Rethinking resistance through and as affect

Abstract

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with No TAV activists in Valsusa, in Alpine Italy, protesting against the planned construction of a new high-speed railway. Focusing on activists’ experiences of vulnerability and police violence, the article contributes to the recent ‘subjective turn’ in the anthropology of resistance and contentious social movements, and responds to calls to ‘de-pathologize’ and ‘de-exoticize’ resistance. It explores ways to reconceptualize the subjective experience of resistance through a focus on affect, vulnerability and becoming. Combining neo-Spinozist theory of affects with Judith Butler’s feminist perspective on agency and subjectivity, the article seeks to point a way beyond the limitations of established approaches informed by the work of Michel Foucault. Further, the article also shows how affects experienced during direct action are embedded in activists’ longer biographical narratives and gradually structured, through remembering and narrativization, to provide ground for a coherent subjective sense of agency. Third, the article highlights the difference a focus on affect makes compared to the more conventional sociological focus on emotion. The notion of affect helps us to move beyond a rationalist and instrumentalist approach to emotion in social movements. The article stresses the heuristic potential of a focus on affect, but also considers methodological challenges posed by such a perspective. It suggests that the methodological toolkit available to the ethnographers of contentious politics can be enhanced by drawing on the affective capacities of researchers’ own bodies in order to register the visceral intensities vital to the experience of resistance and the ongoing formation of insubordinate subjects.

Keywords

resistance vulnerability affect activism social movements

Under white banners bearing the crossed-out image of a mega-train, marchers are moving across vineyards on a moonlit mountainside. A compact group of militants from autonomist social centres is leading the march, chanting ‘La Valsusa paura non ne ha!’ (‘Valsusa has no fear!’). Several hundred other people follow them: local Valsusa residents, students, farmers, workers, merchants, office clerks, pensioners. As I pass Luca, a farmer and one of the most charismatic and uncompromising local activists, he mutters with mild irony, ‘La Valsusa paura un po’ ne ha’ (‘Valsusa does have a little bit of fear’). Luca is limping. Several years earlier, during a standoff between protesters and police, he climbed a utility pole, was chased by a cop and inadvertently electrocuted. Luca narrowly escaped death.

As we enter the forest, the chants become quieter. A sense of anxious anticipation settles in. Just before the narrow bridge crosses the creek, a detachment of riot police is blocking the road. We stop and go silent. Some activists try talking to the cops, but they remain unresponsive behind their Plexiglas visors. It is hard to say how many cops there are. Bluish reflections from two blinding lights behind them flicker off their helmets. From time to time, there’s a crackling short-wave radio. We talk in hushed voices. Tension is palpable in the air, a sense of excitement mixed with uncertainty. I recognize Titti, a frail-looking blond nurse approaching sixty, about my mother’s age, who lives in a nearby town. A few years earlier, during the winter roadblocks that followed Luca’s electrocution, she slipped and fell as she ran with other protesters from the riot police. A heavily-armoured cop stepped on her ankle as she was down, smashing it. Titti never fully recovered. Now she must use a walking stick. Yet she continues to attend demonstrations. She recognizes me, smiles faintly, and whispers, ‘Aren’t you afraid to come here with us?’ I smile back with what must be a vague look on my face, but Titti’s question strikes me. Suddenly I realize that, yes, I am afraid—really jumpy—but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now. I realize that Titti is afraid too, as is everybody else. But something seems to fill the forest and connect us, giving us a sense (a feeling, rather than an understanding) of purpose as we face the police. I step forward, into the cold blinding light.

* * *

This article draws on my fieldwork with the No TAV movement in the Susa Valley (Val di Susa; Valsusa) in the Italian Alps. The movement opposes a high-speed railway project (TAV—treno alta velocità, Italian for ‘high-speed train’) that would cut a 57 km tunnel through the mountains and dissect the valley lengthwise in order to connect Lyon in France with Turin in Italy. The project threatens the socio-natural environment and livelihoods in Valsusa. Moreover, the protesters see it as an expression of the exploitative and anti-democratic character of the neoliberal state and the political economy (e.g. Pepino and Revelli, 2012). Activists argue further that it is unnecessary. At the time of this research, 2014–2015, France’s fast train from Paris via Lyon and Turin to Milan, the TGV, passed through Valsusa four times a day. The existing Turin–Lyon connection utilizes only about one-eighth of its carrying capacity, and demand for passenger and freight traffic on this route has been in steady decline for two decades (Tartaglia, 2015: 43). Although plans for the new railway were first announced in the early 1990s, during my fieldwork the only major construction underway on the Italian side was a geological exploratory tunnel at La Maddalena, near the tranquil town of Chiomonte—where the above scene was set.¹

In 2014–2015, I conducted over thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with No TAV activists in Valsusa. Early on I decided that the protesters were right about the project, and that I agreed with their critique of its broader politico-economic and politico-ecological implications.² My research, therefore, does not focus on who is right or wrong, but rather on the dynamics of the No TAV movement, its relations with other actors, emerging political subjectivities, knowledges and affects. I took part in the political activities and day-to-day social life of the activists, many of whom became dear friends. I regularly attended local No TAV committee meetings in several towns, as well as the (more or less monthly) larger coordination meetings and public assemblies. I participated in demonstrations and direct actions around the La Maddalena construction site and elsewhere, from small vigils by the gate to night-time marches in which hundreds of people took part. Participant observation was supplemented with several dozen, mostly informal in-depth interviews.

The above vignette evokes the affective intensity of moments when activists collectively confronted the police to defy the securitization regime around the construction site. It also provides a starting point for reflection on affect and resistance. As part of a broader research project, this article does not retell the story of the No TAV movement—this story has already been told in many ways by activists and scholars alike (e.g. Aime, 2016; Armano et al., 2013; Askatasuna, 2006, 2012; Cavargna, 2016; Chiroli, 2017; Della Porta and Piazza, 2008; Sasso, 2006). Rather, I aim to contribute to the so-called ‘subjective turn’, an emerging paradigm in anthropological studies of resistance and contentious politics (Alexandrakis, 2016; Apoifis, 2017; Juris, 2008; Krøijer, 2015; Razsa, 2015) that puts emphasis on the personal experience and emotional impact of activism. Here I use Titti’s and Luca’s stories, complemented by my own participatory experience of collective resistance during fieldwork, to make three interrelated arguments that extend this growing body of literature by focusing on relationships connecting affect, vulnerability and the embodied experience of resistance.

