As part of easing myself into working on my new project on the politics of affect and affective labour, I’ve been looking over Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings. That project is currently going under the title “Wilful Feelings,” so I’m particularly interested in Ngai’s focus on using affects to analyse situations of “suspended agency,” which I think I can use as one way in to the question of the relationship between feeling and will. The political contexts Ngai is talking about seem like ones where political theory’s usual privileging of will or agency is going to require some complication (Berlant’s term “lateral agency” is also something I’m thinking about here). Particularly, as Ngai points out, thinking about suspended agency is a useful contrast to the optimistic or recuperative understanding of affect that you tend to get from post-autonomist theorists of affective labour, where affect is quickly subsumed under a more general immaterial labour, which is then also quickly taken to be implicitly communist. Not that there aren’t political possibilities in affective labour, but I think figuring them out requires more attention to the specifics and the ambivalences of affective labour (like, who, in terms of gender, race, and geography, is performing affective labour).
Related to this question about affects and agency is Ngai’s interest in how affect disrupts the distinction between subject and object. She, quite rightly I think, complicates the tendency in affect theory to try and sharply distinguish emotion (supposedly tightly bound both to the subject and to language) from affect (supposedly pre-linguistic and pre- or inter-subjective). Ngai argues for a dialectic between the two terms, and indeed it seems to me that that is the particular theoretical value of affect. Ngai begins the book with a discussion of “tone”, a concept for analysing feelings which are neither objectively observed nor (simply) subjectively experienced. Tone is an aesthetic concept in the sense that it applies to the sensations associated with works of art, which also depend on a dialectic between subjective and objective: the beauty of a painting is neither a purely objective feature of the painting, nor reducible to the subjective pleasure we may experience in looking at the painting. In Austere Politics I argue that this kind of aesthetic mediation is characteristic of more than just art, so I’m interested in thinking about how Ngai’s analysis of tone can deepen my own thinking about political mediations.