Fear and Loathing in Democratic Times: Affect, Citizenship and Agency

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Fear and Loathing in Democratic Times: Affect,Citizenship and Agency

Michael FeolaLafayette College

This article engages some questions raised by recent work on civil society: What is missed by a rationalistreduction of politics, and why does it matter? How does the somatic dimension of citizenship open deliberationto social economies of power? From these questions, the article interrogates what agency is possible if power isinscribed within the affects that mobilize action and judgment – with particular attention to the work of WilliamConnolly. Over the course of the article, it is argued that Connolly’s politics of sensibility makes an ambivalentcontribution to these problems. While critics charge that he undermines possibilities for associational agency, thisarticle proposes a rather more productive contribution to the arts of coalition building. And yet, these resourcesmust be pressed beyond recent trends in the literature if they are to do justice to the unruly movements of civilsociety.

Keywords: William Connolly; affects; democracy; civil society; rationalism

It has been argued that we are experiencing an ‘affective turn’ within political and socialtheory. Broadly, this turn signals a materialist rejoinder to post-structuralist approaches,where attention to discourse (or other symbolic forms) is thought to eclipse the concernsof bodies that feel, hurt, lust, hunger, need, excrete, bleed and so on (see Clough, 2010).From a more focused angle, however, those who propose such a turn typically hope totrouble two forms of thinking the political. On the one hand, there is a narrow institu-tionalism that limits the purview of political theory to laws and policies; on the other hand,stands a thin rationalism, for which politics is rooted within the exchange of argumentsover contested norms and institutions. For this latter camp (largely neo-Kantian in inspi-ration), the emotions that move agents threaten the deliberations of democratic politics,where citizens deploy reason to transcend their merely particular interests and negotiate theclashing values characteristic of pluralistic societies (Cohen, 1998; Elster, 1998; Fishkin,1993; Habermas, 1998; Rawls, 1996; Spragens, 1990). From this angle, the affects representa dangerous anti-politics. They are not only arbitrary guides for deliberation, but intrin-sically self-seeking, invidious vestiges of private life that threaten to tear apart the civicbody (see Hall, 2005, Chapter 3).

A counter-strain of literature, however, has pressed for a more sensitive politics ofsensibility. Hobbes and Machiavelli long ago called attention to the desires, fears orambitions that move and constrain citizens (Hobbes, 1994; Machiavelli, 1998). Andtheorists of nationalism have explored the erotic attachments that supplement the other-wise artificial and symbolic ties of the nation. The bond necessary to generate the sacrificesof citizenship must be thicker, the intuition goes, than a mere sharing of territory, interestsor preferences; rather, it must take root within the sympathies and desires that governattachment. This argument finds its classic voice in Rousseau, for whom the task of

doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12197

POLITICAL STUDIES: 2015

© 2015 The Author. Political Studies © 2015 Political Studies Association

Fear and Loathing in Democratic Times: Affect, Citizenship and Agency

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overcoming amour propre is to inculcate a love for the laws that bind citizens and ultimatelyfor the nation that transcends, memorializes and shelters them (Rousseau, 1987).

Recent debates have pressed these intuitions further yet, into a rich set of democraticconcerns. Minimally, these conversations have helped to develop a more satisfactoryphenomenology of political experience. For while a liberal social ontology tends toprivilege a disembodied subject – a collection of interests, beliefs and values (each of whichcan be bracketed, set at a distance and subjected to rational evaluation) – this literature hasexposed how structures of belonging (or aversion) are rooted at a more visceral level,within shared loves, hates, anxieties and refusals.1 And, this modifier ‘shared’ is meant toperform significant work in characterizing how political subjectivity exists ‘ek-statically’,bound up with transpersonal economies of value, perception and desire that exceed andimplicate the subject (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2004; Brennan, 2004; Massumi, 2002).Affect, in this sense, is neither the property of the sovereign subject (who would possess fullmastery over its moods and passions) nor is it a private holding, ‘internal’ to any givenagent. As we learn from attending a sporting event, enduring a collective tragedy, cel-ebrating an election victory or entering a party, feelings are ‘contagious’ (see Sedgwick,2003; Thrift, 2008, Chapter 10). They strike us without our willing them into action. Theycirculate among agents and help to constitute what it means to be a member of a givencommunity, predisposed towards certain joys, anxieties and fears, and responsive towardsthe needs of certain bodies, rather than others.

The stakes of these debates extend beyond phenomenological considerations, however,to press a more strongly normative point – that is, how this sensible dimension mightinform (or deform) a democratic politics. To put the suspicion in Foucauldian terms, theissue is not whether a thinly rationalized account of politics is true or false, but rather whatis covered up by this framework, and what objectives are facilitated by this obscurity.Exploring this problem will occupy the better part of the article, which aims to accomplisha number of things. At the very least, it will engage this ‘affective turn’ to raise difficultiesfor discursive strains of politics – more specifically, that prominent accounts rest uponsensuous conditions that their models of deliberation cannot fully redeem. That said, themost significant aim of the article is to press upon what is gained by this more politicallyrobust approach to sensibility. If we are convinced (as I think we should be) that significantpolitical work is performed by triggering or maintaining certain affectual modes (hope,fear, resignation, despair, love, resentment), then what follows for political practice? If theeffects of power are inscribed this deeply within our motivational economies, then whatpossibilities exist to contest their operations towards more normatively desirable aims? Suchquestions will lead us to grapple particularly with the work of William Connolly as it isinstructive both in what he gets right and in the questions that his work persistentlyoverlooks. Accordingly, the article will propose two distinct things: first, that this turn tosensibility yields productive resources for a contestatory politics; and second, that theseresources must be pressed beyond recent trends in the literature if they are to reflect fullythe affectual politics (and counter-politics) that define civil society. The core question,then, is not the familiar knot of reason, emotion and justification, but rather how theseconsiderations of sensibility inform emancipatory agency, and whether such agency can bereconciled with democratic ideals.