First, drawing on the episode in which Luca fell from the high-voltage pole, I argue that, while sociologists have emphasized the conscious construction and tactical management of emotions, the concept of affect, as distinct from emotion (Massumi, 2002), helps to highlight the unpredictability and indeterminacy of critical moments that direct the transformations of individual activist subjectivities, as well as the development of whole movements.

Next, I present my central argument concerning the formation of resisting ‘subjects’. Authors representing the subjective turn highlight the ways in which activists consciously strive for self-transformation by engaging in direct action (see also Graeber, 2009). In my view, this rests on a latent ‘masculinist’ (Butler, 2016) vision of the human subject—which is generally central to liberal political thought (Eisenstadt, 2016)—as one who is always able to consciously determine the course of their actions and shape the individual self. In contrast, drawing in particular on Titti’s story, I propose that resisting subjects are also formed by the affects of their vulnerable bodies exposed to violence. While we should not underestimate, let alone ignore, the willful decision to put one’s body on the line, these bodily affects exceed conscious will. They can lead to ongoing, unprefigured personal transformations (or, in the Deleuzean idiom, ‘becomings’—Biehl and Locke, 2010). By connecting individual bodies through shared experiences, they can also generate a transindividual force to resist dominant power.

While I draw on the neo-Spinozist literature on affect in philosophy and anthropology (Biehl and Locke, 2010; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Massumi, 2002; Mazzarella, 2009; Stewart, 2007), my third argument departs from some of that literature’s programmatic postulates. Against the insistence of some theorists on the absolute singularity of affect beyond consciousness or narration (e.g. Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2008), I argue that affects contribute to lasting personal transformation by being remembered, narrativized and partly relived when individuals repeatedly partake in highly charged events, such as riots.

Finally, I draw these arguments tightly together to highlight differences in the perspective I develop from more established sociological approaches to affect and emotion in collective contentious politics. In conclusion, I consider some of the epistemological and methodological implications of this analysis for anthropology.

Foucault and beyond: The roots and limitations of the subjective turn

Assessing resurgent anthropological interest in resistance and contentious politics since the later 2000s, Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (2014) calls on students of these topics to counter what he identifies as the ‘exoticization’ of resistance. Scholars sympathetic to the groups or movements they study may be culpable of such exoticization, he argues, as much as ‘those who have reason to be threatened by the challenge posed by resistance’ (Theodossopoulos, 2014: 416). Exoticization may aim to denigrate or to idealize resistance. Either way, it relegates resistance to some remote, perhaps romantic ‘extrapolitical’ sphere. According to Theodossopoulos, by portraying resisting subjects as pure, unrelenting and uncompromising, or as able to see clearly through the structures of power—as if from some position outside those structures—scholarly approaches to resistance disembed contentious political activism from the webs of power and mundane dependencies that are the weft and warp of the ordinary.³ Such exoticization, he adds, often starts with labelling resistance—for instance, ‘Occupy Everywhere’, ‘Indignant Citizens Movement’, ‘the Zapatistas Movement’ or, to add to his list, ‘the No TAV movement’. This is a first step towards a ‘stereotypical reduction […] of resistance into static images of homogenous, undifferentiated resisting subjects’ (Theodossopoulos, 2014: 418). In other words, exoticizing description glosses over ambiguities entailed by the experience of resistance.

In contrast, one of my aims in this article is to highlight the ambivalent feelings, uncertainties and anxieties experienced by resisting subjects. I also aim to represent these subjects not as static always-already heroic, larger-than-life figures, but as exposed to ambivalent or conflicting affects and entangled in processes of subjective transformation they can only partly control. Simultaneously, my argument counters another problem pointed out by Theodossopoulos—that of ‘pathologization’; that is, representing resistance as irrational or deviant. Pathologization, he writes, hinges on ‘selective decontextualization’—isolating the most spectacular, emotionally intense expressions of resistance from their meaningful social and political contexts so as to make these acts of resistance seem grotesque (Theodossopoulos, 2014: 420). Against this, I aim to reinscribe affectively charged moments of resistance in the context of individual life trajectories and collective social movement dynamics in order to emphasize the significance of affects in the formation of political subjects.

The subjective turn in recent ethnographies of radical politics can be read as a response to the challenges identified by Theodossopoulos. By focusing closely on personal experiences of resistance, ethnographers highlight the intimate embeddedness of resistance in the complex textures of activists’ ordinary lives. This approach also emphasizes the mundane ambiguities and contradictions that follow from that embeddedness, which activists must face everyday. Thus we apprehend much more of a ‘flesh and bone’ image of resisting subjects.

But the subjective turn is rooted in Michel Foucault’s explorations of the relationship between power and subjectivity. It inherits, I argue, an aporia that remained unresolved in Foucault’s work: namely, the contradiction between the realization that subjects are always-already entangled in power relations and the insistence on subjective autonomy (Foucault, 1978, 1982). As Foucault himself reflected (1982: 208), much of his life’s work was committed to identifying ways in which various forms of power transform human beings into subjects. Against the romanticization of resistance (Abu-Lughod, 1990), Foucault emphasized that resistance is never exterior to power and, crucially, that individuality and subjectivity are products of power. ‘Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power,’ he famously wrote in The History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1978: 95–96).

However, in some of his later writings Foucault found at least a residue of freedom in resistance and stressed ‘the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom’ (Foucault, 1982: 221–222). ‘There is no relationship of power’, he asserted, ‘without the means of escape or possible flight’ (Foucault, 1982: 225). The conundrum of squaring the recognition that subjects are constituted by power with the assertion of individual autonomy remained without an unambiguous answer for Foucault. It informed a sustained strand of anthropological debates about resistance in the 1990s and 2000s (e.g. Abu-Lughod, 1990; Brown, 1996; Fletcher, 2001; Gledhill, 2012) and remains a central, if not quite explicitly acknowledged, issue in the more recent subjective turn.

The most explicit elaboration of the subjective turn is found in Maple Razsa’s (2015) work on anarchist activists in former Yugoslavia. Razsa describes activists as explicitly seeking to cultivate themselves as radical subjects, working on their self-understandings and desires. The focus of the subjective turn in Razsa’s formulation is ‘the struggle to develop individual and collective subjects who are antagonistic to dominant social relations’ (Razsa, 2015: 27). ‘Whereas biopower, as Foucault formulated it, produces docile bodies (1977),’ writes Razsa, ‘activists explicitly sought to produce unruly bodies, bodies prepared, even desirous, of confrontations’ (Razsa, 2015: 12). This notion hinges, I suggest, on the implicit concept of the individual subject as autonomous and able to consciously deploy what Foucault (1988) calls ‘technologies of the self’—although in this case, these ‘technologies’ are mobilized to defy rather than to extend the dominant power.

