POLITICAL STUDIES: 2015

Political Studies
Fear and Loathing in Democratic doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12197
2016, Vol. 64(1S) 53­–69
© The Author(s) 2015

Times: Affect,
Fear and Citizenship
Loathing and
in Democratic Times: Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1111/1467-9248.12197
Agency
Citizenship and Agency psx.sagepub.com

Michael Feola
Lafayette College

This article engages some questions raised by recent work on civil society: What is missed by a rationalist
reduction of politics, and why does it matter? How does the somatic dimension of citizenship open deliberation
to social economies of power? From these questions, the article interrogates what agency is possible if power is
inscribed within the affects that mobilize action and judgment – with particular attention to the work of William
Connolly. Over the course of the article, it is argued that Connolly’s politics of sensibility makes an ambivalent
contribution to these problems. While critics charge that he undermines possibilities for associational agency, this
article proposes a rather more productive contribution to the arts of coalition building. And yet, these resources
must be pressed beyond recent trends in the literature if they are to do justice to the unruly movements of civil
society.

Keywords: William Connolly; affects; democracy; civil society; rationalism

It has been argued that we are experiencing an ‘affective turn’ within political and social
theory. Broadly, this turn signals a materialist rejoinder to post-structuralist approaches,
where attention to discourse (or other symbolic forms) is thought to eclipse the concerns
of bodies that feel, hurt, lust, hunger, need, excrete, bleed and so on (see Clough, 2010).
From a more focused angle, however, those who propose such a turn typically hope to
trouble two forms of thinking the political. On the one hand, there is a narrow institu-
tionalism that limits the purview of political theory to laws and policies; on the other hand,
stands a thin rationalism, for which politics is rooted within the exchange of arguments
over contested norms and institutions. For this latter camp (largely neo-Kantian in inspi-
ration), the emotions that move agents threaten the deliberations of democratic politics,
where citizens deploy reason to transcend their merely particular interests and negotiate the
clashing values characteristic of pluralistic societies (Cohen, 1998; Elster, 1998; Fishkin,
1993; Habermas, 1998; Rawls, 1996; Spragens, 1990). From this angle, the affects represent
a dangerous anti-politics. They are not only arbitrary guides for deliberation, but intrin-
sically self-seeking, invidious vestiges of private life that threaten to tear apart the civic
body (see Hall, 2005, Chapter 3).
A counter-strain of literature, however, has pressed for a more sensitive politics of
sensibility. Hobbes and Machiavelli long ago called attention to the desires, fears or
ambitions that move and constrain citizens (Hobbes, 1994; Machiavelli, 1998). And
theorists of nationalism have explored the erotic attachments that supplement the other-
wise artificial and symbolic ties of the nation. The bond necessary to generate the sacrifices
of citizenship must be thicker, the intuition goes, than a mere sharing of territory, interests
or preferences; rather, it must take root within the sympathies and desires that govern
attachment. This argument finds its classic voice in Rousseau, for whom the task of

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overcoming amour propre is to inculcate a love for the laws that bind citizens and ultimately
for the nation that transcends, memorializes and shelters them (Rousseau, 1987).
Recent debates have pressed these intuitions further yet, into a rich set of democratic
concerns. Minimally, these conversations have helped to develop a more satisfactory
phenomenology of political experience. For while a liberal social ontology tends to
privilege a disembodied subject – a collection of interests, beliefs and values (each of which
can be bracketed, set at a distance and subjected to rational evaluation) – this literature has
exposed how structures of belonging (or aversion) are rooted at a more visceral level,
within shared loves, hates, anxieties and refusals.1 And, this modifier ‘shared’ is meant to
perform significant work in characterizing how political subjectivity exists ‘ek-statically’,
bound up with transpersonal economies of value, perception and desire that exceed and
implicate the subject (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2004; Brennan, 2004; Massumi, 2002).
Affect, in this sense, is neither the property of the sovereign subject (who would possess full
mastery over its moods and passions) nor is it a private holding, ‘internal’ to any given
agent. As we learn from attending a sporting event, enduring a collective tragedy, cel-
ebrating an election victory or entering a party, feelings are ‘contagious’ (see Sedgwick,
2003; Thrift, 2008, Chapter 10). They strike us without our willing them into action. They
circulate among agents and help to constitute what it means to be a member of a given
community, predisposed towards certain joys, anxieties and fears, and responsive towards
the needs of certain bodies, rather than others.
The stakes of these debates extend beyond phenomenological considerations, however,
to press a more strongly normative point – that is, how this sensible dimension might
inform (or deform) a democratic politics. To put the suspicion in Foucauldian terms, the
issue is not whether a thinly rationalized account of politics is true or false, but rather what
is covered up by this framework, and what objectives are facilitated by this obscurity.
Exploring this problem will occupy the better part of the article, which aims to accomplish
a number of things. At the very least, it will engage this ‘affective turn’ to raise difficulties
for discursive strains of politics – more specifically, that prominent accounts rest upon
sensuous conditions that their models of deliberation cannot fully redeem. That said, the
most significant aim of the article is to press upon what is gained by this more politically
robust approach to sensibility. If we are convinced (as I think we should be) that significant
political work is performed by triggering or maintaining certain affectual modes (hope,
fear, resignation, despair, love, resentment), then what follows for political practice? If the
effects of power are inscribed this deeply within our motivational economies, then what
possibilities exist to contest their operations towards more normatively desirable aims? Such
questions will lead us to grapple particularly with the work of William Connolly as it is
instructive both in what he gets right and in the questions that his work persistently
overlooks. Accordingly, the article will propose two distinct things: first, that this turn to
sensibility yields productive resources for a contestatory politics; and second, that these
resources must be pressed beyond recent trends in the literature if they are to reflect fully
the affectual politics (and counter-politics) that define civil society. The core question,
then, is not the familiar knot of reason, emotion and justification, but rather how these
considerations of sensibility inform emancipatory agency, and whether such agency can be
reconciled with democratic ideals.
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Political Feelings. Democratic Anxieties

