Theorists disagree on whether affect is external to or constitutive of state projects

Evidence

How sentiments articulate with state projects can be imagined in several ways, some more developed than others. In one perspective, states are in the business of controlling the passions of their subjects and citizens, setting up rules to ensure they are penalized for transgressions and remain subject to a rule of reason and a rule of law. In this model, affect is outside the state; reason is the means to sort out irrational ends. Alternately, knowledge of affect may be seen as an art of the individual politician’s craft and his mobilizing rhetoric. Tapping into what people consider their “private” aspirations presumes a fine-tuned empathy, both more and less than people want those who rule to know. Here a knowledge of sentiment is seen as a ruse of politicians and not internal to the structure of states. Others, such as William Reddy, offer keen insight into how specific sentiments drive bureaucracies, their recruitment procedures and meritocracies. Here affective knowledge is that on which states depend in their pursuit of “the art of knowing men.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 609

Categorization

• XREF: Reddy’s affective knowledge framing of bureaucracy connects to Carol B. Stack and to work on how states read subject interiority for recruitment and control.
• DEFINE: Useful taxonomy distinguishing three models of how states relate to affect — affect-as-external, affect-as-politician’s-ruse, affect-as-bureaucratic-knowledge.