the geographical boundaries that create political, cultural and imaginary borders—it would also necessarily alter temporal limits. Globalism as an economic phenomenon in which territories once external to the nation state are included in ever-expanding and mutating markets would need to be supplemented or transcended by a cosmopolitanism1 that imagined modes of sympathy, recognition and respect beyond the terms of the market.2 If cosmopolitanism were truly to distinguish itself from globalism then it must not do so merely in a spatial and extensive manner (being more inclusive) but would need to differ intensively.3 The cosmos would differ from the globe only if it were not simply the spatial unit of this planet earth with its already identified resources, organizations and geographical borders (all included in the systems and networks of globalism); the cosmos would, in its new mode, include a virtuality.

Traditionally the cosmos signifies an orderliness, suggesting that the actual globe as material entity is placed within, or expressive of, a broader harmony (a cosmos of the planets and heavens). In contemporary forms of cosmopolitanism such appeals to divine or eternal harmony give way to an imaginative supplement: whatever the world is here and now, with all its global networks, markets and power structures, there can also be the figuration of *ethical* territories. Above and beyond physical and political borders there might be affective or immaterial communities, such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's redemptive positing of a humanity united by ties of immaterial labor (Hardt and Negri 2000).

The political times and the mode of production have changed. We have to construct the figure of a new David, the multitude as champion of asymmetrical combat, immaterial workers who become a new kind of combatants, cosmopolitan bricoleurs of resistance and cooperation. These are the ones who can throw the surplus of their knowledge's and skills into the construction of a common struggle against imperial power. This is the real patriotism, the patriotism of those with no nation. (Hardt and Negri 2005, 69)

These territories would not be extensively spatial (a portion of the globe) but intensive—a space of infinite hospitality without limit, a city of refuge that occupies a virtual space, a community that is not grounded upon a common soil or even a normative notion of the citizen (Derrida 2001, 8).

Such a virtual or spiritual humanity (that could no longer be reduced to man as an organism) was already imagined by Bergson in his *Two Sources of Morality and Religion.* Bergson's work on the distinction between morality and religion was part of a broader project that aimed to intuit, from the actual world's present state of complex phenomena, the *tendencies* that had enabled the emergence of the current state of things and that would indicate possible futures. If we have, today, a complex mixture of morality and spiritualism—of closed self-interest and open altruism this is because there are two tendencies or speeds that produce opposing (yet coupled) forces in the groupings of human bodies. Morality is an extension of the organic and material need for survival; it makes sense at the level of our merely biological or instinctual existence to gather into localized units, establish basic order, defend ourselves from others and imagine others to be rather like ourselves. If *instinct* is the tendency that enables organisms to act for the sake of their own preservation, then basic morality is instinctual. If intellect is another tendency—this time allowing for generalization and abstraction beyond individual survival—then this, too, would account for more complex social groupings—such as the nation state, or even 'man': such groupings would be based on a calculation of the present for the sake of a future that is akin to the present. I might die for my country, my children, or even act somewhat selflessly by consuming fewer resources for the sake of future generations that I imagine to be an *extension* of the present. Morality, Bergson argued, would proceed from social groupings and recognition: the intellect would not be limited to animal self-interest and immediate gratification of needs but would imagine a life beyond the present, and bear sympathy towards individuals beyond itself and immediate family. Morality sacrifices the demands of present pleasure for the sake of future security and the formation of a public good. But Bergson posited another tendency that was also a different mode of temporality: spirit, unlike intellect, was not generalizing and extensive (creating categories that would reduce minor differences for the sake of inclusiveness and efficiency). Spirit would slow down the speedy and manageable reduction of complexity and instead begin to intuit differences, rhythms and perceptions beyond its own purview—beyond the range of ready-made concepts. Religion is different in kind, not degree, from morality. It would be a mistake to see something like Pauline universalism as the extension of sympathy to include all of mankind, creating a 'family of man.' It would similarly be mistaken to see an *evolution* of monotheism as a movement of increasing abstraction and universality (Wright 2009). It is Bergson's claim that a truly spiritual religion is not more and more inclusive, but moves beyond inclusiveness and single groupings of 'man' and instead imagines that one might act and feel for what is not yet present, represented or imagined. For Bergson the spirit of religion has an annihilating rather than self-preserving or selffurthering quality. One may form moral frameworks for the sake of man, for the sake of those other organisms that I imagine to be like myself and towards whom I feel some (however distant) sympathy. Bergson's examples of Christ and Socrates, by contrast, do not extend sympathy to yield a greater inclusiveness or broader definition of the human. Their actions and teachings are not directed to some normative or general figure of the human. The intellect that will sacrifice the present of pleasures for the sake of long-term gain, efficiency and stability is surpassed by a spirit that can liberate the temporalizing and creative power from any body. Whereas the intellect uses the imagination of a future to calculate more efficient self-interests, expending more energy in the present for the sake of a greater deferred good, spirit can embark upon *deferred action as such.* This would not be for the sake of any already imagined, figured or felt good—it would be a saintly, Christ-like, Socratic and dynamic spiritualism that did not rest with any object.

