4      Being Moved to Action

Micropolitics, Affect, and Embodied Understanding

Randelle Nixon and Katie MacDonald

Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. . . . One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. (Butler 2004, 19)

In the above passage, Judith Butler poignantly describes the inherent relationality of identity and the way in which both real and imagined affective encounters with others have the capacity to “undo” us. In this chapter, we emphasize the vital role of embodiment, emotion, and affect in how we come to know others and ourselves and point to how affect surpasses the intentionality and control of individual subjects. We, like many others, argue that rational thought does not occur through a repression or domination of our affective responses; rather, what we understand to be rational relies and draws on our bodily feelings and knowledge. Thus, we are seeking here to collapse several dualisms that continue to structure Western culture: mind and body, reason and emotion, thinking and doing.

In the following pages, we use the video that formed the centrepiece of Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign to explore the ethical politics of being undone and to examine the multiple forms of coming undone in the context of the West, where affective and emotional responses are a tool for profit, used to spark political mobilization. When interrogated, however, these responses can be deep sources of knowledge that have the potential to spark social change. In what ways did Kony 2012, the video at the centre of the campaign, “undo” individuals? What kinds of histories of feeling and acting does Kony 2012 evoke? What are the effects of this kind of being undone? And finally, what are the implications of not reflecting on how being undone is inextricable from specific genealogies of (inter)subjectivity (Heyes 2007)? Before beginning our discussion, though, we want to be explicit about what, in this chapter at least, is not our problem: Invisible Children, the complex issues surrounding development and international aid, and Joseph Kony.

The Kony 2012 campaign debuted on YouTube on 5 March 2012. The video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc) was released by Invisible Children, a charitable organization founded by filmmaker Jason Russell, with the aim of raising public awareness of the atrocities committed by the militia group Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) operating in central and northern Africa; the ultimate goal was to bring its leader and an international war criminal, Joseph Kony, to justice. Within days, the video went viral, and at the time of writing, it has been viewed over 101 million times on YouTube. With the help of his young son, Russell introduces the audience to Joseph Kony and gives an artfully arranged and affectively compelling synopsis of the LRA and Joseph Kony, along with a detailed explanation of how the Kony 2012 campaign will lead to his eventual capture; through a poster campaign, the distribution of a $30 Action Kit, and pressure on American politicians to encourage and continue intervention, Joseph Kony will be “made famous.”

Kony 2012 opens with the written words “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come, whose time is now.” An image of the earth appears, and we hear a voice talking about the human desire to belong. Rapid images of traffic and loved ones hugging and connecting through social media whip by as we are told about the power of social media to connect people and to “change the way the world works.” One-second clips of recognizable and heartwarming viral videos are shown—a clueless white elderly couple tries to use a webcam; an overzealous inspirational white child gives a short pep talk (“If you believe in yourself, you will know how to ride a bike. Rock and roll!”); a white twenty-nine-year-old woman hears for the first time after receiving a hearing device. We’re hooked—we’ve laughed, we’ve experienced extensive visual stimulation, and our heartstrings have effectively been pulled by videos and narratives we already know. As more images of scrolling tweets and sharing videos flash before our eyes, we listen to an ominous script telling us that the world is changing, that older generations are concerned, and that essentially, because the world is out of control, anything is possible. As we are beginning to wonder what this was all about (after all, our late modern minds have an attention span not much longer than one minute), a slow, clear, and straightforward voice tells us: “The next twenty-seven minutes are an experiment. [pause] But in order for it to work, you have to pay attention.”

Kony 2012 can be examined from several angles. The lens through which we will examine this short documentary focuses on the interwoven layers of affect, embodiment, politics, and suffering. Specifically, we explore the relationships among Western subjectivity, affect, and the video’s reliance on familiar narrative forms to trigger its Western audience affectively. We argue that the comfortability, predictability, and oversimplified nature of this narrative functions to keep the stability, innocence, and superiority of the Western subject intact; perhaps more problematically, the video forecloses (at the level of affect and bodies) a reflective engagement with the affective politics of difference. By exposing this narrative and the very familiarity of its characters and elements, we hope to push the reader (and ourselves) into a space of affective reflection—a space where what we feel is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, but is nevertheless loaded with epistemic significance; where what we feel in our bodies is understood not only as an individual expression but as a deeply historical product of collective ways of knowing and feeling. Thus, we do not prescribe other avenues on how to find Joseph Kony or on what should be done. One of the central points we seek to make is the need to reimagine thinking as a kind of doing.

