August 9, 2006
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion interrogates the ways that emotions work on and through us socially–to the point where “we” become social and individual beings precisely through this work. Using a model of the “sociality” of emotions,” Ahmed shows that “it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others” (10). A detailed analysis of emotions is therefore central to a proper understanding of individuals as well as collective groups–and, in fact, such an analysis reveals the way in which individuals and groups form each other.
Ahmed’s critical frame is both psychoanalytic and Marxist, and she draws on queer/feminist scholars–such as Butler, Berlant, and Brown–who similarly, if to greater or lesser degrees, work in psychoanalytically-sympathetic modes to analyze social structures (11-12). Ahmed uses Marxism and psychoanalysis to probe and complicate on another, and in this regard her book is iin implicit dialogue with work as diverse as Herbert Marcuse’s sociohistoricization of Freud in Eros and Civilization or Cathy Caruth’s study of culture and trauma in Unclaimed Experience. While Ahmed’s predominant methodology throughout is psychoanalytic, she couples this with a strong focus on the circulation of emotion and a reinterpretation of “the subject” of more traditional psychoanalytic inquiry. An affective economy, she writes, means that the “subject” “is simply one nodal point in the economy […] the sideways and backwards movement of emotions such as hate is not contained within the countours of a subject” (46). In fact, as she explains in her chapter on “The Contingency of Pain,” an emotion such as pain “involves the violation or transgression of the border between inside and outside, and it is through this transgression that I feel the border in the first place” (27). Pain, in other words, creates a sense of self paradoxically by making the self aware of the violation of that very self-constituting border. Rather than private, pain is contingent on a greater social experience. This contingency makes pain a political issue–and makes the sociality of pain a matter for ethical debate.
Ahmed argues that pain enters the political register through the ways in which it is evoked in public language. Through discourse, pain is frequently described as something solitary, something only the person experiencing the pain can really feel. At the same time, the evocation of pain through discourse demands a reaction. Pain must have a witness, even if that witness can only ever fail to fully understand. An ethics of pain, therefore, involves “being open to being affected by that which one cannot know or feel” (30). In the move from ethics to politics, however, Ahmed warns against the fetishization and/or commodification of suffering in the political arena (32). The danger is in politicizing pain through “claims for compensation” as well as through speech (31). Ahmed advocates harrative as a way in which pain can be told and heard by another. Noting the dangerous use of testimonials for the appropriation of individual pain in the service of creating a fetishized national pain, she writes that we must nevertheless hear and remember the other’s pain. It is through the stories of pain that the pained body comes aligned with other bodies. Such stories operate as a political call to action: they are a call based on “learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one” (39). Ahmed suggests that emotions such as pain create a sense of subjectivity through the relation of the subject to the collective. In her terminology, emotions act on bodies and create the sense of bodily borders. All of this happens through language, through the ways that emotions are mobilized discursively and the ways that felt emotions are, in turn, told to others.