Affective Economy Research Articles

Indian-Jewish Shrine Hopping in Israel

Focusing on the aesthetic, moral, and affective economies of one-day multisite pilgrimage tours of Indian-Jewish Israelis to the tombs of tzaddikim (“righteous persons”) as well as venerated sites of biblical figures in Israel, the article explores how the neoliberal idea of entrepreneurial competitiveness assists in mobilizing and sustaining culturally valued moral and aesthetic inclinations. Furthermore, it foregrounds the “multisensoriality” of religiously defined practice, emotion, and belief and their role in the production of an Indian-Jewish ambiance and the narratives that it elicits. Clearly, throughout their pilgrimage, Indian-Jewish Israelis carve out their own spaces in which they author the sacred sites and cultural landscapes that they visit through aesthetic engagement, embodied ritual, and, more generally, sensory enactment. However, in order to achieve the desired ambiance, Indian-Jewish pilgrims must to some extent become entrepreneurs or consumers in Israel’s flourishing market of folk veneration both with regard to homegrown and imported saintly Jewish figures.

Winners of the Ashby prizes

The editors of EPA: Economy and Space are delighted to announce that the Ashby prizes for the most innovative papers published in the journal in the calendar year 2018 have been awarded to Jinn-yuh Hsu (National Taiwan University), Dong-Wan Gimm (Seoul National University), and Jim Glassman (University of British Columbia) for their paper “A tale of two industrial zones: A geopolitical economy of differential development in Ulsan, South Korea, and Kaohsiung, Taiwan,” and Carolin Schurr and Elisabeth Militz (University of Bern, Switzerland) for their paper “The affective economy of transnational surrogacy.”

Olfactory Attunements and Technologies: Exposing the Affective Economy of Scent

We conceive olfaction as a sense of the elemental—a term encompassing odors and the organs that detect them. Contributing to efforts in elemental thinking, we enlist olfactory attunement as a sensual and speculative mode of aesthetic orientation, an analytical frame for attending to scented matter(s) in the air. Moving in malodorous urban airs of the American Northeast, we encounter new technologies and techniques for curating scented bodies and micro air spaces, fueled by the secretive Fragrance & Flavor (F&F) industry. The F&F industry is creating and promoting “natural” and “pleasurable” scents and atmospheres that impress and inhabit bodies, creating an affective economy that summons, seduces, and habituates moods and memories. We expose the expressive infrastructure of aesthetic capitalism in the realm of olfaction using examples of new digital technologies in transmitting and exercising personalized proprietary scents: AireSpa®, Cyrano by Vapor Communications, and Aroma Gym™, a smell art installation. Operating beneath the radar but in tandem with wellness and the smell arts, digital scenting technologies are manipulating and, ultimately, diminishing the most primal of our environmental senses. We call for olfactory experiments in the “wildlands” of scent, both fair and foul, arguing that olfactory attunements, as artful science and practice, are imperative for multispecies survival on a damaged planet.

Listening otherwise: attuning to the caring-chaos of a refugee and asylum drop-in service

This article argues for the need to develop a politics of listening attuned to the sonic environments of caring encounters. Drawing on a sonic ethnography conducted with a refugee and asylum seeker community centre in Greater Manchester, this article explores the ‘affective economies’ of listening and how everyday caring encounters come to be imbued with state affects while still holding the potential to challenge such power structures. This article articulates a politics of listening otherwise attuned to the sensuous intensities of the everyday. Sound is a visceral phenomenon, and our listening responses are always unpredictable; what creates a sense of coherence or solidarity between some could provoke feelings of unease in others, and therefore, can be equally felt as a disruptive noise. To elucidate an ordinary politics of listening, this article draws on semi-structured conversations with refugee and asylum seeker friends and attendees of the drop-in, discussions with those who work and volunteer and a narrative vignette drawn from a sonic ethnographic listening diary and field recordings.

