Affective Economy Research Articles

Neo-Hindutva affective economies: feelings of pride and offense among Surinamese Hindus in the Netherlands

ABSTRACTThis article contests the role that India as a ‘motherland’ plays in the circulation of neo-Hindutva sentiments by exploring the relationship between reterritorialisation, affect and citizenship identities among Surinamese Hindus in the Netherlands. Following Jones (2016, 2014), this article posits that Surinamese Hindu citizens are ‘conditional’, which causes some community actors to strategically reterritorialise Hindu practices and identity as part of the Dutch landscape. Other groups protest their place as conditional citizens as they see their religious practices under threat by cultural and neo-colonial appropriations. In this way, what it means to be Hindu is circulated through a neo-Hindutva affective economy (Ahmed 2004). By presenting ethnographic data that explores the importance of pride and offense as ways to ‘be Hindu’ at an HSS shakha summer camp in 2016 and during a Hindu protest campaign in 2015, this article aims to make sense of the ways in which neo-Hindutva sentiments associated with reterritorialisation strategies respond to citizenship regimes that exist in the Netherlands today.

The Voice of a New China: Democratic Behaviours in the Chinese Reality Shows Super Girl and Happy Girls

AbstractOne of China’s reality shows,Super Girl, showed too much of a ‘democratic’ idea for the taste of the Chinese Communist Party, which suspended it in 2006. Nevertheless,Super Girlsucceeded in introducing a participatory audience and welcoming a new form of ‘affective economy’ that helped Chinese audiences actively engage in a given show. Today’s new media technologies and their convergence empower the participatory audience and spur democratic ideas in Chinese society. Because of these empowered audiences, China’s reality shows have become an influential platform. I examine four aspects of these Chinese reality shows in an era of ‘media convergence’: first, the new relationship between the Chinese government and media producers; second, the intense cooperation between Chinese new media producers and consumers; third, the public voice created by Chinese audiences in and outside the studio; and fourth, the limitations and possibilities of democratic participation in Chinese reality shows.

Tradition and its ‘use’: the ethics of theological retrieval

AbstractThis article argues for the importance of attending to the subjective dynamics involved in retrieval of past theological traditions for contemporary purposes. Building on a close analysis of Martin Luther's distinction between the ‘substance’ of a thing and its ‘use’, the article makes a theological case for the importance of attending not just to what we retrieve from tradition, but also to how and why we retrieve it. Analysis of Luther's distinction suggests (1) that the meaning of theological claims remains unexpectedly fluid until such claims have been located within the ethical drama of ‘use’, and (2) that one of the best ways to get theological traction on the dynamics of ‘use’ is to attend to the affective economies in which theological reasoning is always located. It concludes by drawing attention to specific areas in contemporary ethics where new light can be shed through attention to the dynamics of ‘use’.

Affective economies, autism, and ‘challenging behaviour’: Socio-spatial emotions in disabled children's education

This paper tells a story of a small action in a fleeting moment in a morning spent in a UK special school classroom with Molly, a child with an autism diagnosis. It brings the socio-politically active sphere of Critical Disability Studies (Goodley, 2014; Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2014; Titchkosky and Michalko, 2012; Shildrick, 2012; Titchkosky, 2011) and more recently, the emergent Disabled Children's Childhood Studies (Runswick-Cole, Curran and Liddiard, 2017; Curran and Runswick-Cole, 2013) in to conversation with emotional geographies in education (Kenway and Youdell, 2011). This paper rejects the pathologising of disabled children's emotions as symptoms of disorder and instead reorientates our gaze towards emotions as socio-spatially mediated in the subjectification of children in school spaces. It does this by drawing together the theoretical tools of Ahmed's affective economies (2004a; 2004b) to explore the interventions in the everyday lives of disabled school children. Ahmed's affective economies are put to work to explore the emotions produced, reproduced and resisted between bodies in disabled children's schooling. Through such a reorientation we can explore how the subjectivation of children labelled with Special Educational Needs or Disability (SEND) becomes between bodies rather than residing within an individual child's pathology or psychology.

