but that, equally, it is often difficult to show what is at stake for the individual or
groups in submitting to such institutions and embracing certain emotional styles
that render them deferential, obedient or humble – or independent, aggressive
and arrogant – yet we can all attest to the fact that there are many ‘hidden injuries’
in the systems we inhabit. Disciplines like psychoanalysis have been very good
at searching out the violence done and the costs that have to be borne and laying
them bare through indices like physical trauma and tears. But, at the same time,
we still lack a politics of emotional liberty^22 or hope which can be both productive
and not so attached to Euro-American individualism that it simply reproduces
the assumptions of the West in what it strives for: a kind of free to do what one
likes, goal-oriented selfishness which actually flies in the face of all the evidence
that human individuals (or perhaps better ‘dividuals’) only exist as faint traces in
much larger and more extensive circuits of social relation. As Reddy puts it:
Can a person who feels that an emotion is a learned response, a product of
social construction, be oppressed – in the political sense of the term – by this
feeling? The concept of emotions as used in the West is closely associated with
the individual’s most deeply espoused goals; to feel love for one’s spouse or
fear of one’s opponent, presumably, is to be moved by those things one most
authentically wants. It is hard to see how a person can be oppressed by his
or her most authentic, most deeply held goals. To make such a claim, that a
certain person, group, or community is politically oppressed – without
knowing it – would require that one be prepared to assert something about
the nature of the individual. Such an assertion, by definition, would have to
apply to the individual as universally constituted, outside the parameters of
any given ‘culture’. Who would have the temerity, today, to make positive
claims about this politically charged issue?
(Reddy 2001: 11 4 )In what follows, I therefore want to point to four of these new intensities and
speeds and the attendant navigations of discipline, expressive exploration and hope
which are grouping around them, each of which corresponds to one of the forms
of affect introduced in the first part of the chapter. In each case, there are some
complexities. Foremost amongst these is the fact that these knowledges are not
innocent. Each of them represents a striving for new forms of power-knowledge
of the kind that John Allen points to in his paper as well as a new kind of political
ethic. So, for example, each of the kinds of thinking about affect that I want to
foreground have already been drawn on by large capitalist firms, both to under-
stand their environment and to design new products. But they also provide, along
with some recent experiments in cosmopolitics, one of the best hopes for changing
our engagement with the political by simply acknowledging that there is more
there.
I will begin by considering the kind of affect associated with embodied practices.
The political goal of this strand of work might best be described as skilful
comportmentwhich allows us to be open to receiving new affectively charged
Spatialities of feeling 189