Glossary of Terms

Active

Joyful passions give us clues about becoming active in the growth of joy, opening the potential for tuning into, stoking, amplifying, modulating, and tending to emergent powers. To become active in joyful transformation is to become capable of participating in the forces that increase one’s capacity to affect and be affected. To become capable of feeling and doing new things always requires an openness and vulnerability, and active participation requires a capacity to sustain this openness to change. The desire for full control or independence remains trapped in passivity, because learning to participate in joy’s unfolding means being partially undone and transformed through an open-ended, uncontrollable process.

Affect

Affect is at the heart of Spinoza’s philosophy of a “world in the making,” in which things are defined not by what they are but by what they do: how they affect and are affected. To attend to affect means becoming attuned to the relations and encounters that compose us, right here and right now. To be affected intensely won’t feel straightforwardly good or happy because intense affects are what transform, undo, and remake us. Emotions are a capturing of affect—a way of registering some of the forces that compose us. There can be no handbook for affect, because each encounter—each transition we undergo—is unique. No one knows what a body is capable of, and one only learns by experimenting: by becoming capable of new things. The capacity to affect and be affected leads to questions at the heart of this book: how do we affect each other? How can we become more capable, attuned, and alive together? What gets in the way of all this, and how might some of these obstacles be affective: intertwined with our comfort, safety, happiness, habits and pleasures?

Affinity

The notion of affinity that we draw on comes from anarchism but stretches beyond the “affinity group” in which people who trust each other get together for a particular action. Organizing and connecting by affinity is an alternative (and sometimes a complement) to organizing on the basis of preexisting ideologies, identities, and interests. It basically means encountering each other and seeing how it goes, searching for something shared that is emergent rather than preexisting. It orients us to the question of what we might be able to do together, rather than (only) who we are and what we should do. To find affinity, in this sense, is not about finding people who are “like us” or who we “like,” but about searching out connections and alliances through which we increase our powers and capacities.

Common notions

Common notions are not fixed ideas but shared thinking-feeling-doings that support joyful transformation. As such, they require uncertainty, experimentation, and flexibility amid changing circumstances, and they exist in tension with fixed systems of morality and ideology. Common notions are processes through which people figure things out together and become active in joy’s unfolding, learning to participate in and sustain new capacities. We suggest that trust and responsibility can be emergent and relational common notions, rather than fixed duties. In a certain way, common notions are fragile: if they are turned into fixed ways of doing things or moral commandments, detached from the ethical responsiveness that animated them, they die.

Conviviality

To undo Empire’s radical monopolies entails participating in convivial forms of life: assemblages of tools, feelings, infrastructures, habits, skills, and relationships that enable and support the flourishing of creativity, autonomy, collective responsibility, and struggle. Conviviality gets at the way in which people are able to figure out things for themselves, from transformative justice that undoes dependence on cops and courts, to regenerative forms of subsistence that support a diversity of non-human critters, to alternatives to school that enable intergenerational learning, to all of the innumerable ways that people are reviving and inventing ways of living and dying that break Empire’s monopoly over life today.

Deschooling

We use deschooling in two different ways. The act of deschooling is a process whereby a previously schooled person learns to shed habits and behaviors inculcated through schooling. Deschooling is also used to describe the creation of alternatives to schools and institutionalized education by generating learning environments that work from nonhierarchal relationships between learners and mentors. This means recognizing that we are always learning, everywhere, and that sharing knowledge works in all directions and relationships (a child can teach an adult, and so on).

Empire

Empire is the name for the organized catastrophe in which we live today. It is not really an “it” but a tangle of habits, tendencies, and apparatuses that sustain exploitation and control. We argue that it entrenches and accumulates sadness: it crushes and co-opts forces of transformation and detaches people from their own powers and capacities. It keeps us passive, stuck in forms of life in which everything is done to us or for us. This takes place through overt violence and repression, and the entrenchment of hierarchical divisions like heteropatriarchy and racism, by inducing dependence on institutions and markets, and by affective control and subjection.

