ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to draw attention to the affective patterning by focusing in on the surprise. It suggests that in the context of unrest, surprise has an affective structure which we might understand by thinking about it temporally and in its energetic dimensions. Although seldom remarked upon, Jacques Ranciere’s political writings of the nineties are riven through with a subterranean thinking of surprise. In the struggle for meaning, the raw surprise of unrest is anesthetised. Surprise marks a temporal and energetic dimension of unrest. It is that excitement and energy that can come with newness. Understanding the identification of protest and disorder as ‘violence’ is essential to understanding the affective structures which are deployed around unrest. Unrest emerges not because of the activities of particular groups (identified or un-identified) but because the affective life of the populace begins to share a growing sense of unease, crystallising around a particular issue or protest.