Repositioning thinking as doing is not an elaborate evasion of responsibility or a suggestion to do nothing in the face of suffering and injustice. On the contrary, we want to push against and probe the impulse to help others before knowing how our own affective and political histories are implicated in the kinds of actions we feel moved to take. We want to reflect on a wildly unsuccessful (predominantly white) Western history of helping in both global and local contexts (from colonization to international aid) and to question deeply the implications of the unreflected-upon moves to action that have shaped this history. Thus, rather than emphasize the specificities of the Kony 2012 campaign, or Invisible Children, we will use the video not only to push against the anxious desire to know and to save but also to explore how this desire is wrapped up in colonial histories. To do so, we consider how “international norms” hail Western subjects into this narrative (in this case, with the imagined Ugandan child and the imagined Ugandan warlord) as the bearer of knowledge and truth. We will examine the embodied and political aspects of the “knowing” Western subject, keeping at the forefront the inextricable relationship between power and knowledge.

We want to think through precisely why Kony 2012 moved so many people. While the role of social media and the heated debate that followed the video are obvious contributors to its viral popularity, there is something very specific about the narrative and affective structure of the video that enabled it to resonate through, across, and between so many bodies. We argue that what was specific or unique about Kony 2012 was the way it compacted so many elements common to stories of development, colonialism, and the industrial saviour complex in a very short, visually stimulating way. The video not only made us feel but also told us how to feel and what to do with those feelings. It demanded a seemingly intuitive action that made thinking about or reflecting upon this action counterintuitive or potentially unethical. In the face of overwhelming suffering and violence, the impulse of most people is to want to do something, to help, to stop it. However, that impulse—the embodied energy and intensity that one feels in the face of massive injustice—is not enough on its own. As we will discuss later, ethical and political transformation lies in the painful pedagogical work of processing and translating affective energy.

We begin our exploration of the video with a discussion of our methodology and the theoretical concepts upon which we draw to unpack the way bodies, identities, politics, and learning are all implicated with and through one another. Among those theoretical ideas are our conceptualizations of affect and emotion as they relate to bodies, power, and the embeddedness of ethics and politics in every encounter. We discuss how affective encounters are (re)produced within specific embodied histories of structural violence and oppression. We rely heavily, explicitly and implicitly, on the resonances between feminist philosopher Alexis Shotwell and antiracist feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, each of which draw heavily on the work of second-wave feminist Audre Lorde, whom we consider a precursor to many contemporary discussions surrounding bodies, politics, and pedagogies. What these thinkers bring to the fore is how embodiment and feeling (sensation and emotion) are inextricable from histories of domination and deeply sedimented structures of inequality and how these structures are manifested again and again in our daily interactions. Put another way, these thinkers point to the ways in which material practices and structures have a dynamic and co-constitutive relationship with the materiality of bodies and feelings: our feelings are literally shaped by these structures but they also reinforce and continue to reshape and reform these same structures. We draw from these insights to suggest that the stories told in Kony 2012 are not only about what we “learn” but about the shape, movements, and reactions of our bodies.

In the second section, we use this theory to examine the highly emotional and moralistic responses to Kony 2012 and the way in which these responses reaffirm Western subjectivity yet largely fail to interrogate the affective structure of the typical Western body-subject. In the video, Jason Russell shows a picture of Joseph Kony, the “bad guy,” to his five-year-old son Gavin and explains to him that Kony “has an army,” “takes children from their parents,” “gives them a gun to shoot and he makes them shoot and kill other people” and “forces them to do bad things.” When asked by Russell what he thinks, Gavin replies, “Sad” (9:30–10:38). The narratives told by the video are so simplistic that even a child can point to the “bad guy.” Furthermore, the panic and hype caused by the video works to obscure the rampant systemic racism(s) that routinely occur on domestic soil. For example, in the Canadian context, the presence of sympathy toward child soldiers and the (fleeting) desire to capture Joseph Kony exists in stark contrast to the affective and political numbness toward the suffering of First Nations people, including the atrocities and treaty violations at the hands of the Canadian government and the historical and ongoing apathy and inattention toward missing and murdered Aboriginal women.

