Ahmed: Affective Economies and Connectedness.

Ahmed's article on affective economies of fear was in itself fearful -- how people groups can identify with certain actions and words, and be incited to fear or hate at the smallest movements. Yet beyond that, Ahmed's ideas about affective economies spreads to almost every other thing outside of just this affective economy in fear, from politics to media to education and everything in between. If it's true that any statement is rhetorical, impacted from previous affective means, and going to impact future rhetoric, then it gives the implication that almost everything is connected.

Ahmed's research into affect is quite different from Brennan, who focuses much on the physiological transmission of affect, but no less important. Different words are connected together in meaning or connotation, and then connected to different images -- all creating a certain economy of terror and fear, passing on to more and more terms and images in identification. Truly, the spoken rhetoric of Ahmed's affective economies takes the forefront, whereas Brennan's transmission of affect can happen almost independently of actual rhetoric with words.

This was a question that I had when reading Brennan -- what is the place of words in this affective theory? Does meaning no longer count toward anything if physiological affect is in everything? Ahmed answers with this article, showing example after example and connection after connection in the words and rhetoric surrounding this global affective economy of fear. It helps us to understand why it has escalated as such, and why it will continue to grow. As Ahmed says, "The impossibility of reducing hate to a particular body allows hate to circulate in an economic sense, working to differentiate some others from other others, a differentiation that is never “over,” as it awaits for others who have not yet arrived" (Ahmed).

This, again, like pretty much every author we've read during this class, is a profound idea. We can never reduce a whole affective economy down to one body, and thus it circulates and grows, giving potential with things that haven't even be uttered or written yet. The connectedness and continuity of ideas in rhetoric is indeed a fearful thing -- and it is likely how we've shaped or expanded all of our views on any topic in life... through an affective economy.