To begin, it will be useful to narrow the focus. Any inquiry into the affects and politics as
such would prove far beyond the limits of the article form – incorporating questions of
motivation, psychology, media forms and power. A thread that runs throughout much
recent literature, however, is an effort to complicate rationalist approaches to the political,
that disavow the somatic, the embodied or the sensuous dimensions of citizenship. There
are, of course, many ways this thesis might be pursued. As a variety of theorists have
proposed, the political climate of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ has been suffused by a
wide-ranging ‘politics of fear’ – one that channels and cultivates the amorphous anxiety of
terrorist attack into a range of ethno-political aims (see Ahmed, 2004, pp. 71–80; Robin,
2004). Here, we might productively think of how a diffused atmosphere of fear has
focused upon a set of brown bodies so as to drive immigration debates, security strategies,
surveillance initiatives and geopolitical interventions, while diminishing democratic scru-
tiny of the policies that result.
Even this limited case yields resources for tracking the reach of power into the affectual
registers that orient deliberation over protection, surveillance and risk. Once problematized
in the social imaginary, these are populations (e.g. the Arab, the Muslim, the foreigner) that
inspire a persistent unease regarding their intentions or allegiances.2 These are the outsiders,
brought by global flows of labor and violence – those ‘we’ can never fully know or trust
– those that must be contained, controlled, monitored or eliminated to resolve the dangers
they embody.
While the cited accounts tend to explore the implications for liberal universalist com-
mitments, more specifically democratic questions arise from this constellation of power and
feeling. To access them, it will be useful to turn to the recent work of William Connolly.
As Connolly’s readers will know, his texts cycle through a series of interlinked themes that
elude any easy summary. Perhaps the clearest point of entry stems from the pathologies that
attend what he terms a ‘fundamentalist’ formation of identity (Connolly, 1995, pp.
105–34). Put briefly, hegemonic forms of identity, desire or belief attain their privilege
only by dismissing, negating and pathologizing competing forms. Within societies of
normalization, these reminders of the self ’s contingency (i.e. that my core beliefs, values
or desires represent just one among many possibilities) are not unmarked alternatives, but
rather deviations, demanding correction, cure or coercive intervention. As Connolly
(1995, p. 90; emphasis in original) puts this, ‘a normalizing society resists the proliferation
of affirmative individualities and positive associational styles. It does so ... by translating the
cultural diversity that exists and struggles to exist into perversified diversities’. At the heart of
the diagnosis, then, is a failure of pluralized societies to live up to the fact of social
difference; instead, they persistently figure those who are different (the queer, the single
mother, the welfare recipient, the disabled, the non-white, the polyamorist, the non-
Christian, etc.) as aberrations from some privileged ideal. While these concerns over
normality begin on standard Foucauldian terrain, the bite of Connolly’s rendering follows
from how these judgments are installed within the ‘visceral register’ that orients the subject
in his or her social entanglements. In other words, these problematized categories of
personhood are not simply classified as abnormal within the conversations of social

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scientists. Rather, these exclusionary judgments come to be ‘entrenched in corporeal

habits, feelings, and dispositions’ (Connolly, 2002a, p. xvi). To take a recurring example,
Connolly invokes the revulsion that the anxious straight holds towards the queer. Here, the
question is not simply medicalized construals of normality and the attendant efforts to
correct these sexual deviations, but rather disgust towards finding pleasure in the very
bodies that must be disavowed for the straight subject to be what it is.
To this point, the argument overlaps with a broad set of considerations over agency,
cognition and rationality. A thinly rationalist model has long privileged a subject that
distances itself from its ends and attachments, submits them to rational inquiry and pursues
those goods it has reflectively endorsed. To render the point in Rawlsian terms, the rational
agent possesses the autonomy to place aside its private commitments, feelings and desires
so as to evaluate claims and needs (both others’ and its own) through the impartial light of
reason.3 By bringing recent strains of cognitive science into dialogue with materialist
theorists (James, Lucretius, Spinoza, Deleuze), Connolly has persistently pushed back, to
maintain that deliberation does not drift in some dematerialized space of thought, but is
oriented by an accumulated body of experience, embedded within sensible reflexes of
safety, fear, trust, anxiety or desire (see Connolly, 2002b, pp. 26–36).4 Consider the
experience of meeting a stranger on an empty street, late at night. Consider the feelings that
guide decisions to cross the street, lock your car doors, greet this stranger, ask them for a
smoke, double your pace, or sit beside them as you wait for the bus. In this admittedly
charged case, the affectual cues are not ancillary to judgment, but an essential component
of thought and evaluation. Below and before deliberative judgment, the subject is oriented
by a set of somatic registers that (as repositories of social learning) give shape to its objects
and encounters – which portend danger, which are innocuous, which should be avoided,
and which demand care. To stress a point associated with Martha Nussbaum, this means
that the affectual substance of thought does cognitive and normative work, even as it
exceeds full discursive redemption (Nussbaum, 2003).5
These motivational insights can be pressed in more readily political directions by
interrogating how they intersect with the institutional forms that shape social space. As
cited at the outset, a broad range of theorists have cautioned against a familiar temp-
tation: that these affectual reflexes reflect merely private choices, beliefs or preferences.
Against this liberal domestication of sensibility, it is necessary to insist upon a more
nuanced social psychology: such economies of feeling and value are inscribed within the
subject through participation in a range of institutions (the school, the workplace, the
parent-teacher association, the bowling club, the church group, the social cohort, the
labor union, the fraternity/sorority, the neighborhood association, etc.) – each of which
conveys ideals of proper personhood, normalized forms of subsistence and attach-
ment, and regularized responses when these norms are violated (Connolly, 2002b, pp.
19–20).
If this sounds like standard materialist fare, the interplay of the private and the public
takes on greater political bite in how such orientations rebound upon the institutional by
informing those deliberations that shape access to core rights, protections or benefits. For
instance, when counter-normative forms of desire are construed as deviations (and felt as
such), this gives traction for measures to ‘cure’ these agents or withhold from them core
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partnership rights. Likewise, this helps to explain the current boom of ‘law and order’
discourse that reduces extra-legal modes of subsistence to a pathology of the will, demand-
ing punishment or correction by a stern prison-state (see Connolly, 1995, pp. 41–74).
These cases may seem too disparate to lump into a common category. What binds them
for Connolly is the deliberative complication: support for these measures is mobilized not
solely through reasons, involving the social meaning of punishment or economies of risk
and deterrence; but rather through the anger, repugnance or indignation oriented towards
those who fail to adopt ‘proper’ modes of comportment, self-disciplining or attachment. It
is not simply an individualist grammar of civic desert that motivates the neoliberal
evisceration of state support; rather, it is the resentment towards those who ostensibly
refuse the sacrifices that the ‘rest of us’ undergo under conditions of widespread financial
precarity. And it is through this indignation that we can understand the punitive conditions
under which material relief has been granted in neoliberal times: attitude workshops (to
correct these individuated failures of will); drug testing (to regulate the ‘proper’ circuits of
consumption and pleasure); home inspections (to root out signs of domestic inadequacy);
restrictions on travel or the spending of relief funds (as a moralized, paternalist mode of
regulation). These subjects (we are told) refuse to govern themselves appropriately; they
choose to sponge off the ‘responsible’ citizen-subject, and thus, we (the good, the
responsible) are justified in treating them as the parasites they have proven themselves to
be (Connolly, 2002a, pp. 77–80).
The stakes of these questions thus press beyond the framework of social ontology.
Perhaps most fundamental is a challenge to prominent rationalist models – for which
political practice is (or should be) a process where dematerialized subjects exchange
discursive arguments over contested institutions and policies.6 Though questions of feeling
may be acknowledged, they are characteristically treated as a pathological departure from
the measured terms of civic dialogue – where subjects are driven into decisions that cannot
be redeemed in rational terms (e.g. to support military interventions, to deny rights to
unpopular minorities and so forth).7 A growing literature has challenged this set of
premises, however, to remind us that democratic deliberation perpetually operates through
affectual registers. To inhabit a field in which the subject is not simply faced with choices,
but with choices that matter, is bound up with the sensible inscription of social values. Even
within a deliberative framework, a meaningful reason (at least to count as such, authori-
tative for our thought and willing) must resonate with those things that we care about –
whether this be love of the nation, an aversion to needless suffering, the preservation of
constitutional essentials or a commitment to social justice (see Krause, 2008, pp. 144–61;
Damasio, 1994, Chapter 9; Mazzarella, 2009). Put differently, the affectual resonance of
citizenship is not an aberration, to be vigorously winnowed out, but rather a constitutive
condition for the deliberations that matter to citizens (which is not, of course, to discard
rational justification altogether). And, for present purposes, this rejoinder cannot be
reduced to a corrective to the insufficient psychology of much deliberative theory. Rather,
it is a call to untangle the more politically fraught concern: how social mediations of
sensibility play a significant role within untoward dynamics of power – and how they
might yet be contested without simply arguing away their structuring role within thought,
evaluation and deliberation.
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Reflexive Questions. Political Possibilities