Bergson is explicit that for the most part the forces of matter tend towards inertia: the intellect may break with immediate organic selfinterest but will then be seduced by the moral image of man or humanity as a stable object with properties. It takes an *anti-social* and *anti-moral* impulse to break with norms, pleasures and habits of communication: 'Shaken to its depths by the current which is about to sweep it forward, the soul ceases to revolve around itself and escapes for a moment from the law which demand that the species and the individual should condition one another' (Bergson 1977, 230). Nature (by way of moral obligation) builds 'man' for stable and closed societies—akin to the ant in the ant-hill—but there is another impulse that is distinct from man's organic being and distinct from moral humanity. This creative dynamism is destructive of the closed figures of man, tearing the intellect from its forms and figures; spirit bears a supra-rational force, especially if we think of moving beyond rationality as the surpassing of any single ratio. There is something essentially malevolent in Bergson's passage beyond moral humanity. Bergson notes that such an individual reaction against collective moralism not only tends to close back on its own figures and myths; the creative impulse always works in conflict with the tendency towards inertia. There must have been a time, Bergson suggests, when there was not a split between an explosive tendency and matter exploded, when differential force occurred as such, without resistance. But those days are over, and moral man—global man with all his delusions of existing as a being with a closed nature—can never be fully surpassed by the dynamism of spirit. All one can aim for practically is some ever-expanding and ever-creative figure of humanity that would be relatively open.

Bergson's thought therefore anticipates the current predicament of cosmopolitical desire in an age of globalism. On the one hand political relations, geographical distributions, market forces and the residues of imperialism already include and anticipate all human organisms as a unified whole. On the other hand, a new cosmopolitics would allow every event of inclusion to have a destructive force on the very humanity that appropriates all others in its name. Bergson makes a distinction between static and dynamic religions, the former creating stabilizing myths and figures, projecting its own organic image of itself onto life as a whole; the latter draw upon already given figures but do so in order to recreate and open the image of what counts as ethical life. The former tend towards self-satisfaction and the rewards of pleasure, the latter towards a selfless and mystical joy. Both are results of the creative or differential force of life, which works against the closed and fixed forms of matter—destroying the actual for the sake of a not-yet present end. Following Bergson, though, we can mark a difference in kind, and not just degree, between globalism and cosmopolitanism. The former tends towards measuring its own movements according to the actual world: striving to achieve greater profits or even human rights for more individuals, improved conditions for more individuals, inclusion of more individuals (all the while maintaining the standard figure of the moral individual as rational consumer blessed with rights and moral judgment). Cosmopolitanism, by contrast would be oriented to the virtual: hospitable (as Derrida suggests) to an other who is totally other, who does not answer to or accord with already given notions of human dignity and whose possibility (rather than presence) is destructive of any supposed good conscience (Derrida 2001).