Razsa confronts this problem by referring to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2009) concept of the ‘politics of becoming’. However, I think this argument is insufficient, for reasons I shall presently explain. Hardt and Negri suggest that, paralleling Foucault’s analyses of discipline and biopower, the intuition of ‘an alternative production of subjectivity which not only resists power but also seeks autonomy from it’ is implicit in his work (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 56). Foucault called this ‘resistance’, but Hardt and Negri propose the more specific term ‘counterpower’. They distinguish between a politics of identity that aims for the freedom of a fixed, predetermined self—‘the freedom to be who you really are’—and a politics of liberation that ‘aims at the freedom of self-determination and self-transformation, the freedom to determine what you can become’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 331; emphases in original). In short, subjects engaged in liberation politics defy domination by ‘becoming other’ (Deleuze, 1992, cited in Hardt and Negri, 2009: x).

This notion directly informs the subjective turn in the anthropology of resistance. Razsa (2015: 11–12) invokes the counterpower concept with reference to his post-Yugoslav activist collaborators’ efforts to cultivate themselves as radical, rebellious subjects. However, Hardt and Negri’s politics of liberation still hinges on the conscious will of autonomous political subjects to determine the directions of their self-transformation. The concept may be useful for interpreting aspects of radical politics that focus on dialogue and deliberation—indeed Razsa (2015: 174–203) draws on it primarily with reference to assemblies and discussions organized by Slovenia’s Occupy movement. It seems less applicable to that other hallmark of radical political movements, collective direct action, which, although carefully planned, can nevertheless unfold chaotically and evoke powerful affects. Beyond focusing on deliberation, conscious will and self-determination, I suggest that understanding the embodied experiences of resistance in terms of pre-reflexive and visceral ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart, 2007) can enhance efforts to ethnographically de-exoticize resistance. The next section outlines my alternative approach.

An alternative approach: Affect and vulnerability

To account for the subjectivity-transforming experience of direct action, I focus on vulnerable bodies whose capacities to ‘affect and be affected’ (Massumi, in Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: xvi) foster their continuous becoming (Biehl and Locke, 2010). I draw on two distinct yet congruent bodies of theory: Judith Butler’s feminist account of agency (1990, 2016) and certain versions of the neo-Spinozist turn to affect (Clough and Halley, 2007).

Butler criticizes what she calls the masculinist view of agency that posits ‘a seemingly sturdy and self-centred form of the thinking “I”’ (Butler, 2016: 24). This masculinist subject always acts but is never acted upon, at least not without its (or his) advance knowledge and will. It exercises sovereign control over itself, its property and its actions. Against this view, Butler’s lifelong work on performativity stresses that subjects are continually constituted by being acted on as much as by acting. Therefore, their performativity cannot be reduced to unconstrained sovereign action (Butler, 1990). Butler’s recent work (2016) highlights the consequences this has for the relationship between vulnerability and resistance: the masculinist subject must shun vulnerability as contrary to sovereign agency. Instead, Butler proposes an affirmative view of vulnerability as a ‘deliberate exposure to power’ (Butler, 2016: 24) and a crucial part of the practice of political resistance. ‘[P]olitical resistance,’ she writes, ‘relies fundamentally on the mobilization of vulnerability, which means that vulnerability can be a way of being exposed and agentic at the same time’ (Butler, 2016: 24). Importantly, vulnerability does not equate with resistance. Vulnerability is not a prerogative of resisting bodies. Instead, it complicates the gulf between domination and resistance. Suicide bombers, for instance, weaponize their own vulnerability in order to annihilate accidental bystanders who represent, for them, the dominant structures in society. Yet I argue that Butler’s emphasis on the positive role of vulnerability in resistance helps to overcome the ‘masculinist’ bias in understanding resisting subjects.

This framework can be enhanced by a focus on affect. The extraordinary rise to prominence of the concept of affect across social science and the humanities has led some anthropologists to raise legitimate concerns about its implications for our discipline (Jansen, 2016; Pelkmans, 2013; see also Laszczkowski and Reeves, 2015). Acknowledging these cautious anthropological approaches, I nevertheless contend that the notion of affect facilitates ethnographic and theoretical work in the study of resistance that was not made possible by the recent subjective turn, nor by the more conventional sociological focus on emotion (e.g. Aminzade and McAdam, 2002; Flam and King, 2005; Goodwin et al., 2001). In anthropologist William Mazzarella’s (2009: 291) words, ‘thinking affect […] implies a way of apprehending social life that does not start with the bounded, intentional subject while at the same time foregrounding embodiment and sensuous life’. Implicitly opposing the Foucauldian obsession with the ‘docile body’ formed into subjecthood through disciplinary power and cultural inscription, Massumi (2002)—probably the most influential proponent of the neo-Spinozist turn to affect—highlights the ‘indocile body’ (Mazzarella, 2009: 293), which defies domination through its sensuous, nervous and affective capacities.

Here, it is useful to distinguish between affect and emotion. While these terms are often used interchangeably, ‘emotion’ refers to named, identifiable categories of feeling; socio-linguistic constructs consciously experienced as subjective, personal states (Lutz and White, 1986). In contrast, ‘affect’ can be reserved for visceral intensities that are felt but are not yet semiotically mediated (Massumi, 2002). Affective intensities emerge from encounters between diverse bodies, human and other (Stewart, 2007: 128). They can have a powerful impact on a person’s subjectivity without being ‘personal’ (that is, internal to that person’s ‘mind’). As my opening vignette suggests, they may sometimes be partly qualified and expressed as named emotions, such as fear, yet affects are not reducible to subjective emotions. They transcend the boundaries separating distinct or opposing emotional states, such as courage and angst. Capturing affects in culturally established emotional terms reduces the excess that is central to them.

Crucially for my argument, affect highlights the relationship between vulnerability and the ongoing (trans)formation of ‘subjects’. In the neo-Spinozist view, the body (‘subject’) is defined by what it can do to other bodies, and what those other bodies can do to it (its ‘active and passive affects’—Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 257). The ability to act is inextricable from the ability to be acted upon. Since these capacities continue to change, the body continually becomes other. Affective intensities correspond to such augmentations or diminutions in the body’s capacity to act (Massumi, in Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: xvi). They can push us to action or maim and benumb us (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 1). Vulnerability is thus a risk, but also a condition of growth. In the ethnography below, vulnerable subjects could be injured or destroyed, but they could also be transformed in defiance of dominant power.

