Molecular Affects in Human Geographies

Abstract

In this paper I engage critically with the relation between affect and the molecular—the former touching upon but not limited to questions of mood and emotion, and the latter registering the power of processes including, but not limited to, the neurochemical. The backdrop to this engagement is an emerging diagram of the molecular processes and pathways in which affect is implicated. The emergence of this diagram not only foregrounds the importance of thinking critically about how affect is caught up in a range of techniques and technologies: it also raises the question of how to attend to molecular affects—and their implication in the matter and movement of thinking—without falling back upon a kind of biological or physiological reductionism. I provide a provisional answer to this question. In doing so I draw support from a range of thinkers, including Lucretius, Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari, each of whom points to the possibility of cultivating a kind of molecular logic of sense. In moving towards a conclusion, I speculate about how this logic productively complicates the thinking space of human geography.