Necromedia, Haunting, And Public Mourning in The Puerto Rican Debt State: The Case of ‘Los Muertos’

This essay attends to the intersections of haunting, indebted citizenship, and economies of affect, in media representations of national mourning. It centres on the concept of necromedia as it pertains to the mobilisation of a Puerto Rican indebted subjectivity based on a hauntological logic within a neoliberal and mediatic regime. Following Marcel O’Gorman’s definition of necromedia as ‘the collusion of death and technology,’ I argue that as the site where the idioms of subalternity summon notions of citizenship and public mourning, necromedia has become the prevailing mode of representing the social death of the Nation-State’s unwanted citizens, in what I have come to call the ‘Puerto Rican Debt State’ (O’Gorman 13).

Crafting Quebec’s Seventeenth-Century Past: A Birch Bark Letter by Twentieth-Century Hospitalières

This article examines a letter written by the Quebec City Hospitalières to the Society of Jesus in 1925. Written on birch bark, the letter stands out from other notes of congratulation received by the city’s Jesuits on the tercentenary of their arrival at Quebec. Drawing on queer theory ― in particular, Sara Ahmed’s theory of “affective economies” ― this article analyses the ways in which this letter was crafted in order to shape feelings about ― and to colonize ― the seventeenth-century past. Feelings, Ahmed argues, are not “in” objects, but are created through “circulation.” As an object for which circulation is embedded in its purpose, the Hospitalières’ letter provides a useful case study for the examination of the ways in which encounters with objects could shape feeling in twentieth-century Quebec. While the Hospitalières claimed to be able to feel the seventeenth-century past ― and sought to evoke these feelings in the letter’s recipients ― they were, in fact, crafting a feeling for it.

The stickiness of affect in architectural practice: the image-making practice of Reiser + Umemoto, RUR Architecture DPC

Many disciplines have taken an ‘affectual’ turn, from the philosophical lineage of Spinoza, Nietzsche to Deleuze & Guattari where affects constitute bodies according to capacities and processes of becoming, to more recent engagements with ‘new materiality’ that has redirected attention to the expressive properties of materials - matter's relational, interactive and affective capacities. Affect and its indeterminacy as a concept encourage different interpretations. This paper is situated in this complex theoretical landscape. Although numerous studies have examined how affect emerges in- and through- the occupation of architectural spaces, little analytical attention has been paid to the creative process of design and the role that affect plays in the many contingencies that arise in the process. In this context and specifically, this article explores the production and circulation of affect within architectural practices invested in image-making processes. Importantly, it illustrates how affective aspects of image-making in architecture plays a role in the process of design. The study concentrates first on the work of Sara Ahmed who provides a critical engagement with affect as a sticky process, and then extending this to incorporate such things as sticky images. An analysis of the architectural practice of Reiser +Umemoto, RUR Architecture DPC and their project for Kaohsiung Port Terminal is put forward to show how images and image-making can inform and be informed by the design process, and moreover, how they can produce certain affective economies. The article explores the usefulness affect theory in architectural discourse to provide other ways of conceptualising architectural practice beyond being governed by the generations of actual objects and clear processes of production.

"En gift i blodet": Følelsesøkonomier i de dansk-grønlandske relationer

Inspired by Sara Ahmed, the article analyzes how long-established affective economies still dominate post-colonial relations between Danes and Greenlanders. Affective relationships between Greenlanders and Danes are embedded in historically inherited, asymmetric political, and financial power relations. While the political and economic conditions often are subject to analysis because data in these fields is relatively easy to access, it is much harder to access material that illuminates affective relationships. The article focuses on an email correspondence between two women, each of whom has a prominent place in the Danish-Greenlandic cultural debate. The two women know each other in advance and are both eager for the communication to succeed. It turns out not to be quite so simple. The analysis shows how the Dane, contrary to her own intentions, maintains the Greenlander in the role as the object of the Danish, evaluative and normative, gaze. The Greenlander protests against this and tries to renegotiate their positions so that the Greenlanders become subjects of their own actions and the history of Greenland. The article argues that it is not possible to understand the current political discussions, including debates on large scale projects, uranium extraction, and independence, unless these affects and their historicity are taken into account. A conversation about reconciliation must also begin here.

