- Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects” [1]
- Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism” [2]
- Sara Ahmed, “The Contingency of Pain” [3]
In “Happy Objects” Ahmed focuses on the problematic term happiness as a site for inquiry into affect in general. Although she begins with a fairly “straight-forward” interpretation of happiness as the ultimate good—citing Aristotle and Locke—she eventually “queers” the notion by introducing a complication into the “pursuit of happiness.” The family itself provides the deepest challenge to happiness, Ahmed argues, because it tends to be the most intense arena for the circulation of “happy objects,” chief among those objects being the family members themselves.
Family members, because of their deep (and potentially endless) affective involvement with each other, attribute “the causes of bad feeling differently” (43) when bad feelings do arise. Their feelings are different and become contrary, even antagonistic:
“The father is unhappy as he thinks the daughter will be unhappy if she is queer. The daughter is unhappy as the father is unhappy with her being queer. The father witnesses the daughter's unhappiness as a sign of the truth of his position: that she will be unhappy because she is queer” etc. (43)
Ahmed draws attention to basic fallacy by which we attribute causes differentially, based on our affective dispositions or “orientations,” drawing upon Nietzsche's insight that causality as a concept only applies after the fact, when our reasoning catches up and delimits the waning affect in question (40). Her essay concludes on a wistful tone of irony; not wanting to be sour, she still doesn't mind to disturb our happiness.
Lauren Berlant develops a stance or attitude of “cruel optimism” first through a poignant treatise on Apostrophe, drawing on the work of Barbara Jordan, and then through criticism of a poem, a story, and an historical novel.
Cruel optimism is defined as “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss” (94, emphasis original). Berlant charts significant moments of disruption in the poem by John Ashbery, story by Charles Johnson, and historical novel by Geoff Ryman, and the different changes taken on by the various protagonists. The major differences, for Berlant, seem to lie along lines of property and history, for each literary form, in its way, is a “lie-affirming defense against the attritions of ordinary violent history” (112). Ashbery's protagonists manage to attain a kind of “lost” apotheosis that somehow dissolves the mundane into a heightening, if frozen, power of listening. Johnson's main characters, two brothers, are radically confronted by a change of fortune, only to prove unequal to the affective challenge brought on by sudden wealth. And the affective alienation of Ryman's children-protagonists in Kansas eventually leads to insanity: “To protect her last iota of optimism she goes crazy” (115). The threes cases indicate points on the continuum, as it were, to illustrate cruel optimism.
Similar to Ahmed's perhaps gentler irony, cruel optimism is part suspicion, part radical openness or susceptibility. As a concept it manages to condense a remarkable variety of theoretical viewpoints, and would have its initiates “become theoreticians” (105) as they emerge from inevitable “self-interruptions” (116) in our affective and political economies.
“The Contingency of Hate,” gives an affective study by Ahmed inverse to the essay “Happy Objects.” Here she constructs a complex sociology of pain, defined empirically and constitutively (following Judith Butler) as that which shapes bodies on their surfaces (24-28). This shaping action allows Ahmed to blend cognitive and effective elements as she avoids or skirts a now common distinction between “sensations and impressions” from “emotion” (40n.4). She acknowledges the “direct” impression of the affect, but pain, she argues, due to its complexity and endurance, “may be a very good example to challenge the distinction between sensation and emotion” (40n.4), where emotion is considered as an intellectual understanding of sensation. In fact pain is almost completely associated in this essay with the foundations of motive and consciousness; for all purposes it is equated with both memory and knowledge of the “other”; even further, following Sartre, pain is the contingency of our world itself, our “contact” with any and all, our path to awareness and recovery from forgetting.
Ahmed differs in emphasis from Berlant when she argues in favor of continuity in historical memory: “The past is living rather than dead... harm has a history” (33). A large component in Ahmed's “politics of pain” is careful thought on the role of empathy, or response to the pain of others. She argues for the sociality of pain, not through appropriation of someone else's pain or the illusion that we can ever feel exactly the feeling of another, but rather through the memory and process of witnessing, of sharing: “[P]ain may be solitary, [but] it is never private” (29). Her ultimate illustrative example concerns accounts of Australian aborigines “stolen” from their families and culture as children. Ahmed leaves readers with the incommunicability of pain, surprisingly calling from an embrace of impossibility, “learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one” (39). This final sentence seems to capture well the status of bodies when affect is considered primary.
