Affect, state theory, and the politics of confusion

•Explores several approaches to reading affect and emotion as a continuum.•Assesses the political dimensions of affectiva-emotivity in relation to the state.•Pairs unifying state effects with differentiating, massifying state affects.•Proposes confusion (not-knowing) as a component of statist thought.•Discusses mass arrests at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

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 biological–methodological and epistemological–ontological stakes of such negotiations of affective 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.