Departing from an ‘orthodox’ reading of Massumi, Mazzarella stresses that affect should not be thought of as a mutually exclusive binary of either ‘intensity’ or ‘qualification’. Rather, the social efficacy of affect depends on a kind of oscillation, perhaps even a ‘dialectic’ (Mazzarella, 2009: 300) between these two poles (see also Pinker and Harvey, 2015). Subjects are transformed not only in singular moments of striking intensity, but also continually and reiteratively as intensities and their impacts are remembered, narrated and qualified. Since there is always an excess that evades signification, the process of becoming moves on and is never complete (Biehl and Locke, 2010). This oscillation between visceral intensity and signification is fundamental for anthropologists, as signification provides an indispensable, if perhaps imperfect ethnographic approach to registering and communicating (researching and writing) affect (cf. Jansen, 2016). In what follows, I elaborate on the relationship between affect, remembering and narrativization. Constructing my ethnography by drawing on narratives as well as direct bodily experiences makes a case for just such a ‘both–and’ approach to ethnographic knowledge generation.

Luca: Affect and event

Italian sociologist Donatella della Porta (2008) draws on her research on Valsusa’s No TAV movement to emphasize what she terms the ‘eventful’ character of site occupations, barricades and similar forms of direct-action protest (see also Arenas and Dzenovska, 2010). Contingent events, she argues, can change the structure and trajectory of the development of a social movement. Indeed, the history of the No TAV movement is marked by multiple such events. The episode in which Luca was chased up an electricity pole by a policeman and electrocuted is a case in point. The significance of this contingent event was that it triggered a rapid shift in the structure of feeling prevalent among activists at the time. But whereas Della Porta’s focus is on how participants’ feelings during collective direct action strengthen their motivation by fostering a sense of solidarity and community belonging, the episode of Luca’s fall additionally highlights how embodied affects and vulnerabilities generate these eventful moments in the first place. It reveals the role of affect in producing unforeseeable turning-point events that may invigorate collective resistance.

In the summer of 2011, No TAV activists established a tent camp at La Maddalena, near Chiomonte, to prevent construction from starting on the geological survey tunnel. The camp swelled into the so-called Libera Repubblica della Maddalena (‘Free Republic of La Maddalena’). Hundreds of people milled about the tents every day for several weeks. They shared meals, danced, sang in choirs and participated in sports activities, DIY workshops and lectures by distinguished Italian and foreign academics (Salmoni, 2012). The Free Republic marked the peak No TAV mobilization to date. Among Valsusa residents and activists it is remembered as a prefigurative experience (Maeckelbergh, 2009) of communal life based on horizontality, direct democracy and mutuality.⁴ On 27 June, police forces crushed the Free Republic with massive use of tear gas, severe beatings, destruction of tents and a manhunt up the steep mountainside adjacent to the site. One week later, on 3 July, the movement attempted to regain control of the area. Despite tens of thousands of people participating in three converging marches, a prolonged battle with the police ended in failure.

The destruction of the Free Republic of La Maddalena and the launch of construction on the exploratory tunnel marked a crushing defeat for the No TAV movement. Over the months that followed, the movement struggled to recover while activists searched for new tactics and forms of mobilization to carry on their fight. In February 2012, construction was expected to extend farther down the slope to an area closer to Clarea Creek. The movement organized a large march to protest against further implementation of the TAV project, as well as the arrest of around twenty activists accused of participating in riots during the previous summer. Many participants gathered and the demonstration went well. At the same time it was marked by a sense of irrelevance. While marchers chanted protests along the streets of Bussoleno, some 17 km down the valley, work proceeded undisturbed at Chiomonte. ‘They let you make your demonstration but they do whatever they want all the same’ was the pervasive understanding among activists. The day after the demonstration, a public meeting was called to discuss how extension of the construction site might be prevented. However, in Luca’s words, the sparsely attended meeting felt ‘like a funeral’ or like ‘after a party when you’ve drunk yourself into sadness’. The mood that day reflected weakness, indecision and defeat.

Luca recalled the event several years later as he and I talked on our knees in the dirt, picking onions from his field. In 2011, the activists had built a stone baita (shelter) near the creek. The expansion of the construction area, planned in early 2012, meant that the baita was to be enclosed inside the perimeter fence. Anticipating the move, a handful of activists stayed at the baita, watching the police and construction personnel stationed up the slope. The morning after the melancholy meeting just described, at around 4 a.m., Luca received a phone call from those activists. The police and contractors were clearly preparing to expand the construction site. All alone, following forest trails, Luca managed to bypass police checkpoints and reach the baita. The activists were already surrounded by police, and crews were moving in to set up new perimeter fencing.

Luca found himself in the middle of a tense, affectively charged situation. He knew he must try to win time for more activists to arrive. As he later explained to me, he sought to turn things around using the only means at his disposal: his own body. But ‘what a body can do’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 257) changes with the affective intensity of a situation. With little thought, Luca started to climb the utility pole.

Eyewitness testimonies and available video footage confirm that the police were also nervous and let themselves be carried away by the affects of the moment.⁵ An officer followed Luca up the pole. As he moved higher Luca inadvertently touched the high-voltage cables. Shocked, he lost consciousness and dropped onto the rocks at the foot of the pole. He seemed dead, and in fact he only just escaped death, remaining comatose for a week. ‘I had never seen war,’ said Cecilia, an activist present that day, ‘but this was the closest to war I have seen.’ Agitated police officers surrounded Luca’s prostrate body, probably trying to determine whether he was still alive and arguing about what they should do. Simultaneously, construction machinery continued to expand the site, and a small skirmish ensued as riot police attempted to remove the protesters from the area.

The news spread quickly across the valley. Protesters blocked the freeway, building makeshift barricades and taking turns manning them. Soon numbers grew into the hundreds and thousands. The roadblock lasted for several days. When the police finally intervened, a massive riot erupted. Cecilia remembers that the war-like intensity after Luca’s fall infused ‘the days and nights spent blocking the freeway […] when all routines and everyday rhythms were abandoned, and when you’d feel your stomach cramp each time your phone rang, because it could mean something had happened and you had to be always ready to move fast and fight.’ If on previous occasions leading roles in roadblocks and other forms of action involving defiance of the law and direct police confrontation had usually been played by urban political radicals who had come to Valsusa to offer support, Cecilia stresses that this time so-called ‘ordinary people’ from the valley spontaneously built barricades and clashed with the ‘forces of order’. This was another tipping point in No TAV history. Breaking away from a state of apathy that had hung heavy for many months, the movement regained force and the ability to resist, not just symbolically but physically and concretely.