The Neoliberal Heritage Affect

This article explores the transformation of heritage values from discourse to experience in a new affective economy. The case of Phong Nha Ke Bang National Park in Vietnam serves to demonstrate the intertwined role of affective experience and neoliberal heritage entrepreneurialism. Both are intimately connected through processes of heritage commodification and consumption prompting attention to heritage not only in affective terms alone, but how this relates to the political economy of tourism.

Slow burn: James M. Cain, slow cinema and György Fehér’s Szenvedély

Abstract Few novels have proven as alluring to filmmakers as James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which since its publication in 1934 has been adapted to the screen seven times in six different countries. This article focuses on one such adaptation – a film that has to date received little critical attention: György Fehér’s Szenvedély (or Passion) from 1998. More precisely, it positions Szenvedély as a work of ‘slow cinema’, arguing that Fehér’s film draws heavily on the aesthetic practices of this emergent genre in its creative engagement with Cain’s story of lust and murder, its engagement with the affective economy generated by Cain’s text, and the intensities this fosters. With an emphasis on affect and lived time over narrative momentum and causality, Szenvedély’s affords viewers a temporally engrossing, viscerally arresting cinematic experience that – in its own distinctive, insinuative manner – is downright Cainsian in its power to move and shock.

“Even if it didn't happen, it's true”: The fantasy of geopolitics in the “post-truth” era

In times when notions of political facts and objective truth are significantly challenged and undermined, this paper seeks to re-examine “old” questions of ideology by paying attention to economies of knowledge deemed fake and (officially) discredited. Using the “docu-fiction” film “Houston, We Have a Problem!” as a grounding point for examining the topological relationship between reason and fantasy inherent in geopolitics, I explore the contradictions within the film's production and reception, as it offers a powerful and complex account of illusion and reality that form our geopolitical worlds. The paper argues for geopolitics as a fantasy, where the fantasy is conceived as a material process, one placed firmly within the field of social practice and productive of social reality itself. The emotional grip of the fantasy is explored through humor, fun and laughter as forms of emotional purchase of geopolitics. To that end, this paper seeks to expand the field of popular geopolitics by offering a psychoanalytically-informed account of the emotional and affective economies involved in the production of geopolitical ideologies, and proceeds to explore how such fantasies of geopolitics continue to inform our contemporary social reality of “alternative facts” and “post-truth” politics.

The affective economy of transnational surrogacy

The booming business of global surrogacy has come to a halt: one surrogacy hub after the other has started to regulate the incremental flow of intended parents to the Global South hoping to fulfill their desire for a baby with the help of a foreign surrogate laborer. Thailand and Nepal have banned surrogacy altogether; India and Mexico insist on the altruistic nature of their surrogacy arrangements. As the drive for altruistic surrogacy suggests, the baby holds an exceptional position in many societies: ideas about the ‘unique’ maternal bond create public unease about the commercialization of babies in surrogacy markets. Drawing on economic sociology and theories of affect, this paper argues that multiple processes of affective attachment, detachment and reattachment shape transnational surrogacy journeys. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico’s surrogacy industry, the paper studies processes of commodification and decommodification in three instances of market-making: (1) the assignment of value and a price to reproductive laborers’ bodies on the basis of affective postcolonial geographies of beauty; (2) the affective/effective organization of the market encounter through contracts and communication rules and (3) the detachment of the final ‘good’ of the baby from the surrogate laborer. Transnational surrogacy arrangements, the paper concludes, are always forms of partial commodification – no matter whether they are framed as altruistic or commercial – because processes of affective/effective attachment and detachment are fundamental for delineating the intimate boundaries of families that come into life with the assistance of the globally operating surrogacy industry.

Affect, risk and local politics of knowledge: changing land use in Narrabri, NSW

ABSTRACTAs conflicts emerge over land use when extractive industries arrive, what counts as legitimate knowledge about the risks generated by these developments becomes important to how individuals formulate their opinions. This article analyses knowledge, risk and perceptions of future land use in the Narrabri Shire, a rural area in Australia. In a risk society, especially a ‘post-truth’ one, the production of knowledge, whether scientific, political, media or commercially driven, does not provide more security and certainty, but more insecurity and uncertainty. This article uses Bourdieusian concepts informed with theoretical insights about affect and emotion to understand how reflexivity about risks and environmental politics are interpreted. Land use practices are emotional for some local farmers, where their ‘sense of one’s place’ is structured by their deep connection with the land and is therefore structuring of their land use politics. For others, their response may be couched as more economically ‘rational’, but this also expresses an emotional position in an affective economy that destabilises traditional economic understandings of rational/emotional dichotomies. Affect and illusio can contribute to understanding the colour and intensity of the positions occupied in response to land use disputes.