Case Study: The Politics of Hope - 9/14/12
“That is, to realizing that 'another world is possible.' That is what a context of hope is all about for me.”
- Lawrence Grossberg, interview with Gregory J. Seigworth & Melissa Gregg [4]
“Particular things I call possible in so far as, while regarding the causes whereby they must be produced, we know not, whether such causes be determined for producing them.”
- Spinoza, Ethics, IV. Def. IV.
“Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—only not for us.”
- Franz Kafka, conversation with Max Brod
ARGUMENT: Following Spinoza, a politics of hope relies upon ignorance regarding present causes and future outcomes. It is a “positive” feeling in that it affectively invests in a desired outcome; but if that outcome were certain, the affect of hope would be missing. Therefore hope relies on both ignorance and pain, which it attempts to ward off for the purpose of self-preservation.
[Source: http://www.thewrigleyblog.com/2011/02/introducing-cubs-hope-o-meter.html]
As a Chicago Cubs fan I have learned about the perils of hope. The illustration above is a fairly accurate portrayal of the affective indulgence the truly "loyal" Cubs fan will go through on an opening day. We are used to a state of hopelessness -- not from confidence, but from certainty of defeat. And yet we are so unused to the positive feeling, so accustomed to the state Lauren Berlant terms "political depression"-- "evidenced in affectlessness, apathy, coolness, cynicism" (97)-- that the slightest good sign assails us with "hope," a "cluster of promises" (Berlant 94). The atmosphere of Wrigley Field beguiles us into this dream that can carry us away, for a moment, from our listlessness and cynical feeling of constant betrayal.
This sentimentality has been brutally and even sadistically employed by the advertisers:
I can think of no better portrayal of the "hope" affect.
So what about politics, what about Barack Obama? Remember this?
Or this?
How do these videos affect you now?
What was the condition of pain from which this message of "hope" persuaded so many? I won't answer that question, but it's obvious to many commentators nowadays that Obama can't quite make the same claims. If only because if hope does respond to a condition of pain, Obama cannot associate this pain with someone else. Consider this clever number:
This blog post is not about party politics or the American economy or who to vote for in November. Rather, I am interested in the affect itself. Something in the "hope" message touched a nerve 4 years ago, and the question remains, what is the status of that message? Is the affect enough? It would be like asking, does it really matter if the Cubs win, as long as they get a few runs in the early innings frequently enough to keep us addicted to the hopeful affect? Addicted to possibility itself, in other words? As a replacement for the grim certainty of defeat that always threatens to impinge upon the North Side good-time bars.
Does it matter if Obama wins in 2012, if we will always have the Hope of 2008?
In 2007 Andrew Ferguson wrote that Obama's The Audacity of Hope was written under "the careful watch of his advisers" and that the world "lost a writer and gained another politician." Obama the rhetorician becomes reduced to Obama the politician. And politicians are judged by the effects of which they are the cause; when the effects are known, or "conceived to be known," in Spinoza's language, then there is no room for either hope or fear when considering the causes (in this case Obama-as-cause).
But I am concerned with the affect. I remember the pain I felt between the years of 2000-2008, when I was ashamed of my president and did not feel welcome or appreciated when George W. Bush held office, the bulk of my twenties. I felt euphoric when Obama was elected, like many other young "liberals" like myself. I also felt euphoric when I watched the treacherous commercial portraying a Cubs World Series victory.
Scholarly material is growing on the singular phenomenon of Obama's 2008 election mystique. Robert Spicer [5] points out two sides the of rhetorical environment: a melancholic liberalism wishing to revive the heady days of the Kennedy administration (190), and a "paranoid" conservatism wary of eloquence swaying mass crowds of people into irrational exuberance (193). Both views tend to focus on "what Obama does to the crowd" (200, emphasis original) and so place the attention and fascination, then as now, on Obama's affective power. And for both sides, the response to Obama emerges from a condition of pain; anxiety about the future for conservatives, longing for the past for liberals.
Mindful of Sara Ahmed's warning that "empathy sustains the very difference that it may seek to overcome" ("Contingency" 30), it may be fair to ask, what good is hope anyway? By the first premise, hope can be perceived as disingenuous. This is the Fox News line today, which would portray Obama as a pied piper misleading the willing masses unto ruin. Or, from the other side, Obama's play to the masses could silence more radical left-wing dissent. Hope is always and necessarily an illusion. As Kafka said, "The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty" [6]. Spinoza would simply call hope the result of inadequate knowledge and leave it at that.
