Musk was hitting a nerve with Tesla. For a very short time Tesla had the vibe of both being able to save the world and being sexy (for me, at least, it worked). It must be some years ago that I realized I fell under the sway of a right-wing technofascist without any morals and, worse, financial limits. Hitting a nerve, however, means to tap into something that resonates with many people, thus bringing forth a shared sense of a mood or vibe, something Berlant called “organized air”.¹

How does affect move, socially? I have been thinking for quite some time about scales of affect. Is an individual affect, say, anger, the same as its collective expression, as seen, for example, in a violent mob? How do individual and collective denial sanction each other? Can I mourn people I have never known personally, and how is that different from a personal loss? Sara Ahmed proposes a social theory of affect leaning on an economic imaginary derived from Sigmund Freud, who introduced the notion that psychic processes are related to the circulation and distribution in a person’s energy household (oikos), also called the ‘psychic apparatus.’ Here, energies transform themselves and are channeled in different directions, unleashed, tamed, or stored away.²

Ahmed builds on these terms to draft her theory of the social movement of affect: “A chain of effects (which are at once affects) are in circulation.”³ A chain is a “series of interconnected rings, links or things,”⁴ for which Wiktionary suggests thinking about mountains, ideas, or events.

Bahar Noorizadeh’s Teslaism: Economics After the End of the End of the Future (2022) presents us with all of these figures: mountains, ideas, events. In her hilarious and smart video work, we follow an anxious CEO-DJ Elon Musk to the annual shareholder meeting. Here, he plans to rebrand “the future (model XX) with a sensorium upgrade, a new look, and a new sound.”⁵ The 27-minute spree in the aesthetics of a third person video game follows a simple logic: everything that Musk does is meaningful. Even if he runs erratically through a desert (future Brandenburg?), with aggressive fields of water lilies slowing his pace, we feel he is on a mission. In the wild search for a party in an abandoned point-cloud modeling of the Giga Factory, he is frantically looking for fun, the next great idea, or fellow humans (“Where is everybody?”⁶). Such frantic behavior is not only an aesthetic feature of most video games, specifically racing games, but also an aesthetic-affective category of Ahmed’s theory: “In anxiety, one’s thoughts often move quickly between different objects, a movement which works to intensify the sense of anxiety.”⁷ When Musk’s avatar moves, he runs. When he stands, he turns in every direction, scanning the surroundings for something the viewer is not always privy to.

Noorizadeh’s film extrapolates the intimate correlation of feelings and ideas, of states of insecurity and products that stem from this psychic locus of lost and loneliness, connecting them to time and movement. Movement itself is a crucial term for Ahmed, as

[e]motions are after all moving, even if they do not simply move between us. We should note that the word ‘emotion’ comes from the Latin, emovere, referring to ‘to move, to move out’. Of course, emotions are not only about movement, they are also about attachments or about what connects us to this or that. The relationship between movement and attachment is instructive. What moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place. Hence movement does not cut the body off from the ‘where’ of its inhabitance, but connects bodies to other bodies: attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others.⁸

Connection or attachment is certainly lacking for the lost Musk in Noorizadeh’s video work: The only person ‘moving’ him is his driver, who resembles a submissive, therapeutic service bot, always beholden to the desires of his boss. While “CEO-DJ” Musk’s superego centers only around himself, the driver seems to lack an ego entirely.

In addition to Freud’s psycho-economic model, Ahmed uses Marxist theory to set up her affect circulation model. Both theories, she claims, make an argument without a strong subject position. I envision her practice of theory-building as one of connecting chains: Theories are attached to each other, sharing a common denominator of nothingness: a non-essentialist, anti-subjective, post-coherent construction of sociality focusing on relations. Each theoretical element shares each other’s weight while containing an emptiness that only stabilizes their mechanism. And you can also argue that Marx’s theory was explicitly a theory about chains: as workers have “nothing to lose but their chains,”⁹ the proletariat is defined as a “class with radical chains, which only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity.”¹⁰ The metaphor of the chain abides as a bridge between a materialist analysis of productive forces and an affective analysis of the nonmaterial attachments they bring forward and reproduce.

Marx and Engels (2023) conceptualized the production of value in two circular models: commodity circulation describes how a commodity (c) can be exchanged for money (m), which, in turn, can be exchanged for another commodity (c). Here, commodities are being exchanged that have a similar monetary value, but differing use values for their respective buyers. Exchange takes place on the basis of needs, while no further value is being generated.