 Kant had also, in one of the key texts on cosmopolitanism, argued that as a being of nature man could only regard himself as bound up with physical causes and passions. But natural being does not exhaust man's nature. The human species, though seemingly acting in a lawful manner when considered historically, is neither governed by pure animal instinct nor a rational law. Kant assumes that if we could separate man as he is *in himself* from the manner in which he *appears* then humanity would follow a prearranged plan in the manner of 'rational cosmopolitans' (Kant 1991, 41). Why would the 'rational cosmopolitan' be the figure that Kant opposes both to an animal nature that is instinctual and man as he appears historically? A preliminary answer would draw upon what Kant says elsewhere about the pure forms of moral law that we are capable of thinking but not knowing. If I were to act *as if I were a rational cosmopolitan* then my individual and worldly being (with all its pleasures, calculated interests, possible pay-offs from good actions and other motivations) would be surpassed by the imagination of myself as a member of humanity in general. I would not be a specific historically located and culturally defined self, but a pure will who could act *as if* my actions and desires were those of all wills for all time. Cosmopolitanism, then, is for Kant an idea that we cannot avoid; it is the duty to think of how one might act for all and for all time. If we can *think* such a will (despite the impossibility of knowing or actually becoming a 'rational cosmopolitan') then we ought to act in accord with such a possibility: 'Nature only requires that we should approximate to this idea' (Kant 1991, 46-7). The first manoeuvre of Kant's essay is, then, to place cosmopolitanism out of this world. It is an Idea, something that we can not see evidenced in history other than afterwards, via reflection, when we can look back on collective past actions that seem to tend towards increasing order. Because we only know human actions, and ourselves, in terms of natural consequences of cause and effect, and within a nature of physical laws, any seeming 'rational cosmopolitan' may, for all we know, be acting from local interests. As in personal morality, one never knows whether one has acted from duty. One can know that one has acted according to duty. Similarly at a global level, one can never witness benevolent humanity as such—one is presented with antagonisms, violent usurpations, wars, disputes over honor and recognition—and this because man is a divided being. Unable to remain in a state of animal inertia and security he struggles to conquer those others without whom he would not receive recognition but with whom he cannot live peacefully. Even so, something like cosmopolitanism will emerge: not through material and empirical calculation (which can only be a question of more or less sophisticated brutish self-interest) but through a nature that we assume, on reflection, after the event, opens to a human concord beyond that of our merely animal natures. Kant's idea of cosmopolitanism is not the result of calculation within this world, but intimates another ordering power liberated from the finite point of view of man whose world is only known as it is given to him, not as it is in itself:

Wars, tense and unremitting military preparations, and the resultant distress which every state must eventually feel within itself, even in the midst of peace—these are the means by which nature drives nations to make imperfect attempts, but finally, after many devastations, upheavals and even complete inner exhaustion of their powers, to take the step which reason could have suggested to them even without so many sad experiences—that of abandoning a lawless state of savagery and entering a federation of peoples in which every state, even the smallest, could expect to derive its security and rights not from its own power or its own legal judgement, but solely from this great federation (*Foedus Amphictyonum*), from a united power and the law-governed decisions of a united will. (Kant 1991, 47)

Where Bergson's dynamic religious or mystical impulse differs from Kant is in its suggestion of the positive power of the virtual, and this may well mark its distinction from anything *cosmopolitical.* That is to say: Kant, like contemporary cosmopolitical approaches, distinguishes between a calculative, conflict-based, self-interested and antagonistic global warfare (even if that global war is one of market competition and political expediency) and the idea, beyond that, of a humanity that can imagine itself beyond any of the natural figures that have grounded its specific communities. The problem—despite the distinction in kind between a managerial globalism and an open ethical cosmopolitanism—is whether one can ever do more than *think* this potentiality as a negation of the actual.