We conclude this chapter by discussing possibilities that can emerge from experimenting with our affect and cultivating new embodied practices—practices that can foster learning, unlearning, and relearning at the level of the body. We frame this discussion with Angela Davis’s (1997, 318) notion of “basing identity on the politics rather than the politics on identity,” which challenges the dominance of identity politics and focuses on political and ethical praxis. We give concrete examples of what Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004, 149–166) conception of the “body without organs” might look like when put into practice; this conception points to how experimenting with bodily intensities has transformative political potential and can bring to consciousness the ways in which the body and bodily processes are politically and historically organized.

Methodological Approach and Theoretical Framework

Affective and Decolonizing Methodology

In this chapter, we centre decolonization not only as a change of framework synonymous with coalition politics but also as a process through which the complications of land, governance, and the lives of both colonized and settlers materialize. We take seriously Tuck and Yang’s (2012, 21) call to their readers “to consider how the pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence—diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt of responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege.”

Following Tuck and Yang (2012), we consider decolonization as a more complicated process than the conscientization that Freire (2000) suggests is a mode of cultivating new ways of seeing the world. As Fanon (2004, 36) argues in The Wretched of the Earth:

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.

Thus, we seek to contribute to a decolonizing methodology that is, in many ways, impossible to define in advance, since it will take shape differently depending on local contexts and is inarticulable from the place we stand. For us, a decolonizing methodology accompanies a refusal to forget that the dominance of certain types of methods (modes of data collection), methodologies (modes of data analysis and interpretation), and epistemologies has played a massive role in the displacement and erasure of Indigenous peoples and ways of knowing.

The Kony 2012 campaign video aimed to mobilize American intervention and consumerist practices as a way of both stopping Kony and stopping child soldiers. This move to justify American imperialism and position the American government as the helper of those in the Global South, particularly through the infantilizing focus on children, necessitates a decolonizing lens that not only asks how we perceive and think about others but also how we position ourselves in relation to others and their land. A decolonizing method takes seriously a critical consciousness, but it also retains a focus on land, power, and privilege rather than simply being a move to reflect on and cultivate the self.

We understand affect to be the unconscious intensities we feel in our bodies; in contrast, emotion is the verbal expression of those intensities. Following several feminist, postcolonial, antiracist, and critical theorists and philosophers, we want to destabilize the dominant understanding of affect and emotion as individual and natural (and therefore indisputable) and to resituate affective encounters as sociohistorical. Patricia Clough (2010, 228) points out that since affect is felt on the unconscious register, “affect studies calls for experimentation in methodology.” Given that our analysis of Kony 2012 is primarily concerned with the affective politics of the video and how it moved bodies, our methodological approach is one attempt to meet this call for experimentation.

Drawing on feminist media analysis (Currie 1999; Jiwani 2009; Stabile and Kumar 2005), we look to Kony 2012 for which narratives are being (re)told about the world. We suggest that these discourses reveal different ways of making meaning of the world (Weedon 1997, 23). We draw from critical discourse analysis to consider how ideology is at play in representations and the context of discourses—we examine the video for both what is said and what is not said, and we also attempt to read in the framing and affective pull of the video the ways in which bodies are being moved. We pay attention to camera angles: for example, when the viewer is positioned as “above” those in the screen, this conveys a sense of power and superiority (Jewitt and Oyama 2001, 135).

Following Nancy Armstrong’s (2002) work on photography, we suggest that visual representations (including video) do epistemological work for the viewer, based on already existing categories and ideas. We read Kony 2012 for the epistemological work that is accomplished and for how these representations compel particular affective responses. Thus, rather than doing a visual or discursive analysis, we take Kony 2012 as an opportunity to consider how affect structures not only the framing of the campaign but also what viewers learn—bodily and intellectually. We ask what position the viewer is put into through camera angles and voiceovers, what is present and absent in the video, what viewers are asked to do, what the tone of the video is, who is speaking, and who is asked to act.