The capital movement circle, however, describes how money (m) is exchanged for a commodity (c) and sold with some plus, generating more money (m’). In the sphere of circulation, it appears as if money would reproduce itself. What this level of abstraction does not show is that the surplus value (m’ – m) is produced from the worker’s sweat and pain.

The surplus value enables sovereignty on the side of the employer while keeping the employee in a relative state of unfreedom. When Marx asked, why, although workers were formally free, they still seem chained, he hinted at this constellation of unfree labor: ‘the capitalist’, that is, the owner of the means of production, invests the worker’s labor power (whose ‘price’ is the worker’s wage) as well as material resources, which together determine the capitalist’s resulting profit. The worker, then, produces value for the capitalist, of which the worker ultimately has no share.

This description of labor relations is Marx’s answer to the question of the source of capital, that is, how surplus value is extracted in the process of commodity circulation. Although the worker is a potential revolutionary subject, this formal assessment concerns objects being transposed into something else via social relations and movement, which in the capitalist system necessarily brackets the worker’s position as an (economic) subject. This is why Ahmed thinks of the Marxist circulation model as operating without a strong subject position.

Ahmed adapts this circulation model for her theory of how individual affect scales up to social or collective affect. She describes “this accumulation of affective value as a form of stickiness, or as ‘sticky signs.’”¹¹ Stickiness means that signs, words, or images connect to particular meanings or affects. They “become sticky through repetition; if a word is used in a certain way, again and again, then that ‘use’ becomes intrinsic; it becomes a form of signing.”¹² The notion hints at a doubled effect: a word’s meaning is flagged, and is thus unique, but it also becomes a signature that is recognized as something determined.

History and affect are closely related in such a meaning-making process. Teslaism excavates such a process of a sign sticking to meaning, for it exemplifies how a certain object-world is part of a bigger universe of meaning: “In the Teslaworld, historical artifacts are accumulated to build up future’s creditworthiness.”¹³ History becomes a reservoir of affective weight, ready to be paired with prognoses stretching into the future. Musk explains to his driver: “The point is, here at Tesla’s, we have managed to control the end of the future. Losers try to find their ways into others consensual future, but the visionaries, they create storytelling machines for people to play with.”¹⁴ In the logic of such play, meaning is connected to projects and practices, projecting assets into a future that otherwise has lost any charm. Ahmed sees history as an affective stabilizer: The “sticky sign” is “an effect of a history of articulation, which allows the sign to accumulate value.”¹⁵ While Ahmed uses “history” as binding factor, chaining an otherwise very floaty affect to meaning, Fredric Jameson performs a similar move for history itself. Just as Ahmed argues for a psychoanalytic conception of a subject without coherent identity, as I will elaborate below, Jameson argues for ‘history as an absent cause’: “It is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and […] our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.”¹⁶ History is “not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise”¹⁷ but a broken-chain-like accumulation of events, dates, and periods, which are not linear nor immediately graspable. This postmodern understanding of history helps to understand the image of the chain as binding history to the present: as something sedimented in a political unconscious or, in Ahmed’s words, in a social imaginary. It is many interlinked things, sticky objects, which, once activated, can unleash powerful affects. For such an image of a chain, one can consider Monica Bonvicini’s Chain Swings (2009), which uses the multimodal interconnectability of chains to create a new object of its own. Hammock-like, the chains perform the function of a cotton tray––they can carry, although they themselves are only holes and frames. History as a chain swing may not be random, but it is fragile.

A bit later, while Musk’s car races along a memorial site for the Berlin Wall, upon which graffiti sprayers have manifested their version of history’s lessons, Musk shares his secret affective ingredients: “By pairing two primitive narrative tropes––hope and desire––we ensure the future never ends. In Teslaworld everyone is free to speculate on the value of their assets, be it their gender, their skin color, or their house.”¹⁸ Teslaism describes how personal identities become assets you must invest in, as if you could sell them at peak value or, more despairingly, once they begin losing value. Musk chooses the historical artifacts that fuel his vision and drops those that come into conflict with it. While ‘Berlin’ bears an affective brand value that he happily integrates into ‘Teslaworld’, Brandenburg does not. It is too much connected to the countryside, to water problems, to the materiality of resources.