To this point, the account has centered upon a related cluster of questions: What are the
sensible resources that orient the practice of citizenship? How are these resources targeted
and shaped by social circuits of power? And finally, how might these dynamics lead to
invidious, antidemocratic outcomes? To be sure, similar questions have been raised by a
range of contemporary theorists.8 Martha Nussbaum, for instance, has dedicated substan-
tial attention to how opponents of same-sex marriage initiatives mobilize disgust as a tactic
of political disqualification. As she details, these strategies persistently highlight the
‘abominations’ that homosexual couplings entail (along with lurid considerations of germs,
orifices, excretions, pathologies and so forth) so as to short-circuit dialogue over equality,
entitlements or the state’s role in regulating the intimate sphere (Nussbaum, 2010, pp.
1–30). And thus, this deployment of emotion reflects the concerns long associated with
rhetoric – a practice of language that moves agents beyond measure and beyond
justification.
From a political perspective, however, this line of argument encounters significant
questions. For if deliberation is (necessarily) shaped by sensible registers of value, this raises
a difficulty faced by earlier generations of critical theory: To what degree can agents subject
these reflexes (or the ends they enjoin) to rational scrutiny? If circuits of power reach this
deeply into our resources for thought, feeling or responsiveness, then how are they open
to revision by the subject they mobilize? Here, the concern echoes the charge that was long
(if erroneously) aimed at Michel Foucault: that he dissolves the subject into a network of
discourse and norms, leaving him unable to theorize how agents could resist these
operations of power (see Dews, 1987; McCarthy, 1994). To re-approach this concern so
as to bring out its political stakes, is there a way to intervene within this constellation of
power and sensibility, so as to better reflect core democratic ideals; or do we ultimately gain
a more satisfactory phenomenology of political experience by arguing away any mean-
ingful possibility of agency (see also McManus, 2011)?
As sketched at the outset, there is a consistent rationalist response to such questions: if these
strategies do significant work to marginalize, silence and problematize certain groups, then
the task must be to eliminate the work of emotionality in favor of cool reasoning – a process
where these motivational tactics will be exposed as unjustified and the ‘unforced force of the
better argument’ will prevail (see Marcus, 2002: Chapter 2; Hall, 2005).9 In this connection,
even Nussbaum has traditionally shied away from the full weight of the problem. For, while
she is keen to reveal the anti-democratic work performed by the politics of disgust, her
prescription has (until very recently) toed a classic liberal line: it is only by committing to a
rights grammar (itself situated within a story of constitutional guarantees) that the dangerous
work of emotionality can be held at bay (Nussbaum, 2004).10 And so the diagnosis concludes
with a familiar, juridical reduction. Sensibility is not, itself, the proper object of political
inquiry or agency. If the politics of emotion is to be kept in check, it must be domesticated
by the institutional (itself construed as impartial, neutral, etc.).
It is for this reason that Connolly’s thought merits particular attention. For what is most
provocative about his recent work is the effort to abide with this affectual problematic not
merely as an explanatory tool, but as a domain for praxis. Here, he takes his cue from the

