Affect is useful for creating a sense of intimacy, which is necessary for creating care as a common good.

Critical scholars of publicity have found in the language of affective publics a helpful framework for theorizing the embodied and processual dimensions of rhetorical worldmaking. Building on Michael Warner’s claim that publics are produced out of stranger relationality and shared attention to circulating textual fragments (67), scholars have advanced a conception of publicity as affective circulation that emerges out of the “temporal, historical, and lived fluxes” of material existence (Edbauer 9). Drawing on a range of approaches, from psychoanalytic theories of affect’s tropological economies (Lundberg) and new materialism (Gries) to the vocabularies of affective economy and public feeling theorized by feminist and queer theory scholars (Cisneros; Edbauer; Johnson; Rand), critical scholars of publicity have produced a powerful account of the ways that shared affects produce “bod[ies] and [their] boundaries” along with relationships between bodies, via their circulation “within, alongside, and outside of power, ideology, and discourse” (Johnson 14). While critical scholars of publicity have turned to affect for many reasons, one key reason concerns affect’s role in the reproduction of capitalism. Many of the theorists that first informed rhetoric’s turn to affective publics have pointed out that felt investments in certain forms of relation and community emerge as accumulations of “affective value” that mimic the circulation of commodities, and that are naturalized through the erasure of the sedimented histories that produce specific patterns of affective circulation (Ahmed 11, 45; Chaput, “Overdetermination”). Rhetorical scholars of publicity have drawn on these insights to argue that the possibilities of collective decision-making under neoliberalism are shaped by “bodily dispositions” that prime individuals to assume forms of subjectivity and shared affect conducive to the reproduction of capital, constraining “what individuals are and are not capable of as public subjects” (Chaput, “Attunement” 182; Greene). An example of this conditioning is capital’s increasing reliance on “affective labor,” which includes cultural labor associated with the entertainment industries and digital economy, as well as service industry work requiring emotional performance and self-management, and the unpaid reproductive labor associated with the mainte- nance of emotional relationships in domestic spaces, workplace environments, and immediate social connection (Bruce and Homan). Broader scholarship on affective publics and scholarship dealing with the affective nature of capitalist reproduction both suggest intimacy as a useful concept for staging a conversation between publicity and the common. Rhetorical scholars who have engaged with the common to a greater or lesser degree have highlighted the ontological “affectability” (Davis 195, original emphasis) that provides the conditions of possibility for rhetorical existence-in-common, includ- ing public deliberation and action. At the same time, as scholars like Rice and Johnson insist, the porosity of bodily boundaries entailed by affect theory is also entangled with the “structures of feeling that shape the social field” (Edbauer 10). Such bodily boundaries are “produced” through socially mediated power dynamics, rendering “some bodies” such as “those of queer and trans folks, people of color, women, and especially the intersections thereof” as “more porous,” hence more precarious and vulnerable, than others (Johnson 5). As a form of affective relation that is crucial to securing investments in particular forms of collective life, intimacy is a productive analytic for considering the power dynamics that inform affective publicity, especially the collec- tive investments and divestments that reproduce patterns of racialized and gendered violence (Mack and McCann 336–38). Intimacy also makes clear the ways that publicity can be said to draw on a generalized affectability expressed by the concept of the common, without holding the common up as a “reparative” fantasy (Berlant, Inconvenience 111) that need merely be affirmed to address systemic oppression. The ways that structural power dynamics shape publicity have been a topic of wide conversation among rhetorical scholars, many of whom have drawn attention to affect and bodily experience as a part of these dynamics (e.g., Asen and Brouwer; Foust et al.; on affect see Bruce and Homan; Chávez; Johnson). Staging a conversation between publicity and the common through a rhetorical theory of intimacy expands scholarly accounts of capitalism as a structural factor in the oppressive nature of dominant forms of publicity by considering how capitalism both produces and “tries to curtail” certain “public goods and public powers” (Fraser xiv) through enclosures of the common that coincide with the production of normative forms of intimacy. Moreover, where literature on capitalism and affect (especially that centered on digital or informational labor) has been taken to task for being insuffi- ciently attentive to the racialized and gendered “exploitation of bodies and environments” (Bruce and Homan 229), our focus on intimacy centers a perspective on capitalism as a social order that gains power by dispossessing the intimate relationships that reproduce existence-in-common, including care work, the “energy and creativity of working people,” and wealth extracted from “nature and subject peoples” (Fraser xiv). If normative forms of intimacy provide the “enabling conditions” for capitalist economic produc- tion in the form of unwaged reproductive labor (Fraser 145), then those who would contest capitalist reproduction should seek to organize intimacy along “nonreproductive” lines that aid in surviving crises and orient intimacy toward alternative futurities (Berlant, Inconvenience 28). Such forms of counterintimacy can be a strategy for publics and counterpublics that seek to “affirm and bolster multiplicity” (Asen, “Neoliberalism” 335) against neoliberalism and the historical patterns of enclo- sure it perpetuates. Moreover, when oriented around the figure of the common, counterintimacies advance publics scholarship focused on affirming counterpublic multiplicity by theorizing the ways that solidarities between different counterpublic groups might emerge through the hard work of negotiating the “converging and competing intensities, junctures and crises” produced by different forms of identity and oppression (Rowe 40–42; see also Chávez 41–46). As recent theorists of publicity’s relationship to capital would have it, such solidarities are the site of “boundary struggles” that contest the “structural divisions that have historically constituted capitalist societies” (Fraser 26). Such a perspective suggests a turn from “the common” as ontological backdrop or utopian fantasy to commoning as a social activity that can produce forms of solidarity and collective existence. In the next two sections, we expand on these claims along two lines of thought. The next section discusses the history of enclosures as a context that is both antecedent to, and productive of, neoliberalism’s attack on public life. The following section discusses the value of counterintimacies for resisting capitalist enclosure.