Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera

2. The Materiality of Affect

« 37 »« 2 » The Materiality of Affect Affect: The Last Colony Over the past decade or so, scholarship on affect has proliferated to the point that the trend some call the “affective turn” is already being considered passé.1 Why all of this attention to affect? One answer is history. In the past fifty years, as capitalism has profoundly invaded the human organism and harnessed the productive powers of life, the human capacity for affect has been raided by the global media, advertising, entertainment, care, and service industries as a lucrative vehicle for profit making. It is fair to say that affects and their expression in cultural scripts are capital’s last colony. The affective turn in research is both a symptom and a response to this invasion. Because these historical developments are far from dissipating, we need to have a better critical handle on them. Instead of dismissing affect studies as a passing academic fad, we should pursue a more robust understanding of the investments in affect and their role in organized efforts to devise alternative ways of life. This chapter is a step in that direction. The most prominent theories of affect have addressed it as a corporeal intensity that confounds the split in Western knowledge between mind and emotion, language and social relations. Nonetheless, as Clare Hemmings contends, I think rightly, some culture theorists have turned to affect because it appears to provide a remedy to the political vacuity that settled over the academy in the late twentieth century. Her point is that in developing a critical vocabulary to better understand this incorporation of affect and resistance to it, what we need is not more attention to affect per se but analyses that do not abstract it from material history.2 « 38 » The Materiality of Affect Decades before the recent affective turn, feminists were contest­ ing the trivializing of feelings and emotion that the empiricist tradition had imprinted upon the disciplining of knowledge. As early as 1973, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called for a sociology of emotion and feeling, and she went on to theorize emotion work (1979) and to investigate the commodification of feeling in her landmark study The Managed Heart (1983), which probes the commerciali­ zation of feelings in the rising service industry. During those years other marxist and socialist feminists were also disrupting the separation of mind and emotion in Western knowledge. In her pioneering book Knowledge and Passion (1980) and her 1984 path-breaking essay “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling,” anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo puts forward affect as corporeal and culturally informed cognition. “Emotions,” she argues, “are thoughts somehow ‘felt’ in flushes, pulses, ‘movements’ of our livers, minds, hearts, stomachs, skin. They are embodied thoughts, thoughts seeped with the apprehension that ‘I am involved.’”3 She affirms that what individuals can think and feel is a product of socially organized modes of action and talk. By the 1980s the importance of emotion to the making of knowledge had become a major theme in feminist thought as feminists continued to break open the Western equation of emotion with all things female and dangerous and elaborated lessons gleaned from their struggles in social movements, from the practice of consciousness raising and from women’s entry into the professions. Audre Lorde’s 1981 groundbreaking essay “The Uses of the Erotic” claims the value of emotions as a critical resource in every­ day life. Like Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), she tackles the lived intensity of abjection for lesbians and women of color. Lila Abu-Lughod’s 1986 study of Bedouin women’s use of poetic conventions to manage conflicting emotions discloses the ways emotion is culturally scripted and coded rather than spontaneously expressed. She and Catherine Lutz were among a growing number of feminist anthropologists, including Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Ruth Behar, whose work over the next decade critiqued Western assumptions regarding the naturalness of emotion. Among these feminist innovators , socialist and marxist feminists from Canada, France, Germany , Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States recognized The Materiality of Affect « 39 » emotion as vital to social reproduction and theorized its integration into analysis of everyday life under capitalism.4 Though I argue that this feminist line of thought provides the least partial approach to affect, there are, in fact, multiple materialist approaches with varied and contesting understandings of what is meant by “affect.” Some have ancient roots in European...