The Aesthetic Politics of Affect

The fact that affects whatever they are, are “new” is a point raised by every author of the volume. Sara Ahmed characterizes a basic element of affectivity as being “more and less open to new things” (32); Lauren Berlant writes of a “new atmosphere of new objects” (106); Ben Highmore suggests that affects constitute “new sensual worlds” (135); Ben Anderson describes how affectivity offers a “promise of a new way to attend to the social or cultural in perpetual and unruly movement” (162); affects “open unsuspected possibilities for new ways of thinking, being, and acting” (187), they are for Gibbs “envisionings beyond the already known” (203); for Clough affects are “unexpected, new,” contributing to the “forging of a new body” (207); while Steve D. Brown and Ian Tucker see affects as affording a “new space of liberty in the ineffable” (248). Characteristically, the word “new” appears no fewer than one hundred and ten times in the fourteen essays.