2010/12/03 by Beverley Best · 1 voice
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Affect (linguistics) #Biopower #Capitalism #Dialectic #Epistemology #Foucault, Power, and Ethics #Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices #Law #Linguistics #Mediation #Narrative #Philosophy #Political science #Politics #Posthumanist Ethics and Activism #Psychology #Social psychology #Social science #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1080/08935696.2011.536339
openalex publication_date 2010/12/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Within the last decade there has emerged a discourse around biopower that is characterized by two conceptual moves in particular: the mobilization of, and placing central importance on, the concept of “affect”; and the jettison of the concept of mediation. These two moves are often represented as sharing a mutual cause-and-effect relationship in the historical narrative of late capitalism: affect emerges as a significant mechanism of social organization in late capitalism when and because the process of mediation has become a redundancy, and is no longer considered an adequate rendering of the modality of that social formation. I argue that the mutual cause-and-effect relationship between affect and mediation could alternatively be called a dialectical relationship. I demonstrate that affect and mediation are not oppositional concepts, but can be understood as two different but interrelated effects of a single historical process.