Rematerialization, Art, and Affective Economies

The paper highlights artworks that engage with materials to comment on the dematerialization of the economy and the invisibility of labour. The emphasis is on artworks which disturb these conditions through a process of rematerialization, defined as “attending to materials.” How to revalue what has been dematerialized, devalued, or deemed invisible? To revalue invisible labour is to find a material that can engage with the affective relation surrounding labour and space, a material that can experience the invisibility rather than represent it. By correspondences of materials, actions and the body, the artworks counter abstraction and standardized value. One can identify across diverse contemporary artworks parallel forms of rematerialization through tasks. Tasks are free from the hegemony in the binary of work vs. leisure and productive notions of land and labour. The geographically dispersed artistic examples present a possible process of revaluation rather than mere critique of value. These examples are compared against twentieth century artworks considered critique of standardized value. With the help of affect theories, the paper argues that such rematerialization through care and attention may offer a “reparative” process that posits an alternative to exposing economic structures.

An assemblage of avatars: Digital organization as affective intensification in the GamerGate controversy

Through a study of the so-called GamerGate controversy, this article argues that a new dynamic of affective intensification is currently instating itself in the digital organization of not only highly collaborative industries, such as that of gaming, but of society as such. This dynamic may best be understood and conceptualized through reconsiderations of the notions of affective economies and affective labour. The affective constitution of digital organization is a process of affective intensification that not only works like an economy but is directly productive of economic value, and not only involves human emotionality but technological affectivity as well. Guided by the notions of assemblage, affordance and agency, the article offers a conceptual framework for studying affective intensification in and as socio-technical processes of value production.

Why Mourning Matters: The Politics of Grief in Southeast Asian Narratives of Women’s Migration

This paper examines how migrant women’s lives are politicized through the work of mourning by analyzing how grieving over their deaths becomes a way of also claiming accountability from a nation-state that deploys its citizen-breadwinners. I employ critical discussions on mourning by Vicente Rafael, Pheng Cheah, and Judith Butler to analyze an OFW film and two Southeast Asian novels that present different responses to deaths of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers: Joel Lamangan’s The Flor Contemplacion Story (1995), Jose Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister (2008), and Rida Fitria’s Sebongkah Tanah Retak (A Lump of Cracked Land, 2010). While these texts are different—one is a melodrama, the second a faux-detective novel, the last one a novel inspiratif (“inspirational novel”)—all three portray how grief becomes an affective economy, in that it reproduces and circulates feelings, like pity, sympathy, rage, and reproach, that forges a community to either foster or forestall political action. My reading maps out how the bereavement over migrant women’s lives can lead to a more critical understanding of labor migration policies and discourses in the Philippines and Indonesia, opening the possibilities of social activism that not only transforms a national community but also transcends national boundaries among and between Filipina and Indonesian migrant women.

Mapping the circulation of fat hatred

ABSTRACT The authors draw from affect theory and intersectionality-as-assemblage theory to conceptualize fatmisia as a complex affective force. In line with queer affect theorist Sara Ahmed’s theorizing of emotion, the authors explore how fat hatred circulates as an affective economy: how it flows across, attaches to, and comes to define or value different bodies. The authors analyze interview data compiled for the research project Through Thick & Thin to map fat hatred circulating in healthcare contexts, on transit, and while exercising. The data yielded insight into how fat hatred obstructs access to public participation, resources, and services, by rendering public space and social exchanges uncomfortable, unwelcoming, unsafe, and inaccessible. Constellations of feelings that adhere to fat bodies become instruments of fatmisia, and operate relationally in the space between bodies with the object of erasing or expunging fat life.

