March of the kitten herders

Abstract

Everything is affective; everything is infrastructural. Or: (1) affectivity is the relational force of materiality and (2) a thing is the convergence of a range of relations and is itself a compositional element of others. Or again: if affect and infrastructure associate, it is on the order of what, in 2010, I called ‘abrupt conditions’ and tend, sometimes, toward the organization of a ‘site’. This dynamic system is ontologically ‘flat’ in the sense that it does not prioritize in advance any entities or relations. However, all such emergence negotiates an already complex, actual system of social unevenness because it unfolds amidst sociality (everything is affective; everything is infrastructural). Thus, while I agree with almost all of Bosworth's (2023) treatment of affective infrastructures, our understandings diverge on the political consequences of flatness. Pace Bosworth, a ‘first’ philosophy of emergence (flatness) is necessary for conceiving the possibility of actual change and, by extension, for realizing efforts to abolish unevenness. What follows animates this notion through several gestures to the banal sociality of academic working life and intellectual exchange, its confused affinities and familiar misunderstandings, its good vibes and bad energies.