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‘arts of the self ’ that stem from the late stages of Foucault’s thought (see Foucault, 1985,
pp. 1–35; 1998), where the self is not simply forged by discourses and tactics of power, but
plays a part (if qualified) in its own articulation. As Connolly emphasizes, there are
productive possibilities that follow from the premises considered so far. If certain groups
are rendered abject, fearful or detestable through public economies of feeling, then the
possibility of disrupting these dynamics might rest within an ‘experimental work’ at this
‘visceral sensibility that has grown up in you’ (Connolly, 2005, p. 127).11 It is this emphasis
upon sensibility that marks an expansion of his more thinly culturalist Identity/Difference,
where structures of exclusion are mitigated by revisiting identity commitments previously
taken to be axiomatic, and coming to live in light of their contestability. As Connolly
increasingly proposes, to challenge this sensible resonance of power calls for something
more than a cognitive humility towards core values and beliefs. Ultimately, it demands an
agency upon the self at this visceral level, working to isolate, suspend and transform the
dynamics of aversion detailed to this point (see Khan, 2009, pp. 170–1).
Accordingly, this materialist approach neither takes the self as a pre-formed datum, the
sovereign master of its states and movements, nor does it drift to the other extreme, to
construe this formation as drilled in a one-way direction, terminal in its effects, beyond the
reach of intervention. Rather, the self at stake is conditioned by social economies of
meaning, and yet capable of disentangling the ostensibly ‘natural’ reactions (if in small,
slow, incremental ways) to the strangers who populate democratic life. Take, for instance,
the person for whom homosexual desire is a sin that inspires discomfort or disgust. How
could such a subject come to acknowledge that this practice of desire is one possibility
among many, one that merits no less civic status than straight, monogamous attachment?
What kinds of encounters, films, literature or conversations would be necessary to
re-situate these forms of attachment within an expanded field of normality? Similar
questions arise for those unsettled by ‘foreign’ bodies, defined by their strange smells and
beliefs and dress and languages – each of which troubles the privilege of the ‘native’. In a
symptomatic formulation, Connolly (2000, p. 146) offers: ‘The goal is to work demurely
on a relational self that has already been formed, recrafting vengeful, anxious, or stingy
contingencies ... and forging them into a distinctive form you can admire without having
to treat it as a true copy of a universal model.’ Though difficult in formulation, such claims
make an important intervention. Minimally, they complicate the Foucauldian inspiration
for the argument.12 For, while Foucault steadfastly refuses to endorse any specific goal for
these ‘arts of the self ’, Connolly posits a core commitment: to cultivate an ‘agonistic
respect’ for the many forms of personhood that jostle within democratic space. The
question is thus not simply to resist formations of power (as if this were a self-evident
good); rather, there is a specific aim for these experiments in sensibility: a ‘critical
responsiveness’ to those subjects who trouble dominant forms of desire, embodiment,
belief and self-discipline (Connolly, 1997, p. 193; 2000, p. 51–8). Accordingly, if Con-
nolly often overbids in a metaphysical direction (i.e. a generosity towards ‘being’ or
‘becoming’ as such), this language of respect suggests a more politically rich ideal: the
civic virtues necessary for democratic citizenship – to engage in difficult negotiations over
social space while resisting the tendency to absolutize one’s commitments, beliefs and
attachments.
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Some pointed challenges follow, however, from situating the argument on a broader
stage. There are important precedents for construing the affects as a site of agency and
emancipation. In short (and inadequate) form: Martin Luther King’s demands for a practice
of civic love (against a mute, racialized hatred); Herbert Marcuse’s insistence that an
‘internal revolution’ is necessary to re-establish access to our genuine needs (see Marcuse,
1969, pp. 3-48); or feminists who highlight maternal or erotic love as a resource for radical
politics (Elshtain, 1981; Lorde, 1984). In a more contemporary vein, Connolly’s texts
resonate with a set of theorists who have made similar appeals for a ‘receptive generosity’
(Romand Coles) or ‘affirmation’ (Stephen White) towards strange lives, wants and bodies
(Coles, 1997; White, 2009). Each of these theorists, in their own way, argues that the
difficulties of pluralized societies cannot be accommodated by a thin, deliberative rational-
ism; and neither are they adequately addressed by a liberal framework, where difference is
relegated to the private to forge consensus on what is shared. Rather, democratic citizenship
demands an ethos of generosity towards those lives (and the needs they express) that fall
outside the conventions of community or normality. If these lines of affinity are clear, so
too is the perception of some shared liabilities. Are these strategies capable of dealing with
institutional dynamics of power and exclusion, or do they symptomatize a moment in the
academy where questions of identity came to eclipse considerations of power, inequality
and democratic citizenship (see Fraser, 1997, pp. 11–40)? Does this turn to affirmation
undersell the critical potential within those more aggressive affects (e.g. anger, outrage) that
have long mobilized struggle against intolerable social conditions (see Lloyd, 2009)? Or, to
bring these reservations to a point, how can these concerns for sensibility (construed within
an internalized language of feeling) inform the worldly work of politics?
These suspicions find their strongest articulation in Jodi Dean. Although Dean’s resis-
tance speaks to a wide set of commitments, it tends to rest upon the following intuition:
in these times – where nation states pursue renewed, imperialist ambitions; where funda-
mentalisms of various stripes (religious, market or otherwise) expose bodies to violence and
abandonment; and where the neoliberal evisceration of politics persistently erodes the
space of democratic contestation – an ethos of affirmation betrays the negative ideals behind
a meaningfully critical theory. According to Dean, these appeals to sensibility ultimately
displace ‘potential radicalism ... with an interiorized cultivation of an ethos of generosity.
Political and economic struggles against fundamentalisms are thereby reformatted as the
struggles of a subject against itself ’ (Dean, 2005, p. 58). From this vantage point, a politics
