Coding Intensive Movement with Technologies of Visibility: Alien Affects

Abstract

This is an essay about how alienhood is made. Alienhood is a material, affective, and political condition of that is manufactured by the State’s technologies of visibility. Immigration control in the US relies on enhanced technologies of perception to surveil the intensive movement differences (alien affects) of migrants to control their extensive movements—their flow. Alien affects are the micro-flows of intensity that when cast upon the surface of the State, glimmer with difference, augmenting the ways alien migrant bodies move into and across the surfaces of US statehood. This makes the process of alienation a political process that involves governance of migrating bodies through a multitude of technologies aimed at surveilling and controlling both citizen communities and non-citizen communities. This essay explores the relationship between extensive movement and intensive movement and what this relationship means in the context of affect studies. It also describes how State power is expressed through layers of articulable and visible expression that is distributed across landscapes of US statehood to control the flows of the bodies. Lastly, the essay invites those invested in affect studies to find more links between the fields of rhetoric and affect studies, to study the technological production of alienhood in our societies of control, and to consider what adopting a movement politics can offer that ascribing to an identity politics may not.