In our reading of the video, we found that tropes of hero or saviour, alongside of victims or innocents as well as villains or “bad guys,” were deployed, with the viewer being ushered into the position of “hero.” We ask what this may mean for orientations toward the stories of Invisible Children: How are bodies shaped and moved? What does the narrative propel bodies to do, or not do?

Our analysis of Kony 2012 employs a critical, decolonizing framework that explores the possibilities and consequences of intervention, imperialism, and invasion. We turn now to the theoretical framework that enables an affective deconstruction of Kony 2012, suggesting that the video frames viewers as saviours, without attention to land, rather than enabling a reflexive engagement of consciousness and embodied relationality.

Theory, Thought, and Feeling

We draw on various theoretical traditions and concepts to think through the affective impact of, and responses to, Kony 2012. We use these concepts to examine how the video deploys familiar historical narratives; this examination moves us toward a space of critical reflection on how we might begin to work through feelings such as the ones evoked by the video and how these sorts of feelings tell us more than that Joseph Kony is bad and scary and that children getting kidnapped is sad. We want readers to engage seriously with the reality that in conjunction with deliberate rational thought, patterns of feeling structure our political and ethical actions and identities. Given this reality, thinking about how one feels, what it feels like to believe in something, how it feels to identify with something or someone, and, perhaps more pertinently, how it feels when one cannot identify with someone or something becomes an entry point into both embodied learning and complex political and ethical engagements with difference. However, because this is not how most of us are trained to learn and because feeling is so ubiquitous and involuntary, reflecting on our sensory habits can be a very emotionally draining and intellectually challenging process.

Discussing the embodied roots of subjectivity and the politically vital process of disidentification, Rosi Braidotti (2012, 35) states:

Disidentification involves the loss of cherished habits of thought and representation, a move that can also produce fear and a sense of insecurity and nostalgia. Change is certainly a painful process, but this does not equate it with suffering. . . .

Changes that affect one’s sense of identity are especially delicate. Given that identifications constitute an inner scaffolding that supports one’s sense of identity, shifting our imaginary identifications is not as simple as casting away a used garment. [emphasis added]

What Braidotti describes is the way in which affective patterns “constitute an inner scaffolding” that supports the self and how one makes sense of the world. Thus, changing these “cherished” habits is painful, because shifting how we think and feel not only inevitably alters how we perceive the world and, as such, is accompanied by a loss of parts of ourselves, but also potentially changes our relationships, career choices, patterns of speech, behaviours, and so on. The process of disidentification is “delicate” in that feeling stable grants us a certain amount of control and security in a world that can seem chaotic. Disidentification asks us to feel unstable in reflecting on our inner scaffolding.

Rather than destabilize or interrogate how our “inner scaffolding” is constituted by potentially oppressive patterns of thought and feeling, Kony 2012 relies on well-known narratives that work to restabilize (rather than interrogate) the structure of Western subjectivity as the agent of historical change. Through a series of affective strategies, the video evokes intense emotions that at first glance appear to come from a place of genuine engagement but actually reinscribe Western identity at the expense of African bodies that have been discursively produced by the overdeveloped world.

Affect, Emotion, Intensity

At this juncture, it is important to explain how we define affect and to understand the difference between affect and emotion. According to Spinoza, affect refers to a force or felt intensity that impinges upon the body as well as to the idea that the affect evokes (cited in Massumi 2002, 31). This definition encapsulates both the intersubjective and embodied aspects of affect and its inextricability from thinking and ethical practice.

We follow Brian Massumi (2002, 27–28) in his understanding of affect as bodily intensity registered below or prior to subjective qualification. Emotion, in contrast, is determined by the extent to which a subject consciously narrates the affective experience of intensity into historically specific sociolinguistic discourses. In other words, emotion is the attempt to make sense of and capture affect within language. It is our interpretation and expression of our bodily intensity according to dominant social and political categories.

