Hawhee, Rice, Gould, Brennan, and Ahmed embrace an affective ontology in which beings are utterly exposed to an \u201coutside,\u201d and the apparently stable borders between \u201cinside\u201d and \u201coutside\u201d are affectively produced. Brennan and Ahmed offer different interpretations about how affective intensities contribute to boundary production, to the \u201csurfacing\u201d of a \u201cself\u201d and an \u201cother,\u201d an \u201cus\u201d and a \u201cthem.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Brennan, the act of projection<\/strong> is boundary-producing: once I project characteristics I don\u2019t like about myself onto you, I stabilize my sense both of who I<\/em> am and of who you<\/em> are by establishing a clear distinction between your bad self and my good self. \u00a0<\/p>\n For Ahmed, the surfacing of an apparently secure boundary between self and other takes place through an economic circulation of affective intensities. According to her, emotions don\u2019t reside \u201cin me\u201d nor are they forced into me from the outside; rather, emotions \u201ccreate the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds\u201d (117). The circulation of love and hate on the Ayran Nation website is her case in point:<\/p>\n Here a subject (the white nationalist, the average white man, the white housewife, the white working man, the white citizen, and the white Christian farmer) is presented as endangered by imagined others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs, security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject. In other words, the presence of these others is imagined as a threat to the object of love. (117)<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cI\u201d feel endangered due to some contact that \u201cI\u201d read (interpret) as threatening, and the combined emotion (fear\/anxiety) and bodily sensation (sweat, racing heart, etc.) result in my \u201cturning away,\u201d which helps secure my sense of myself as a bounded individual (128). I immediately cast about for the cause<\/em> of my fear\/anxiety, and I assign blame to an object, a \u201cnot-me.\u201d \u201cI\u201d am not \u201cthat<\/em>,\u201d that which is fearsome.<\/p>\n But this \u201cI\u201d is already a \u201cwe,\u201d as Ahmed shows in her analysis of the Aryan Nation website: the \u201cI\u201d comes into being via its alignment with a \u201cwe\u201d that is collected under the signifier \u201cwhite.\u201d<\/p>\n And because the felt threat to the \u201cwhite\u201d subject is not inherent in an object<\/em>, it is free to slide around associatively. Here, the apparent causal object is a collection of associatively linked figures: mixed race couples, immigrants, foreigners, rapists, child molesters, Jewish people, etc. (!), all of whom are thought to \u201cmake\u201d the \u201cwhite subject\u201d feel threatened in some way. That\u2019s the sideways<\/strong> motion: the hate is distributed among figures \u201cwho come to embody the threat of loss: lost jobs, lost money, lost land\u201d (118).<\/p>\n There is also a backwards <\/strong>motion. The sideways motion \u201cworks to stick objects together as signs of threat is shaped by multiple histories<\/strong>,\u201d Ahmed writes, which \u201cremain alive in the present\u201d (126). The backwards (historical) movement involves a process of displacement<\/strong>: the redirection of an emotion from its original association to another, so that the emotion now becomes attached to a different \u201ccause.\u201d \u201cObjects of fear [or hate] become substituted for each other over time,\u201d she writes (127). This sideways and backwards movement is how bodies of others are \u201ctransformed into \u2018the hated\u2019 through a discourse of pain\u201d (118).<\/p>\n Ahmed argues that all this displacement and metonymic sliding is possible only because emotions don\u2019t reside in<\/em> individuals, nor are specific objects the inherent<\/em> cause of our feelings. <\/strong>The entire enterprise takes place only because we are not<\/em> bounded subjects sealed off from one another. Emotions are produced through contact, and that contact is what makes us who we are. Borders are not natural but constructed, both psychically and politically. Emotions \u201cinvolve<\/em>\u201d\u2014or, let\u2019s say entangle<\/em> or engage<\/em>\u2014\u201csubjects and objects, but without residing positively within them\u201d (119). They do so by moving sideways and backwards:<\/p>\n This is what I would call the rippling effect of emotions; they move sideways (through \u2018sticky\u2019 associations between signs, figures, and objects) as well as backward (repression always leaves its trace in the present\u2014hence \u2018what sticks\u2019 is also bound up with the \u2018absent presence\u2019 of historicity). In the opening quotation, we can see precisely how hate \u201cslides\u201d sideways between figures, as well as backward, by reopening past associations that allow some bodies to be read as the cause of \u201cour hate,\u201d or as \u201cbeing\u201d hateful. (120)<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In Brennan, remember, love and other positive emotions (joy, hope) are associated with a life force that dissolves hate. Aristotle also talks about emotions as dyads: some are intensifiers and some are calmers. But Ahmed is doing something else.<\/p>\n Ahmed shows how love can instead function as a way to stick one group together (the object of love) against<\/em> another group (the object of hate). Both the \u201cus\u201d and the \u201cthem\u201d depend on associative identifications. Since the emotion is not inherent in the subject, and the cause for it is not inherent in the object, the situation must be read<\/em>, its signs must be interpreted, so that the objects of love and hate may be identified and consolidated. Through this identification and consolidation, an identity may be named and loved, and an enemy may be named and hated.<\/strong><\/p>\n There is not one thing that inherently links a mixed-race couple and an immigrant, and not one thing links either of them to a rapist (for goodness sake). And yet the objects of hate can be associatively stuck together in this way with hate-glue: the more they circulate together, the more stuck they get, and the more affective intensity builds. The more hate builds up against<\/em> this collective object of hate, the more love builds up for<\/em> the \u201cwe\u201d that is the object of love. \u201cTogether we hate, and this hate is what makes us together\u201d (118).<\/p>\n So hate cannot be found in<\/em> one figure, but it \u201cworks to create the very outline of different figures or objects of hate, a creation that crucially aligns the figures together and constitutes them as a common threat\u201d (119). Kenneth Burke will talk about this very movement in the next reading.<\/p>\n So emotions do<\/em> things\u2014this is Ahmed\u2019s point. They work by aligning \u201cindividuals with communities\u2014or bodily space with social space\u2014through the very intensity of their attachments\u201d (119). Her work aims to show how emotions stick figures together (adherence), and so create the effect of a collective (coherence).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hawhee, Rice, Gould, Brennan, and Ahmed embrace an affective ontology in which beings are utterly exposed to an \u201coutside,\u201d and the apparently stable borders between \u201cinside\u201d and \u201coutside\u201d are affectively produced. Brennan and Ahmed offer different interpretations about how affective intensities contribute to boundary production, to the \u201csurfacing\u201d of a \u201cself\u201d and an \u201cother,\u201d an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"parent":197,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2612","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/davis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/davis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/davis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/davis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/davis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2612"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/davis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2618,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/davis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2612\/revisions\/2618"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/davis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dwrl.utexas.edu\/davis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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