So, what is the ‘collective air’ of the Teslaism Age? Cara Daggett suggests that Musk’s “sunny, California techno-scientism” enabled a new form of masculinity that she describes as “ecomodernist:”

Ecomodernism contributed to a new style of masculinity in which toughness, determination and hardness was mixed with appropriate moments of compassion and care (…). [Yet] ecomodernism, and the Silicon Valley masculinities often aligned with it, are ‘asymmetric’ in how they organise these values. Care and compassion remain subordinate to techno-rationality, toughness, and economic growth.¹⁹

The ecomodernists are a variation on the petro-masculinists, for whom “coal and oil do more than ensure profit and fuel consumption-heavy lifestyles. If people cling so tenaciously to fossil fuels, even to the point of embarking upon authoritarianism, it is because fossil fuels also secure cultural meaning and political subjectivities.”²⁰ Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective have shown how even newer policies link fossil fuel to freedom, “when the Department of Energy in 2019 began to speak of ‘freedom gas, to be exported around the world without constraints’ and official documents from that department calling fossil fuels “molecules of U.S. freedom.’”²¹

In her “psycho-political analysis of authoritarianism,”²² Dagget articulates how fossil fuel is being used “as violent compensation for the anxieties provoked by both gender and climate trouble,”²³ thus pointing at the convergences of liberal techno-scientism with right-wing conservatism. Following the publicization of relationship troubles between Musk and his trans daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson, Musk claimed that the upside was that he has ‘good relationships’ with his other nine children. “Can’t win them all,”²⁴ he maintained. Having many kids seems to be a net positive because, just as with assets, a diverse portfolio can increase chances for future profit. “Can’t win them all” means you have to speculate on not only your children’s futures but also on your relationships with them. His daughter did not stick to the Muskian “signs” ––longtermism, pronatalism, conservative libertarianism, space colonialism, or the framing of migrants as invasive. By now, it should become clear that the signs circulating in Teslaism, although not operating on fossil fuel, are part of the petro-masculine universe. While Musk once was seen as a danger to the fossil fuel industry, by now, he is not, as his liaison with Trump, the hero of the fossil fuel industry, makes clear.²⁵ This is the ‘collective air’ of the Teslaism Age.

But the anxiety does not vanish. Quite the opposite. The volatility of seeing everything––gender, kids, history, the future––as an asset comes at a price. “Sometimes I feel very insecure,” Musk opens up to his driver, “like the shareholder meeting is my birthday party, and no one’s gonna show up.” At this, the emotionally intelligent driver offers to “switch into psychoanalytic mode.”²⁶

Psychoanalysis, as Ahmed delineates, similarly to the Marxist theory of value production, “offers a theory as involving relationships of difference and displacement without positive value.”²⁷ Thus, “psychoanalysis is a theory of the subject as lacking in the present.”²⁸ Psychoanalysis assumes that there is no coherent subject as taken for granted in economic rational choice theories. Instead, a person is conflicted, furcated, speaking from a past place, sometimes not even knowing what they want. Sometimes, emotions do not express themselves clearly,²⁹ sometimes the feelings themselves are ambivalent.³⁰ In anxiety, for example, the “displacement between objects works to link those objects together.”³¹ The “sideways movement between objects […] is itself explained as determined by a repression of the idea to which the affect was originally attached.”³² However, this sideways movement does not necessarily need to be individual but “may already be in place within the social imaginary.”³³ Objects of anxiety, as Daggett might put it, can be transcoded to questions of gender that are in no way related to an actual danger but instead form a basin of historically accumulated meaning.

While anxiety (as distinct from fear) is marked by a transposition of historical affect onto (more or less present) objects, Ahmed connects patriotism to an “unreturned love” which plays a special role in affective economies: “[t]he failure of return”, she claims, only “extends one’s investment.”³⁴ The patriotic subject lives with the nation’s failure to return its love, building on affects that are virtual, that is, unrealized in the present but possible in the future:

If love functions as the promise of return, then the extension of investment through the failure of return works to maintain the ideal through its deferral into the future. To wait is to extend one’s investment and the longer one waits the more one is invested, that is, the more time, labour and energy has been expended.³⁵