In Foucault, Deleuze (1988, 60–61) discusses the relationship between power (relations) and affect, explaining that exercised power is affective and that force is defined by its power to affect and be affected. Drawing heavily on Spinoza’s parallelism (i.e., the idea that mind and body are not separate but rather act in parallel), Deleuze states that one’s capacity to be affected and one’s capacity to affect occur simultaneously. Since power and affect are physical, in that they literally shape and move bodies, doing the work of exploring our bodily capacities and “to learn to be affected” (Latour 2004, 205) becomes a political task. Learning to be affected, or to be more attuned to our sensual capacities, by unpacking both the meaning and histories embedded in our everyday encounters and the ways in which we narrate them can enhance our power to act and can also become an ongoing embodied, pedagogical, and ethical practice.

Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004, 149–66) concept of the “body without organs” is one entry point into thinking through how this learning process can be undertaken; the authors discuss how experimenting with intensity, or affect, can enable us to challenge the established patterns of feeling through which the self is structured. For Deleuze and Guattari, the body is politically organized according to historically specific ideas about what is “normal” and “proper.” The “normal” body-subject, which Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the “organism,” regulates and controls its body, feelings, and desires according to these pregiven ideas about what is right, productive, and possible. The organism demands interpretation and organization from the body, with the goal of extracting embodied and affective labour for a higher “cause,” be that capitalism, patriarchy, the nation, heterosexuality, or God (Protevi 2009, 94–101). The organism channels its bodily intensities into productive (capitalist social relations, proper labour practices) and reproductive (the species, proper sexual practices) labour because of the social stigma attached to “doing” the body otherwise (unproductive labour, nonreproductive sex, etc.).

In contrast to the heavily regulated bodily patterns of the organism lies the “body-without-organs”—the “body” whose conditioned habits have been released from its controlled form, thus leaving thoughts, feelings, and desires totally open to any and all possible connections (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 30). The body-without-organs does not interpret anything—it is driven by desire. It is a body-subject without a social filtration system that tells one what is and is not right, what should and should not be said, felt, eaten, or done.

To clarify, the body-without-organs and the organism are both limits on a spectrum (no one is a perfect organism or a completely disorganized body-without-organs). Through consistent and careful experimentation, however, one can become conscious of the ways in which the body is politically organized according to truths (given by God and/or experts) that have been absorbed into our embodied and emotional habits.

The project of experimenting with, asking after, and working to become aware of our affective and emotional habits is a never-ending practice. It is a process that can often be incredibly difficult and dangerous; Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 160) caution us to use the “art of dosages” in order to keep ourselves safe and intact: “You don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file.” They use the drug addict and hypochondriac as examples of those who have gone too far in their experimentation and have become unrecognizable to themselves and the social world (163). Being open to thinking through our bodies and with our affect then becomes vital to living an ethical life. This requires the work of moving through our feelings and through the possible thoughts, norms (clothing, eye contact, gender expression, sexual orientation), beliefs (about God, nature, society), and affects (these tears welling up in me mean that I am sad) that contributed to the manifestation of that particular feeling. Cultivating practices that seek to bring to awareness how our bodies are vital to learning can aid in the process of integrating our minds and our bodies.

The creators of Kony 2012 relied on historically produced differences between the viewers and subjects of the video in order to maximizing the affective response. We believe that the visceral response to the video was exacerbated by the fact that YouTube is often watched voluntarily and in solitude, thereby maximizing a certain level of attention and minimizing the chance of a mediated response; in addition, the “comments” section was turned off, further exacerbating the solitude of watching and foreclosing the possibility of meaningful dialogue. Our problem with the outpouring of emotion that the video evoked is not the reaction itself but the fact that the intensity of this affect obscured many of the difficult realities of this sort of suffering, including the contexts of the conflict that have sustained it and Western implication in this conflict. The affective response was directed to an emotional narration that affirmed separateness between the presumed viewers and the subjects of the video.