of sensibility goes wrong in multiple ways. First, this reflexive approach is an inadequate
response to a world in which dominant groups use media technologies, the resources of
capital and coercive state power to disenfranchise and control many, while shutting down
the channels through which these dynamics could be democratically contested. In light of
such challenges, a materially rich politics is needed – one that would join agents into an
unruly counter-force and risk itself in the novelty of action. If there are no guarantees that
such action will succeed or meet its guiding aspirations, it is only in these worldly
interventions that forms of domination can be meaningfully contested (Dean, 2005, pp.
64–5). Second, even if a reflexive strategy could offer emancipatory possibilities, the
specific postures endorsed by Connolly (and White and Coles et al.) sap them of their
potential bite. When facing conditions of violence, the appropriate response must not be
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generosity, but rather condemnation – to indict, in the strongest possible terms, how
complexes of power secure ever greater dominion over social space, dismantle environ-
mental and labor protections, or violate the mandates of law.
From this point, I want to suggest that the challenge is posed in such a way as to prevent
a more productive engagement. Already the cited formulations reveal the work of a stark
either/or. The options seem to be affirmation or negation; we must either embrace these
institutional dynamics or refuse them; we either cultivate generosity or we risk ourselves in
genuine action. And here it is not necessary to press upon what it means for agency to be
‘genuine’ (and whether this criterion might have liabilities of its own) to recognize the
work performed by this style of formulation. Each question leads ineluctably to the
conclusion: if the operations of power are to be contested, it cannot be through a turn
‘inward’; rather, it must be through actors who join forces and demand a world that more
closely approximates their commitments (see also Myers, 2008).13 The commitments at
stake are surely sympathetic. Indeed, the recent ‘plaza movements’ suggest productive
directions for a broad-based, coalitional politics, capable of pressuring representative bodies
or disrupting social conversations on the entitlements and burdens of citizenship. That said,
the terms in which the challenge is framed lead the reader to wonder whether there are not
contributions that a politics of sensibility might make to the very kind of associational
agency that is meant to be under threat.
This, however, requires us to approach the problem from a different angle. The
challenges considered rest upon a common set of presuppositions: such reflexive consid-
erations signal a turn away from associational counter-politics in favor of an ethics of
selfhood. At best, we can slot Connolly (and his various interlocutors) into a depoliticized
pluralism, where the task is to maintain less violent relations with others, while leaving
intact existing structures of power and privilege (see Vazquez-Arroyo, 2004, pp. 11–12).
Or, in broader terms, what we are left with is a de-fanged morality of coexistence, rather
than a contestatory politics, capable of refashioning the world in more egalitarian direc-
tions. And if this is the case, the argument would seem to take the ‘ethical turn’ associated
with a strain of contemporary theory – a move that lacks resources to grapple with the
agonistic heart of politics, where power is ineradicable and there will never be an
untroubled social harmony (see Mouffe, 2013, pp. 13–15). What remains under-theorized
in such critiques, however, is how these reflexive considerations might inform the conditions
under which contestatory association takes place. To put this intuition in terms that distill
a productive (if underdeveloped) possibility out of Connolly’s texts, it will be useful to
pose a series of questions: What are the social and political modes of relationship under
which subjects are encouraged to forge tactical alliances, stretching across lines of social or
ideological cleavage? If a neoliberal evisceration of the political works by individuating
calculations of benefit and desert, then how can solidarities be formed out of agents
acculturated into patterns of indifference or competition?
When we do not treat association as a self-evident fact, and instead interrogate the
conditions under which such movements are sustained, it is possible to read this politics
of sensibility in a very different direction. How might various ethnic groups, practices of
belief and forms of attachment relativize their tensions to contest the displacement of
families, rent manipulation and class-based discrimination in neighborhoods undergoing
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gentrification? How might cisgender and transgendered women bracket disputes over the
authenticity of gender to mobilize in common against practices of sexual violence or wage
inequities? In such cases, the ostensibly ‘ethical’ considerations detailed thus far resonate with
considerations of coalition building – more precisely, the modes of selfhood through which
these fragile associations could be encouraged and sustained. As Connolly (1995, p. 197;
emphasis in original) suggests (though he does little more than gesture in this direction), ‘new
drives to pluralization would foster multiple, shifting connections between a variety of inter-
dependent constituencies’. Or, elsewhere we find ‘experimentations can both make a
difference on their own and help to set preconditions for constituency participation in more robust
political movements’ (Connolly, 2013, p. 184; emphasis in original). Such statements signal what
might be termed a ‘minority report’ within his writings – a point that is hinted at, though left
substantially underdeveloped. These considerations of sensibility do not just yield a less
violent practice of social habitation, where freaks and squares and whores and saints and
punks and preps and goths and queers can all co-exist within some harmonious (and
ultimately depoliticized) ‘celebration of diversity’; rather, the bite of this reflexive politics
might rest in the capacity to act and struggle with forms of personhood one has heretofore seen
as degenerate, perverse, undisciplined, bullies, whiny, unpatriotic, frivolous, snooty or what-
ever. Here it is helpful to recall the lessons of the Seattle World Trade Organization protests
that brought together agents characteristically at odds with one another (labor organizers,
punks, environmentalists, communists, queer activists, globalization critics, prison abolition-
ists, etc.). The upshot is not simply to be with others in less violent ways; rather, it is to
combine and act with them so as to destabilize existing structures of power.14

