Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-xxrs7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T13:55:43.970Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

‘I wasn't angry, because I couldn't believe it was happening’: Affect and discourse in responses to 9/111

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2011

Abstract

While the recent interest in affects and emotions in world politics is encouraging, the crucial relationships between affect, emotion, and discourse have remained largely under-examined. This article offers a framework for understanding the relations between affect and discourse by drawing upon the theories of Jacques Lacan. Lacan conceptualises affect as an experience which lies beyond the realm of discourse, yet nevertheless has an effect upon discourse. Emotion results when affects are articulated within discourse as recognisable signifiers. In addition, Lacanian theory conceptualises affect and discourse as overlapping yet not as coextensive, allowing analyses to theoretically distinguish between discourses which become sites of affective investment for audiences and those that do not. Thus, analysing the mutual infusion of affect and discourse can shed light on why some discourses are more politically efficacious than others. The empirical import of these ideas is offered in an analysis of American affective reactions to 11 September 2001.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

2 Danchev, Alex, ‘“Like a Dog!”: Humiliation and Shame in the War on Terror’, Alternatives, 31:3 (2006), pp. 259283CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Saurette, Paul, ‘You dissin me? Humiliation and post-9/11 Global Politics’, Review of International Studies, 32:4 (2006), pp. 495522CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

3 See Bleiker, Roland and Hutchison, Emma, ‘Fear no more: emotions in world politics’, Review of International Studies, 34:S1 (2008), pp. 115135CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

4 Mercer, Jonathan, ‘Emotional Beliefs’, International Organization, 64:1 (2010), pp. 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

5 Crawford, Neta, ‘The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotions and Emotional Relationships’, International Security, 24:4 (2000), pp. 116156CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

6 Hymans, Jacques E. C., The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

7 Ross, Andrew A. G., ‘Coming in from the Cold: Constructivism and Emotions’, European Journal of International Relations, 12:2 (2006), pp. 197222CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

8 Bleiker and Hutchison, ‘Fear no more’, pp. 128–9.

9 Doty, Roxanne, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar ; Milliken, Jennifer, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 5:2 (1999), pp. 225254CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Hansen, Lene, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar .

10 See Ashley, Richard and Walker, R. B. J., ‘Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies’, International Studies Quarterly, 34:4 (1990), pp. 259268CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Walker, R. B. J., ‘Culture, Discourse, Insecurity’, Alternatives, 11:4 (1986), pp. 485504CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

11 See, respectively, Milliken, ‘the Study of Discourse’; Doty, Imperial Encounters; Tickner, J. Ann, Gender and International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)Google Scholar ; Chilton, Paul A., Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common House (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1996)Google Scholar ; Oren, Ido, Our Enemies and US: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002)Google Scholar .

12 Again, I argue below for distinguishing between affect and emotion.

13 Bleiker and Hutchison, ‘Fear no more’.

14 Krebs, Ronald R. and Lobasz, Jennifer K., ‘Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony, Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq’, Security Studies, 16:3 (2007), pp. 409451CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

15 Gershkoff, Amy and Kushner, Shana, ‘Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11-Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration's Rhetoric’, Perspectives on Politics, 3:3 (2005), pp. 525537CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

16 Jackson, Richard, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, and Counter-terrorism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005)Google Scholar .

17 Lustick, Ian S., Trapped in the War on Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 17Google Scholar .

18 Croft, Stuart, Culture, Crisis, and America's War on Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Many other states also accepted the interpretation of post 9/11 world politics in terms of the War on Terror, albeit to varying degrees. See, for example, Katzenstein, Peter, ‘Same War-Different Views: Germany, Japan, and Counterterrorism’, International Organization, 57:4 (2003), pp. 731760CrossRefGoogle Scholar , and Rees, Wyn, ‘European and Asian responses to the US-led “War on Terror”’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 20:2 (2007), pp. 215231CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

19 See also Hülsse, Rainer and Spencer, Alexander, ‘The Metaphor of Terror: Terrorism Studies and the Constructivist Turn’, Security Dialogue, 39:6 (2008), pp. 571592CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

20 Sjöstedt, Roxanna, ‘The Discursive Origins of a Doctrine: Norms, Identity: and Securitization under Harry S. Truman and George W. Bush’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 3:3 (2007), pp. 233254CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

21 Flibbert, Andrew, ‘The Road to Baghdad: Ideas and Intellectuals in Explanations of the Iraq War’, Security Studies, 15:2 (2006), p. 326CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

22 Flibbert, ‘The Road to Baghdad’, pp. 336–7.

23 Krebs and Lobasz, ‘Fixing the Meaning of 9/11’, p. 428.

24 Ibid., p. 433.

25 Hutchison and Bleiker point out that emotions are central components in understanding the responses to terrorist attacks and in understanding the rebuilding of political community after such a trauma. They nevertheless do not pursue the questions posed here on the relationships between discourse, emotions, and affects. See Hutchison, Emma and Bleiker, Roland, ‘Emotions in the War on Terror’, in Bellamy, Alex J., Bleiker, Roland, Davies, Sara E., and Devetak, Richard (eds), Security and the War on Terror (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 5770Google Scholar .