The analogous argument has been made in similar fashion for the love for work, as in Sarah Jaffe’s study Work Won’t Love You Back,³⁶ or in Christine Wimbauer’s When Work Replaces Love.³⁷ Of course, it is his job that is most fun for Noorizadeh’s Musk; nothing else can be more relaxing for an anxious CEO than work. Yet, the more virtual an affect is, the better you can capitalize on it. The affects best suited for virtualization are, as Musk claims in the video, “hope and desire.” Ahmed adds “nostalgia,” and claims that such affects are inherently connected to a racializing logic, because, as in the case of nationalist love, “the fantasy of love as return requires an obstacle:”³⁸ Reasons for non-actuality need to be found that do not question the ideals and values the ideology is built upon. It is easy but cheap to claim that “without [racial others], the good life would be attainable, or their love would be returned with reward and value.”³⁹ “Everyone loves you, Elon. They already ordered a cake!”, is the driver-psychoanalyst’s patronizing answer to his childish boss.

The upbeat music in the video makes us want to drive faster, look faster, dance faster, think everything through as fast as possible. It resembles the image of the voracious cultural consumers⁴⁰ who are never satisfied, always want more, and, in the best case, want to consume more. In this way, affect connects to Marxist economics also in another sense: Marx can be read as affect theory avant la lettre, as he criticized this very split of passions from interests. While some ‘interests’ were counted as rational by bourgeois early capitalism, especially those that seemed to be coherent with market logic, other ‘passions’ were deemed as irrational. However, employing feeling in economic theory meant walking a tight rope, as Xine Yao has indicated in regards to Adam Smith’s concept of “fellow-feeling.”⁴¹ Smith, says Yao, “divides humanity along the line of sympathy: while the ‘civilized nations’ are said to be ‘founded upon humanity,’ the ‘rude and barbarous nations’ are focused on ‘self-denial.’”⁴² The “savage,” in Smith’s reading, is “inexpressive and unreactive, refusing to change ‘the serenity of his countenance or the composure of his conduct and behaviour.’”⁴³ Yao’s reading of Smith’s Moral Sentiments shows the particular calculus of emotions within a white, Western mindset. A lack of emotionally coherent expressivity is related to a moral lack. While Marx does not criticize what much later came to be known as rational choice theory––the construction of a readable person with stringent interests––, Ahmed shows how Marx and Engels criticized the passion to accumulate: “[t]his boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser.”⁴⁴ While Ahmed locates affect as a driving force for accumulation in the Marxian system, she radicalizes this view to claim that not only does affect (passion) lead to accumulation of value, but affect itself is what is being accumulated.⁴⁵

Both, the Marxist and the psychoanalytic theories combined, lead to an affect theory of value, whereby “[a]ffect does not reside in an object or sign, but is an effect of the circulation between objects and signs (= the accumulation of affective value).”⁴⁶ Thus, it is the movement, the circulation which adds gravity to social affects: “[s]igns increase in affective value as an effect of the movement between signs: the more signs circulate, the more affective they become.”⁴⁷ The more people feel a particular affect, express it publicly, and connect through it, the more it strengthens. The concept of manifestation qua repetition is framed by a Derridean différance in its Butlerian iteration: as a repetition which accumulates body memory and habitual behaviors, thus manifesting a form of reality. Affect theory questions the borders of the individual and its objects, because “if the movement of affect is crucial to the very differentiation between ‘in here’ and ‘out there,’ then the psychic and the social cannot be installed as proper object.”⁴⁸ Furthermore, it does not equate absence with a lack, but with a powerful place of effect.⁴⁹

Affect is thus relational, as it develops only between subjects in ways that cannot be foreseen by the individual subject. It is historical, as affect is always already prefigured by past associations. It is materialist, as it takes into account all the different “infrastructures of feelings”⁵⁰ shaping up to a “collective air.”⁵¹

So, what is there, if nothing positive? What can we imagine in the many holes established by Marxist and psychoanalytic theory? Ahmed uses the metaphor of chains, and this metaphor is quite suitable, as it evokes the inescapability of the connection between affect and meaning. It can be a chain of associations, trust, words, images, money flows, hardware, software, anything. Contemporary blockchain vocabulary offers a slight variation on this social transaction via chains. It offers a mode of transactions via a monodirectional, but decentralized chain which connects data via hashes; it interlocks information and secures it with, if not meaning, value. An onchain transaction, in opposition to an offchain transaction, describes a transaction in the main path of a blockchain. It thus is part of a system already secured via decentralized consent. “Onchain”, in comparison to “in chains,” is perhaps the more precise metaphor for the social interconnectedness of feelings. It is an onchain experience of immaterial attributes, in which “‘the subject’ is simply one nodal point in the economy, rather than its origin and destination.”⁵² Yet it’s being a ‘nodal point’ does not make it less important. Quite the opposite: the notion of being a link in a chain is about being a member of some interconnectedness, that however virtual, still persists in reality. The chain suggests circles, but also intersecting circles, where not necessarily an end needs to be found. It can be ongoing. Link in link, chain in chain, like an ouroboros biting its own tail.

