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Ties that Bind? Engaging Emotions, Governmentality and Neoliberalism: Introduction
ANNE-MARIE DâAOUST
This introduction to the special issue on âEmotions, Governmentality and Neoliberalismâ situates the theme inside the recent International Relations literature devoted to emotions and affect. This literature misses an engagement with governmentality, notably because Michel Foucaultâs prime concern with practical rationalities, such as âthe conduct of conductâ in the case of governmentality, led to an assumption that these were devoid of emotional dimensions. Paying attention to governmentality allows us to examine how emotions and rationality actually intermingle, notably by putting the body at the centre of analysis in ways that do not make it the locus of a pre-social âaffect.â All six contributions to the special issue are then individually discussed around the three key dimensions they all seek to address and emphasise: (1) the ways in which emotions partake in relations of power, sometimes to the point where individuals can become emotionally attached to regimes of power that hurt them; (2) the ways in which neoliberal processes are concomitant with the enclosure and valorisation of certain subjective/emotional dispositions; and, finally (3) the ways in which emotions can challenge or exceed existing relations of power.
Despite the fact that we are far from being able to identify an emotional or affective turn in International Relations (IR), there has been a renewed interest in the subject in recent years, to the point that âarticles on the topic are increasingly less likely to begin by noting that the study of emotions is a recent occurrence in IR and there is more work to be done.â1 Indeed, most conventional works that consider emotions as a key variable in explaining state behaviour2 or even geopolitics3 now coexist alongside more critical scholarshipâranging from constructivist4 to feminist,5 poststructuralist6 and postcolonial works7âthat examine how emotions come about and imbue political life. Parallel to this renewed engagement with emotions, scholars began to address the issue of affect and its relevance in world politics.8 Affect is here seen as preceding cognition, as being experienced as a physical intensity. This double engagement certainly reflects the difference that many scholars make between the two terms, following the famous distinction proposed by cultural scholar Brian Massumi:
An emotion is a subjective content, the socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion. If some have the impression that it has waned, it is because affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable, and is thus resistant to critique.9
This flourishing scholarship is certainly not limited to IR. In fact, several scholars have pointed to an emotional or an affective turn in disciplines as varied as sociology, geography and anthropology, if not the whole of social sciences. While several factors can explain this renewed engagement, Ruth Leys draws our attention to the fact that it appears to be closely tied to broader epistemological anxieties, along with a sense that our world has been increasingly falling into the grip of (global) governmentality.10 Governmentality, as Michel Foucault explained, refers to the conduct of conduct, to âthe ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculation, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument.â11
This understanding of the rationalisation of life, argues Leys, leads contemporary scholars to carefully characterise emotions and affect as non-rationality, thus in effect reproducing the very dichotomy between emotion and rationality they sought to question in the first place. From Nigel Thrift to William Connelly and Brian Massumi, she claims that what
motivates these scholars is the desire to contest a certain account of how, in their view, political argument and rationality have been thought to operate. These theorists are gripped by the notion that most philosophers and critics in the past (Kantians, neo-Kantians, Habermasians) have overvalued the role of reason and rationality in politics, ethics, and aesthetics, with the result that they have given too flat or âunlayeredâ or disembodied an account of the ways in which people actually form their political opinions and judgments.12
But Foucaultâs prime concern with practical rationalities, such as âthe conduct of conductâ in the case of governmentality, does not mean that they are devoid of emotional dimensions. Advanced capitalism, for instance, is characterised by a level of symbolic production that not only results in a dematerialisation of labour, but also increasingly relies on highly emotional components, ranging from consumption desire to workforce management. Feelings as varied as love, anxiety, anger and desire are integral to neoliberal processes, though not in unproblematic and monolithic ways.13 Whereas some accounts decry capitalismâs hold on the emotional realm, as the commodified search for soul mates through the use of online dating sites or Starbucksâ promotion of fair trade coffee appear to suggest, others counter that emotions in fact might represent the privileged site of resistance to market rationality. Again, such binary perspectives, as human geographer Nancy Ettlinger critically points out, often reflect an ontological discursive commitment to consider emotions as either integral to capitalism or as belonging to a sphere of resistance distinct from it.14
Governmentality and Emotions
Paying attention to governmentality allows us to examine how emotions and rationality actually intermingle, notably by putting the body at the centre of analysis in ways that do not make it the locus of a pre-social âaffect.â In fact, we need to be wary of drawing too sharp a distinction between emotions and affect. Keeping this distinction implicitly reproduces an assumption that âa model of human subjectivity exists, one that pits the self against social norms and âtrue feelingâ against convention, thus reproducing the divide between experience and expression (ruled by norms or âdiscourseâ).â15 In other words, to paraphrase Scheer, insisting on the distinction between affect and emotions leads to an unintended understanding that expressions of emotions is the proper domain of social scientific studies, leaving âthe bodyâ as a proper stable and ahistorical site of affect that needs to be understood through the ânatural sciences,â such as neurosciences.
Whereas Foucault himself did not engage much with emotions, his thorough engagement with the body entails that they do have a bearing on the ways in which we should conceive of governmentality and its workings. Emotions can certainly be seen as yet another instrumental way through which practical rationalities can be enacted or as an effect of specific power/knowledge relations subjected to historical and social variations. Understood in this way, emotions are usually only noted in passing in works relying on governmentality as a key framework as either technologies of government âimbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects,â16 or as socially conditioned desired states (of happiness, wisdom, etc.) individually attainable through technologies of the self.17 While relevant, these readings tend to overemphasise the rationality of emotional expression, deployment and management. Even more, they often neglect the important role of emotional excess in management practices, as well as the discrepancy between actual emotional practices and discourses of emotional management.18
As Monique Scheer insists, we need to forego a linear understanding of emotions whereby they are seen as triggered responses to an event or a situation: âThe claim that emotions âhappen toâ the subject splits mind from body, locating the subject in the mind. On this reading, the emotions are viewed as outside the subject and thus acquire a sort of autonomy.â19 Emotions are not free-floating forces, but they are also not something âweâ possess:
Emotions are not a propertyâthat is, something that I or we have. Rather, the surface of bodies âsurfacesâ as an effect of the impressions left by others. Emotions produce the very surfaces and boundaries by which specific kinds of objects can be delineated. In this respect the objects of emotions âcirculateâ. As they move through the circulations of objects such objects become âstickyâ or saturated with effect, as sites of personal and social tension or contestation, as emotions are âmadeâ. Emotions are thus a form of world-making, which allow us to address the question of how subjects come to embody both meaning and belonging.20
Not only are emotions central to subjectification and meaning-making, but they also cannot be dissociated from the materiality of bodies, whose very signification or âreadabilityâ hangs on emotional meaning. Because bodies are always situated, sexualised and racialised, they do not feel the same wayâto ourselves, but also to others. For instance, specific emotions give a certain materiality to some bodies and not others, as Judith Butlerâs reflections on which bodies are grievable or not in war made clear.21 Therefore, emotions cannot be uncoupled from relations of power that characterise and permeate the social field.
As John Protevi and others have argued, the body is central to Foucaultâs work, be it as an object of knowledge,...