26 Alcorn, Marshall W. Jr., Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Constructions of Desire. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), pp. 106107Google Scholar .

27 Stavrakakis, Yannis, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), p. 166CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

28 Bracher, Mark, Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 19Google Scholar .

29 Ross, ‘Coming in from the Cold’, p. 211.

30 Laclau, Ernesto, ‘Glimpsing the future’, in Critchley, Simon and Marchart, Oliver (eds), Laclau: a critical reader, (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 326Google Scholar .

31 Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p. 125Google Scholar .

32 Žižek, , Sublime Object, p. 125Google Scholar .

33 Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits, trans. Fink, Bruce (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006)Google Scholar .

34 Campbell, David, Writing Security: US Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 4Google Scholar .

35 Lacan, , Ecrits, pp. 671702Google Scholar .

36 Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 101Google Scholar .

37 Stavrakakis, Yannis, Lacan and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 42Google Scholar .

38 One may reasonably ask whether jouissance/enjoyment is another way of talking about human nature, or something akin to it. If enjoyment is an extra-discursive affect that helps to propel identification practices, it may seem like a kind of essence or foundation upon which identification is based, or determined. Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis offer both an acknowledgement of this concern and a reasonable rebuttal. ‘For in talking about jouissance one is always walking on the threshold of essentialism … However, one should not forget that, even if thinking about the real qua jouissance seems to flirt with a certain essentialism, it nevertheless remains ‘essentially’ unrepresentable and always in a state of irresolvable tension with the socio-discursive field.’ In other words, enjoyment as affect is not a determinate that pushes the subject in any specifiable or predictable direction. See Glynos, Jason and Stavrakakis, Yannis, ‘Encounters of the Real Kind: Sussing out the limits of Laclau's embrace of Lacan’, in Critchley, and Marchart, Laclau: a critical reader, pp. 201216Google Scholar .

39 Žižek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 50Google Scholar .

40 The examples here of patriotism and religion, and the arguments below, are certainly not meant to exhaust the entire myriad of ways in which affects influence human social reality. There may be, for example, affects which are largely independent of discourse, such as those experiences which could be understood as akin to ‘instinct’. Instead, my concern here is with the political relevance of affects and their relations to political discourse. On a related note, Lebow, Richard Ned, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar discusses the political implications of experiences such as appetite and spirit.

41 Žižek, Slavoj, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 201CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

42 It is, for example, the Lacanian answer to Sara Ahmed's question of why identities ‘stick’. Ahmed, Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar .

43 Dean, Jodi, Žižek's Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 10Google Scholar .

44 Žižek, , Sublime Object, p. 124Google Scholar .

45 See Green, Andre, The Fabric of Affect in Psychoanalytic Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar .

46 Lacan, , Ecrits, p. 78Google Scholar .

47 Ross, ‘Coming in from the Cold’, p. 216.

48 Ibid., p. 199.

49 Ibid., p. 214.

50 Lacan, , Ecrits, p. 705Google Scholar .

51 For a recent critical view of this tradition, see Damasio, Antonio, Descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994)Google Scholar .

52 Fink, Bruce, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 51Google Scholar .

53 Glynos, Jason and Stavrakakis, Yannis, ‘Lacan and Politial Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory’, Subjectivity, 24:1 (2008), p. 267CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

54 Crawford, ‘the Passion of World Politics’, p. 125.

55 Ibid., p. 125.

56 Ross, ‘Coming in from the Cold’.

57 Mercer, ‘Emotional Beliefs’, p. 2.

58 Widmaier, Wesley W., ‘Emotions Before Paradigms: Elite Anxiety and Populist Resentment From the Asian to Subprime Crises’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:1 (2010), p. 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For other recent work on emotion in IR see Löwenheim, Oded and Heiman, Gadi, ‘Revenge in International Politics’, Security Studies, 17:4 (2008), pp. 685724CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Harkavy, Robert E., ‘Defeat, National Humiliation, and the Revenge Motif’, International Politics, 37 (2000), pp. 345368CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Fattah, Khaled and Fierke, K. M., ‘A Clash of Emotions: The Politics of Humiliation and Political Violence in the Middle East’, European Journal of International Relations, 15:1 (2009), pp. 6793CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

59 Stavrakakis, , Lacanian Left, pp. 99100Google Scholar .

60 Croft, , Culture, Crisis, pp. 113115Google Scholar .

61 Gentzler, Edwin, Contemporary Translation Theories, rev. 2nd ed. (MultilingualMatters Ltd., 2001), pp. 47, 75Google Scholar .

62 Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Translator's Task’, trans. Rendall, Steven, TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction, 10:2 (1997), p. 155Google Scholar .

