Feminism, affects and the political
economy of knowledge
(1) Fragments of Auto/Biography
(2) Brief Biased History of Affects
(3) Cruel Optimism, or How I learned to
stop worrying and embrace
‘Depressive Realism’
(Berlant)
28 June, 2016
Part 1 : Forming (Feel Good)
Feminism?
• The positive energies of anger –
legitimate grievances
• The collectivisation of analysis
and self/society understanding
• How was it possible to think
against the intellectual hegemony
of the times?
28 June, 2016
Was Feminism A Structure of
(Political) feeling ?
‘structures of feeling’ as ‘social experiences in solution, as distinct from other
social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more
evidently and immediately available’ In this sense, the structure of feeling is in a
condition of unarticulated pre-emergence: it is neither visible, nor fully
developed, but its presence can be felt nonetheless’. (Raymond Williams 13334).
‘[structures of feeling] are about the selective traditions operating on class &
culture, …the selective traditions on language & literature’ and ‘the practical
social consciousness and knowledge people develop from inside their own
histories’ (Jane Miller, 1990, 38)
28 June, 2016
Performing (Feel Bad) Feminism?
See inter-alia; work of Morley,(1995); Strathern,(2000); Evans (2004);
Gillies & Lucey, (2007); Gill, (2009) indicatively Beverley Skeggs notes:
‘[the effect of the REF]… I think this is when feminism in the academy
became feminism of the academy. The politics of knowledge replaced
other forms of politics and the activism that had defined a particular sort
of feminism became detached from the practice of feminism in
academia’ BUT: these ‘driven maniacs’ (i.e.. ourselves) have become
the ‘perfect workers for capital’ (Skeggs, 2008).
28 June, 2016
Part 2: The Irony of Absence - Academic
Authorities & ‘The Affective Turn’
Posed now as occurring post-post-structuralism and breaking with
Foucauldian discursive determinism but this misrecognizes 3
relevant contributions:
1. Feminism’s embodied knowledge = personal as political &
2. The ensuing feminist scholarship in sociology – feminism as
knowledge production
3. The early work in sociology of emotions
28 June, 2016
The Irony of Productive Presence
[Sociology] should concern itself with what has been too easily left to
psychology, namely with well-being, happiness, selfhood and with the
languages used to define and talk about these socially situated forms of
eudemonia'
(Illouz 1997, p. 61).
Sociology is conspicuously inadequate …physicality, humanity,
imagination, the other, fear, the limits of control: all are missing in their
own terms, in their own dynamic (2000:19).
(Barrett, 2000)
28 June, 2016
The Sociology of Emotions ; Shame
(From a review by Thomas Scheff) indicatively identifying:
Simmel’s (1904) work on fashion – a treatise on shame,
Lynd’s (1961) work on shame – argued it strengthened social
bonds,
Sennett and Cobb (1977) an implicit account of masculine
humiliation.
28 June, 2016
Authorising The Psycho-Social
Lauren Berlant speaks of a ‘sensual turn’ (2008) – cultural studies –
literature & structures of feeling – (influenced by Raymond Williams)
e.g. devised a 3 part history of national sentimentality.
Margie Wetherell (ethnomethodological approach) sees the domain as
‘encompassing: embodied domains of experience; what repels
and what attracts people and how emotions come to move
people and societies’ (2012).[affective practices]
Judith Butler; The Psychic Life of Power (1997).
28 June, 2016
Wishful Thinking?
Butler does not see ‘identity’ at all, but produces the subject as a fictive
accomplishment of ‘identifications’ made in and against the law of the
‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler, 1990, p. 35).
‘All identifications are saturated by wish fulfilments. This reveals the
place of an active imagination or interpretation in the facilitation or
prohibition of our own desires but crucially ‘these fantasies are
themselves disciplinary productions of grounding cultural sanctions and
taboos’.
• This ties in with thinking about feminist academic desire – the affective
charges of the feminist politics of knowledge/production.
28 June, 2016
Part 3: Feminist/Academic – Am I Still
Feeling it?
• Feminism’s Passionate Attachments - Audit and Alienation ?
• The limits of critique – thinking fine but feeling bad!
• Productivity v Politics?
28 June, 2016
Market Forces: Hard Times : Hard Feelings
Higher education is now modelled on the
types of financial speculation that has helped
get us in to this mess’. Students are
encouraged to get expensive loans based on
an imagined income and to hypothecate their
future from the perspective of a nonguaranteed and most likely precarious job
with only speculative earning power’
Vernon, (2010)
28 June, 2016
‘Cruel Optimism’ & ‘Depressive
Realism’ (Berlant, 2006, 2010)
‘To phrase ‘the object of desire’ as a cluster of promises is to allow us to
encounter what is incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as
confirmation of our irrationality but as explanation for our sense of our
endurance in the object, all attachments are optimistic‘
‘There is no collective life without norms, the question isn’t how to become postnormative as such but how to respond to the urgency to engender other kinds of
anchors or magnets for new social relations and modes of life’
Depressive Realism – An Interview with Lauren Berlant (2010)
28 June, 2016
Berlant’s Praxis - Feel Tank
The Feel Tank & 2 Day conference for The Politically Depressed
Negative affective states such as depression not a disconnection
from politics, but as another form of attachment to it.
28 June, 2016
Depressive Realism
‘…Most people self-idealize, imagining themselves to be more beautiful
and more efficacious than they are: and […] this kind of self-optimism is
genuinely adaptive. Depressive realists, in contrast, are more accurate:
their sense of realism isn’t dark or tragic, but less defended against
taking in the awkwardness and difficulty of living on in the world. So
when I said I write as a depressive realist, I meant that I see
awkwardness, incoherence, and the difficulty of staying in sync with the
world at the heart of what also binds people to the social.
28 June, 2016
Defending What ?
28 June, 2016