Ethics

We suggest that ethics—and ethical attunement—is an enabling alternative to morality. Ethics is a space that lies beyond morality and an anything-goes relativism. This conception runs against the grain of many standard definitions of ethics that basically conceive it as an individual version of morality (ethical consumption, ethical principles, and other rules to live by). Rather than a fixed set of principles, ethics means becoming attuned to the complexity of the world and our immersion in it. It means actively working on and reshaping relationships, cultivating some ties and severing others, and figuring out how to do without the fixed rules of ideology or morality. It entails the capacity for responsibility, not as a fixed duty, but as response-ability—the capacity to be responsive to relationships and encounters. Compared to morality, ethics entails more fidelity to our relations in their immediacy—to all the forces that compose us and affect us—not less.

Forms of life

The concept of a “form of life” is borrowed from Tiqqun, and we have used it synonymously with “worlds,” without unpacking it rigorously, in favor of focusing on other concepts. Every form of life has an affective and ethical consistency. A form of life is irreducible to the people, practices, desires, and feelings that compose it—inseparable from the way people feel, from the questions they have, from their subtle gestures, from the place where they live and the non-human elements there. Forms of life are not stable units that can be represented with precision, with a fixed inside and outside; instead, they are patterned relations in movement. In this sense, the concept of a form of life orients us to the texture of life here and now. The forms of life proper to Empire are characterized by a paradoxical attenuation of intensity and joy—the very things that subtend forms of life. Empire’s apparatuses of subjection nurture an attenuated form of life in which desire is turned against itself and subjects remain stuck in loops of anxiety, dependence, fear, evaluation, and categorization. One cannot imagine oneself into a different form of life, or plan it out. Connecting with other forms of life entails entanglement with transformative capacities and the values, penchants, and relations that go along with them. These other affective worlds are always in the making in the cracks of Empire: people are inventing and recovering ways of living and relating that are joyful and transformative, through which they are exploring new capacities together.

Freedom

Freedom means finding the transformative potential in our own situations and relationships. This is very different from conventional, Western, patriarchal definitions of freedom, which tend to conceive it as a state of being uninhibited, unaffected, unhindered. This “free” individual of Empire is a form of subjection invented by capitalism and the state, enclosing us in a trap of market-mediated choices, contracts, and the refinement of our individual preferences. From the relational perspective we are advocating, freedom cannot be an escape from all connections and relations, or any destination; it can only mean finding room to move in the present. Finding the wiggle-room of freedom is joyful: a collective increase in capacity to work on relationships. It is in this sense that we argue that friendship and kinship are the basis of freedom: intimate, durable, fierce bonds with others that undo us, remake us, and create new capacities together.

Ideology

In the broad sense that we use it here, ideology means having a preexisting set of answers for political questions. This can be a capitalist ideology that sees everything in terms of individual preferences and self-interest; or a Marxist ideology that evaluates everything in terms of whether or not it will lead to a workers’ revolution; or any other perspective that uses a fixed system of thought to evaluate and manage encounters. By sorting unfolding events into categories, everything becomes recognizable and thus one is closed off from the capacity to be affected intensely and transformed. To be transformed by an encounter, in contrast, is to be affected in a way that is disorienting and undoes some of the habits, categories, and perceptions enabled by ideology. To undo ideology requires a kind of thinking-feeling that is relatively open and vulnerable.

Joy

From Spinoza, joy means an increase in a body’s capacity to affect and be affected. It means becoming capable of feeling or doing something new; it is not just a subjective feeling, but a real event that takes place. In this sense it is different from happiness, which is one of many potential ways a body might turn joy into a subjective experience. This increase in capacity is a process of transformation, and it might feel scary, painful, and exhilarating, but it will always be more than just the emotions one feels about it. It is the growth of shared power to do, feel, and think more.