63 Gentzler, , Contemporary Translation, p. 161Google Scholar .

64 Miller, Jacques-Alain, ‘Paradigms of Jouissance’, Lacanian Ink, 17 (2000), p. 37Google Scholar .

65 Miller, ‘Paradigms of Jouissance’, p. 37.

66 Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 3536CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

67 Connolly, William, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For discussions between Lacanian and Deleuzian approaches to subjectivity and democracy, see Tønder, Lars and Thomassen, Lasse (eds), Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005)Google Scholar . Many disciplines discuss affect and emotions in a variety of ways, including neuroscience: Damasio, Descartes’ error, geography: Thien, Deborah, ‘After or Before Feeling? A consideration of affect and emotion in geography’, Area, 37:4 (2005), pp. 450456CrossRefGoogle Scholar , anthropology: Richard, Analiese and Rudnyckyj, Daromir, ‘Economies of affect’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15 (2009), pp. 5777CrossRefGoogle Scholar , and cultural studies: Hall, Stuart, Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London and New York: Verso, 1988)Google Scholar ; Grossberg, Lawrence, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar ; Harding, Jennifer and Pribram, E. Deidre, ‘The power of feeling: Locating emotions in culture’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 5:4 (2002), pp. 407425CrossRefGoogle Scholar , to name a few.

68 Williams, Leonard, ‘Abundance, lack, and identity’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 12:2 (2007), p. 115CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

69 Alcorn, , Changing the Subject, p. 66Google Scholar .

70 Saurette, ‘You dissin me?’; Danchev, ‘Like a Dog’.

71 Fink, , Lacan to the Letter, p. 51Google Scholar .

72 Holland, ‘From September 11th, 2001 to 9/11’.

73 Nabers, Dirk, ‘Filling the Void of Meaning: Identity Construction in US Foreign Policy After September 11, 2001’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 5:2 (2009), pp. 191214CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

74 Ibid., p. 193.

75 Ibid., p. 193, emphasis added.

76 Holland, ‘From September 11th, 2001 to 9/11’, p. 276, emphasis added.

77 Ibid., pp. 275–6, emphasis added.

78 Ibid., p. 276; see also Widmaier, Wesley W., ‘Constructing Foreign Policy Crises: Interpretive Leadership in the Cold War and the War on Terrorism’, International Studies Quarterly, 51:4 (2007), pp. 779794CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

79 Connolly, William, Neuropolitics: thinking, culture, speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 35Google Scholar .

80 Holland, ‘From September 11th, 2001 to 9/11’, p. 285, also pp. 275–6, 289.

81 By examining some of the affective politics surrounding 9/11, I do not mean to suggest that affects and emotions matter only during times of crisis rather than in everyday life and politics. Although, Bleiker and Hutchison, ‘Fear no more’, p. 129 suggest that the relevance of emotions is often most visible during traumatic events, since these events unsettle and challenge the emotional ties which help to hold together communities.

82 See Campbell, David, ‘Time is Broken: The Return of the Past in the Response to September 11’, Theory and Event, 5:4 (2001)Google Scholar , available at: {http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.4campbell.html} accessed 27 May 2010, and Edkins, Jenny, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

83 Dan Hiller, Witness and Response Collection, US Library of Congress American Folklife Center, 18 September 2001 (SR 381), quoted in Holland, ‘From September 11th, 2001 to 9/11’, p. 279.

84 Naree Bisson, Witness and Response Collection, US Library of Congress American Folklife Center, 11 October 2001 (SR144), quoted in ibid.

85 Karl Day, Witness and Response Collection, US Library of Congress American Folklife Center, 2 October 2001 (SR101), quoted in ibid.

86 Daniel Dominguez, Witness and Response Collection, US Library of Congress American Folklife Center, 8 October 2001 (SR247), quoted in ibid.

87 Kyoko Sato, Witness and Response Collection, US Library of Congress American Folklife Center, 16 October 2001 (SR015), quoted in ibid.

88 Holland, ‘From September 11th, 2001 to 9/11’, p. 281.

89 Adam Gospodarek, Witness and Response Collection, US Library of Congress American Folklife Center, 13 September 2001 (SR375), quoted in ibid., p. 285.

90 Bill Kyriagis, Witness and Response Collection, US Library of Congress American Folklife Center, 14 September 2001 (SR375), quoted in ibid.

91 Patti Chapman, Witness and Response Collection, US Library of Congress American Folklife Center, 27 October 2001 (SR025), quoted in ibid.

92 Aaron Hill, Witness and Response Collection, US Library of Congress American Folklife Center, 18 September 2001 (SR203), quoted in ibid., p. 288.

93 Debbie Spinner, 11 September 2001 Documentary Project (2001), US Library of Congress American Folklife Center, available at: {http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/afc911:@field(DOCID+afc2001015t011)}.

94 Fink, , Lacan to the Letter, p. 51Google Scholar .

95 See Holland, ‘From September 11th, 2001 to 9/11’; the media, of course, played a significant role in this process. See Croft, Culture, Crisis; Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism.

96 Fink, , Lacan to the Letter, p. 51Google Scholar .

97 Glynos and Stavrakakis, ‘Lacan and Politial Subjectivity’, p. 267.

98 Nabers, ‘Filling the Void of Meaning’, p. 197.

99 Holland, ‘From September 11th, 2001 to 9/11’, p. 285.

100 Ibid.