Despite the seeming ethical simplicity of the video, the visceral responses to it were not necessarily right, true, or ethical. Affect is about style, colour, texture, speed, culturally specific images, narration, tonal vibrations, and how these elements move our bodies in ways that are below conscious awareness. Instead of opening a space where a critical engagement with “cherished habits” of feeling could occur (Braidotti 2012, 35), the Kony 2012 creators artfully and intentionally arranged all of these elements in order to ensure a high-impact affective result and then provided outlets for this affect. Intense feelings, in that they come from our bodies, are involuntary and are generally considered “natural”; thus they are often interpreted as a sort of truth. One might think: How can anyone not be appalled by the fact that this is happening in our world? How can any caring, conscientious person not want to do something about this? The video relied on feelings alone as enough. However, feelings alone are not always enough; they have a long history of being created by and reproducing incredibly violent and oppressive power inequalities. For example, take a mundane racial encounter. A white woman walking alone at night passes a group of young black men; she may experience embodied triggers that signal fear and, based on that feeling, may come to a seemingly rational and intuitive conclusion that there is in fact something inherently dangerous about black men. She came to this conclusion based on the effect the encounter had on her body. However, if she had probed the cause of that feeling, she may have questioned the extent to which the history of slavery and mass media representations of black men as dangerous and sexually predatory structured her initial and seemingly natural feelings of fear.

Recognizing the Villain: Affective Encounters and Racialized Histories

Sara Ahmed’s work on histories of encounters with difference is very useful for exploring racialized histories in the context of Kony 2012. As evidenced by never-ending debates on comment threads, Facebook sites, and blogs, virtual or “imaginary” encounters are enfleshed and literally move bodies. We assert that Kony 2012 triggered histories of black-white racial violence and the familiar figures of the dangerous black man and the innocent child, alongside that of the white saviour, all of which ensured the affective impact on its viewership.

A long history of racial encounters helped to make Joseph Kony a recognizable (online) stranger who had already been pseudo-materialized through viewers’ local (real-life) encounters. Due to the “racialized fear that the perception of blacks” evokes in many white people (Protevi 2009, 174), the image of the black man is a loaded signifier with a history of being used for specific purposes, often with the intention of striking fear into the white population in order to garner political support and ensure white economic and political dominance (Westen 2007, 60–68). Affective responses to loaded images are particularly potent in the political realm because the impact often occurs below conscious awareness. In Kony 2012, the images are intended to hail white subjects into a particular relation to, and history of, racial encounters. In Ahmed’s interpretation of Louis Althusser’s theory of subject formation, she considers hailing as a simultaneous recognition of the self and the stranger (Ahmed 2006, 107). That is, one becomes a subject through ongoing judgments of difference between the self and the stranger both consciously and subconsciously. The process of subject formation is thus inherently intersubjective and collective; the “I” can only take shape as it moulds itself into a larger (and in the case of the Kony campaign, predominantly white and Western) “we,” in contrast to a pseudo-materialized “them.” Recognizing the stranger and then taking action to remove and punish him (in this case, Joseph Kony) provides Western subjects with a needed mechanism to reassert and stabilize a (civilized, moral, good) “we” in opposition to an uncivilized, immoral, inhuman “them.” However, and this is particularly true in the case of Kony, the distance of the stranger shifts its function from an actual to an imaginary, fairy-tale–like monster from which we derive pleasure. Much like the pleasure in watching a thriller or horror movie, the “Third World” monster functions to distract from, yet reinforce, real-life spatial negotiations that accompany encounters with bodies read as different at “home.”

Embodied encounters are the raw material of subject formation, and therefore, thinking through our feelings and feeling through our thoughts as we encounter difference is an ongoing pedagogical process. Ahmed (2000, 7) contends that the process of recognition operates as a visual economy, since it relies on seeing difference. What might it look like to decentre the reliance on sight—on the seemingly unavoidable capacity to see difference—in order to bring into focus other sensory experiences evoked by strange encounters? And in the context of late modernity, what would it mean to think through the implications of intersubjective encounters in the context of online publics and to reflect on the way these encounters interpellate and thus constitute and produce new subjectivities into and through processes of differentiation? Since the rapid and ongoing decisions that fuel processes of subject formation are made below explicit patterns of thinking, their vast pedagogical possibilities often remain unacknowledged.

