[…] the hegemonic orientation toward the affirmative I am describing entails not only an emphasis on positive modes of affective sociality but on a singular way of contending with affective experience of all permutations. In other words, affirmationism in this context is not solely, or even primarily, about an insistence on joy, pleasure, and other recognizably “positive affects” (though there is no shortage of work with that focus). Rather, the pull of affirmationism is evident in how we read and contend with even so-called negative affects, those dimensions of affective experience that emerge at sites of violence and dispossession. Many of the significant considerations of the negative affects have been characterized by the naming of specific negative affective states or “bad feelings”—for example, shame, anger, envy, paranoia, disgust, pain, depression, and so forth—and subsequently affirming and positioning them as legible and credible modes of affective experience, in contrast to the pathologization and dismissal with which they are generally met. Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings is an especially noteworthy text in this vein for its foregrounding of the marginal and “minor” affective registers—those affects that are indicative of suppressed, diminished, or “suspended” agency, that do not immediately present themselves as useful or pleasant but are in fact often experienced as intense displeasure. Yet as essential as Ngai’s text is for its centering of “sites of emotional negativity” as they emerge from and around the aesthetic, she notes that “it is part of [her] book’s agenda to recuperate … negative affects for their critical productivity” as well as their “social and symbolic productivity”. Although looking at negativity through a critical lens, there is an enduring emphasis on what is useful about it politically, socially, and aesthetically in a way that ultimately falls in line with the methodological imperative of productivity articulated by [Brian] Massumi. Along similar lines, in the conclusion to her contribution to the first Affect Theory Reader, titled “Happy Objects,” Sara Ahmed calls for a move “beyond the affirmative gesture” in our considerations of affect, noting that the dominant tendency is to try to convert supposed “bad feelings” into “good feelings,” generally toward the ultimate goal of attaining “happiness”: the ultimate good feeling. The pursuit and attainment of positive affects is placed above a reckoning with the negative and in fact misapprehends the true scope of negative affects—as Ahmed states, “[The] affirmative turn actually depends on the very distinction between good and bad feelings that presumes that bad feelings are backward and conservative and good feelings are forward and progressive”. Yet rather than taking this observation a bit further and therefore leading to an outright rejection of affirmation in toto, Ahmed argues that “it is the very exposure of … unhappy affect that is affirmative, that gives us an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as a good or better life”. In other words, a shift in orientation toward what are often dismissively characterized as “bad” affects can function as a gateway to affirmative “possibilities”—getting us back to the always ever-present potential for “something new” to emerge, for “alternative model[s] of the social good”. The question remains, unasked and unanswered, of affective registers that threaten the very stability of the social, that are pointedly and irredeemably antisocial in their orientations and manifestations.
Tyrone S. Palmer, from Affect and Affirmation