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Political Feelings. Democratic AnxietiesTo begin, it will be useful to narrow the focus. Any inquiry into the affects and politics assuch would prove far beyond the limits of the article form – incorporating questions ofmotivation, psychology, media forms and power. A thread that runs throughout muchrecent literature, however, is an effort to complicate rationalist approaches to the political,that disavow the somatic, the embodied or the sensuous dimensions of citizenship. Thereare, of course, many ways this thesis might be pursued. As a variety of theorists haveproposed, the political climate of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ has been suffused by awide-ranging ‘politics of fear’ – one that channels and cultivates the amorphous anxiety ofterrorist attack into a range of ethno-political aims (see Ahmed, 2004, pp. 71–80; Robin,2004). Here, we might productively think of how a diffused atmosphere of fear hasfocused upon a set of brown bodies so as to drive immigration debates, security strategies,surveillance initiatives and geopolitical interventions, while diminishing democratic scru-tiny of the policies that result.

Even this limited case yields resources for tracking the reach of power into the affectualregisters that orient deliberation over protection, surveillance and risk. Once problematizedin the social imaginary, these are populations (e.g. the Arab, the Muslim, the foreigner) thatinspire a persistent unease regarding their intentions or allegiances.2 These are the outsiders,brought by global flows of labor and violence – those ‘we’ can never fully know or trust– those that must be contained, controlled, monitored or eliminated to resolve the dangersthey embody.

While the cited accounts tend to explore the implications for liberal universalist com-mitments, more specifically democratic questions arise from this constellation of power andfeeling. To access them, it will be useful to turn to the recent work of William Connolly.As Connolly’s readers will know, his texts cycle through a series of interlinked themes thatelude any easy summary. Perhaps the clearest point of entry stems from the pathologies thatattend what he terms a ‘fundamentalist’ formation of identity (Connolly, 1995, pp.105–34). Put briefly, hegemonic forms of identity, desire or belief attain their privilegeonly by dismissing, negating and pathologizing competing forms. Within societies ofnormalization, these reminders of the self ’s contingency (i.e. that my core beliefs, valuesor desires represent just one among many possibilities) are not unmarked alternatives, butrather deviations, demanding correction, cure or coercive intervention. As Connolly(1995, p. 90; emphasis in original) puts this, ‘a normalizing society resists the proliferationof affirmative individualities and positive associational styles. It does so ... by translating thecultural diversity that exists and struggles to exist into perversified diversities’. At the heart ofthe diagnosis, then, is a failure of pluralized societies to live up to the fact of socialdifference; instead, they persistently figure those who are different (the queer, the singlemother, the welfare recipient, the disabled, the non-white, the polyamorist, the non-Christian, etc.) as aberrations from some privileged ideal. While these concerns overnormality begin on standard Foucauldian terrain, the bite of Connolly’s rendering followsfrom how these judgments are installed within the ‘visceral register’ that orients the subjectin his or her social entanglements. In other words, these problematized categories ofpersonhood are not simply classified as abnormal within the conversations of social

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scientists. Rather, these exclusionary judgments come to be ‘entrenched in corporealhabits, feelings, and dispositions’ (Connolly, 2002a, p. xvi). To take a recurring example,Connolly invokes the revulsion that the anxious straight holds towards the queer. Here, thequestion is not simply medicalized construals of normality and the attendant efforts tocorrect these sexual deviations, but rather disgust towards finding pleasure in the verybodies that must be disavowed for the straight subject to be what it is.

To this point, the argument overlaps with a broad set of considerations over agency,cognition and rationality. A thinly rationalist model has long privileged a subject thatdistances itself from its ends and attachments, submits them to rational inquiry and pursuesthose goods it has reflectively endorsed. To render the point in Rawlsian terms, the rationalagent possesses the autonomy to place aside its private commitments, feelings and desiresso as to evaluate claims and needs (both others’ and its own) through the impartial light ofreason.3 By bringing recent strains of cognitive science into dialogue with materialisttheorists (James, Lucretius, Spinoza, Deleuze), Connolly has persistently pushed back, tomaintain that deliberation does not drift in some dematerialized space of thought, but isoriented by an accumulated body of experience, embedded within sensible reflexes ofsafety, fear, trust, anxiety or desire (see Connolly, 2002b, pp. 26–36).4 Consider theexperience of meeting a stranger on an empty street, late at night. Consider the feelings thatguide decisions to cross the street, lock your car doors, greet this stranger, ask them for asmoke, double your pace, or sit beside them as you wait for the bus. In this admittedlycharged case, the affectual cues are not ancillary to judgment, but an essential componentof thought and evaluation. Below and before deliberative judgment, the subject is orientedby a set of somatic registers that (as repositories of social learning) give shape to its objectsand encounters – which portend danger, which are innocuous, which should be avoided,and which demand care. To stress a point associated with Martha Nussbaum, this meansthat the affectual substance of thought does cognitive and normative work, even as itexceeds full discursive redemption (Nussbaum, 2003).5

These motivational insights can be pressed in more readily political directions byinterrogating how they intersect with the institutional forms that shape social space. Ascited at the outset, a broad range of theorists have cautioned against a familiar temp-tation: that these affectual reflexes reflect merely private choices, beliefs or preferences.Against this liberal domestication of sensibility, it is necessary to insist upon a morenuanced social psychology: such economies of feeling and value are inscribed within thesubject through participation in a range of institutions (the school, the workplace, theparent-teacher association, the bowling club, the church group, the social cohort, thelabor union, the fraternity/sorority, the neighborhood association, etc.) – each of whichconveys ideals of proper personhood, normalized forms of subsistence and attach-ment, and regularized responses when these norms are violated (Connolly, 2002b, pp.19–20).