Here, then, is a contingent event that shifted the structure of feeling in a movement and changed the trajectory of its development. Crucially, the event was sparked by the affective intensity of an unexpected momentary conjuncture. Moreover, Luca’s act embodies the interdependence of resistance and vulnerability. Luca pushed his body to the limit of what it could endure and survive, and by doing so he triggered a sequence of happenings that reinvigorated collective resistance.

Titti: Becoming a militant

For Titti, the roadblocks erected following Luca’s injury marked a culminating point in a longer personal history of radicalization. If Luca’s fall highlights the capacity of affect to coalesce and generate critical changes in the trajectories of collective mobilization, Titti’s experience reveals the relationship between affect and the ongoing formation of resisting subjects. Titti and her husband Giovanni moved to Valsusa when they decided to leave the city of Turin for a cosier, more peaceful home in an old peasant house they had bought and reconstructed. Titti told me their story one night as she sat beside Giovanni on a colourful couch in a living room decorated with artisanal furniture and Giovanni’s paintings.

Not long after arriving in the valley, they discovered that the high-speed rail project might threaten the idyll of their newly acquired, beautifully situated house. They started to attend public meetings organized by the No TAV movement to learn more about it. This inspired them to ask questions about the rationality of the project and what hidden agendas it might serve. As for so many others in the valley, a first moment of radicalization came in 2005, with the experience of successful direct action as well as police brutality. A series of site occupations by the No TAV movement had blocked planned geological tests during the summer and autumn, leading to stand-offs with police (Askatasuna, 2006; Picco et al., 2006; Sasso, 2006). These events culminated in a violent night-time raid by the ‘forces of order’ on the protesters’ tent camp at Venaus. People lying in their sleeping bags were savagely beaten. Even elderly individuals had their faces smashed by police batons. The ‘liberation’ of Venaus occurred three days later when tens of thousands of protesters forced the police to abandon the town. Titti and Giovanni frequently recount the shock of the violence—witnessed at this scale and brutality for the first time—but also the extraordinary sense of collective empowerment when they watched the police retreat. ‘We found ourselves doing things we would have never imagined,’ Titti concludes, highlighting how affectively charged collective experiences pushed individuals beyond the limits of what they had believed themselves able to do. In the neo-Spinozist perspective outlined above, where the body is defined by the sum of the affects it can experience and what it can do (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 257), this amounts to saying that the individuals were pushed to exceed what they were and to ‘become other’.

Later, the couple participated in other episodes of collective direct action. They took part in the next wave of site occupations and riots, which occurred in 2010 (Spinta dal Bass, 2010) and in the Free Republic of La Maddalena the following year. The two days of riots that marked the Republic’s destruction further radicalized valley residents. Confronted with massive police violence, many adopted tactics such as stone-throwing and the use of self-manufactured weapons like potato-launchers and fireworks. As Giovanni put it in the aftermath of these events, ‘We all became Black Bloc’. Thus, by 2012 Titti and Giovanni had become militants. This was clearly expressed in their changed understandings of citizenship and the state. They had come to understand the state not as representative of its citizens, but as a violent inimical force serving illicit interests.

In late February 2012 hundreds of protesters occupied the A32 freeway running through Valsusa. They were acting on instinct, responding to Luca’s fall from the high-voltage pole. ‘We had been occupying the freeway for three days,’ Titti says,

We made a sit-in. The police arrived. We were thirty people, and we […] sat down behind the barricade. […] I had arrived from work at 4.30 p.m. […] The police tried to remove us, to check everybody’s documents […] Meanwhile it got late, it was seven or eight. Other people arrived […] So, even if I had wanted to go away […] But I wouldn’t have gone away! We stayed put, face to face—the police and the demonstrators.

Then her firm voice begins to tremble slightly. ‘At a certain moment,’ she continues, ‘at nine, the roadside lamps were shut. And simultaneously, the police started shooting …’ Titti chokes and chuckles nervously: ‘I don’t know; I still get really upset when I recount this story!’ After a pause and an anxious grin, her narrative becomes noticeably edgier.

Titti: They started shooting tear gas, spraying water with irritants, and endless truncheon blows! Those who were in the front took those blows […] all over their bodies! […] We had no way to move aside, because there were so many people […] And they [the police][…] beat us. I don’t remember if I had tripped or […] anyway, I found myself on the ground. While I was down, they kept on beating me. […] Later some lad took me in his arms and carried me away. At that moment, I realized that thank god there were people throwing stones and other things—that was the only way to stop the [police] attack! They [the police] went into the town, shot tear gas, smashed the front window at a bar—they were mad! […] They were hunting the demonstrators! […] I had my ankle broken for eight months, in three points. I was taken to hospital, I had to undergo several surgeries.⁶

Author: So this has been a lasting injury?

Titti: Yes. I’ve got 13 or 14% disability.

Titti stops talking and the room fills with uneasy silence. I look in her eyes and see that she is carried somewhere far away, to the freeway that winter night three years ago. I glance over at Giovanni, next to her on the couch—he seems to see that too, and looks troubled. But suddenly Titti’s hazel eyes regain their focus. She says, ‘Even though they harmed me, they have not stopped me. I’m still always there. Maybe I have a little more fear, but I’m there anyway.’ She reaches for Giovanni’s hand and adds, ‘We’re there with my husband, we bring our grandchildren when we can. We’re always there. They will not break us.’

Titti’s story offers insights into the relationship between vulnerability, affect and the embodied experience of resistance. It chimes with Butler’s (2016) argument that exposure of the vulnerable body is often central to resistance. Vulnerability is not just potential, but a fact inscribed on and in activists’ bodies. It is performatively enacted by these bodies through, for instance, Titti’s limping. Transforming embodied vulnerability into individual and shared power to resist can occur, I suggest, via the corporeal and intersubjective dimensions of affect. In addition to Titti’s narrative, I explicitly draw on my own experience of tension-filled moments of collective action, as described in the opening vignette. Affects refer to an increase or decrease in the body’s capacity to act and be acted upon—to vulnerability and agency. Titti’s bodily abilities were obviously diminished by her injury at the hands of the police. But the surplus of strength, the affect of resilience that I found in her during demonstrations and night-time encounters with police, gave me the force to resist as well. In those moments, Titti’s capacity to act and to affect was increased. Her walking stick, a prosthetic device to partially compensate for her disability, appeared a technological extension of her embodied resistance.