A suitable woman: The coming-of-age of the ‘third world woman’ at the bottom of the pyramid: A critical engagement

While the slogan ‘Make Poverty Business’ has become integral to neoliberal discourses on global poverty management, what often goes unremarked is the role of women, especially poor third world women in profitable poverty ventures. Taking the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ (BOP) approach as an entry point, the present article brings into sharpened focus the centrality of poor third world women in the ‘global order of poverty management.’ Drawing on Foucaultian notions of problematization, combined with feminist insights on the stakes involved in instrumentalizing women and their subjectivities, and a Marxist-inspired notion of immaterial labor, the article examines how poor third world women are incorporated into profitable poverty eradication ventures. I argue that the construal of poor third world women as knowable objects of knowledge and entrepreneurial subjects remains at the heart of the BOP programmatic. Where, at one level, poor third world women’s participation lends ethical credence to the BOP projects; at another level, their immaterial labor helps to build ‘economies of affect’ at the bottom of the pyramid. Located at the intersection of neoliberalism and feminism, the article aims to add to the ongoing debates on the uneasy proximity between women’s empowerment and ‘neoliberal reason.’

Graphic Katrina: disaster capitalism, tourism gentrification and the affect economy in Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (2009)

ABSTRACT This article explores the ways in which Josh Neufeld’s documentary comic, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which was published first online from 2007 to 2008 and then collected in book form in 2009, offers a radical visual commentary on the processes of disaster capitalism and tourism gentrification that have reshaped New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Whilst A.D.’s biblical imagery evokes the proto-corporate language of the ‘blank canvas’ in order to critique regimes of disaster capitalism, its vertical multi-scalar perspectives meanwhile resist the racism of media coverage of the event. Through colouring and other aesthetic choices, the comic also challenges the subsequent propagation of an ‘authentic image’ of New Orleans that promotes tourism gentrification. Where previous critics have emphasised the emotional appeal A.D.’s makes on its readers, I instead discuss the comic’s identification of the structural conditions that have violently impacted the city’s most marginalised inhabitants. Nevertheless, the article qualifies these contentions by acknowledging that A.D. also contributes to an ‘affect economy’ that has exacerbated the privatisation of previously public infrastructure and social services, often to the detriment of pre-Katrina residents simply trying to return to their city.

The affective economy of internationalisation: migrant academics in and out of Japanese higher education

ABSTRACTInternationalisation is a polyvalent policy discourse, saturated in conceptual and ideological ambiguity. It is an assemblage of commodification, exploitation and opportunity and is a container for multiple aspirations, anxieties, and affordances. It combines modernisation, detraditionalisation, and expansiveness, with knowledge capitalism, linguistic imperialism, and market dominance. There are notable policy shadows and silences, especially relating to the emerging subjectivities, motivations and narratives of internationalised subjects, and experiences that expose the gendered, racialised, epistemic and affective inequalities constituting academic mobility. This paper explores the affective economy and policyscape of internationalisation drawing upon interview data gathered in one private and one national university in Japan with 13 migrant academics. What emerged from our study is that internationalisation policies, processes and practices generate multiple affective engagements. Internationalising oneself can be repressive and generative, with migrant academics finding themselves both vulnerable and animated by their diverse and frequently embodied experiences.

Measurement and Modernity

The Modulor was a tape measure–style tool created by Le Corbusier in the 1940s to govern the distribution of objects in space. When he first conceived of the Modulor, Le Corbusier was a bureaucrat working in the fascist regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain. Six years later, the same tool played a role in the construction of the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. In this essay, I recall the eight-year production history of the Modulor and trace its movement across different political regimes as an opportunity to ask how Modulor measurements became liberal. Attending in particular to the height and gender of Le Corbusier’s Modulor Man, I argue that the forgotten system of measurement has much to teach us about the affective economies that underpin modernity and ongoing practices of measurement.

Great War Games: Notes on Collective Memory, the Adynaton, and Posthumanism

This essay performs a narratological reading of 2014 video games Valiant Hearts and Super Trench Attack and the ways through which they memorialize the Great War. By close-reading the narrative techniques of these games, I argue that through their storytelling elements they memorialize the Great War by countering the narrative trope of the adynaton, often employed to manage the traumatic articulation of war narratives. Bathetic, pathetic, and chronotopic representations contribute to the affective economy on which these video games rely to memorialize the war, and hint at what posthumanist memorialization could mean for the remembrance of Great War.