‘Green with envy:’ affects and gut feelings as an affirmative, immanent, and trans-corporeal critique of new motivational data visualizations

In recent educational reforms, policy papers present students’ desire and motivation for learning as decisive issues. The documents indicate that motivation has become a crucial issue for governmental intervention and results in a number of motivational technologies. Envy, once perceived as a mortal sin, is shown as integral of the ambiguous affective economy following the wake of the motivational technologies used to translate the Danish school reform of 2014 into everyday class rooms. Grasping and following the invidious complex as performative effects of the intra-action of policy, motivational technologies, and student bodies is a way of researching the implementation of a reform beyond the already designed tales of the reform. The point of formulating envy as an affirmative critique is not to debunk visual devices or motivational technologies. Rather, it is to provide a more complex understanding of, and the possible consequences of, certain ways of reforming learning and motivation, and to show how affects and gut feelings are both a motivating force and a disruptive one, that can generate an immanent and hopeful critique.

Affective Economies in the Tug of War between Idealism and Anti-idealisms. Reviewers’ reactions to Anne Charlotte Leffler’s Sanna kvinnor (True Women)

The aim of the article is to demonstrate and discuss a method for analyzing reviews, emphasizing the emotional reactions and personal attempts by reviewers to position themselves. Paying attention to such structures is especially important during periods of intense aesthetic and ideological struggles in the field of theatre. The documents used in the study are three reviews of the opening night (15 October 1883) of Sanna kvinnor (True Women), by the Swedish playwright Anne Charlotte Leffler. The reviews constitute an interesting case, as both the play and the performance broke with dramaturgical conventions and strongly criticized the gender-ideology of the era, at a time when the advocates of idealism exercised hegemony and were challenged by various anti-idealist opponents.

The affective economies and political force of rural wildness

Although conventionally distinguished from the wilderness, the rural is nevertheless frequently perceived as a site of wildness, both in the sense of the uncultured/uncivilised and in the sense of the natural/authentic. Arguing that the politics of rurality have an important affective dimension that cannot be dismissed as illusionary or neatly separated from supposedly rational assessments, this article explores the affective economies that, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, cause particular feelings and values to become ‘stuck’ to the notion of rural wildness, influencing how it can be mobilised politically. Case studies of how rural wildness is harnessed as a political force in the self-presentation of the Countryside Alliance, a prominent British rural advocacy group, and in the successful 2013 Dutch documentary film The New Wilderness [De nieuwe wildernis] about a rewilding project in the Oostvaardersplassen reveal that, in both instances, the affective economies at play explicitly or implicitly support a conservative politics.

¿Dos caras de la misma moneda?: una reflexión sobre la relación entre engagement y participación en medios

Este texto presenta las principales disciplinas y aproximaciones teóricas que estudian el engagement en medios y adopta una comprensión interdisciplinar del término. A través de una extensa revisión bibliográfica se trata de problematizar el engagement atendiendo a los matices que aportan otros conceptos vinculados a él, como la interactividad, la economía afectiva, el compromiso y, fundamentalmente, la participación. Se apunta finalmente a la necesidad de interpretar los complejos fenómenos comunicativos que involucran a las audiencias partiendo de la base de una relación de confianza y respeto mutuo que reconozca sus desequilibrios de poder y sus implicaciones morales y afectivas.

Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their by Leigh Gilmore

Reviewed by: Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their by Leigh Gilmore Sarah Brophy (bio) Leigh Gilmore. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives Columbia UP 2017, 240 pp. ISBN 978-0231177146, $30 hard-cover; $22 paperback. As the #MeToo hashtag began to go viral in October 2017, prompting an overdue reckoning with endemic sexual harassment and assault, memoirist Dorothy Allison's epigram resurfaced in my thoughts: "Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I' d rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me" (71, emphasis in original). In its bold refusal to accept the weight of the world's judgment, Allison's telling of family sexual violence and class shame crystallizes the necessity—but also the riskiness—of survivors going public with their stories. While leaders of the #MeToo movement, including Black feminist organizer Tarana Burke, who coined the phrase for use by survivors in 2006, have been acknowledged by Time as "Person of the Year" for 2017, and while some cases of longstanding injustice are being addressed in the courts and within institutions, the deck remains stacked against testimony by women and people of color. Even as some of the most predatory figures, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Larry Nassar, are beginning to be held to account, countless others, including men in the highest offices of the land, continue to "float" in what Leigh Gilmore in her 2017 book Tainted Witness aptly calls "bubbles of impunity" (31), and the speech of those testifying against them struggles to find purchase. What is the nature of this impasse, and how might we imagine breaking through it? As Gilmore makes clear, "testimonial truth is indexed not to facts but to power," and "when witnesses testify they elicit different standards of judgment" (14). The "blank" in our knowledge that Gilmore fills in is "that norms of justice and personhood do not fully include women, and their agency, value, and even existence are often denied through this exclusion" (25). As a result, sympathy, credibility, and indeed objectivity remain stubbornly lodged as the perquisites of the powerful and the institutions that support them (14–15). In Gilmore's prescient and incisive study, we have at hand vital resources for historicizing the present sea change as well as for grappling with our roles as scholars, teachers, artists, and activists in working toward a more just future. This conceptually and analytically rich book carries forward the ground-breaking insights of Gilmore's earlier work on women's life writing. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation, published in 1994, put pressure on how we understand autobiographical identity, repositioning it as multitextual, discontinuous, and embedded in stories and their interpretation and linking "resistance" in women's life writing to "eruptions and interruptions" that challenge normative notions of self-coherence (42). The [End Page 691] Limits of Autobiography, published in 2001, went on to develop the idea of literary witness as an "alternative jurisdiction," highlighting "the productivity of the limit" in the work of queer and diasporic writers, such as Allison and Jamaica Kincaid, who resist the centrality of the confessional in Western autobiography, and who find "other ways to bear this burden" of intimate truth-telling (14–16). Tainted Witness continues and deepens Gilmore's feminist intervention into how women's auto/biographical production is understood by attending to the discrediting and ultimately the violence meted out at the juncture of public and private spheres, where women's testimonies struggle to be articulated and to find an "adequate witness" (5). Theoretical emphases in Tainted Witness appropriate to its focus on "testimonial networks" (3) include the workings of the "intimate public sphere" (from Lauren Berlant), "affective economies" (from Sara Ahmed), and the idea of "testimonial transactions," as survivor speech moves transnationally through multiply mediated public spheres (from Gillian Whitlock). In Gilmore's pithy formulation, "Testimony moves, but judgment sticks" (5). A key insight here is that those sticky judgments are hard to get rid of once your speech and embodiment are targeted for tainting. Scandal "takes parasitic life from the body of testimony, and old, illegitimate stories have...

Taming Heroes: Deep Time, Affect, and Economies of Honor and Glory in Contemporary Mexico

The article compares affective economies in the The Iliad and a corpus of drug runner ballads, focusing on the way they organize power through honor and glory, instead of money. I argue that affective economies go beyond the merely pecuniary, demonstrating how heroes in both Mexico and ancient Greece operate within economies built upon the notions of honor and glory.

The Necropolitics of New World Nativism

This essay outlines the necropolitical structure of the national romance in North and South America, tracing the ways in which the heirs of colonial violence and occupation rewrite themselves as native patriots through rituals of mourning in national culture. Connecting the lament of the Vanishing American in the United States to the celebratory Creole patriot movement in Spanish America, it argues for the centrality of mourning to the work of imagining the nation. Nativist mourning is not only an acknowledgment of loss but also an affirmative materialism through which the mourner emerges as a national subject by rendering impossible a Native American present and presence. This affective economy of the national romance legitimizes Creole nationalism as an indigenous patriotism, a birthright claimed through the sighs and tears of the romance's reader that evoke simultaneously a feeling in common with always-historical Native American figures and the exceptional position of the survivor, the one who remains to mourn.