Affect, Association and Agency

The considerations of the previous section can be summarized as follows. Is it necessary to
conclude that there is a strong either/or between reflexive questions and associational
forms of counter-power? Or, are there grounds to believe that these affectual consider-
ations might contribute to the resources under which solidarities are forged for tactical
purposes? To invoke an imperfect parallel, it is through such questions that we might
re-imagine the ‘hegemonies’ that orient Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s model of a
radical politics, in which subjects of dissent do not reflect some thick, underlying essence
(the class, the nation, the race or whatever), but rather mobile, multiple associations with
regard to specific issues perceived to be intolerable (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). Where these
hegemonies are forged against a primary ‘them’, Connolly’s gambit (at least in its best
moments) might be construed as an effort to address these possibilities from the other side
– how the ‘we’ might be rendered in more flexible, inclusive terms.
If my sympathies should be clear, they must be qualified significantly. To this point, I
have argued that some prominent challenges operate with an unhelpful set of premises
regarding association, affect and agency. As this section will propose, however, this does
not mean that there are not productive questions to be raised from the perspective of civil
society, questions that will lead beyond the terms followed to this juncture.
To elaborate, it will be useful to begin with a point that will prove inadequate on its
own, but that will lay some productive seeds for thinking a democratic politics of the
affects. As Alexander Livingston and Sharon Krause have charged, the Foucauldian
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inspiration for the argument threatens to withdraw this agency into the private work of a
subject upon itself, which means that it fails to account for how the dialogical exchanges
of civil society could foster such modifications in a more readily politicized way (Krause,
2006; Livingston, 2012).15 This rejoinder enlists a familiar vision of civil society that turns
upon the exchange of reasons to negotiate differences in needs, interests or social position.
Imagine, for instance, the subject of a gated, affluent community, forced to consider the
effects that the privatization of health care or transportation have upon lives unable to
provide private substitutes for these goods; or, the straight subject, engaging communities
ravaged by the AIDS epidemic, forced to confront (at a visceral, uncomfortable level) the
effects that a moralized discourse of sexual normality has upon public health imperatives.
When we engage in these exchanges, one does not simply issue reasons in a one-way
direction, immune to the responses that follow. Rather, one risks that one might be
changed by exposure to the circumstances of others – how apparently neutral structures of
the world might have different effects for those located differently in social space – how
celebrations of hegemonic cultures (its achievements, triumphs or conquests) may be
humiliating reminders of past wounds or dispossession. And in such exposure, one does
more than simply refine one’s reasons (to put the point in familiar, deliberative terms).
Rather, one might revisit and problematize those commitments that may have previously
organized one’s sense of social fairness, or one might come to find value in forms of life
that previously struck one as degenerate or perverse. And it is this intersubjective dynamic
(where subjects press one another with unpredictable, unsettling challenges) that Connolly
is meant to miss when he construes politics in a reflexive vein.
It is difficult to accept this rejoinder at face value. Indeed, a more nuanced reading
reveals Connolly’s interest in precisely these kinds of engagements, where the subject
pursues such transformations by exposing itself to strange lives, unfamiliar narratives and
the disorientation they might yield.16 Posing the question on intersubjective ground,
however, helps to push these considerations into more politically rich terrain. For if
Connolly is concerned with the unruly power of association, he characteristically fails to
address how these displacements of sensibility might be guided, shaped or operated by the
groupings of civil society. As we will come to see, the core question is not simply the
possibility of cooperating with a broader range of agents or responding to them with less
violence or deafness, but how the movements and collectives that populate civil society (a)
might help to re-orient affectual attunements towards institutions, policies or practices and
(b) how these attunements displace, reveal or shut down possibilities for agency. If this is
the case, then it is not simply the interpersonal basis for these shifts that must be taken
seriously (i.e. ‘where’ they take place) – nor is it reducible to how these sensible modifi-
cations might enable new kinds of alliances and connections. Nor is it even the classic
question of motivation: what will move agents to act in the service of a more just world.
Rather, at stake is their disclosive possibilities – what kinds of footholds in the world now
seem possible, misguided or exigent to those who participate in (and might be changed by)
these collaborative sites of speech, feeling, memory, anger and hope.
To give substance to this gesture, it will be helpful to engage Deborah Gould’s reflections
on social movement politics. For while the article has addressed the possibilities (or closure)
of association, it has not yet explored the sensible resonance of these counter-publics: how
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the conversations and public culture of affinity groups might offer a collaborative ‘counter-
pedagogy’ of the affects. As Gould proposes, insofar as movements offer languages for
making social experience intelligible (or recoding experience), they ‘shape what people
actually feel, they can have tremendous effects on political action and inaction, generating,
for example, fear of the unknown, high expectations regarding change, satisfaction with the
status quo, angry dissatisfaction with the status quo or political depression – feelings that,
each in its own way and in combination with others, help to establish a given political
imaginary and block others’ (Gould, 2009, p. 41). There is perhaps a clearer way to put this
point: the political work of these counter-publics is not simply to contest dominant
understandings of the world (in cognitivist terms), but to challenge the affectual labor of
everyday social narratives (themselves concerned with generating acceptance, satisfaction,
trust, resignation, inevitability, etc.). And to give a further turn to the screw, these
modalities of feeling contain strongly evaluative components. By facilitating new
attunements towards social practices, such groups might transform what social burdens are
felt to be acceptable or excessive; what might be perceived as targets of intervention and
struggle; what inequalities are considered necessary or contingent; and what subjects will do
with (or against) these practices if they prove to be problematic.17
These indeterminate claims benefit from examples. For instance, women’s groups of the
1960s and 1970s did not simply share experiences taken to belong to ‘women’ as such (a
category that came to be contested on multiple grounds), but rather worked to dislocate the
experience of female melancholia – from a pathology or maladjustment (thus demanding
individual therapy or medical intervention) to a justified response towards a world whose
structures frustrate full participation on the basis of gender (Gould, 2009, p. 28). And, by
recasting these feelings, giving them new names, participants gained a new orientation
