Abstract

Within the last decade there has emerged a discourse around biopower which is characterized by two conceptual moves, in particular: the mobilizing of, and placing central importance on, the concept of “affect”; and the jettisoning of the concept of mediation. These two moves are often represented as sharing a mutual cause and effect relationship in the historical narrative of late capitalism: affect emerges as a significant mechanism of social organization in late capitalism when and because the process of mediation has become a redundancy, and is no longer considered an adequate rendering of the modality of that social formation. I argue that the mutual cause and effect relationship between affect and mediation could, alternatively, be called a dialectical relationship. I demonstrate that affect and mediation are not oppositional concepts, but can be understood as two different but interrelated effects of a single historical process.