If this sounds like standard materialist fare, the interplay of the private and the publictakes on greater political bite in how such orientations rebound upon the institutional byinforming those deliberations that shape access to core rights, protections or benefits. Forinstance, when counter-normative forms of desire are construed as deviations (and felt assuch), this gives traction for measures to ‘cure’ these agents or withhold from them core

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partnership rights. Likewise, this helps to explain the current boom of ‘law and order’discourse that reduces extra-legal modes of subsistence to a pathology of the will, demand-ing punishment or correction by a stern prison-state (see Connolly, 1995, pp. 41–74).These cases may seem too disparate to lump into a common category. What binds themfor Connolly is the deliberative complication: support for these measures is mobilized notsolely through reasons, involving the social meaning of punishment or economies of riskand deterrence; but rather through the anger, repugnance or indignation oriented towardsthose who fail to adopt ‘proper’ modes of comportment, self-disciplining or attachment. Itis not simply an individualist grammar of civic desert that motivates the neoliberalevisceration of state support; rather, it is the resentment towards those who ostensiblyrefuse the sacrifices that the ‘rest of us’ undergo under conditions of widespread financialprecarity. And it is through this indignation that we can understand the punitive conditionsunder which material relief has been granted in neoliberal times: attitude workshops (tocorrect these individuated failures of will); drug testing (to regulate the ‘proper’ circuits ofconsumption and pleasure); home inspections (to root out signs of domestic inadequacy);restrictions on travel or the spending of relief funds (as a moralized, paternalist mode ofregulation). These subjects (we are told) refuse to govern themselves appropriately; theychoose to sponge off the ‘responsible’ citizen-subject, and thus, we (the good, theresponsible) are justified in treating them as the parasites they have proven themselves tobe (Connolly, 2002a, pp. 77–80).

The stakes of these questions thus press beyond the framework of social ontology.Perhaps most fundamental is a challenge to prominent rationalist models – for whichpolitical practice is (or should be) a process where dematerialized subjects exchangediscursive arguments over contested institutions and policies.6 Though questions of feelingmay be acknowledged, they are characteristically treated as a pathological departure fromthe measured terms of civic dialogue – where subjects are driven into decisions that cannotbe redeemed in rational terms (e.g. to support military interventions, to deny rights tounpopular minorities and so forth).7 A growing literature has challenged this set ofpremises, however, to remind us that democratic deliberation perpetually operates throughaffectual registers. To inhabit a field in which the subject is not simply faced with choices,but with choices that matter, is bound up with the sensible inscription of social values. Evenwithin a deliberative framework, a meaningful reason (at least to count as such, authori-tative for our thought and willing) must resonate with those things that we care about –whether this be love of the nation, an aversion to needless suffering, the preservation ofconstitutional essentials or a commitment to social justice (see Krause, 2008, pp. 144–61;Damasio, 1994, Chapter 9; Mazzarella, 2009). Put differently, the affectual resonance ofcitizenship is not an aberration, to be vigorously winnowed out, but rather a constitutivecondition for the deliberations that matter to citizens (which is not, of course, to discardrational justification altogether). And, for present purposes, this rejoinder cannot bereduced to a corrective to the insufficient psychology of much deliberative theory. Rather,it is a call to untangle the more politically fraught concern: how social mediations ofsensibility play a significant role within untoward dynamics of power – and how theymight yet be contested without simply arguing away their structuring role within thought,evaluation and deliberation.




Reflexive Questions. Political PossibilitiesTo this point, the account has centered upon a related cluster of questions: What are thesensible resources that orient the practice of citizenship? How are these resources targetedand shaped by social circuits of power? And finally, how might these dynamics lead toinvidious, antidemocratic outcomes? To be sure, similar questions have been raised by arange of contemporary theorists.8 Martha Nussbaum, for instance, has dedicated substan-tial attention to how opponents of same-sex marriage initiatives mobilize disgust as a tacticof political disqualification. As she details, these strategies persistently highlight the‘abominations’ that homosexual couplings entail (along with lurid considerations of germs,orifices, excretions, pathologies and so forth) so as to short-circuit dialogue over equality,entitlements or the state’s role in regulating the intimate sphere (Nussbaum, 2010, pp.1–30). And thus, this deployment of emotion reflects the concerns long associated withrhetoric – a practice of language that moves agents beyond measure and beyondjustification.

From a political perspective, however, this line of argument encounters significantquestions. For if deliberation is (necessarily) shaped by sensible registers of value, this raisesa difficulty faced by earlier generations of critical theory: To what degree can agents subjectthese reflexes (or the ends they enjoin) to rational scrutiny? If circuits of power reach thisdeeply into our resources for thought, feeling or responsiveness, then how are they opento revision by the subject they mobilize? Here, the concern echoes the charge that was long(if erroneously) aimed at Michel Foucault: that he dissolves the subject into a network ofdiscourse and norms, leaving him unable to theorize how agents could resist theseoperations of power (see Dews, 1987; McCarthy, 1994). To re-approach this concern soas to bring out its political stakes, is there a way to intervene within this constellation ofpower and sensibility, so as to better reflect core democratic ideals; or do we ultimately gaina more satisfactory phenomenology of political experience by arguing away any mean-ingful possibility of agency (see also McManus, 2011)?

As sketched at the outset, there is a consistent rationalist response to such questions: if thesestrategies do significant work to marginalize, silence and problematize certain groups, thenthe task must be to eliminate the work of emotionality in favor of cool reasoning – a processwhere these motivational tactics will be exposed as unjustified and the ‘unforced force of thebetter argument’ will prevail (see Marcus, 2002: Chapter 2; Hall, 2005).9 In this connection,even Nussbaum has traditionally shied away from the full weight of the problem. For, whileshe is keen to reveal the anti-democratic work performed by the politics of disgust, herprescription has (until very recently) toed a classic liberal line: it is only by committing to arights grammar (itself situated within a story of constitutional guarantees) that the dangerouswork of emotionality can be held at bay (Nussbaum, 2004).10 And so the diagnosis concludeswith a familiar, juridical reduction. Sensibility is not, itself, the proper object of politicalinquiry or agency. If the politics of emotion is to be kept in check, it must be domesticatedby the institutional (itself construed as impartial, neutral, etc.).