While Ahmed’s notion of stickiness serves well to grasp the transversal movement of affect, the interconnectedness of signs and meanings, and the weirdly random, but no less strategic and historically grown conglomerates of affect and symbols, the notion of chains has, let’s say, an imaginary surplus value. Ahmed herself claims that “what makes something sticky in the first place is difficult to determine precisely because stickiness involves such a chain of effects.”⁵³ That is, the stickiness is co-constitutive with the chain of effects enabling someone’s integration into a social collective and its history. This “chain of effects (which are at once affects),”⁵⁴ as quoted in the beginning, are thus powerful tools, as they not only stick together but may be intractably tied. To loosen such interlinkage needs violence. It is, as Berlant claims in her account on “infrastructural feelings,”⁵⁵ still better to tenderly loosen an object than to lose it altogether. This is the problem with hardwire infrastructures of feelings, such as affective chains: they are not easy to loosen up. “Big Data Weighs You Down”⁵⁶ reads the status indicator of the Muskian car race simulation. Big Data, as in the accumulated weight of history, as manifested in the sticky affect, the onchain feelings, the baggage we carry, and the energy spent on losing, loosening, or finding it again.

Thanks to Jason King for English language editing, to Sam Nimmrichter for Marx language editing, and to Lukas Stolz for organizing and inviting me to the conference “Alienating Presents, Recovering Futures: On 'Futures Industries' And The Political Imagination”, January 24th to 25th 2024 at “Cultures of Critique”, Leuphana University Lüneburg. Major thanks also to Bahar Noorizadeh for generously providing image material for this text and critical thought at the conference cited above.

Footnotes

1. Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Durham: Combined Academic Publ., 2022), 2. Today, it is the eco-activist group Disrupt Tesla, aiming to hinder Tesla’s expansion in Brandenburg, which is hitting a nerve. Incredible frustration with contemporary climate and public transport politics showed itself in the vast number of people camping against the expansion and the manifold actions of solidarity accompanying the days of the intervention. “Our aim is not to stop production for a weekend but to prevent the plant expansion and initiate a course correction in public transportation. Our protest is not just directed against Tesla but against the car system. Instead of expensive cars for the few, we need buses and trains for the many. We continue to fight for a course correction in transportation and resources and a good life for all people”, says Ole Becker, speaker of the group. https://disrupt-now.org/2024/05/11/4-pressemitteilung-11-05-erfolgreiche-aktionstage/. ↑

2. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2004); Sigmund Freud, “Massenpsychologie Und Ich-Analyse (1921),” in Fragen Der Gesellschaft. Ursprünge Der Religion., ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey, vol. 9, Studienausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1974). ↑

3. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 63. ↑

4. “Chain,” in Wiktionary, the Free Dictionary, June 14, 2024, https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=chain&oldid=80239933. ↑

5. Teslaism, 2022. ↑

6. Ibid. ↑

7. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 72. ↑

8. Ibid., 16. ↑

9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Jodi Dean (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 103. ↑

10. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). ↑

11. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 98. ↑

12. Ibid., 97. ↑

13. Teslaism. ↑

14. Ibid. ↑

15. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 98. ↑

16. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 2. Edition (London: Routledge, 2002), 20. ↑

17. Ibid. ↑

18. Teslaism. ↑

19. Cara Daggett, “Petro-Masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 47, no. 1 (September 2018): 34, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818775817. ↑

20. Ibid, 27. ↑

21. Andreas Malm and Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel. On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. (New York: Verso, 2021), 191–92. ↑

22. Daggett, “Petro-Masculinity.” ↑

23. Ibid. ↑

24. Perkin Amalaraj, “Meet Elon Musk’s Transgender Daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson,” Mail Online, September 1, 2023, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12470455/who-elon-musk-transgender-daughter-vivian-jenna-wilson-communist.html. ↑