towards the institutions that undermine female equality. These are practices that should be
indicted and transformed if they are to meet liberal ideals of participatory equality. Gould
calls particular attention to the affectual politics surrounding the AIDS crisis, conducted by
those who found their world, connections and lovers dying day by day. While early years
of the crisis were characterized by mourning – a project of grieving and care – the
ACT-UP movement was marked by a prominent sensibility of anger. Historians might
have much to say as to why this shift took place, or why it took place at a certain moment
in the crisis, rather than others. Of greater interest here is the tactical effect of this shift –
how it encouraged a politicized, confrontational engagement with the policies that left
queer bodies abandoned by state funding priorities and pharmaceutical mandates of share-
holder profit. The meetings, literature and public culture of the movement persistently
offered a single core message: the appropriate reaction to queer deaths is not a quiet,
dignified mourning over an epidemic that strikes like fate; nor is it private networks of
care, by which the queer counter-public would ‘take care of their own’ to compensate for
the indifference of the straight public sector; rather, it must be outrage, that drives bodies
into the streets and the accusatory theatrics of death. And it was through this collaborative,
affectual work that a prominent trajectory of queer politics came to re-orient its public
presence, from a group who asked to be recognized in their dignity and mourned in their
loss, to those who demand the protections, investments and treatments they are owed as
citizens (Gould, 2009, Chapter 4).
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In the space that remains, I do not wish to assess the historical rigor of this account.
Indeed, one could imagine different ways of describing the relations of sorrow, outrage,
anger and divestment – ones that more fruitfully plumb the rage that inhabits grief and a
mourning that may have public (rather than merely private) resonance (see Crimp, 2004,
Chapter 7). And one could very well offer more nuanced alternatives within AIDS activism
for the period in question. For present purposes, I am more interested in how this narrative
opens a way of thinking the affectual resonance of associational politics, without reducing
it to the work that a subject performs upon itself. More specifically, it is necessary to think
such associations not simply as facilitated by these experiments in sensibility but as
themselves capable of an emotional (re)formation with praxical aims. Through such work,
it is not simply the subject that becomes strange and different, but also the world it faces
in concert with others. What was a natural feature of the world might now strike the
subject as a threat, an intolerable humiliation, a deliberate obstacle, an instance of malign
neglect – practices that must be opposed or dismantled, even when the social costs for such
insubordination will be significant and it would be safer to continue with the current order
of things. And if this emotional labor raises potential concerns from a rationalist perspec-
tive, there is at least one feature that distinguishes these fractious movements of civil society
from the manipulation of a fascist politics. These modes of feeling are not only fostered by
the songs, art, literature and conversations of such counter-publics, but persistently con-
tested and evaluated by their constituencies so as to evaluate the legitimacy of their claims,
where they are leading and whether the interventions they encourage meet (or do harm to)
the substantive aims of the movement in question (see Gould, 2009, pp. 157–63).
Accordingly, there is a richer relationship to justificatory concerns than is typically acknow-
ledged by those who charge an affectual politics with a flat, dangerous irrationalism.
As this brief detour demonstrates, a more robust engagement with the politics of sensibility
must live up to what Teresa Brennan has termed the ‘transmissability’ of affect (Brennan, 2004).
The question cannot be limited to how the subject can take up less violent relations with others
by interrogating the visceral resonance of power. Rather, it must address how the unruly
groupings of civil society might conduct a transpersonal counter-formation of the affects,
which opens up, guides or directs modes of engagement. For a contemporary example, it is
instructive to consider the recent ‘Occupy’ or ‘plaza’ movements. On a conventional account,
what these movements offered was a form of occupying space to disrupt the ongoing priva-
tization of the commons. Where public space has been eroded and diminished, these bodies
used their material presence to take back these spaces and experiment with alternative modes of
co-living, decision making and deliberation. If we take seriously, however, these reflections
upon movement politics, a different set of conclusions emerges – i.e. these conversations and
unions opened a space where feelings of economic deprivation or failure could be
re-constituted, from cases of individuated failure or bad luck to anger at a set of policies that
systematically channel wealth to some and assign the burdens of market fallout to others. And,
by forging a counter-public in which neoliberal economic practice could be felt as political
problems – the legitimate target of anger or betrayal – such spaces permitted a wider range of
practices to show up as sites of power, decision and intervention. Even if the ‘Occupy’
movement is perceived to have dissipated along with its encampments, praxis continues along
a number of lines once considered the purview of administrative decision: the executives and
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agents behind the foreclosure crisis (occupy our homes), Securities and Exchange Commission
regulations and executives (occupy the SEC), and interventions within the secondary debt
industry to purchase and forgive bank debt (occupy debt).
Any accounting of this movement, its effectiveness or its failures would far exceed the
interests of this article. Instead, I want to close with an ambivalent appreciation for recent
engagements with a politics of sensibility. William Connolly details an ethos of responsiveness;
Romand Coles invokes a ‘receptive generosity’; Stephen White suggests a ‘presumptive
generosity’ – each of which enjoins a greater willingness to listen and negotiate with the
strangers of democratic space (see Coles, 1997; White, 2009). While these approaches helpfully
construe the affectual substance of citizenship as a site of power (and thus a site of potential
agency) they typically fail to explore the related question of how forms of association help to
shape what agents hope, fear and want of the world, and thus shape how social institutions
appear amenable to intervention and action. This leaves us with two provocations. At the very
least, it is a call to resist the discursivist turn of much deliberative theory – those who take
seriously the movements of civil society, but narrow their gaze to claims, backed by reasons,
presented in discursive terms (see Fraser, 1997, Chapter 3; Habermas, 1998). Rather, a robust
account must engage with how these counter-publics contest and transform the ways that
agents feel towards those institutions within (and against) which they live. And this means that
a satisfactory engagement with the affectual politics of civil society must likewise avoid reducing
these questions to the individual. Instead, this counter-politics is routinely conducted in a
collaborative fashion – inspired, debated and reproduced by the culture and narratives we forge
with select others. At stake is not simply a more comprehensive approach to the subject, but
rather what the subject can and must do in concert with others.
(Accepted: 12 November 2014)