It is for this reason that Connolly’s thought merits particular attention. For what is mostprovocative about his recent work is the effort to abide with this affectual problematic notmerely as an explanatory tool, but as a domain for praxis. Here, he takes his cue from the

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‘arts of the self ’ that stem from the late stages of Foucault’s thought (see Foucault, 1985,pp. 1–35; 1998), where the self is not simply forged by discourses and tactics of power, butplays a part (if qualified) in its own articulation. As Connolly emphasizes, there areproductive possibilities that follow from the premises considered so far. If certain groupsare rendered abject, fearful or detestable through public economies of feeling, then thepossibility of disrupting these dynamics might rest within an ‘experimental work’ at this‘visceral sensibility that has grown up in you’ (Connolly, 2005, p. 127).11 It is this emphasisupon sensibility that marks an expansion of his more thinly culturalist Identity/Difference,where structures of exclusion are mitigated by revisiting identity commitments previouslytaken to be axiomatic, and coming to live in light of their contestability. As Connollyincreasingly proposes, to challenge this sensible resonance of power calls for somethingmore than a cognitive humility towards core values and beliefs. Ultimately, it demands anagency upon the self at this visceral level, working to isolate, suspend and transform thedynamics of aversion detailed to this point (see Khan, 2009, pp. 170–1).

Accordingly, this materialist approach neither takes the self as a pre-formed datum, thesovereign master of its states and movements, nor does it drift to the other extreme, toconstrue this formation as drilled in a one-way direction, terminal in its effects, beyond thereach of intervention. Rather, the self at stake is conditioned by social economies ofmeaning, and yet capable of disentangling the ostensibly ‘natural’ reactions (if in small,slow, incremental ways) to the strangers who populate democratic life. Take, for instance,the person for whom homosexual desire is a sin that inspires discomfort or disgust. Howcould such a subject come to acknowledge that this practice of desire is one possibilityamong many, one that merits no less civic status than straight, monogamous attachment?What kinds of encounters, films, literature or conversations would be necessary tore-situate these forms of attachment within an expanded field of normality? Similarquestions arise for those unsettled by ‘foreign’ bodies, defined by their strange smells andbeliefs and dress and languages – each of which troubles the privilege of the ‘native’. In asymptomatic formulation, Connolly (2000, p. 146) offers: ‘The goal is to work demurelyon a relational self that has already been formed, recrafting vengeful, anxious, or stingycontingencies ... and forging them into a distinctive form you can admire without havingto treat it as a true copy of a universal model.’ Though difficult in formulation, such claimsmake an important intervention. Minimally, they complicate the Foucauldian inspirationfor the argument.12 For, while Foucault steadfastly refuses to endorse any specific goal forthese ‘arts of the self ’, Connolly posits a core commitment: to cultivate an ‘agonisticrespect’ for the many forms of personhood that jostle within democratic space. Thequestion is thus not simply to resist formations of power (as if this were a self-evidentgood); rather, there is a specific aim for these experiments in sensibility: a ‘criticalresponsiveness’ to those subjects who trouble dominant forms of desire, embodiment,belief and self-discipline (Connolly, 1997, p. 193; 2000, p. 51–8). Accordingly, if Con-nolly often overbids in a metaphysical direction (i.e. a generosity towards ‘being’ or‘becoming’ as such), this language of respect suggests a more politically rich ideal: thecivic virtues necessary for democratic citizenship – to engage in difficult negotiations oversocial space while resisting the tendency to absolutize one’s commitments, beliefs andattachments.




Some pointed challenges follow, however, from situating the argument on a broaderstage. There are important precedents for construing the affects as a site of agency andemancipation. In short (and inadequate) form: Martin Luther King’s demands for a practiceof civic love (against a mute, racialized hatred); Herbert Marcuse’s insistence that an‘internal revolution’ is necessary to re-establish access to our genuine needs (see Marcuse,1969, pp. 3-48); or feminists who highlight maternal or erotic love as a resource for radicalpolitics (Elshtain, 1981; Lorde, 1984). In a more contemporary vein, Connolly’s textsresonate with a set of theorists who have made similar appeals for a ‘receptive generosity’(Romand Coles) or ‘affirmation’ (Stephen White) towards strange lives, wants and bodies(Coles, 1997; White, 2009). Each of these theorists, in their own way, argues that thedifficulties of pluralized societies cannot be accommodated by a thin, deliberative rational-ism; and neither are they adequately addressed by a liberal framework, where difference isrelegated to the private to forge consensus on what is shared. Rather, democratic citizenshipdemands an ethos of generosity towards those lives (and the needs they express) that falloutside the conventions of community or normality. If these lines of affinity are clear, sotoo is the perception of some shared liabilities. Are these strategies capable of dealing withinstitutional dynamics of power and exclusion, or do they symptomatize a moment in theacademy where questions of identity came to eclipse considerations of power, inequalityand democratic citizenship (see Fraser, 1997, pp. 11–40)? Does this turn to affirmationundersell the critical potential within those more aggressive affects (e.g. anger, outrage) thathave long mobilized struggle against intolerable social conditions (see Lloyd, 2009)? Or, tobring these reservations to a point, how can these concerns for sensibility (construed withinan internalized language of feeling) inform the worldly work of politics?

These suspicions find their strongest articulation in Jodi Dean. Although Dean’s resis-tance speaks to a wide set of commitments, it tends to rest upon the following intuition:in these times – where nation states pursue renewed, imperialist ambitions; where funda-mentalisms of various stripes (religious, market or otherwise) expose bodies to violence andabandonment; and where the neoliberal evisceration of politics persistently erodes thespace of democratic contestation – an ethos of affirmation betrays the negative ideals behinda meaningfully critical theory. According to Dean, these appeals to sensibility ultimatelydisplace ‘potential radicalism ... with an interiorized cultivation of an ethos of generosity.Political and economic struggles against fundamentalisms are thereby reformatted as thestruggles of a subject against itself ’ (Dean, 2005, p. 58). From this vantage point, a politicsof sensibility goes wrong in multiple ways. First, this reflexive approach is an inadequateresponse to a world in which dominant groups use media technologies, the resources ofcapital and coercive state power to disenfranchise and control many, while shutting downthe channels through which these dynamics could be democratically contested. In light ofsuch challenges, a materially rich politics is needed – one that would join agents into anunruly counter-force and risk itself in the novelty of action. If there are no guarantees thatsuch action will succeed or meet its guiding aspirations, it is only in these worldlyinterventions that forms of domination can be meaningfully contested (Dean, 2005, pp.64–5). Second, even if a reflexive strategy could offer emancipatory possibilities, thespecific postures endorsed by Connolly (and White and Coles et al.) sap them of theirpotential bite. When facing conditions of violence, the appropriate response must not be

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generosity, but rather condemnation – to indict, in the strongest possible terms, howcomplexes of power secure ever greater dominion over social space, dismantle environ-mental and labor protections, or violate the mandates of law.