25. Tatjana Söding, “Elon Musk Und Das X: Was „Longtermismus“ Bedeutet.,” Taz, 9 2023, https://taz.de/Elon-Musk-und-das-X/!5955322 ↑

26. Ibid. ↑

27. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 51. ↑

28. Ibid. ↑

29. Rei Terada, Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2023). ↑

30. Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People. ↑

31. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 72. ↑

32. Ibid. ↑

33. Ibid. ↑

34. Ibid., 137 ↑

35. Ibid. ↑

36. Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone (New York, NY: Bold Type Books, 2021). ↑

37. Christine Wimbauer, Wenn Arbeit Liebe ersetzt: Doppelkarriere-Paare zwischen Anerkennung und Ungleichheit, 1st edition (Campus Verlag, 2012). ↑

38. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 137. ↑

39. Ibid. ↑

40. Tally Katz-Gerro and Oriel Sullivan, “Voracious Cultural Consumption: The Intertwining of Gender and Social Status,” Time & Society 19, no. 2 (July 2010): 193–219, https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X09354422. ↑

41. Xine Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham London: Duke University Press Books, 2021), 13. ↑

42. Ibid. ↑

43. Ibid, 14. ↑

44. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 51; Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 254. ↑

45. Bataille uses a similar framework to put forward his fascism theory. While he builds on Marxist labor theory, he says that affect is not only produced analogously to value but forms a surplus energy produced as an excess to the capitalist flattening of the worker’s personality. While working in a standardized factory, the worker cannot live up to their full affective scopes, their affective energies thus accumulating while being dammed up: “the energies of the laborer are not completely exhausted (utilized) in the labor process itself. Surplus value represents the measurable portion of the worker’s productive capacity which does not return to him or her as a wage. There is, however, another surplus, an unmeasurable excess, which does not return to the production process but is expended “unproductively.” This unproductive expenditure Bataille calls heterogeneity - in opposition to the homogeneity of capitalist production and calculation, that is, the system of equivalent values and interchangeable actions and objects” John Brenkman, “Introduction to Bataille,” New German Critique, no. 16 (1979): 61, https://doi.org/10.2307/487876. While I think that there is some truth to it, this argument feels short-sighted, especially from a perspective of feminist theory trying to implement care work or mental load. Isn’t the affective excess energy something to be spent on friends, families, and yourself? Or is any work, including care work, reducing workers to a supposed one-dimensionality, including the workers doing care and emotional work? While I agree that there should be a different time ratio to work and leisure time as Teresa Bücker argues (Bücker, Alle_Zeit: Eine Frage von Macht und Freiheit | Wie eine radikal neue, sozial gerechtere Zeitkultur aussehen kann, 7th edition (Berlin: Ullstein Hardcover, 2022)), Bataille’s conclusion seems one-dimensional itself, stating that there is a linearity between factory work, affective excess, and fascism. ↑

46. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 51. ↑

47. Ibid. ↑

48. Ibid., 52. ↑

49. While the economic framework suggests a substantial lack of resources, which is why there is a difference between use and exchange value in the first place, this deficit default assumption does not necessarily ring true for affect: it grows via movement, oscillates in exchange, and can diminish for no reason. It is, therefore, essential to challenge the economistic framework for affect theories or to challenge the scarcity theory for the economistic framework. A similar and crucial intervention against an economist metaphor in remembrance theory was made by Michael Rothberg, Multidirektionale Erinnerung: Holocaustgedenken im Zeitalter der Dekolonisierung, trans. Max Henninger (Berlin: Metropol, 2021), who argues for a concept of memory culture in which no logic of scarcity dominates the debate, but quite the opposite: “Conflicts around memory produce more memory, not less. According to this axiom, memories never exist in singular. Comparisons, analogies, appropriations, and echoes are inevitable parts of all articulations of remembrance – for sure public remembrance, but I suppose this is true for personal, intimate memories” (translation and highlights by JB.). ↑

50. Lauren Berlant, “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28, no. 3 (September 2015): 191–213, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-014-9190-y; Rebecca Coleman, “Infrastructures of Feeling: Digital Mediation, Captivation, Ambivalence” (Affective Societies, Freie Universität Berlin, May 2, 2024); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Brenna Bhandar, and Alberto Toscano, Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation (London ; New York: Verso, 2022). ↑

51. Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People. ↑

52. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 52. ↑

53. Ibid., 97. ↑

54. Ibid., 63. ↑

55. Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People. ↑

56. Teslaism. ↑