This, indeed, seems to be the issue that exercises writing on cosmopolitanism: is not the aim for a plural world inclusiveness just one more way in which one reduces the world's differences to one's own ideas of humanness? Acting in accordance with duty is not the same as acting dutifully. I may appear to have effaced self-interest, nationalism, global capitalist assimilation and predation and yet who knows whether this benevolent outcome is not the consequence of a will oriented to particular calculations? For Kant, one cannot *know* such a thing, but that is beside the point. We can, at least, aim to act *as if* we were rational cosmopolitans; we can imagine what such willed maxims would be. Whether any of the actual decisions we make would actually be executed solely with the view of 'humanity in general' (liberated from any determination of locality or history) would not alter our attitude towards how we think about what a good principle would be. Cosmopolitanism of this nature—as an Idea or infinitely receding horizon—characterizes the post-Kantian tradition that ranges, however diversely, from Habermas's ideals of ongoing critique to Derrida's infinite hospitality (even though Derrida distinguishes his city of refuge from Kantian Ideas precisely in its lack of a human normative dimension and its orientation to the wholly other). Positive approaches tend to locate the cosmopolitan intention not in a necessarily impossible 'beyond' but in the real, in the bringing into actuality of an already given potentiality. In the case of Hardt and Negri's *Empire,* it is humanity itself, in its laboring activity that yields a multitude that is no longer delimited by a normative image of humanity but creates from itself, for itself, nothing other than its own collective being. But it is just the language used by Hardt and Negri—'homohomo humanity squared,' the Christian love of St Francis or *agape* (therefore not confined to bourgeois normality) that ought to give us pause (Hardt and Negri 2000, 204). Such an appeal to immanent potentiality avoids the crippling effects of what Deleuze (1994) referred to as the 'thermodynamic' nature of bourgeois ideology, whereby one recognizes the force of a moral ideal and yet also resigns oneself to knowing it only in its diminished and finite mode. One recognizes a call for justice, democracy, hospitality and cosmopolitanism but always in the deferred form of a 'not yet.' On the one hand I know that cosmopolitanism requires the surpassing of any given or particular norm, and yet I know that such an ideal will always be marked by a particularity from which it emerges. Life is deemed to be nothing more than the compromised actuality that we are already given.

Can cosmopolitanism find a way beyond standard balancing acts between feelings of liberal guilt and liberal self-satisfaction? Hardt and Negri discern a potentiality not just for *more* justice, or even the intrusion of an Idea of justice, but of a revolutionary rupture from the present and within the present. The conditions of the present, such as immaterial labor and the networks of globalism, are precisely those that can inaugurate a new commonwealth that transcends localities, nations and state forms. Hardt and Negri's debt to Deleuze is by no means direct, nor straightforward. One of the clearest distinctions between Hardt and Negri's approach and some of the philosophical sources upon whom they draw is their sustained commitment to figures of humanity. Their call for an immanent politics remains wedded to the anthropomorphic tendencies of global, commonwealth or cosmopolitical figures and the residual archaisms of man that such figures bring in train. First, for Hardt and Negri the bringing into actuality of the new commonwealth is liberated from static and transcendent ideas of the state that would impose order and justice from without; but the image of a man who makes himself from himself and who exists, not as an isolated being, but as a creative component of a multitude that has no being other than its ongoing dynamic creativity transposes theological axiology into a supposed secular immanence. It is now not God who expresses his being through a creation capable of returning and recognizing itself in its divine and immanent origin; it is the human creative spirit. This much, also, was suggested in Bergson's dynamic religion that, like Hardt and Negri's multitude, tended to figure the future in Christian terms. Bergson defines mysticism as the creative spirit liberated from practical affairs and inertia, and it is because of its mystical component that Christianity had the potential to remain active, not simply resting with a negation of the world but proceeding to bring forth a new world *of life's own creativity, a creativity feeling itself in its own creative joy.* For Bergson such a power of creative life partaking in its own creativity—no longer stalled by meeting the needs and pleasures of the organism or society—found its end in man, and especially in the Christian man of dynamic religion:

the ultimate end of mysticism is the establishment of a contact, consequently of partial coincidence, with the creative effort which life itself manifests. The great mystic is to be conceived as an individual being, capable of transcending the limitations imposed on the species by its material nature, thus continuing and extending the divine action. (Bergson 1977, 220-221)