From this point, I want to suggest that the challenge is posed in such a way as to preventa more productive engagement. Already the cited formulations reveal the work of a starkeither/or. The options seem to be affirmation or negation; we must either embrace theseinstitutional dynamics or refuse them; we either cultivate generosity or we risk ourselves ingenuine action. And here it is not necessary to press upon what it means for agency to be‘genuine’ (and whether this criterion might have liabilities of its own) to recognize thework performed by this style of formulation. Each question leads ineluctably to theconclusion: if the operations of power are to be contested, it cannot be through a turn‘inward’; rather, it must be through actors who join forces and demand a world that moreclosely approximates their commitments (see also Myers, 2008).13 The commitments atstake are surely sympathetic. Indeed, the recent ‘plaza movements’ suggest productivedirections for a broad-based, coalitional politics, capable of pressuring representative bodiesor disrupting social conversations on the entitlements and burdens of citizenship. That said,the terms in which the challenge is framed lead the reader to wonder whether there are notcontributions that a politics of sensibility might make to the very kind of associationalagency that is meant to be under threat.

This, however, requires us to approach the problem from a different angle. Thechallenges considered rest upon a common set of presuppositions: such reflexive consid-erations signal a turn away from associational counter-politics in favor of an ethics ofselfhood. At best, we can slot Connolly (and his various interlocutors) into a depoliticizedpluralism, where the task is to maintain less violent relations with others, while leavingintact existing structures of power and privilege (see Vazquez-Arroyo, 2004, pp. 11–12).Or, in broader terms, what we are left with is a de-fanged morality of coexistence, ratherthan a contestatory politics, capable of refashioning the world in more egalitarian direc-tions. And if this is the case, the argument would seem to take the ‘ethical turn’ associatedwith a strain of contemporary theory – a move that lacks resources to grapple with theagonistic heart of politics, where power is ineradicable and there will never be anuntroubled social harmony (see Mouffe, 2013, pp. 13–15). What remains under-theorizedin such critiques, however, is how these reflexive considerations might inform the conditionsunder which contestatory association takes place. To put this intuition in terms that distilla productive (if underdeveloped) possibility out of Connolly’s texts, it will be useful topose a series of questions: What are the social and political modes of relationship underwhich subjects are encouraged to forge tactical alliances, stretching across lines of social orideological cleavage? If a neoliberal evisceration of the political works by individuatingcalculations of benefit and desert, then how can solidarities be formed out of agentsacculturated into patterns of indifference or competition?

When we do not treat association as a self-evident fact, and instead interrogate theconditions under which such movements are sustained, it is possible to read this politicsof sensibility in a very different direction. How might various ethnic groups, practices ofbelief and forms of attachment relativize their tensions to contest the displacement offamilies, rent manipulation and class-based discrimination in neighborhoods undergoing




gentrification? How might cisgender and transgendered women bracket disputes over theauthenticity of gender to mobilize in common against practices of sexual violence or wageinequities? In such cases, the ostensibly ‘ethical’ considerations detailed thus far resonate withconsiderations of coalition building – more precisely, the modes of selfhood through whichthese fragile associations could be encouraged and sustained. As Connolly (1995, p. 197;emphasis in original) suggests (though he does little more than gesture in this direction), ‘newdrives to pluralization would foster multiple, shifting connections between a variety of inter-dependent constituencies’. Or, elsewhere we find ‘experimentations can both make adifference on their own and help to set preconditions for constituency participation in more robustpolitical movements’ (Connolly, 2013, p. 184; emphasis in original). Such statements signal whatmight be termed a ‘minority report’ within his writings – a point that is hinted at, though leftsubstantially underdeveloped. These considerations of sensibility do not just yield a lessviolent practice of social habitation, where freaks and squares and whores and saints andpunks and preps and goths and queers can all co-exist within some harmonious (andultimately depoliticized) ‘celebration of diversity’; rather, the bite of this reflexive politicsmight rest in the capacity to act and struggle with forms of personhood one has heretofore seenas degenerate, perverse, undisciplined, bullies, whiny, unpatriotic, frivolous, snooty or what-ever. Here it is helpful to recall the lessons of the Seattle World Trade Organization proteststhat brought together agents characteristically at odds with one another (labor organizers,punks, environmentalists, communists, queer activists, globalization critics, prison abolition-ists, etc.). The upshot is not simply to be with others in less violent ways; rather, it is tocombine and act with them so as to destabilize existing structures of power.14

Affect, Association and AgencyThe considerations of the previous section can be summarized as follows. Is it necessary toconclude that there is a strong either/or between reflexive questions and associationalforms of counter-power? Or, are there grounds to believe that these affectual consider-ations might contribute to the resources under which solidarities are forged for tacticalpurposes? To invoke an imperfect parallel, it is through such questions that we mightre-imagine the ‘hegemonies’ that orient Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s model of aradical politics, in which subjects of dissent do not reflect some thick, underlying essence(the class, the nation, the race or whatever), but rather mobile, multiple associations withregard to specific issues perceived to be intolerable (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). Where thesehegemonies are forged against a primary ‘them’, Connolly’s gambit (at least in its bestmoments) might be construed as an effort to address these possibilities from the other side– how the ‘we’ might be rendered in more flexible, inclusive terms.

If my sympathies should be clear, they must be qualified significantly. To this point, Ihave argued that some prominent challenges operate with an unhelpful set of premisesregarding association, affect and agency. As this section will propose, however, this doesnot mean that there are not productive questions to be raised from the perspective of civilsociety, questions that will lead beyond the terms followed to this juncture.

