Affect, Politics, Ontology

Abstract

The relationship between politics and ontology has long been a troubled one for geography. More recently, the emergence of affect theory has complicated things even further by introducing a new set of frequently vague concepts into the already cluttered theoretical field of critical geography. This dissertation collects six articles that endeavor to develop the groundwork for establishing a continuum between affect, politics, and ontology. Specifically, it argues that not only is affect a politically rich area for approaching ontology, but, further, it is particularly well suited for addressing difference and radical politics. It proceeds by developing a series of concepts that animate a politically driven ontology of difference, namely: A) becoming and bordering in the context of border studies; B) a flat ontology as a fix for the debilitating transcendence of scale theory; C) an animation of a Nollywood as a 'site' based upon the flat ontological critique of scale; D) a politics of confusion that isolates the workings of affect in relation to the State and in direct action; E) a psycho-pragmatism that checks studies of affect and nonrepresentational theory against the analytic determinism that attends their developing methodologies; and F) the notions of fidelity and affinity as they get articulated through to the State and political subjectivity.