Ahmed and the Economies of Emotions

I was pretty impressed with Sara Ahmed’s observations about how various groups use clever language in order to produce a delineation between the “us” or “in-group” and the “other” or the “threat”.  In a move that was more reminiscent of a Michael Moore film than a scholarly article, she notes that the September 11^th attacks have been used to justify “the detention of any bodies suspected of being terrorists”, “expansion of the war itself to other nations”, and “the expansion of the powers of the state.” (136). She also talks about how Bush’s infamous statement that “you’re either with us or you’re against us” (131, 138) works to fuse all groups of “others” collectively into one group: the enemy.

I thought that Ahmed’s conception of emotions as global economies was interesting/valuable. It’s notable that she emphasizes that emotions are not definitively “possessed” within bodies so much as they function to delineate (or perhaps solidify) the lines between bodies.  Rather than reflecting that we are “bound together” (or separated), they actually produce that cohesion (or division).  For example, it is my love of some common value that makes me part of a group, while it is my fear of some common threat that makes me separate from another group.  Hence, they get passed around, amplified and diffused, just like commodities and currencies. Emotions, Ahmed says, “work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced only as an effect of its circulation” (121).

But with all these emotions flowing back and forth like currencies, we get a lot of potential for “contamination” of one sign/symbol with another.  She notes that legitimate asylum seekers, like Islamic/Arabic/South Asian foreigners, are difficult to differentiate from “bogus asylum seekers” and terrorists.  Thus, in these times of constant and contagious fear, we are encouraged to suspect anyone who isn’t like us (they might be a terrorist or a bogus refugee).  In Bush’s words, America “depend[s] on the eyes and ears of alert citizens” to “look out for suspicious others.” (134-135).

We find ourselves in a situation where we are suspicious of far too many others. Rather than a small and determined group of Taliban operatives, we are in a war against “terror” itself. A war against all of the sources of our fear, all of the “others”. 

After reading Ahmed’s article, I was most impressed with her analysis of how “the slide of metonymy works to generate or make likeness”. Simply by putting words/signs/symbols in proximity, one creates an association among them. This works fine when you’re referring to our national government as “Washington” or referring to the stock market as “Wall street,” but some of these “euphemisms” have a very powerful political function that seems to slip past our conscious awareness. In Ahmed’s example, “the asylum seeker is ‘like’ the terrorist, an agent of fear…” (137).  The mere utterance of a phrase like “Islamic Terrorists” works to associate the two words, creating an assumption that “Islamic” and “Terrorist”, share certain traits, and perhaps should be dealt with similarly. 

The same metonymic slide is at work in our immigration debate. Those who aren’t citizens are compared, implicitly, to terrorists, merely via the proximity of the signs(the words “illegals” and “terrorists”. For example, on www.americanimmigrationcontrol.com, the front page states that their policy is “to alert the nation to the immigration crisis”, to “stop the millions of illegal aliens who sneak across our border from Mexico” and “to secure our nation from terrorists, drug smugglers, and illegals” (emphasis added).  This adds to the skewing of our judgment, blurring the lines between these different groups of others, so that we can uniformly fear them all.  Outside of rhetoric, I think that one important point to take away from this is to be suspicious of metonyms and the blurred boundaries that they create. 

“The only thing we have to fear, is Fear itself” -JFK