Bad feeling at work: emotional labour, precarity, and the affective economy

ABSTRACTReturning to Arlie Hochschild’s foundational work, this article argues for the ongoing relevance of emotional labour in understanding the subjective demands placed on those working at the intersection of affective labour and precarity. Drawing on a range of feminist analyses, I understand emotional labour as the work entailed in producing profitable (often positive) affects at the level of the individual worker, thereby challenging views of affective labour that focus on the affects that circulate productively under neoliberalism. The stakes of such emotional labour in the affective economy, I argue, are heightened by conditions of labour precarity in which many workers are asked not only to produce positive affects, but also to subordinate the bad feelings that can arise alongside socio-economic insecurity. I understand the demand for positive affect from workers as emerging not only due to the productivity of such affects under neoliberalism, but also because the prevalence of positive feeling operates ideologically to normalize precarious working conditions. Bad feeling in this context threatens to challenge the neoliberal status quo. Drawing extensively on Tatjana Turanskyj’s 2011 film Eine Flexibe Frau, I identify the cultural and workplace logics by which bad feelings are excised and suppressed, primarily through the presumption of bad feeling as wilful. These logics complicate any effort to read a straightforward politics of resistance or refusal into bad feeling; however, I conclude that to view bad feeling as structurally embedded and functionalized within capitalist logics offers a means by which to respond differently to those who feel bad as we encounter them in the precarious affective economy.

“Ko te hau tēnā o tō taonga…”: The words of Ranapiri on the spirit of gift exchange and economy

In the 1890s, a dialogical exchange of ideas of people and cultures started with Tāmati Ranapiri, a Māori scholar of Aotearoa New Zealand, and Elsdon Best, an Anglo-New Zealand ethnographer. Their exchange of letters, in Māori and English, impacted profoundly on the nascent discipline of sociology, and the spirit of the gift in rituals of gift exchange. This paper traces an extraordinary cross-cultural Pacific-Europe dialogue that led to Māori concepts of reciprocity being enshrined by French sociologist Marcel Mauss. According to Mauss’s sociology, exchange theory and gift exchange present themselves in the form of a set of propositions: that a gift economy is animated by hau ‘the spirit of the gift’; that exchange is a fundamental social system; that gift exchange is a prior economic system; the effect of the spirit of the gift creates an indissoluble bond between persons engaged in the exchange; and that it was Anglo-Western societies who were responsible for the separation of persons and things. The propositions are particularly informed by Māori thinking as articulated by Ranapiri, whose texts reflect the metaphysics of a spiritual world of the South Pacific Islands. By returning to the primary sources in Māori language, I find Best both mistranslated and misinterpreted the hermeneutics of Ranapiri. In effect, Best reduced Māori metaphysics to a secular materialist’s explanation, thus reflecting his Anglo-world view more than that of Māori. Ultimately, Ranapiri articulates a Māori notion of economy described elsewhere as an economy of mana, or economy of affection, which exists to maintain the four well-beings of Māori and the Pacific—spiritual, environmental, kinship and economic.

Colonial hauntings in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons

Abstract This article traces two interrelated affective economies present in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons. First, I begin with a discussion of colonial hauntings demonstrated by the numerous demons in Barry’s text whose title also bears this word. The demons of Barry’s text are ghostly presences that are the aftereffects of colonial trauma. Second, I examine the ways in which Barry employs what I call are ‘sticky visual rhythms’ that produce haptic knowledge that reverberates colonial hauntings of racism, sexism and empire. These affective rhythms not only echo the haunting effects of colonization, empire and intimacies, but also offer new ways of countering patriarchal and imperial desires. The ‘sticky visual rhythms’ of One Hundred Demons allow us to think through issues of self-loathing, anger and depression that disproportionately affect those who have been subjected to traumas of colonialism and other structural inequalities.

