CCTV, performance management reviews, the unemployment office, the privileges system in the prisons, the rise of right-wing political parties, the constant examination and classification of even the youngest schoolchildren...it seems that we are all very anxious these days. But what is it about the organization of society that instills different socio-economic and marginalized groups with varying degrees of anxiety? Are the visceral and cartographical architectures (urban spaces, occupations, social strata, and other forms of knowledge production) of our modern world predisposed to engender experiences of fear, anxiety, dread, and ultimately, control? In deploying the concepts of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and others to uncover the affective alienations of late capitalism, this book is a political geography that seeks to generate conversations about the relation between our everyday anxieties and larger political structures of control. Of course, there's always a political motive behind any map-a motive that lives in the almost-invisible spaces between a map and the territory it seeks to represent. What draws this schizoanalytical intervention 'together' is an attempt to uproot from the social's causes and traditions in order to conduct physical exoduses from the ideological territories that have harboured us through much of our previous lives. In other words, to embark on a schizo-stroll is to embark on dérive of bodies, spaces, and times; of kinetics, materiality, and the non-conscious faces we present to the world. It is to strive for many heightened degrees of empathy and perception-to focus our gaze on something and tease out the intangible in it-an intangible that transforms something within each of us.
About the Author: A.T. Kingsmith is a doctoral candidate in the department of Politics at York University, Toronto, where they teach critical theory and international relations. His experimental monograph, A Schizo-Stroll: Anxious Reflections on Late Capitalism, examines the advent of generalized anxiety in relation to the affective conditions of neoliberal capitalism since the 2008 global financial crisis. He recently co-edited a special double issue of Global Discourse, which analyzes the dynamics and challenges of Left organizing, mobilizing, and imagining in the face of the rise of the far Right. As the chair of the digital issues committee at Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, he works with community organizers, media critics, technology activists, artists, and academics. For more, see: https: //atkingsmith.co