So, here, we arrive at a problem that is not at all extrinsic to cosmopolitanism. How do we conceive the virtual or futural domain that is irreducible to the ties of global capital and interest? Must it take the form of humanity imagining itself, of a city of refuge, of the divine? Bergson, via a thought of the divine, at least raises the idea of a life that cannot be identified with the organic or global, even if he then falls back upon an already given notion of the divine. As long as we think the surpassing of competing self-interests and organic expediency as being transcended by the cosmopolitical we still remain at the level of difference in degree. First, the cosmos, even if it is not a spiritually ordered or harmonious whole is nevertheless distinguished (by Kant) from the wars of competing social bodies or (by Hardt and Negri) from the globalism of merely material forces that do not yet bring to full potential the immaterial lines of affection, labor and communication. Kant will argue that the cosmopolitical order is the result of a reflective equilibrium: we do not positively engineer political harmony but can discern the tendency towards cosmopolitical peace after the event. This discloses a certain reason in nature, suggesting that human discord, war and aggression ultimately tend towards a higher stability above and beyond human-to-human conflict. This is truly, then, a cosmopolitics: human historical life takes on a cosmological dimension irreducible to the forces of the polity. This cosmpolitical reason does not emerge from political relations directly, but opens out onto another plane.

Even so, while distinct in order, Kant—like those after him—nevertheless sees the potential for a passage from polity to cosmopolitanism. The former achieves order among bodies (as a polity) but is then placed in warring relations with other bodies. The *cosmo*political is therefore a version of the polity—equilibrium achieved among bodies—that layers over the political: no longer sympathy, affinity and legitimation at the political level, but the same concord from discord manoeuvre taken one level higher. Order from disorder, equilibrium from disequilibrium, increasing generality: all this occurs at the point where the cosmopolitical other is not a distinct other (with traits different *from* mine) but is wholly other—human in general. Second, the increasing generality of abstraction of the cosmopolitical order becomes a way of *extending* the forces of globalism: either one argues that global economic, marketing and communicative lines can yield to a new commonwealth by being freed from strictly economic codes (Hardt and Negri) or one posits a critical cosmopolitanism where the economic violence of globalism is reflected upon by a cosmopolitical perspective that never frees itself from, but is also irreducible to, the economic.

Despite Bergson's reliance upon (Christian) humanity as the means through which the creative force of life might create a new potentiality of dynamic spirit, he nevertheless suggests a different way of approaching the cosmopolitical problem. Consider, first, how the problem is posed, invariably passing from relative order to greater order: man as an animal creates polities—relations among similar bodies striving for ongoing stability of their kind or species—but these polities become warring bodies in turn. The problem is posed as one of passing from the political man to man in general, from the generalized and grouped to the higher groupings of a higher generality, from radical difference to increasing indifference. And this passage to the indifferent is disclosed in the ultimate formulae of a new cosmopolitanism in which I need not recognize any traits in the other apart from pure and formal otherness. This is at once an extension and fulfillment of liberalism, from Kant's imperative to act as a member of the kingdom of ends and Rawls's 'veil of ignorance' to Derrida's hospitality towards the wholly other and perhaps even notions of a 'community without community' that would signal the pure form of relation without being governed by any normative term. As long as the problem is posed as one of *cosmopolitanism* it seems that the passage towards greater abstraction, formalism or generalized humanity—Hardt and Negri's 'homohomo humanity squared'—would be the only option.

But is cosmopolitanism a genuine concept of the future that might help us to think twenty-first century horizons? I would suggest that it is not, and this for several reasons. First, for all the laments today regarding the loss of 'the political' (supposedly vanquished by managerialism or biopolitical bureaucratic calculations of mere life), is the polity the best way to think about relations of force? Beyond the political—the gathering of bodies on common for the sake of decision and determination—now is the time to think non-anthropic relations, potentials and forces. The cosmopolitical, after all, is an extrapolation of the polity: a mode of harmony, order, humanity or citizenship that transcends, extends or emerges as the pure (or purer) form of the polity. The problems we encounter today, ranging from a global financial system without center, accountability, rationality or future to a planetary destructiveness that has resulted directly from the inflation of human sustainability at the expense of other rhythms cannot be achieved by granting a greater ideality and range to the political, and certainly not by positing a cosmic (or higher order) harmony that would supplement or override human conflict.

