Ben Anderson

Ben Anderson's work research conceptualises ordinary affective life, and examines the politics of affect in relation to emergency governance, Brexit and the rise of populisms of the left and right, and other contemporary conditions. His 2014 book – Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Routledge)– set out a theory of how affective life is organised and mediated. He is currently working on a geo-history of boredom and changes in capitalism since the 1970s, using boredom as a way into thinking about the politics of eventfulness in political times often described and critiqued as intensely turbulent.

Affect and critique: A politics of boredom* - Ben Anderson, 2021 (sagepub.com)

Throughout his empirical work, he is concerned with how futures are encountered, related to, and made present through ordinary affects, including hope and boredom. This includes research on how events and conditions are governed through ‘emergency’, drawing out the specificity of emergency in the context of the other genres through which we come to feel, know and render actionable events, for example disaster, crisis, catastrophe, and incident. 

Disaffected futures: On being bored by the event to come

What are the consequences for politics and action when imaginations or performances of the future disaster or emergency fail to engage and move people? What happens when calls to action through enactments of possible futures, and other efforts to mobilise subjects and institutions around possible events to come, are met with nothing but disaffection – an ambiguous absence of strong feeling.

The talk focuses on disaffection, what Lauren Berlant calls ‘underperformativity’, in order to think further about how futures are made present affectively in the kinds of future orientated practices and forms of governance NEEDS addresses this year. Arguing that the problem of disaffection has been at the heart of the invention and deployment of scenarios, exercises and other now ubiquitous anticipatory techniques and is central to the politics of climate change and other event-conditions, the talk focuses on scenes where possible catastrophic futures were met with the strange variety of disaffection we call boredom, including: a passage in a live pandemic exercise where a scenario failed to move and something like boredom became a shared atmosphere between participants, and the naming of ‘boredoom’ as an affective response to the COVID-19 pandemic which involves a strange mixture of detachment and fascination.

In conclusion, I reflect on the contemporary politics of disaffection in the context of the tendency to understand the present through the intense vocabulary of catastrophe and crisis.