This book is a compelling attempt to think through the question of what is political. Conventional analysis of politics relies on market evaluation and official indexes of growth and development. Classical theories centre on sovereignty, institutions, policy and the friend–enemy divide; and the political science discipline is fixated on rational choice, polling, nation-state and technocratic governance. These political machineries enact a depoliticizing politics: they direct and defuse affective energy of political subjects into nonpolitical, consumer desire. Passion, commitment and the emotions vital to politics are increasingly subsumed, rechannelled and enervated into policy formulations and commodity desire. Breaking out of the box, Dutton investigates the concept of the political in terms of dynamic flow and ebb of energy and emotion in the body politic.
“The art of the political works with fluids rather than solids” (p. 2), Dutton writes. Genuine politics addresses affect and energy rather than rational choice and technocratic administration. The systematic machineries consolidate and regulate flows of energy and passion. Against that, the book seeks to articulate ways in which the political machinery fails to contain the leaks and irruptions of unpredictable flows and affective intensity.
Dutton plays off Chinese cases against Eurocentric and imperialist icons such as the Crystal Palace; against technoscientific fetishism, neoliberalism and Cold War politics in cyberspace, as well as tech fixes to climate change. Comparatively, the book ranges eloquently from the ancient Chinese cosmology underlying Old Peking, Confucianism and traditional Chinese medicine to modern revolutions and social upheavals; from the subaltern margin of jianghu (rivers and lakes) and the Communist Revolution to Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. Working frequently like a cultural critic, Dutton unpacks Mao’s calligraphy, Cai Guoqiang’s arts, and architecture as politicized aesthetics. From these diverse cases emerges an overarching thesis: a critique of how politics gets lost in the contemporary times and how observing modern Chinese political history may recover a robust form of politics that is bound to the earth, the people, vitality, and social movements.
Neoliberal politics, in the West and in China, is draining the political potential and affective intensity from individuals and societies. Such politics operates by market logic and forces, technocratic management, commodity fetishism and consumerism. Digital platforms such as Google, for example, are also “political” machines that dissipate and transform affective energy into material desire. The Crystal Palace and Eiffel Tower were the 19th-century precedents of the current depoliticizing trend. As monuments of industrialization and consumerism, those spectacles mask and repress the real labour of working bodies, turning embodied energy into exchange value and alluring spectacles, turning fascination and thrills into fantasmagoria. This history of emotional capitalism repeats itself today, as symbolic and digital media drives election campaigns that target potential voters by means of lifestyle branding. Voters vote for the candidates as if they are buying a brand that fits their life-dreams, and civic society degenerates into disengaged, atomistic individuals bent on self-interest and profit.
The book re-energizes a politics of emotional intensity centred on purpose, discipline, mobilization and action. “Political intensity” refers to thymos, spiritedness, commitment, participation and ethics in existential struggles for collective causes. Affective politics is experiential and embodied, marked by “goosebumps on the surface of the skin, lumps in the back of the throat, tears in the eyes of believer, and anger in the heart of revolutionary” (p. 142) – bodily symptoms that are harnessed for political action.
Dutton examines how affective energy shored up ancient Chinese governance, modern Chinese revolutions and Mao-era politics. While markets and institutions “enable a circling of energy around” Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction (p. 28), Dutton engages this dyad dialectically by working through and beyond it. Fluid energies flow across the divide, forming “a crossing of currents whereby flows, channels, breaches, and breaks are all geared toward a particular constellation…” (pp. 37–38). Imperial Peking reveals itself as a city of flow that circulates and re-channels vital energy of qi, epitomizing the ebb and flow of affective energy: transitory, cyclical and resonant with Chinese cosmology.
The space of jianghu – rivers and lakes – represents the energy flow of those living on the margins of mainstream society – the bandits, vagrants and martial arts masters in sworn brotherhood. Jianghu signals a mobile, guerrilla space, and exemplifies an excessive expenditure of anarchist energy that spills over the friend/enemy divide, hierarchy and patriarchy. The jianghu spirit, lionized in the novel of The Water Margins, was inherited by the Chinese rural revolution. Rooted in sworn brotherhood and gifts exchange with local bandits, Mao’s modern revolution in Jinggangshan reveals an affective economy embedded in the symbiotic entwinement of an earthbound, telluric culture. The political moment comes to the fore as affective energy flows away from consanguineous attachment toward modern political comradeship still in the garb of brotherhood. From Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary tidal wave to Mao’s high tides of socialist campaigns, modern Chinese politics presents a history of biopolitics that plays out in ebbs and flows of vital qi: formless, volatile and disruptive, until it becomes entrenched again.
This biopolitical lens puts on par the Cultural Revolution and traditional Chinese medicine in the Mao era: both reflect the rise of a modern cosmology premised on the flows of politicalized affect. The revival of traditional medicine challenged the Western biomedical paradigm but also inspired the practitioners to revive indigenous medicine, reconfiguring flows of vital energy by integrating Chinese knowledge and Western techniques. Similarly, the Cultural Revolution addresses how “the management of bodily flows opens a similar pathway to the management of the flow of the body politic” (p. 83). Instead of madness and chaos, the Cultural Revolution comes through as “an experiment in the channeling and harnessing of political intensity” (p. 53).
The author roams the variegated terrains of intellectual discourses and multidisciplinary fields with ease, clarity and imagination, wielding an epic brush to capture the shifting tectonic plates of politics in widely distant centuries and remote geographies. The book deploys the methods of postmodernism, biopolitics, the Frankfurt School, Marxism, culture studies, political theories and eco-philosophy in Chinese cosmology. Theoretical, poetic and impassioned, this book decries the decay of liberal democracy under neoliberal capitalism in search of political energy for social change. It makes an inspirational read and will appeal to students and scholars in all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.