Yet Ahmed also affirms that the "ethical demand is that I must act about that which I cannot know" ("Contingency" 31). Would this case restore some dignity to hope, the affect Emily Dickinson called "the little Bird / That kept so many warm"? Is there (God forbid) a wisdom in the hopelessness of hope? Is it okay after all to embrace my inner Cubs fan?
Or, what is the value of certainty, if, following Spinoza and Kafka, it negates hope? Do we return to Berlant's political depression (relapse into Kennedy nostalgia), or replace hope with hope (the Romney promise)? Are those the only alternatives?
More recently, Berlant [7] has argued that the affective Obama served, at least in in 2008, as "a placeholder atmosphere to absorb a mutualizing aspiration more particular than hope as such because linked to politics, not just the political" (237). Thus he could be all things to all (or many) people because he evaded questions of "adequate knowledge" which might dampen the affect. In so doing he inspired a new form of populism, what Berlant cleverly terms "Opulism." Opulism puns on populism, optimism (see above), and opulence in a grand rhetorical manner:
"It promised an autopoetic popular self-recognition, a common tone, and he insisted that he was merely the occasion for the tone and the atmospheres that vibrate from it, which is why there were so many songs about it right away and so much desire for the inspiring speech that would provide relief from the materiality of life and knowledge about how hard it is to get through." (237)
Berlant further claims that this sense of belonging or revived belief (hope) in politics-as-the-people helped to energize the Tea Party (238). Just as George Lukacs once asked, "What is the Proletariat?" Berlant argues that Obama has in effect forced the question for our time, "Who are the people?"
I don't have the answers clearly, but I still remember, like Ahmed the pains and wounds which have formed the surface of my body (I mean as a Cubs fan). I have learned a distrust of hope which does, I find, temper the passion.
I better conclude there, yet with a comical reminder that there are alternatives to hope, if we embrace "cruel optimism" and regard every affect as subject to "self-interruption," or more darkly, put ourselves on guard to the eventual loss of every object of our desire. It doesn't exactly abolish the hopeful sentiment, and I'm not sure that it promises certainty, but I'll let you determine that for yourself.
Questions for Class
1) Spinoza links "hope" with the "possible," specifically ignorance as to whether a given outcome will result, arising from inadequate knowledge of the present causal factors necessary to said outcome. Given references to "conditions of possibility" and "the possible," how should we make sense of possibility and/or impossibility as political factors and/or goals?
2) If, as Brian Massumi [8] argues, the affect is autonomous, and, as Berlant argues, the affect of a politician can mobilize political forces far transcending any individual personality, agenda, or term in office, should we re-think any assumptions we have about voting or the electoral process? Is it irresponsible to vote for an "affect" over a "rational" program grounded in claims to certainty?
3) What is the status or value of pain, in political terms? How should we respond to Wendy Brown's claims against pain and injury as a basis for politics ("Contingency" 32)? Are you convinced by Ahmed's reply to Brown, that fetishism severs a wound from its history, thereby repeating its original violence, whereas historically conscious public memory can preserve the dignity of suffering for good, or "healing," political ends? (Contrast, e.g., Spinoza, who argues that pain is never good, and always bad). In other words, do good outcomes ever arise from pain, such that we might develop a certain gratitude or resolve toward pain as necessary?
Citations
[1] Ahmed, Sara. "Happy Objects." The Affect Theory Reader. Ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 29-51.
[2] Berlant, Lauren. "Cruel Optimism." The Affect Theory Reader. Ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 93-117.
[3] Ahmed, Sara. "The Contingency of Pain." The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. 20-41.
[4] Grossberg, Lawrence. "Affect's Future: Rediscovering the Virtual in the Actual." The Affect Theory Reader. Ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 338.
[5] Spicer, R. (2010). The Obama Mass: Barack Obama, Image and Fear of the Crowd. In C. Squires, K. Moffitt & H. Harris (Eds.), The Obama effect: Multidisciplinary renderings of the 2008 campaign (pp. 192-210). Syracuse, NY: SUNY Press.
[6] Franz Kafka, "Reflections on Pain, Sin, Hope and the True Way"
[7] Lauren Berlant, “Opulism” in The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:1, Winter 2011, 235-242.
