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Say there are a number of bodies indexed to the same cut, primed to the same cue, shocked in concert. What happens is a collective event. Its distributed across those bodies. Since each body will carry a different set of tendencies and capacities, there is no guarantee that they will act in unison even if they are cued in concert. However different their eventual actions, all will have unfolded from the same suspense. They will have been attuned  differentially -- to the same interruptive commotion. Affective attunementa concept from Daniel Sternis a crucial piece to the affective puzzle. It is a way of approaching affective politics that is much more supple than notions more present in the literature of whats being called the affective turn, like imitation or contagion, because it finds difference in unison, and concertation in difference. Because of that, it can better reflect the complexity of collective situations, as well as the variability that can eventuate from what might be considered the same affect. There is no sameness of affect. There is affective difference in the same event. Reactions to fear, to that classic example again, vary wildly, and even vary significantly at different times in the same individuals life. JM: How does this relate to politics? BM: Politics, approached affectively, is an art of emitting the interruptive signs, triggering the cues that attune bodies while activating their capacities differentially. Affective politics is inductive. Bodies can be inducted into, or attuned to, certain regions of tendency, futurity, and potential, they can be induced into inhabiting the same affective environment, even if there is no assurance they will act alike in that environment. A good example is an alarm, a sign of threat or danger. Even if you conclude in the next instant that its a false alarm, you will have come to that conclusion in an environment that is effectively one of threat. Others who have heard the alarm may well respond differently, but they will be responding differently together, as inhabitants of the same affective environment. Everyone registering the alarm will have been attuned to same threat event, in one way or another. It is the sum total of the different ways of being interpellated by the same event that will define what it will have been politically. The event cant be fully predetermined. It will be as it happens. For there to be uniformity of response, other factors must have been active to pre-channel tendencies. Politics of conformity pivoting on the signaling of threat, like the politics that held sway during the Bush administration, must work on many levels and at many rhythms of bodily priming to ensure a relative success. And again, there will be minor lines that wont be emphasized or come out into relief or be fully enacted but that everyone will have felt in that unfeeling way of negatively prehending. Those are left as a reservoir of political potential. It is a potential that is immediately collective. Its not a mere possibility, its an active part of the constitution of that situation, its just one that hasnt been fully developed, that hasnt been fully capacitated for unfolding. This means that there are potential alter-politics at the collectively