To elaborate, it will be useful to begin with a point that will prove inadequate on itsown, but that will lay some productive seeds for thinking a democratic politics of theaffects. As Alexander Livingston and Sharon Krause have charged, the Foucauldian

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inspiration for the argument threatens to withdraw this agency into the private work of asubject upon itself, which means that it fails to account for how the dialogical exchangesof civil society could foster such modifications in a more readily politicized way (Krause,2006; Livingston, 2012).15 This rejoinder enlists a familiar vision of civil society that turnsupon the exchange of reasons to negotiate differences in needs, interests or social position.Imagine, for instance, the subject of a gated, affluent community, forced to consider theeffects that the privatization of health care or transportation have upon lives unable toprovide private substitutes for these goods; or, the straight subject, engaging communitiesravaged by the AIDS epidemic, forced to confront (at a visceral, uncomfortable level) theeffects that a moralized discourse of sexual normality has upon public health imperatives.When we engage in these exchanges, one does not simply issue reasons in a one-waydirection, immune to the responses that follow. Rather, one risks that one might bechanged by exposure to the circumstances of others – how apparently neutral structures ofthe world might have different effects for those located differently in social space – howcelebrations of hegemonic cultures (its achievements, triumphs or conquests) may behumiliating reminders of past wounds or dispossession. And in such exposure, one doesmore than simply refine one’s reasons (to put the point in familiar, deliberative terms).Rather, one might revisit and problematize those commitments that may have previouslyorganized one’s sense of social fairness, or one might come to find value in forms of lifethat previously struck one as degenerate or perverse. And it is this intersubjective dynamic(where subjects press one another with unpredictable, unsettling challenges) that Connollyis meant to miss when he construes politics in a reflexive vein.

It is difficult to accept this rejoinder at face value. Indeed, a more nuanced readingreveals Connolly’s interest in precisely these kinds of engagements, where the subjectpursues such transformations by exposing itself to strange lives, unfamiliar narratives andthe disorientation they might yield.16 Posing the question on intersubjective ground,however, helps to push these considerations into more politically rich terrain. For ifConnolly is concerned with the unruly power of association, he characteristically fails toaddress how these displacements of sensibility might be guided, shaped or operated by thegroupings of civil society. As we will come to see, the core question is not simply thepossibility of cooperating with a broader range of agents or responding to them with lessviolence or deafness, but how the movements and collectives that populate civil society (a)might help to re-orient affectual attunements towards institutions, policies or practices and(b) how these attunements displace, reveal or shut down possibilities for agency. If this isthe case, then it is not simply the interpersonal basis for these shifts that must be takenseriously (i.e. ‘where’ they take place) – nor is it reducible to how these sensible modifi-cations might enable new kinds of alliances and connections. Nor is it even the classicquestion of motivation: what will move agents to act in the service of a more just world.Rather, at stake is their disclosive possibilities – what kinds of footholds in the world nowseem possible, misguided or exigent to those who participate in (and might be changed by)these collaborative sites of speech, feeling, memory, anger and hope.

To give substance to this gesture, it will be helpful to engage Deborah Gould’s reflectionson social movement politics. For while the article has addressed the possibilities (or closure)of association, it has not yet explored the sensible resonance of these counter-publics: how




the conversations and public culture of affinity groups might offer a collaborative ‘counter-pedagogy’ of the affects. As Gould proposes, insofar as movements offer languages formaking social experience intelligible (or recoding experience), they ‘shape what peopleactually feel, they can have tremendous effects on political action and inaction, generating,for example, fear of the unknown, high expectations regarding change, satisfaction with thestatus quo, angry dissatisfaction with the status quo or political depression – feelings that,each in its own way and in combination with others, help to establish a given politicalimaginary and block others’ (Gould, 2009, p. 41). There is perhaps a clearer way to put thispoint: the political work of these counter-publics is not simply to contest dominantunderstandings of the world (in cognitivist terms), but to challenge the affectual labor ofeveryday social narratives (themselves concerned with generating acceptance, satisfaction,trust, resignation, inevitability, etc.). And to give a further turn to the screw, thesemodalities of feeling contain strongly evaluative components. By facilitating newattunements towards social practices, such groups might transform what social burdens arefelt to be acceptable or excessive; what might be perceived as targets of intervention andstruggle; what inequalities are considered necessary or contingent; and what subjects will dowith (or against) these practices if they prove to be problematic.17

These indeterminate claims benefit from examples. For instance, women’s groups of the1960s and 1970s did not simply share experiences taken to belong to ‘women’ as such (acategory that came to be contested on multiple grounds), but rather worked to dislocate theexperience of female melancholia – from a pathology or maladjustment (thus demandingindividual therapy or medical intervention) to a justified response towards a world whosestructures frustrate full participation on the basis of gender (Gould, 2009, p. 28). And, byrecasting these feelings, giving them new names, participants gained a new orientationtowards the institutions that undermine female equality. These are practices that should beindicted and transformed if they are to meet liberal ideals of participatory equality. Gouldcalls particular attention to the affectual politics surrounding the AIDS crisis, conducted bythose who found their world, connections and lovers dying day by day. While early yearsof the crisis were characterized by mourning – a project of grieving and care – theACT-UP movement was marked by a prominent sensibility of anger. Historians mighthave much to say as to why this shift took place, or why it took place at a certain momentin the crisis, rather than others. Of greater interest here is the tactical effect of this shift –how it encouraged a politicized, confrontational engagement with the policies that leftqueer bodies abandoned by state funding priorities and pharmaceutical mandates of share-holder profit. The meetings, literature and public culture of the movement persistentlyoffered a single core message: the appropriate reaction to queer deaths is not a quiet,dignified mourning over an epidemic that strikes like fate; nor is it private networks ofcare, by which the queer counter-public would ‘take care of their own’ to compensate forthe indifference of the straight public sector; rather, it must be outrage, that drives bodiesinto the streets and the accusatory theatrics of death. And it was through this collaborative,affectual work that a prominent trajectory of queer politics came to re-orient its publicpresence, from a group who asked to be recognized in their dignity and mourned in theirloss, to those who demand the protections, investments and treatments they are owed ascitizens (Gould, 2009, Chapter 4).