Second, if we accept that the cosmopolitical imperatives of hospitality, community, humanity or refuge occur as a passage from necessary conflict—what Kant refers to as 'childish malice and destructiveness' or what Bergson describes as the enclosure within the organism—towards a higher order equilibrium, then the cosmopolitical would always have as its basic terms the already formed and bounded units of the aggressive individual. Politics and order, even when stretched to its highest ideals, would be a question of negotiating the degree to which the forces of these individuals could be combined to form some higher order individual. In Kant war is defined as a consequence of the human species' strange threshold condition: neither governed by animal instinct nor capable of intuiting the rational cosmopolitanism that would be their pure ideal, humans live with each other for the sake of recognition, yet cannot abide each other because of their competing desires. For Bergson, however, the situation is slightly different: there is a conflict or warring power in the impulse of life as such. Creativity is at once explosive—pulverizing inert and closed forms—and yet always coming up against its past created forms. It is intellect, after all, that frees the human organism from the self-interests of animal instinct (by calculating on a more efficient expenditure of deferred energy), and yet this same intellect maps the future according to already determined units. Perhaps this is one way of understanding contemporary globalism, at once extending itself to all territories in an all inclusive manner but—in reaching the limits of its coherence—failing to adjust its measurements of profit, efficiency, expansion and enterprise. One might say the same about any form of cosmopolitanism that wanted to redeem globalism by reaching a greater or more open humanity; it would only be an extension by degree, not a difference in kind. But if life itself in its creative dynamism is, on Bergson's suggestion, already at war with itself, creating the very obstacles to its own forward movement, obstacles that in turn require a greater creative 'thrust,' is there another way to think the passage beyond global war?

This leads to the third, and final, objection to cosmopolitanism already hinted at earlier. The very nature of the politics of cosmopolitanism is bourgeois and thermodynamic: calculating the relation among forces in terms of management of degrees, or more or less, and of compromise. Yes, we want an all inclusive humanity, but not one of the market. Yes we want equality, but not the reduction of all human cultures to one standard. Yes, we want multiculturalism but not the narcissism of small differences. Yes, we want the rights and freedoms of the enlightenment but should be wary of universalizing specifically modern Western values. In criticizing bourgeois ideology as thermodynamic Deleuze was drawing attention to the crippling and self-important nature of notions of political compromise: on the one hand I maintain certain norms and values—this gives me the individual identity that allows me to be a moral individual. Yet, on the other hand I am aware that those values are provisional, culturally and historically specific and never fully universalizable.

Deleuze signals an alternative mode for thinking 'political' concepts (although it needs to be borne in mind that all his and Guattari's political terms—including *micro*political and *schizo*analysis—decompose psyches and individuals into forces and relations). If one began, not from models of mediation, more and less, or greater and expanded models of hospitality, but from *differential calculus* then forces would not be forces *of bodies* and the cosmos would need to be considered beyond the polity.