I argue that the circulation of affects among protesters strengthened the impulse of collective resistance in such moments. Affect connects bodies differently from emotion. Emotion can become collective, but generally in the sense of similar internalization by multiple individuals who retain their essential autonomy (see Von Scheve and Salmela, 2014). In contrast, affect blurs subjective boundaries between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the self, creating the transient effect of a body at once singular and multiple (Krøijer, 2015: 144; Thrift, 2008). In this sense one may speak of affect as ‘transsubjective’ or ‘transindividual’, even though subsequent narration of the experience is necessarily subjective. My feelings during collective confrontations with the police were mixed. ‘Anxious’ might be the closest description. I certainly felt vulnerable. As the protesters chanted or fell silent, and the police buckled on their armour; as shadows deepened against the blinding lights; as time passed; as firecrackers and concussion grenades shook the night, and eyes and throats grew soar with tear gas, these feelings intensified. But there was also a strong, inextricable sense of togetherness, defiance of the police and anything the police stood for. These visceral affects circulated among the activists. It was partly because of the cramping I felt in my own stomach that I could sense the nervous feelings in my fellow protesters. Of course, this fed back into my own anxiety. The simultaneous mixture of vulnerability and recalcitrance in Titti’s posture and smile, as in the posture and facial expression of many others, made me want to stay and resist the police with them. As we stood arm in arm—vulnerable, anxious and insubordinate—that complex affect became collective as it resonated through our bodies. Through that resonance, we were transformed from a collection of vulnerable individual bodies into a transient collective body capable of resistance.

I have one final point to make based on Titti’s story. Affectively charged moments of collective direct action need to be considered in the context of longer duration. Against postulates of an ‘orthodox’ reading of affect theory that stress affect’s pre-personal and irreducibly singular character, I argue that the role of affect in producing resistant subjects—what Razsa (2015: 12) calls ‘unruly bodies’—is embedded in biographical experience and embodied remembering. The passionate emphasis with which Titti spoke about the violence of the state was energized by the affective intensity of her repeated participation in confrontations with police. The affects were reinvigorated each time Titti took part in a roadblock or a demonstration. It is important to recognize the role that remembering and narrating play in translating affects into a coherent subjective experience. My own memory of my feelings during situations such as those described above suggests that, prior to narrative qualification, the affects activists experience during collective direct action are often hazy and confusing. In remembering and reliving them—including times such as when Titti told her story to me—affects may be structured in what Alexandrakis, drawing on Guattari (1995), calls ‘an existential territory’ (Alexandrakis, 2016: 8). I take this to mean that reiteration gives a sense of coherence to an affect while preserving its intensity, creating ground in which a subjective sense of coherent agency can take root. Through back-and-forth movements between moments of affective intensity, when the body is exposed and vulnerable, and moments of reflection, the insubordinate subject gradually becomes (trans)formed.

Emotion and affect in social movement research

As this article approaches conclusion, let me highlight some of the key differences an affect perspective makes in the study of resistance and contentious politics compared to a more conventional focus on ‘emotion’.

A sociological tradition going back to Gustave Le Bon (1960 [1895]) long incriminated and, to invoke Theodossopoulos’s term (2014), pathologized emotion. Collective contentious politics outside institutional frameworks were characterized as irrational, driven by ‘mob instincts’. Emotions, especially collective ones, were seen as opposed to reason and therefore dangerous. A turning point came in 1968, after which scholars sympathetic to the ‘new social movements’ sought to portray not the dangerous expressions of primordial drives, but the rational collective of political actors. This move, however, entailed a silencing of emotions. By and large, emotions were still seen as irrational and even pathological. They were tacitly excluded from the study of social movements under the resource-mobilization paradigm of the 1970s (e.g. Tilly, 1978) and the subsequent ‘cultural turn’ of the 1990s (e.g. Melucci, 1995).

The 2000s saw resurgent interest in emotions in the sociology of social movements (Aminzade and McAdam, 2002; Flam and King, 2005; Goodwin et al., 2001). Echoing earlier anthropological work on emotions (Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990; Lutz and White, 1986), this literature emphasizes the social constructedness of emotions and stresses how emotions work at, and across the interface between the individual and the social. Advocating against excluding emotion from analysis, as under the previously dominant paradigms, these scholars argue that emotions are crucial to mobilization, to the construction and anchoring of collective identities, and to the perception of political opportunities. Goodwin et al. (2001: 10) note that many different kinds of phenomena tend to be lumped together under the rubric of ‘emotions’—from visceral responses to shocking events to long-lasting emotional relationships and generalized moods. In an attempt to clear up this conceptual field, the authors declare that ‘the emotions most relevant to politics […] fall towards the more constructed, cognitive end of this dimension’ (Goodwin et al., 2001: 13). Scholars working within this framework examine how movements work to stimulate and manage emotions among their members and different publics at large, inter alia through the use of ritual and symbolic acts during protest (Eyerman, 2005). In sum, emotions in this literature are conceptualized in a rationalist and functionalist fashion. Instrumental elements in social movement politics, they are seen as potentially disruptive yet generally planned, managed and controlled.

While this approach informs some of the recent ethnographic literature on radical politics associated with the subjective turn (Apoifis, 2017), I argue for a focus on affect that inspires ethnographic explorations of non-projected events, spur-of-the-moment happenings and non-prefigured transformations far from any instrumental use of emotions. This approach entails attention to intensities that emerge among and connect bodies—in this sense they are ‘social’ but are not constructed. Whereas sociologists conventionally focus on emotions as inner states of autonomous subjects, I emphasize how bodily affects move between and across ‘subjects’, fostering their becoming-other. Such a shift to affect facilitates ethnographic investigations that amplify the openness and prolificacy of social action beyond structural determinations and reductive explanatory models that portray actors as cool, rational strategizers situated in foreseeable scenarios (Biehl and Locke, 2010: 323). It calls for treating events (such as Luca’s fall from the high-voltage pole and the intensified protests that followed) not merely as illustrative expressions of the operative structural principles underlying social processes but, in Bruce Kapferer’s words, as singularities ‘in which critical dimensions of socio-cultural existence reveal new potentials of the ongoing formation of socio-cultural realities’ (Kapferer, 2015: 2).

Another important difference entailed by the turn to affect is methodological, and concerns the effects of the researcher’s outlook on the representations produced of the embodied experiences of resistance. This can be exemplified by highlighting a contrast between Della Porta’s approach and mine. While Della Porta’s (2008) work on the significance of emotions in the history of the No TAV movement draws primarily on interviews, my research uses both narrative sources and first-hand participatory experience. In Della Porta’s interviews, her informants make sense of past experiences by framing them in terms of defined emotions. Exactly the same narrative tropes of solidarity and communal belonging that populate Della Porta’s account recur in the interviews that I conducted in Valsusa. However, activists construct these tropes in retrospect after the actual experiences of collective direct action. Frequently, in the days following an intense confrontation with police, I found myself struggling with conflicting feelings: exhilaration, joy, a sense of collective empowerment, maybe even pride, but also lingering anxiety, fear and perhaps shame or anger at myself for not having done more, for not withstanding the tear gas for half a minute longer (cf. Krøijer, 2015: 146). More importantly, I often saw more experienced local activists discuss and even quarrel over the emotional as much as the tactical meaning of such confrontations. Was it a success or a defeat? Had we done enough? Had we been provoked to go too far? Had we acted in unity, or had someone, some group, pulled up stakes irresponsibly, ignoring the sensibilities and vulnerability of others? In these moments, I contend, the intense yet amorphous affects of confrontational events were transformed into more definite, but still contested, emotions.