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In the space that remains, I do not wish to assess the historical rigor of this account.Indeed, one could imagine different ways of describing the relations of sorrow, outrage,anger and divestment – ones that more fruitfully plumb the rage that inhabits grief and amourning that may have public (rather than merely private) resonance (see Crimp, 2004,Chapter 7). And one could very well offer more nuanced alternatives within AIDS activismfor the period in question. For present purposes, I am more interested in how this narrativeopens a way of thinking the affectual resonance of associational politics, without reducingit to the work that a subject performs upon itself. More specifically, it is necessary to thinksuch associations not simply as facilitated by these experiments in sensibility but asthemselves capable of an emotional (re)formation with praxical aims. Through such work,it is not simply the subject that becomes strange and different, but also the world it facesin concert with others. What was a natural feature of the world might now strike thesubject as a threat, an intolerable humiliation, a deliberate obstacle, an instance of malignneglect – practices that must be opposed or dismantled, even when the social costs for suchinsubordination will be significant and it would be safer to continue with the current orderof things. And if this emotional labor raises potential concerns from a rationalist perspec-tive, there is at least one feature that distinguishes these fractious movements of civil societyfrom the manipulation of a fascist politics. These modes of feeling are not only fostered bythe songs, art, literature and conversations of such counter-publics, but persistently con-tested and evaluated by their constituencies so as to evaluate the legitimacy of their claims,where they are leading and whether the interventions they encourage meet (or do harm to)the substantive aims of the movement in question (see Gould, 2009, pp. 157–63).Accordingly, there is a richer relationship to justificatory concerns than is typically acknow-ledged by those who charge an affectual politics with a flat, dangerous irrationalism.

As this brief detour demonstrates, a more robust engagement with the politics of sensibilitymust live up to what Teresa Brennan has termed the ‘transmissability’ of affect (Brennan, 2004).The question cannot be limited to how the subject can take up less violent relations with othersby interrogating the visceral resonance of power. Rather, it must address how the unrulygroupings of civil society might conduct a transpersonal counter-formation of the affects,which opens up, guides or directs modes of engagement. For a contemporary example, it isinstructive to consider the recent ‘Occupy’ or ‘plaza’ movements. On a conventional account,what these movements offered was a form of occupying space to disrupt the ongoing priva-tization of the commons. Where public space has been eroded and diminished, these bodiesused their material presence to take back these spaces and experiment with alternative modes ofco-living, decision making and deliberation. If we take seriously, however, these reflectionsupon movement politics, a different set of conclusions emerges – i.e. these conversations andunions opened a space where feelings of economic deprivation or failure could bere-constituted, from cases of individuated failure or bad luck to anger at a set of policies thatsystematically channel wealth to some and assign the burdens of market fallout to others. And,by forging a counter-public in which neoliberal economic practice could be felt as politicalproblems – the legitimate target of anger or betrayal – such spaces permitted a wider range ofpractices to show up as sites of power, decision and intervention. Even if the ‘Occupy’movement is perceived to have dissipated along with its encampments, praxis continues alonga number of lines once considered the purview of administrative decision: the executives and




agents behind the foreclosure crisis (occupy our homes), Securities and Exchange Commissionregulations and executives (occupy the SEC), and interventions within the secondary debtindustry to purchase and forgive bank debt (occupy debt).

Any accounting of this movement, its effectiveness or its failures would far exceed theinterests of this article. Instead, I want to close with an ambivalent appreciation for recentengagements with a politics of sensibility. William Connolly details an ethos of responsiveness;Romand Coles invokes a ‘receptive generosity’; Stephen White suggests a ‘presumptivegenerosity’ – each of which enjoins a greater willingness to listen and negotiate with thestrangers of democratic space (see Coles, 1997; White, 2009). While these approaches helpfullyconstrue the affectual substance of citizenship as a site of power (and thus a site of potentialagency) they typically fail to explore the related question of how forms of association help toshape what agents hope, fear and want of the world, and thus shape how social institutionsappear amenable to intervention and action. This leaves us with two provocations. At the veryleast, it is a call to resist the discursivist turn of much deliberative theory – those who takeseriously the movements of civil society, but narrow their gaze to claims, backed by reasons,presented in discursive terms (see Fraser, 1997, Chapter 3; Habermas, 1998). Rather, a robustaccount must engage with how these counter-publics contest and transform the ways thatagents feel towards those institutions within (and against) which they live. And this means thata satisfactory engagement with the affectual politics of civil society must likewise avoid reducingthese questions to the individual. Instead, this counter-politics is routinely conducted in acollaborative fashion – inspired, debated and reproduced by the culture and narratives we forgewith select others. At stake is not simply a more comprehensive approach to the subject, butrather what the subject can and must do in concert with others.

(Accepted: 12 November 2014)

AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers of the journal.Their questions, reservations and challenges have made the argument substantially stronger.He would also like to thank Lafayette College for its EXCEL research program, as well asthe tireless research support of Juannell Riley.

Notes1 There is a considerable literature on this tendency, much of which targets the Rawlsian background for much contemporary

liberal thought. From communitarian quarters, see Michael Sandel (1982). From a feminist perspective, see Lisa Schwartzman(2006). From a difference perspective, see Iris Young (1990). And, from the perspective of agonistic democratic theory, seeChantal Mouffe (2005).

2 This unease is not simply turned ‘outward’, but has served important reflexive aims, to reconstitute the nation in the wake of theSeptember 11 attacks. From a wide variety of media outlets a single lesson was repeated: what came to pass on that day was anact of evil visited upon a fundamentally innocent people, forging a national subject in the mode of righteous anger – one thatpossesses the moral authority to bring justice to ‘evil-doers’, no matter where they may abide (Anker, 2005; Butler, 2004).

3 For a productive reading of this neo-Kantian strain in Rawls and Habermas, see Krause (2008, Chapter 1).4 Perhaps the most well-known effort (persistently cited by Connolly) to root the affects within the somatic register of thought is

proposed by Antonio Damasio. This phrase (‘somatic markers’) is borrowed from his Descartes’ Error (Damasio, 1994, Chapter 8).See also his The Feeling of What Happens (Damasio, 2000). For a helpful overview of this materialist turn, see George Marcus (2002),particularly Chapter 4. Important questions about this tendency to borrow from cognitive science have been raised by Ruth Leys(2011) – reservations that target Connolly, as well as the broader neo-Deleuzian turn to the affects in cultural and social theory.