In the plateau of *A Thousand Plateaus* that deals, however fleetingly, with the cosmos, Deleuze and Guattari achieve two conceptual manoeuvres. Before one can think of the cosmos as a deterritorialization of the earth or territory, one also needs to see earth and territory as themselves assembled from forces of chaos (with their attendant autonomous qualities): 'The forces to be captured are no longer those of the earth, which still constitute a great expressive Form, but the forces of an immaterial, nonformal, and energetic Cosmos' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 342- 343). That is, any world, earth, territory or globe (including the globe of globalism) is assembled from powers that are not those of the organism. On the contrary, it is from the assembling of expressive qualities that something like an individuated body can emerge. Deleuze and Guattari here (and in *What is Philosophy?*) cite the stagemaker bird, whose turning over of leaves to display their lighter side creates a territory of found qualities; it is this formation of assembled qualities that creates individuation. There is a selection *from chaos* of materials that are not indifferent but that possess various potentials for relations and distinctions. Thus any earth or territory has already resulted from the assembling of qualities. Today's figure of the globe, for example, is not arbitrary and relies on the selection of qualities—such as the spherical planet, the generic image of the human being as a communicative, universalizing, enterprising and communal animal—from which something like the concept of globalism is formed. When these qualities are 'deterritorialized' or extended beyond their already actual form to consider virtual variations we get the cosmopolitical citizen: a man blessed with speech (but no language in particular), a sexually differentiated and culturally specified individual (but with no culture or gender in particular). We might look both at the ways in which a supposedly generic humanity draws upon a range of expressive qualities—from the figure of face and voice to the motifs of family, sexual difference and skin color—and at how the composed 'family of man' then allows for extension (or deterritorialization) to a cosmos that is always *cosmopolitical.* That is, the cosmos is always an extension of the composed polity, an abstraction or idealization of man englobed in his world of human others.

If the first feature of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the cosmos is that it is not cosmopolitical—for the cosmos can occur as the deterritorialization of *non*-human forces—the second is that (at least in this plateau) it bears a direct relation to music. But this is the case only if music is defined as the relations of qualities and differences, the power to form inflections and rhythms *from which* something like the human practice and culture of music emerged:

The T factor, the territorializing factor, must be sought elsewhere: precisely in the becoming-expressive of rhythm or melody, in other words, in the emergence of proper qualities (color, odor, sound, silhouette…).

Can this becoming, this emergence, be called Art? That would make the territory the result of art. The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual, is derived from that even when it is in the service of war and oppression. … The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 316)

There is a pre-human and pre-organic music that is generated from the differential relations among expressive qualities: the beating out of a rhythm establishes a pulse or band of time from which something like a meter might be organized. There is an articulation of sounds into tonal inflections that provides the condition for something like a scale or melody (or phonemes). Before there is something like a language a repeatable and formalized set of relations—there must be the formation of qualities and the creation of differences. (One can think here of Freud's example of his grandson establishing a pulsation of *Fort-Da,*  opposing two sounds across space and time, securing a territory that then enables the forming of a body and its world.) And it is here that we can tie Deleuze and Guattari's plateau on the refrain (where cosmos is conceptualized) with Deleuze's idea of a differential mode of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari insist that there is an autonomy or differential power in expressive qualities. Relatively stable terms or beings are formed from pure predicates or qualities. One might say that 'man' as a rational animal who is defined through the speaking-seeing-eating figure of the face and voice has a *political* composition (for it determines relations among human bodies) but this occurs *after* the entering-into-relation of certain qualities. Man is an animal assembled through the speaking-seeing face (itself composed racially of skin colors), the commanding voice (again enabled through the composition of a phonematic spectrum) and the organized body (effected by bringing the hand-eye-brain complex into relation.) There is, in this respect, nothing *political* about the cosmos as long as we take politics to be the relations of the polity. On the contrary, the most important events are micro-political: how did this figure of political man (with the eye of judgment, voice of reason and body of labor) come to be composed from the forces of chaos? Such a determination would have been enabled by certain expressive qualities—the potentialities of sound in the voice, of light in the seeing eye, of conceptual configurations in the reasoning brain. Such qualities are synthesized and coordinated to produce the man of politics. To define the proper destiny of man to be that of a cosmo-political animal is to contain thinking within the already formed bounds of the organism. A differential politics, by contrast, approaches the cosmos as a radical *deterritorialization,* freeing expressive qualities from a human-all-too-human composition:

For there is no imagination outside of technique. The modern figure is not the child or the lunatic, still less the artist, but the cosmic artisan: a homemade atomic bomb—it's very simple really, it's been proven, it's been done. To be an artisan and no longer an artist, creator, or founder, is the only way to become cosmic, to leave the milieus and the earth behind. The invocation to the Cosmos does not at all operate as a metaphor; on the contrary, the operation is an effective one, from the moment the artist connects a material with forces of consistency or consolidation. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 345)