What I have argued above for individual subjective formation also holds, at another level, for the collective formation and self-representation of movements. Only after the fact, through repeated remembering, interpretations and narrativizations—including the interviews activists give to journalists and ethnographers—could sense be made of these experiences and their emotional meaning established. Of course, my conversations with activists are a case in point. By reflecting on their past experiences and arranging them in a particular narrative structure, activists give what Mazzarella (2009) terms ‘qualification’ to remembered affects, amplifying some potential meanings and pre-empting others. No doubt, the questions I asked and my other contributions to the flow of the conversation also played an active part in this work. As Mazzarella argues, qualification in linguistic and culturally comprehensible terms is crucial to the ability of an affect to be socially effective in the long run, beyond its fleeting moment of intensity.

Conclusion: Affective knowledge

Focusing on affect in ethnographic explorations of resistance, I contend, supports the call for ‘de-pathologization’ and ‘de-exoticization’ (Theodossopoulos, 2014). It highlights the creativity of resistance without misrepresenting the unforeseeable as anomalous. Conceptualizing the experience of resistance in terms of affect means locating the impulse to resist quite literally on and under the skin, in the emergent spaces within and across bodies. Resistance is neither ‘pathological’ nor ‘exotic’; neither preternaturally clever nor doomed to failure. Rather, the embodied experience of resistance can be understood as a transformative process animated by the ordinary affects of vulnerable bodies. Linking resistance to violence and vulnerability counters the tendency to locate resistance ‘in a world exterior to power’—a romanticized zone of free consciousness (Theodossopoulos, 2014: 426). Simultaneously, placing emphasis on the affective dimensions of resistance does not imply stigmatizing resistance as deviating from reason. Rather, it underscores that much more than Cartesian ‘reason’ influences what people are capable of, what they are motivated to do and what they become.

Anthropologists increasingly acknowledge the need to recognize our research collaborators’ own knowledge-generating practices, many of which draw on epistemic modalities very different from what Bourdieu (2000) calls ‘scholastic reason’ characteristic of academia (Holmes and Marcus, 2008). This recognition is key in recent anthropological work on radical social movements (Juris, 2008; Juris and Khasnabish, 2013; Razsa, 2015; Shukaitis and Graeber, 2007). As Khasnabish argues, for instance, ‘social movements produce knowledge, critical reflection, and theoretical insights about the world we collectively inhabit and how it might be changed’ (Khasnabish, 2013: 69). Building on, but also adding to that reflection, I contend that there are kinds of knowledge that cannot be accessed outside the epistemic situations from which they emerge. Affect is generative of knowledge that is embodied, transsubjective, pre-discursive and ‘generally other than conscious knowing’ (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 1). That is to say, visceral affects may produce understandings that are very difficult, if not impossible to fully convey with words, yet are nonetheless apprehensible and compelling. Shared among a group of people, their compelling force stems from how they appeal to each person viscerally, how they ‘get us in the gut’ (Mazzarella, 2009: 299).

Registering affective intensities is vital to understanding the processes of becoming at the heart of collective direct-action activism. Ethnographers can and must rely on the reflexive practices of activists who transform visceral affect into conscious knowledge about themselves and the world through remembering and narrativization. Simultaneously, ethnographers need to use their own sensing bodies as research tools (Juris, 2008: 20–21) to experience and cultivate interpersonal affective links with their collaborators and attend to their own visceral and emotional responses to affect. Direct bodily participation in contentious events reveals how intensities such as vulnerability, fear, pain and thrill in the moment of unmediated action can be a visceral impulse to resist. Subsequent narrativization transforms these affects into feelings of solidarity and belonging, cementing collective identities—undoubtedly an important effect. Yet we need to reach beyond narrative construction. I argue that attending to moments of intensity in ways that convey their unmediated experience will help register the non-prefigured affective sources of resistance. This might be a matter of combining narrative collection with first-hand participation when and where possible, but more fundamentally of ethnographic writing that eschews the reduction of affective intensities to clearly defined mental states and embraces the stochastic nature of confrontational events.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Julia Eckert, Alex Flynn, Madeleine Reeves, Magdalena Surawska, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki) under Post-Doctoral Grant No. DEC-2013/08/S/HS3/00277.

Notes

Mateusz Laszczkowski is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw. He has carried out research on the politics of urban transformation in Kazakhstan, and anti-high speed rail protests in Alpine Italy. He is the author of 'City of the Future': Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana (Berghahn, 2016) and co-editor of Affective States: Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions (with Madeleine Reeves; Berghahn, 2017).

References

Abu-Lughod

(1990) The romance of resistance: Tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women. American Ethnologist 17(1): 41–55.

Aime

(2016) Fuori dal Tunnel: Un Viaggio Antropologico in Val di Susa, Rome: Meltemi.

Alexandrakis O (ed.) (2016) Impulse to Act: A New Anthropology of Resistance and Social Justice. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Aminzade

McAdam

(2002) Emotions and contentious politics. Mobilization 7(2): 107–109.

Apoifis

(2017) Anarchy in Athens: An Ethnography of Militancy, Emotions and Violence, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Arenas

Dzenovska

(2010) Making ‘the people’: Political imaginaries and the materiality of barricades in Mexico and Latvia. Laboratorium 2(3): 179–199.

Armano

Pittavino

Sciortino

(2013) Occupy in Valsusa: The No TAV movement. Capitalism Nature Socialism 24(2): 14–26.

Askatasuna (2006) No TAV: La Valle che Resiste. Supplement to Autonomia 15, Torino: Centro Sociale Askatasuna, Comitato di Lotta Popolare No TAV.

Askatasuna (2012) A Sarà Düra: Storie di Vita e di Militanza No Tav, Rome: DeriveApprodi.

10.

Biehl

Locke

(2010) Deleuze and the anthropology of becoming. Current Anthropology 51(3): 317–351.

11.

Bourdieu

(2000) Pascalian Meditations, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

12.

Brown

(1996) On resisting resistance. American Anthropologist 98(4): 729–735.