5 This is what Connolly terms the ‘bicameral’ nature of these ‘brain-body’ patterns (2000, p. 177). To say that such affectual guidesdo cognitive work is not, of course, to say that they are normatively justified, as they are negotiated through social forms ofmeaning that may yield untoward conclusions. The case under discussion is instructive. As a broad literature demonstrates, such

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perceptions of danger and safety are hardly neutral. Rather, they are framed through the anxieties of hegemonic subjects – whereracialized or classed bodies are persistently figured as sites of danger (undisciplined, uncontrollable, irrational, etc.), in need ofpacification. See e.g. Butler (1993).

6 This tendency is perhaps most evident in Joshua Cohen (1998). This is not to say that all deliberative theorists dismiss emotionto the same degree. John Dryzek (2002, pp. 52–3), for instance, concedes a role for emotion in civic argument, although he stillmaintains that such appeals must ultimately answer to the bar of reason. And it would surely be too hasty to conclude that figuressuch as Rawls or Habermas simply exclude the work of sensibility altogether. Indeed, their reliance upon terms such as ‘moralsentiment’, ‘empathy’ or ‘respect’ suggests a rather more robust role for emotionality – though this work is not reflectivelydefended or avowed in the course of their work. For helpful discussions of this point, see Hall (2005, pp. 31–35); Krauss (2008,Chapter 1).

7 Thomas Spragens (1990, pp. 126–8), for instance, acknowledges that the passions may well play a substantial role withindemocratic life, but they tend to yield dangerous excess from the path of rational deliberation – excesses directly linked to themurderous rise of National Socialism.

8 Although couched in an unhelpful Deleuzian idiom, stimulating readings of these affectual dynamics can be found in John Protevi(2009). For instance, these considerations of power and sensibility have long been recognized by military organizations, for whichthe manufacture of the soldier (the one who can kill without lapsing into the ‘berserker’ mode of undisciplined aggression)requires a rigorous affectual training (Protevi, 2009, pp. 144–58).

9 The phrase is borrowed, of course, from Jürgen Habermas. This sentiment is given further shape in Karl Popper’s insistence thatin cases of deep disagreement ‘there are only two solutions: one is the use of emotion, and ultimately of violence, and the otheris the use of reason, of impartiality, of reasonable compromise’ (Popper, 2011, p. 441).

10 This tendency has been complicated by Nussbaum’s recent Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Nussbaum, 2013). Ifthere remain difficulties with her argument, it marks an important shift in her thought, as it begins to ask whether there mightbe an emancipatory politics of the affects rather than construe them as intrinsically dangerous, in need of institutional mastery.

11 To render the aims in greater detail, ‘this preparation to respond generously to new events involves experimental work upon thesensible organization of the will already installed between and within us through our previous history of transactions’ (Connolly,2000, p. 170; emphasis added).

12 In the classic formulation of the Foucauldian via negativa, the core question around which critique turns is ‘how not to begoverned like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of suchprocedures, not like that, not for that, not by them’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 28; emphasis in original).

13 These assumptions are rendered in stark form by Ella Myers, for whom such reflexive strategies (whether in Foucault or Connolly)isolate subjects from one another, and thus threaten the same erosion of political possibilities. As she puts this point: ‘What [thisreflexive model] makes very difficult are “horizontal conjunctions” – collectivities whose members are both connected to anddifferentiated from one another, capable of acting together as co-creators of “counter-power” ’ (Myers, 2008, p. 134).

14 As Connolly (2010, p. 197) asserts: ‘Such energies, rather, must simultaneously be cultivated by individuals, mobilized in variousinstitutions of associational life, and inserted into larger circuits of political action.’

15 In a symptomatic formulation, for instance, Connolly (2002b, p. 132; emphasis added) proposes ‘[e]thical artistry, in its highestforms, is work applied by the self to itself to render its relational proclivities more congruent with principles it professes’.

16 For instance, Livingston and Krause typically overlook passages such as the following: ‘One part of your subjectivity now begins towork on other parts ... But how to proceed? Cautiously. Perhaps you attend a film in which the prolonged suffering of a dyingperson becomes palpable. Or you talk with friends who have gone through this arduous experience with parents who pleaded for helpto end their suffering ....’ (Connolly, 2000, pp. 146–7; emphasis added).

17 This is what Gould terms the ‘emotional habitus’ of a movement politics: ‘With the term emotional habitus, I mean to referencea social grouping’s collective and only partly conscious emotional dispositions, that is, members’ embodied, axiomatic inclinationstowards certain feelings and ways of emoting. By directly affecting what people feel, a collectivity’s emotional habitus candecisively influence political action, in part because feelings play an important role in generating and foreclosing political horizons,senses of what is to be done and how to do it’ (Gould, 2009, p. 32).

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About the AuthorMichael Feola is an Assistant Professor in the Government and Law Department at Lafayette College. His researchinterests include critical theory, continental political theory and democratic theory. Recent publications haveappeared in Contemporary Political Theory, Polity and the European Journal of Political Theory. Michael Feola, Departmentof Government and Law, Kirby Hall, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042, USA; email: [email protected]



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Schwartzman, L. (2006) Challenging Liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press.

Sedgwick, E. (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Spragens, T. (1990) Reason and Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Thrift, N. (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. New York: Routledge.Vazquez-Arroyo, A. (2004) ‘Agonized Liberalism: The Liberal Theory of William E. Connolly’, Radical Philosophy, 127,

8–19.White, S. (2009) The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Young, I. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

About the AuthorMichael Feola is an Assistant Professor in the Government and Law Department at Lafayette College. His researchinterests include critical theory, continental political theory and democratic theory. Recent publications haveappeared in Contemporary Political Theory, Polity and the European Journal of Political Theory. Michael Feola, Departmentof Government and Law, Kirby Hall, Lafayette College, Easton, PA 18042, USA; email: [email protected]



Fear and Loathing in Democratic Times: Affect, Citizenship and Agency

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