[8] Brian Massumi. "The Autonomy of Affect." Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 23-45.
First let me say, AWESOME job Bill. You've set the bar pretty high! :-)
ReplyDeleteNow to the business at hand. Those who know my orientation toward the work of scholarly inquiry—in fact, my very reason for doing it at ll—will be unsurprised to know that I regularly have to wrestle with my desire to engage the voices we read while still keeping my practical, feet on the ground intentions engaged. It is because of what I believe my calling as an educator AND a preacher to be that I sometimes get nervous when theory moves at a faster pace than practice can match. At least this is how it feels when, though the arguments against it are sound, we start talking as though, since the theoretical concepts in identity politics are flawed (and they are), we should throw out the baby with the bath water and go in a new direction.
It only worries me because I know some might take the recognition that there might be a better approach to mean that there is no reason to believe that ANY of the categories with which identity politics is concerned are relevant to cultural theory in ANY way anymore. Ahmed's treatment of the social nature of pain and the illusion of empathy help me to reconcile my discomfort with letting go of identity as central. Her discussion of the shared pain of certain groups and the unknowable nature of the pain of the other helps this Black woman to think about the collective experiences of a group in different terms without giving up that which is core to my understanding of the ways in which the experiences of Black women have sometimes been ignored or misinterpreted.
If I understand the treatment of Brown in Ahmed's “Contingency of Pain,” properly, then Ahmed maybe sees Brown the way I see some scholars who want to rush past identity as a way of brushing certain ways of categorizing people and relationships under the rug and not dealing with them. It seems to me that Ahmed is saying that Brown wants to deny the validity of the pain of the other as a political concept because, Brown believes, that the pain becomes an issue that the person/community cannot utilize for any positive outcome. Ahmed, agrees with Brown that making the pain into an identity all its own is problematic, but argues that the suggestion that it be ignored in order to allow the community to move beyond it is not the proper way to handle it. This—Ahmed argues—is what happens when we try to use empathy as she has conceptualized it—the turning of “your pain” into “our pain”--to overcome the effects of pain on a community.
For Ahmed, to either ignore or co-opt the pain of another is the repetition of the injury. The reality is that we can never know the pain of the other. We are unable to grasp it and will never be able to claim it as our own in any way that honors us, OR the other. However, Ahmed argues—it is precisely this space—this irreconcilable, unsharable space—that calls us constantly back into conversation with and acknowledgment of one another and THAT is the value of pain in terms of the political. It comes into being through our contact with one another and demands, for its relief, that we hear and value each other's stories even as we acknowledge that we can never truly share the experiences.
This week’s blog concerning the politics of hope questions what role the passion of hope should play and does play within the political arena and how relations of hope emerge from the affective field. The authors for this week, Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, provoke fundamental questions about how political subjects are shaped by an economy of hope and shared feeling, as well as the ability of the objects which draw our passions to both conceal and repeat acts of violence and the constituting genealogy of conflict and asymmetrical power embedded in their affective surfaces. In the process, they help to outline the possibility of an ethics of responsible hope which does not commit the subject to a capitalized economy of reward, entitlement, and calculated expectation, but rather as a way of engaging with the Other, destabilizing a regime of autonomizing distance/internality, and clearing a space for the emergence of the new, the unexpected, the im/possible. This outcome is of course by no means certain but rather an ethical experiment in the vein of Deleuze, Spinoza, and Massumi. At the end of “The Contingency of Pain,” Ahmed says of the evocation of the Other’s pain, “It is a call for action, and a demand for collective politics, as a politics based not on the possibility of reconciliation, on learning to live with the impossibility of reconciliation, or learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one.” We must act without the expectation that it is our prerogative to capture the Other’s unknowable pain and to assimilate the Other into a reconciliatory body in which the Other exists only as scar tissue upon the flesh of the same. Yet by greeting the Other as a Thou, rather than It, by bearing witness to the Other’s pain and alterity, by learning to surrender the scepter of sovereign subjectivity which a history of power has placed in our hands and see ourselves as objects of the Other’s affects, we may perhaps dissolve the protean empire of contingency’s tyranny and find ourselves already reconciled in new, unforeseen way before we even cognize its emergence.