Affect, state theory, and the politics of confusion Keith Woodward * Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 455 Science Hall, 550 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706, USA article info Article history: Available online Keywords: Affectiva-emotive geographies Anti-state theory State affect Politics of confusion Policing protest abstract This paper introduces the notion of ‘state affects’ to describe the errancies that often characterize everyday statist relations. Where structured conditions and intelligibilities, such as the government of populations, engender state effects that veil the state’s non-existence, state affects, I argue, enroll bodies and differentiate masses through what Secor has called ‘unrecognizable conditions.’ Particularly where such conditions are bungled and baffling, they constitute a field of problems that enable the formulation of an affective ‘politics of confusion.’ Several models of affect and emotion provide a glimpse at the possible biologicalemethodological and epistemologicaleontological stakes of such negotiations of af- fective uncertainty in state errancies. I anchor these to Spinoza’s notion of ‘inadequate ideas,’ a mode of embodied not-knowing that has important political consequences for describing the opacity of affect in everyday encounters. Finally, the New York City Police Department’s bungled management of protest during the 2004 Republican National Convention offers multiple lenses for reading the spectrum of ways in which deployments of the state’s monopoly on violence and the work of its ostensibly dissociated materialities sustain the political tensions between a state’s non-existence and its affectiva-emotive power. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. The policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder. Richard J. Daley, Mayor of Chicago, 1968 Overture During the final week of August 2004, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested over 1800 protesters on the island of Manhattan e 1200 on August 31 alone (Dwyer, 2005; Ferguson, 2004; Gonnerman, 2004). It was the summer of erst- while President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign and New York City e ‘ground zero’ for a recent terrorist attack and sub- sequent rallying symbol behind the so-called ‘global war on terror’ e had been selected to host the Republican National Convention (RNC). As the occasion that would officially endorse Bush’s candidacy, the political mega-event should have meant big business for the city. However, key components the Bush Ad- ministration’s political hegemony concerning post-9/11 anti- terror securitization discourses backfired when the RNC came to town. Earlier that summer, the city was witness to regular rumblings about massive protests being planned to coincide with the convention. Borrowing the rationale of conducting “preemptive investigations into suspected terrorists” (Gonzalez, 2004), under- cover FBI and NYPD agents were quickly deployed to cities across the country to infiltrate activist groups and harass political orga- nizers. Their nebulous justification for wide-spread domestic sur- veillance kept in perfect step with broader Bush Doctrine-era affective ‘logics’ of homeland securitization: the government has deemed it a plausible strategy of consensus making to wage war not on terrorism or terrorists as such, but on Terror, a feeling, a feeling deemed evidence of injustice and justi- fication for state antinomianism . The vague, shapeless, and pseudo-transparent qualities of Terror, and the relative autonomy of Terror from events and agents, make it possible for the govern- ment to motivate a situation of unending war and juridical crisis as though these practices constitute the just response of a represen- tative state to the felt needs of its citizens. (Berlant, 2005, p. 48) Easy to stir up, the fears of true-believers are difficult to manage. Rather than allaying concerns, preemptive policing * Tel.: þ1 608 262 0505; fax: þ1 608 265 3991. E-mail address: kwoodward@wisc.edu. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2014.04.001 0962-6298/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Political Geography 41 (2014) 21e31