13.

Butler

(1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, NY: Routledge.

14.

Butler

(2016) Rethinking vulnerability and resistance. In: Butler

Gambetti

Sabsay

(eds) Vulnerability in Resistance, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 12–25.

15.

Cavargna

(2016) No TAV: Cronaca di una Battaglia Ambientale Lunga oltre 25 Anni, Volume I, 1990–2008, Naples: Intra Moenia.

16.

Chiroli

(2017) Ora e sempre No Tav: Pratiche e Identità del Movimento Valsusino contro l’Alta Velocità, Milan: Mimesis.

17.

Clough PT and Halley J (eds) (2007) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

18.

Della Porta

(2008) Eventful protests, global conflicts. Distinktion 17: 27–56.

19.

Della Porta

Piazza

(2008) Voices of the Valley, Voices of the Straits: How Protest Creates Communities, New York, NY: Berghahn.

20.

Deleuze

(1992) What is a dispositif ?. In: Armstrong

(eds) Michel Foucault, Philosopher., New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 159–168.

21.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

22.

Eisenstadt

(2016) Non-domination, governmentality and the care of the self. In: de Souza

White

Springer

(eds) Theories of Resistance: Anarchism, Geography and the Spirit of Revolt, London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 27–50.

23.

Eyerman

(2005) How social movements move. In: Flam

King

(eds) Emotions and Social Movements, London: Routledge, pp. 41–56.

24.

Flam H and King D (eds) (2005) Emotions and Social Movements. London: Routledge.

25.

Fletcher

(2001) What are we fighting for? Rethinking resistance in a Pewenche community in Chile. Journal of Peasant Studies 28(3): 37–66.

26.

Foucault

(1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York, NY: Pantheon.

27.

Foucault

(1978) The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, New York, NY: Vintage.

28.

Foucault

(1982) The subject and power. In: Dreyfus

Rabinow

(eds) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 208–228.

29.

Foucault

(1988) Technologies of the self. In: Martin

Gutman

Hutton

(eds) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 16–49.

30.

Gledhill

(2012) Introduction: A case for rethinking resistance. In: Gledhill

(eds) New Approaches to Resistance in Brazil and Mexico, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–20.

31.

Goodwin J, Jasper JM and Polletta F (eds) (2001) Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

32.

Graeber

(2009) Direct Action: An Ethnography, Oakland, CA: AK Press.

33.

Guattari

(1995) Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

34.

Hardt

Negri

(2009) Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

35.

Holmes

Marcus

(2008) Collaboration today and the re-imagination of the classic scene of fieldwork encounter. Collaborative Anthropologies 1: 81–101.

36.

Jansen

(2016) Ethnography and the choices posed by the ‘affective turn’. In: Frykman

Povrzanović-Frykman

(eds) Sensitive Objects: Affect and Material Culture, Lund: Nordic Academic Press, pp. 55–78.

37.

Juris

(2008) Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

38.

Juris JS and Khasnabish A (eds) (2013) Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

39.

Kapferer

(2015) Introduction. In: Meinert

Kapferer

(eds) In the Event: Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments, New York, NY: Berghahn, pp. 1–28.

40.

Khasnabish

(2013) Tracing the Zapatista rhizome, or, ethnography of a transnationalized political imagination. In: Juris

Khasnabish

(eds) Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 66–88.

41.

Krøijer

(2015) Figurations of the future: On the form and temporality of protests among left radical activists in Europe. In: Meinert

Kapferer

(eds) In the Event: Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments, New York, NY: Berghahn, pp. 139–152.

42.

Laszczkowski M and Reeves M (2015) Introduction: Affective states – entanglements, suspensions, suspicions. Social Analysis 59(4): 1–14.

43.

Le Bon

(1960 [1895]) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, New York, NY: Viking.

44.

Lutz CA and Abu-Lughod L (eds) (1990) Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

45.

Lutz

White

(1986) The anthropology of emotions. Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 405–436.

46.

Maeckelbergh

(2009) The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy, London: Pluto Press.

47.

Massumi

(2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

48.

Mazzarella

(2009) Affect: What is it good for? In: Dube

(eds) Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization., London: Routledge, pp. 291–309.

49.

Melucci

(1995) The process of collective identity. In: Johnston

Klandermans

(eds) Social Movements and Culture, Minneapolis, MN: University Minnesota Press, pp. 41–63.

50.

Mercalli L and Giunti L (eds) (2015) TAV No TAV: Le Ragioni di una Scelta. Trieste: ScienzaExpress.

51.

Pelkmans M (2013) The affect effect. In: Anthropology of This Century. Available at: http://aotcpress.com/articles/affect-effect/ (accessed 10 July 2017).

52.

Pepino

Revelli

(2012) Non Solo un Treno … La Democrazia alla Prova della Val Susa, Torino: Gruppo Abele.

53.

Picco

et al.(2006) L’Autunno Contro, Avigliana: Luna Nuova.

54.

Pinker

Harvey

(2015) Negotiating uncertainty: Neo-liberal statecraft in contemporary Peru. Social Analysis 59(4): 15–31.

55.

Razsa

(2015) Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics After Socialism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

56.

Rizzi G and Tartaglia A (eds) (2015) Il TAV Torino-Lione: Le Bugie e la Realtà. Naples: IntraMoenia.

57.

Salmoni

(2012) Resa dei Conti alla Maddalena: 2010–2011. Diario di Due Anni di Lotta contro l’Alta Velocità in Valle di Susa, Massa: Luce Edizioni.

58.

Sasso

(2006) No TAV: Cronache dalla Val di Susa, Naples: IntraMoenia.

59.

Scott

(1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

60.

Scott

(1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

61.

Seigworth

Gregg

(2010) An inventory of shimmers. In: Gregg

Seigwoth

(eds) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–25.

62.

Shukaitis S and Graeber D (eds) (2007) Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

63.

Spinta dal Bass (2010) Fuochi nella Notte: Schegge di Resistenza alla Follia ad Alta Velocità, Borgone: Spinta dal Bass.

64.

Stewart

(2007) Ordinary Affects, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

65.

Tartaglia

(2015) Le ragioni di una infrastruttura. In: Mercalli

Giunti

(eds) TAV No TAV: Le Ragioni di una Scelta, Trieste: ScienzaExpress, pp. 41–58.

66.

Theodossopoulos

(2014) On de-pathologizing resistance. History and Anthropology 25(4): 415–430.

67.

Tilly

(1978) From Mobilization to Revolution, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

68.

Thrift

(2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London: Routledge.

69.

Von Scheve C and Salmela M (eds) (2014) Collective Emotions: Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.