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteAs we unfurl the political threads which gather affectivities of hope, channel them into collective action, we find that hope is continually haunted by a specter of fear, lurking just beyond the margins of our cognitive comfort. Similarly, the sharp arrest of fear, the moment where judgment is both suspended and inadequate, where the mind has not yet caught up with the body, carries within it a desperate kernel of hope, the hope of escape, the hope of rescue, what have. We must not be so reductive as to say that hope and fear are reducible to one key moment of onset, yet their inextricable relation speaks greatly for how anticipatory affects are read. Both are directed towards the future, impelled by ignorance of outcomes coupled with stakes or cares intending towards those outcomes. But neither involves merely a present which stretches forward either hungrily or wincingly towards a future set in clear relation to the present. On the contrary, both involve a suspension of the present, an affective limbo where the archives of experience, interpreted, cherished, resented, forgotten, or half-forgotten collide with the maelstrom of uncertainty which unmakes and remakes these crystallizations even as they provide its point of contact, interpretation, and internalization. Therefore, we come to these experiences already turned towards their objects in a certain manner, ready to anticipate them as affective politics, which creates and recreates the forms of our encounters, dictates. If we refuse the forms prescribed for these encounters, we risk alienation from the community constituted in part around a shared relation to their happy or hurtful affects. Yet the alternative may be nothing more than participation in what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism.” By deferring the unpleasantness of the present to a promise of future prosperity and ease, our lives may be gradually eroded and reduced to a mere process of hoarding objects in anticipation of a day of rest which never comes. Such optimism can prove pernicious not only to those who inhabit it, but to those who must remain outside to maintain its material conditions as well.
ReplyDeleteThe course of American politics in the wake of the September 11th attacks provides a useful glimpse at the politics of hope and/or fear. The day of the attack itself was not yet fraught with the rhetoric which would come to define the War on Terror. Instead, it was a moment of suspension within the normal political discourse, where past histories were confronted with the unexpected, and by extension, their own limitations in the face of futurity. During this period the affectivity of fear was circulating throughout American society, turning its inhabitants this way and that towards new ways of inhabiting a post-Cold War world. Fear was soon translated, or at least accented, with hope, however, as the roar of gunfire and the whistle of rockets promised the American public not only revenge, but a revitalization of the American spirit and a future in which the United States would secure and expand its moral leadership of the world. Taxes were cut, effigies of the hated enemies were constructed and maligned, and the mainstream discourse of American politics was now certain that America’s future was safely in hand. Like a chiaroscuro effect upon this rosy, star-spangled picture, however, was a fear so wide in its scope and so vague in its direction that the comfortable certainty born of the promise of America Invictus was forever to be haunted by the looming threat of a repeat experience. Here, fear and hope were not in opposition to each other but rather fed upon one another. The enemies attracted by American valor were never-ending and so therefore would be the tide of American victories. As the years proceeded, however, this giddy terror receded into a grey political ennui. As factuality about wars began to overtake sensationalism, they become a secondary concern for a society now embroiled in an economic malaise which seemed to prove that the American Dream, far from being revived, was more distant and ephemeral than ever. The initial response of mainstream society to the terrorist attacks, which amounted almost to making every day the Fourth of July, could no longer contain the affective energies circulating with American society. In the midst of this identity crisis entered a new politician, Barack Obama, who appeared to articulate a new promise and a new economy of hope. The American Dream would not be questioned, of course, nor would the United States admit either mistake or defeat in its overseas adventures, but there was no mistaking that the tone of American politics would be different. Gone were the days of cowboy hat diplomacy, of roughriders ready to remake the world in America’s graven image. Instead, a promise more in keeping with American insularity and consumerist excess was pledged. After the heady days of 9/11 intoxication, the American polity was ready to get over the Bush-era hangover and to set their hopes on something more material, more personal, than flags and yellow ribbons. Others, disillusioned by the failure of their crusade and embarrassed by their leadership, were now given a new cause to fight for, a new enemy who would destroy their nation from inside and do it all on national television!
ReplyDeleteO then at last relent! Is there no place
ReplyDeleteLeft for repentance, none for pardon left?
None left but by submission; and that word
Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
Among the Spirits beneath, whom I seduced
With other promises and other vaunts
Than to submit, boasting I could subdue
Th’ Omnipotent. Ay me, they little know
How dearly I abide that boast so vain,
Under what torments inwardly I groan;
While they adore me on the throne of Hell,
With diadem and scepter high advanced
The lower still I fall, only supreme
In misery; such joy ambition finds.