Militancy

We want to revalue militancy as fierce conviction in which struggle and care, fierceness and tenderness, go hand in hand. This emergent militancy is enabled by supportive and transformative relationships, which undo the stultifying forms of subjection inculcated by Empire. This is different from the militancy associated with strains of Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, and other currents that, historically, have been criticized for machismo, coldness, and vanguardism. At the same time, there are nascent tendencies of joyful militancy everywhere, including movements associated with rigidity. As something that comes out of and depends on relationships, joyful militancy is not a fixed perspective or an ideal to aspire to, but a lived process of transformative struggle.

Morality

Morality is the fixing of a division between good and evil that is divorced from the the intense uniqueness or singularity of situations, and the potentials therein. As such, it is a form of subjection that divorces us from our ability to be responsive to changing conditions, offering up rigid divisions between good and evil. We focus in particular on the rise of a liberal morality inherited from Christianity, which upholds the status quo and constantly regulates and pathologizes resistance and otherness. We suggest that an anti-liberal, radical morality has grown in reaction, attempting to turn the tables by pathologizing Empire and rooting out any form of complicity with it. This is a poisonous trap: anti-liberal morality purports to be against Empire, but it smuggles in penchants for guilt, shame, and self-righteousness, leading to new forms of radical policing and regulation in radical movements and spaces.

Passive

Much of the time, bodies undergo joy and sadness passively: we are always being affected by forces to which we are not attuned. To be affected passively is to undergo waves of joy and sadness (passions) without being able to participate in the process. One might experience a surge of joy and then suddenly lose the connection to those forces, without having much of a sense of what made the surge possible, or what led to its end. Sadness (the reduction of capacities) is always passive, but bodies can become active in and through joy.

Radical monopoly

Radical monopoly is Ivan Illich’s term to get at the ways that modern institutions and infrastructures—from schools to courts to hospitals to highways—have made us dependent on them by monopolizing life and forcing out alternatives. In so-called “developed” countries in particular, the growth of modern institutions and industrial tools have created a form of life that is increasingly dependent on expert knowledge and industrial production. Through these monopolies, the skills, practices, and relationships that sustained grassroots, convivial forms of dying have been subjugated and, in some cases, completely annihilated. We take this a bit further by arguing that contemporary societies of control tend increasingly towards an affective monopoly, suffusing our habits, desires, and tendencies through perpetual surveillance, stimulation, and individualization.

Sadness

Sadness is the reduction of one’s capacity to affect and be affected. It is not necessarily about feeling unhappy or despairing, but about the ways that a body loses capacities, becoming more closed-off or inhibited. Because we found it is so easily conflated with sorrow, we tend to use words like stifling, stultifying, depleting, deadening, and numbing to get at the affections of sadness. Sadness can never be escaped or avoided completely; all things wax, wane, and change.

Subjection

Subjection gets at the ways that power does not merely oppress its subjects from above, but composes and creates them. People are not simply being tricked into participating in Empire’s stifling forms of life, nor are we “choosing” to do so, as if we could simply opt out. On the contrary, under certain sets of conditions, people can be made to desire fascism, repression, and violence even if these forces are killing them. This form of power cannot simply be opposed because it is the condition of our existence; it is part of who we are and what we want, and our habits and pleasures have been shaped by it. For example, the promise of happiness through consumption can make us chase after experiences or objects that deplete us even though they are pleasurable, closing off our capacity to be affected otherwise. In a different way, social media trains its subjects into perpetual performance of an online identity, and the anxious management of our profiles closes us off from other forms of connection. Rigid radicalism induces a hypervigilant search for mistakes and flaws, stifling the capacity for experimentation. None of these modes of subjection dictate how exactly subjects will behave; instead they generate tendencies or attractor points which pull subjects into predictable, stultifying orbits. Resisting or transforming these systems is never straightforward, because it means resisting and transforming one’s own habits and desires. It means surprising both the structure and oneself with something unexpected, new, and enabling.