Caring to Teach: Exploring the Affective Economies of English Teachers in Singapore

Abstract The ethical project of education hinges on the ideal of caring relations between teachers and students, an ideal that entails deep emotional commitments on the part of teachers. Drawing on interview data from a larger study of teachers’ lived experiences in Singapore’s secondary schools, this paper examines the cultural politics of caring as an emotional practice in teaching. The ethic of care serves to construct normative accounts of good teaching based on “feeling rules,” and becomes a disciplinary technology for evaluating the professional, social and emotional competencies of teachers. I suggest that this project in turn entails an ideological effort to mobilize teachers’ emotional attachment to this ethical ideal. The ethic of care shapes the subjectivities, beliefs, and practices of English teachers, particularly as they circulate through the neoliberal imperatives of educational accountability regimes.

Entanglements in multispecies voluntourism: conservation and Utila's affect economy

Through a case study of conservation voluntourism this article brings together critical political ecology, multispecies ethnography, and studies of humanitarian tourism to advance a political ecology of multispecies conservation voluntourism. The article presents multispecies conservation voluntourism as a field that produces and is produced by an “affect economy”, or an economy based on the exchange or trade in the relational. Since the mid-1990s, life on Utila, Honduras, a popular discount backpacker scuba destination located along the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, has been deeply transformed by the growth of dive tourism, the ecological destruction it has produced, and now the conservation voluntourism industry emerging in its wake. Seventy percent of Utila is comprised of mangroves and associated wetlands, home to several endangered and endemic species. Using examples of whale shark tourism, lionfish hunts, and iguana tracking, this article shows how conservation organizations operate as affect generators, enabling the privilege of engaging in multispecies encounters. Engaging in multispecies conservation voluntourism produces value in the form of cultural capital which is then exchanged for material outcomes by volunteers in the global economy; at the same time, this form of voluntourism obscures local relationships to nature and alters multispecies assemblages from past configurations.

Haunting Expectations of Hospital Births Challenged by Traditional Midwives

ABSTRACT In Balochistan, Pakistan, hospitals are not the desired location for childbirth, but an affective economy of obstetric care, deceit, and clinical tactics of control has emerged, redirecting women away from midwives toward biomedical obstetrics. This economy manifests in forms such as coercing expectant mothers to deliver in the clinic rather than the home by generating fear in them and their kin through a narrative of imminent maternal and child harm. Drawing from ethnographic research, I show why Baloch midwives’ ethical expertise and affective responses to iatrogenically induced emergencies haunt the postcolonial state and constrain biomedicine’s haunting expectations of hospital/clinical births.

Political motherhood and a spectacular resistance: (Re) examining the Kangla Fort Protest, Manipur

ABSTRACTThis essay is a (re)examination of the Kangla Fort protest in Manipur (2004), where 12 imas (mothers) enacted a spectacular nude protest, with banners reading ‘Indian army rape us/Indian army take our flesh’. Based on interviews with the imas, I examine how the notion of ‘political motherhood’, along with a shared affective economy of hurt and pain produced a protest, both spectacular and singular, in its symbolic, as well as actual resistance against the atrocities of the Indian army. The 12 women who protested are members of the Meira Paibis (torch bearers), who draw their strength from their identity as mothers. Thus, their narratives, memories and articulations of the nude protest is saturated and conditioned by patriarchal idioms of ‘motherhood’, and how the ‘mothers of Manipur’ had to rise up, to save Manipuri people from the masculine Indian state. The essay grapples with the double bind that the notion of ‘political motherhood’ poses: on the one hand, the imas operate within the paradigm of benevolent patriarchy, drawing their strength from sacred and religious traditions that legitimise their roles as peacemakers; on the other hand, the event of the protest destabilizes and ruptures all social, historical, and cultural norms that constitute the members of the Meira Paibis as grieving mothers. In this essay, I argue that the spectacular and radical act of protesting nude in broad daylight speaks to the crux of recent feminist theorizations on subjectivities, where agency is understood as something that is not pre-discursive and prior to power, but produced by historically specific, concrete contexts. I argue that the singular and the spectacular act of protest gives a completely new meaning to agency, and even if momentarily, redefines the politics of resistance within a field over determined by social, political, and ideological constructions of normative femininity.