But say I could repent and could obtain
By act of grace my former state; how soon
Would heighth recall high thoughts, how soon unsay
What feigned submission swore: ease would recant
Vows made in pain, as violent and void.
For never can true reconcilement grow
Where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep:
Which would but lead me to a worse relapse,
And heavier fall: so should I purchase dear
Short intermission bought with double smart.
This knows my punisher; therefore as far
From granting he, as I from begging peace:
All hope excluded behold instead
Of us outcast, exiled, his new delight,
Mankind created, and for him this world.
So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost.
-Lucifer, from Milton’s Paradise Lost
Sorry this is in so many parts, guys, but it was the only way to get around the characer limit. Also, sorry for it being so long but the pieces were very thought-provoking and I wanted to sufficienly foreground my thoughts on them before turining to the politcs of hope as such. But while I'm already taking up excessive space, here is a bit from Milton I thought was very relevant to the readings. Next time I will try to be a lot more concise!
You know that old saying “ignorance is bliss?” I cannot help but think that that sentiment wraps up my feelings on hope. Hope is for the ignorant, those blissfully deluded populations of people who believe that anything is possible and things will always work out just as the universe planned. You know the ones I am talking about. Perhaps you ARE one of those people I am talking about. I refer to these people (which includes myself more often then I care to admit here) as idiots. Bless their hearts. It pains me to inform you that anything is NOT possible; the universe does not have a definitive plan for you; and, sometimes things will absolutely not go your way. These traumatic events will take their toll on you mentally, physically, and emotionally. You will learn the difficult lesson that life sucks. You will build a bridge. You will get over it. And you will continue to “hope” even as life continues to disappoint you. And, why not? It gives you something to talk about. As Ahmed recognizes, it connects you with others who are (“hopefully”) more pathetic than you are and can acknowledge and validate how you feel.
ReplyDeleteEnter Bill’s eternal struggle with being a Cubs fan. I feel for you Bill. I am a Kansas City Chiefs fan so I subject myself to weekly bouts of hope and disappointment (which is probably the point where this comment is coming from). But to give up hope would be to admit that I was wrong. The Chiefs are not going to be better this year but still I hope that they are; and I defend them as worthy competitors to gangs of fans of other teams who taunt me and my delusional state.
Enter further Obama’s run for re-election on the hope platform. For Obama supporters to jump ship and give up hope on hope would be to admit that they to were wrong. Hope for a brighter future, a more pleasant tomorrow, lower gas prices, increased job security, and a balanced budget is not enough to bring about positive change. Damn it! Yet Obama supporters continue to maintain their attachment to him in a display of Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” holding on to their hope with relentless enthusiasm and support. I watch the videos Bill posted with the same weird feeling of excitement in my being as I did four years ago. I want to believe in Obama. I want to believe in hope as I want to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I, along with millions of others, want to be right. I hold steadfastly to my hope. In its infantile stages, hope feels good. It allows us to temporarily forget the trials and tribulations of the past. It keeps us focused on the future with a sense of keen optimism. It allows the dismal present to fade into a cloud of ambiguity. It makes us happy. However, hope’s affect may not be something to treasure so deeply. As my mother told me and your mother probably told you, just because it feels good doesn’t make it right. Thanks for the words of wisdom Mom!
I would like to address the second question posed here by Bill.
ReplyDelete“If, as Brian Massumi [8] argues, the affect is autonomous, and, as Berlant argues, the affect of a politician can mobilize political forces far transcending any individual personality, agenda, or term in office, should we re-think any assumptions we have about voting or the electoral process? Is it irresponsible to vote for an "affect" over a "rational" program grounded in claims to certainty?”
To answer this question I think it most pertinent to look at the relationship between reason and affect when voting.
First, we should see that the issue, or rather, object - voting - itself has a two-fold impact: first, on the body of the subject and secondly, on the social body. These two points of impact both affect and are affected by one another. Not only this, they appear to define the limits of action and understanding of the other body. Voting, in a sense, therefore, is a mutually constitutive act.