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers of the journal.
Their questions, reservations and challenges have made the argument substantially stronger.
He would also like to thank Lafayette College for its EXCEL research program, as well as
the tireless research support of Juannell Riley.

Notes
1 There is a considerable literature on this tendency, much of which targets the Rawlsian background for much contemporary
liberal thought. From communitarian quarters, see Michael Sandel (1982). From a feminist perspective, see Lisa Schwartzman
(2006). From a difference perspective, see Iris Young (1990). And, from the perspective of agonistic democratic theory, see
Chantal Mouffe (2005).
2 This unease is not simply turned ‘outward’, but has served important reflexive aims, to reconstitute the nation in the wake of the
September 11 attacks. From a wide variety of media outlets a single lesson was repeated: what came to pass on that day was an
act of evil visited upon a fundamentally innocent people, forging a national subject in the mode of righteous anger – one that
possesses the moral authority to bring justice to ‘evil-doers’, no matter where they may abide (Anker, 2005; Butler, 2004).
3 For a productive reading of this neo-Kantian strain in Rawls and Habermas, see Krause (2008, Chapter 1).
4 Perhaps the most well-known effort (persistently cited by Connolly) to root the affects within the somatic register of thought is
proposed by Antonio Damasio. This phrase (‘somatic markers’) is borrowed from his Descartes’ Error (Damasio, 1994, Chapter 8).
See also his The Feeling of What Happens (Damasio, 2000). For a helpful overview of this materialist turn, see George Marcus (2002),
particularly Chapter 4. Important questions about this tendency to borrow from cognitive science have been raised by Ruth Leys
(2011) – reservations that target Connolly, as well as the broader neo-Deleuzian turn to the affects in cultural and social theory.
5 This is what Connolly terms the ‘bicameral’ nature of these ‘brain-body’ patterns (2000, p. 177). To say that such affectual guides
do cognitive work is not, of course, to say that they are normatively justified, as they are negotiated through social forms of
meaning that may yield untoward conclusions. The case under discussion is instructive. As a broad literature demonstrates, such

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perceptions of danger and safety are hardly neutral. Rather, they are framed through the anxieties of hegemonic subjects – where
racialized or classed bodies are persistently figured as sites of danger (undisciplined, uncontrollable, irrational, etc.), in need of
pacification. See e.g. Butler (1993).
6 This tendency is perhaps most evident in Joshua Cohen (1998). This is not to say that all deliberative theorists dismiss emotion
to the same degree. John Dryzek (2002, pp. 52–3), for instance, concedes a role for emotion in civic argument, although he still
maintains that such appeals must ultimately answer to the bar of reason. And it would surely be too hasty to conclude that figures
such as Rawls or Habermas simply exclude the work of sensibility altogether. Indeed, their reliance upon terms such as ‘moral
sentiment’, ‘empathy’ or ‘respect’ suggests a rather more robust role for emotionality – though this work is not reflectively
defended or avowed in the course of their work. For helpful discussions of this point, see Hall (2005, pp. 31–35); Krauss (2008,
Chapter 1).
7 Thomas Spragens (1990, pp. 126–8), for instance, acknowledges that the passions may well play a substantial role within
democratic life, but they tend to yield dangerous excess from the path of rational deliberation – excesses directly linked to the
murderous rise of National Socialism.
8 Although couched in an unhelpful Deleuzian idiom, stimulating readings of these affectual dynamics can be found in John Protevi
(2009). For instance, these considerations of power and sensibility have long been recognized by military organizations, for which
the manufacture of the soldier (the one who can kill without lapsing into the ‘berserker’ mode of undisciplined aggression)
requires a rigorous affectual training (Protevi, 2009, pp. 144–58).
9 The phrase is borrowed, of course, from Jürgen Habermas. This sentiment is given further shape in Karl Popper’s insistence that
in cases of deep disagreement ‘there are only two solutions: one is the use of emotion, and ultimately of violence, and the other
is the use of reason, of impartiality, of reasonable compromise’ (Popper, 2011, p. 441).
10 This tendency has been complicated by Nussbaum’s recent Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Nussbaum, 2013). If
there remain difficulties with her argument, it marks an important shift in her thought, as it begins to ask whether there might
be an emancipatory politics of the affects rather than construe them as intrinsically dangerous, in need of institutional mastery.
11 To render the aims in greater detail, ‘this preparation to respond generously to new events involves experimental work upon the
sensible organization of the will already installed between and within us through our previous history of transactions’ (Connolly,
2000, p. 170; emphasis added).
12 In the classic formulation of the Foucauldian via negativa, the core question around which critique turns is ‘how not to be
governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such
procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 28; emphasis in original).
13 These assumptions are rendered in stark form by Ella Myers, for whom such reflexive strategies (whether in Foucault or Connolly)
isolate subjects from one another, and thus threaten the same erosion of political possibilities. As she puts this point: ‘What [this
reflexive model] makes very difficult are “horizontal conjunctions” – collectivities whose members are both connected to and
differentiated from one another, capable of acting together as co-creators of “counter-power” ’ (Myers, 2008, p. 134).
14 As Connolly (2010, p. 197) asserts: ‘Such energies, rather, must simultaneously be cultivated by individuals, mobilized in various
institutions of associational life, and inserted into larger circuits of political action.’
15 In a symptomatic formulation, for instance, Connolly (2002b, p. 132; emphasis added) proposes ‘[e]thical artistry, in its highest
forms, is work applied by the self to itself to render its relational proclivities more congruent with principles it professes’.
16 For instance, Livingston and Krause typically overlook passages such as the following: ‘One part of your subjectivity now begins to
work on other parts ... But how to proceed? Cautiously. Perhaps you attend a film in which the prolonged suffering of a dying
person becomes palpable. Or you talk with friends who have gone through this arduous experience with parents who pleaded for help
to end their suffering ....’ (Connolly, 2000, pp. 146–7; emphasis added).
17 This is what Gould terms the ‘emotional habitus’ of a movement politics: ‘With the term emotional habitus, I mean to reference
a social grouping’s collective and only partly conscious emotional dispositions, that is, members’ embodied, axiomatic inclinations
towards certain feelings and ways of emoting. By directly affecting what people feel, a collectivity’s emotional habitus can
decisively influence political action, in part because feelings play an important role in generating and foreclosing political horizons,
senses of what is to be done and how to do it’ (Gould, 2009, p. 32).

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About the Author

Michael Feola is an Assistant Professor in the Government and Law Department at Lafayette College. His research
interests include critical theory, continental political theory and democratic theory. Recent publications have
appeared in Contemporary Political Theory, Polity and the European Journal of Political Theory. Michael Feola, Department
of Government and Law, Kirby Hall, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042, USA; email: feolam@lafayette.edu

© 2015 The Author. Political Studies © 2015 Political Studies Association

POLITICAL STUDIES: 2015