In the first instance, voting informs the subject (who recognizes her/himself as a constituent part of the social body) of proper ways of thinking and acting as part of the social body. (The fact that the question was centered on the concept of voting is somewhat telling as to what is considered proper political action). So, the social body defines the framework within which the individual subject acts when voting. Now of course, the individual’s particular framework has been shaped by its own experiences, having an n¬-number of possible reasons to vote the way s/he does. But, as the popular discourse around voting suggests, we are to make “reasoned,” “well-informed” decisions. We are to justify ourselves without making emotional appeals. Yet, our action of voting is not an unbiased means to an end, but rather a normative goal and product of our experience, linked to our emotions.
This is because what is considered “rational” itself will be determined not upon the inevitability of outcomes or objectives, but by subjective opinions regarding ones own vision of the good. In other words, reason is as subjective as emotion. It is as dependent on experience as affect. It is affected. What is reasonable, or rather, what we should strive for reveals more about our preferences of what is “good” for the social body than what is “reasonable” in itself. We saw this in the example of the family provided by Ahmed. The father’s vision of the good, and by extension happiness, can rationally be achieved by having a family and following certain steps (all based on his experience), which the queer daughter cannot do. His formula to happiness is reasonable only within the context of his definition of good.
Furthermore though, we have no guarantee that our votes will produce the outcome we seek. We have limited information when voting, so there are significant limits on our ability to use pure reason when casting our ballots. Therefore, the affect must play some role. We are making a leap of faith. Hoping for something. Now, if we vote entirely based on affect then our subjective bodies may or may not achieve happiness more easily than if we set definitive, definable goals, but nonetheless the same can be said for our bodies if we vote based on "reason." There are no guarantees.
Therefore, it would be no more or less responsible to vote based on an affect than a rational program. Rational programs themselves are affected. As Ahmed points out to us in ‘Happy Objects’ “The promise of happiness thus directs life in some ways rather than others”
(Ahmed, p. 41). We’re directing the life of the social body by voting. We’re choosing what makes it happy. We’re also directing the life of our bodies by investing our happiness, our vision of good, in this other body. This is what political campaigns such as Obama’s capitalize on: the hope of achieving happiness by constructing a vision of happiness and good that links the two bodies into one.
There is a certain blindness that arises with the association of pain and happiness with the moral values of bad and good (respectively). Ahmed’s argument that the pain of suffering should remain in public memory will ultimately serve a good in that it will foster healing seems to negate that in all cases I can think of the suffering of one social group coincided with the prosperity of another group. It argues that the pain of one should carry more weight than the happiness of another, therefore the sufferer has greater personal value than the oppressor. As was stated in class previously, even the vilest acts come from the belief that a person was doing the “right” thing or a “good” thing. The frustration Ahmed describes at the impossibility of “fellow-feeling” may also be applied to happiness in that there can be no collective politics because a person cannot share their pain may also result from the fact that the same person cannot feel the happiness of the other. Assigning the moral values of good and bad to pain and happiness skew our own perspective of events and affect. If I feel pain, this must be bad, even if you feel happy. The impulse to label and assign value to the affect locks us in a circular argument which has no end and provides no understanding. The politics of pain may be motivating, but at Bill points out, so is the politics of hope. Making value judgments about these two politics inevitably leads to a question of which is “better” or at the very least, directs our thinking towards one or the other and distorts our ability to examine the totality of affect.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, Berlant’s cruel optimism seems to ignore an equally cruel pessimism. Certitude is an impossibility, even for perennial losers such as the Cubs. Hope dashed is certainly unpleasant, but so is a persistent state of anticipated grief. The error in either perspective is the placement of emotional state or anticipated affect on to another. In The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama argues that true happiness come not just from within but from freeing ourselves of the illusion that other, whether people or objects, actually affect us. Modern psychotherapy echoes this with the premise that if someone or something made you happy or sad or whatever, it is because you gave them the power to do so. In many ways, the ultimate search for true happiness is to be completely unaffected by others, regardless of the relationship. In essence, we strive for the divine is ourselves, we seek to be like God, who is the ultimate “unaffected”. (S)He is perfect and permanent and unchanged by the relationship to the rest of creation. (If you believe that sort of thing.) This understanding requires viewing happiness as a state rather than an affect. Take Locke’s delightful grapes for example, there must have preexisted happiness within the eater before ever tasting the first grape for them to cause delight. Likewise, happiness must exist as a state in the person, free of any tie to object or other. I believe the existence of clinical depression and the use of anti-depressants supports this. If sadness can exist, by degree, regardless of external influence, so too can happiness. Rather than trigger the affect of happiness, object serve to bring to the consciousness the preexisting state.