Kony 2012 leaves its viewers with an intense affective charge that could have pedagogical potential; however, what is masterful about the video is its (albeit implicit) built-in pedagogy. Rather than leaving with a sense of dis-ease, a sense of questioning, and a desire to learn more about the context of the conflict, viewers leave affectively satisfied and content with the knowledge of how to do their part. In other words, the video does not require the viewer to engage with the history and ongoing practices of colonialism and with the way in which Western subjects are directly implicated in these processes. Rather than feeling ashamed of being implicated in the suffering of others, the viewer leaves feeling benevolent and satisfied. We feel that this is another major failure of Kony 2012, and we want to follow Alexis Shotwell’s (2011) exploration of the potential productivity of white shame. Sparing a white viewership of responsibility relies on the all-too-common assumptions that white people “feeling bad” is the wrong way to go about achieving antiracist goals and that positive feelings (happiness, pride, excitement) are intrinsically innocent and conducive to building solidarity. In terms of the Kony 2012 video and campaign, the potential of white people engaging with their “bad feelings” associated with historical and current colonialism was obscured by a positive (and historically constituted) feeling of helping. The affective identifications that uphold unjust gender and racial formations were relied on rather than challenged, leaving the embodied, historical, and economic structures that reproduce inequality, and the Western subjectivities that rely on and benefit from those structures, more secure than ever.

Cultivating Practices and “Identifying into” Politics

Our seldom-inspected common sense posits a separation—or even an opposition—between thought, understood as cerebral reflection, and action, understood as embodied engagement with the world. This makes it hard to see thinking itself as a kind of action—that we are doing thinking, in other words, touching the world and being touched by it and in the process things (and we) are changing. (Gibson-Graham 2006, xxix)

In a “risk society” where society is increasingly oriented to towards identifying and managing risk (Beck 1992), our bodily capacities and emotional energies are increasingly expected to be under our control. They are simultaneously being used and exploited for political and economic gain in relation to risk and safety; doing the work of sorting through our affects is therefore an ethical necessity for feminist, queer, antiracist, and anticapitalist struggles. In this section, we give concrete examples to prompt affective experimentations. We do not provide “rules” on how one should feel but rather attempt to develop a guide to open up the reader to the plethora of ways in which we can actively and thoughtfully engage with our bodily sensibilities and capacities.

Here we move from thinking in particular about the Kony 2012 video to thinking broadly about practices that may challenge common responses to witnessing suffering. Following Angela Davis’s (1997, 318) desire for folks to work at “basing the[ir] identity on politics rather than the[ir] politics on identity,” we suggest some practices that may help to cultivate new affective and emotional responses that push at, rather than reinforce, liberal forms of identity politics. Several scholars and philosophers have addressed the role of bodily experimentation in better understanding how we relate to and are composed through our encounters with the external world (Deleuze and Guattari 2004; Connolly 2002), and in that spirit, we have constructed several scenarios to help prompt such affective experimentation. The types of experimentation we are imagining here are not of the scientifically rigorous sort. Rather, we imagine experimentation within an ethos that is mindful, playful, and gentle; one that is not invested in obtaining particular results or the Truth but that seeks to push against taken-for-granted and often unreflected-upon patterns of thought and feeling. The purpose of such experimentation is to open up possibilities for new insights, which, “once developed, can inform the reflective techniques we apply to ourselves to stimulate thought, complicate judgment, or to refine ethical sensibility” (Connolly 2002, 13). The scenarios that follow are structured around questions rather than prescriptions because of the necessity that they remain open to subjective reflection rather than foreclose what possible affects should be.

While recognizing that the word experimentation can evoke negative affect because of the ways in which colonizing and Western science have and continue to use “experimentation” as a guise to construe subjects as objects (including nonhuman animals), we continue to use the term for an important reason. Experimentation is a term in the literature in relation to the project of changing embodiment, relation to others, and thought through action with the hope of cultivating a different future, but with unpredictable “results.” While terms such as reflection and inquiry may be offered as synonyms, we feel that experimentation signals the embodied component of this engagement. Reflection and inquiry are often imagined as cognitive processes, but the processes that we are suggesting emphasize the embodied and material components of thought, as well as affect and matter. We maintain concerns about the use of the word experimentation because of these histories, but we also use it with the hope that this experimentation can be seen in a different light, in that it isn’t searching for truth, nor for a way to fix things; rather, it is conducted in the spirit of cultivating open futures without a predicted ending.

PRACTICE #1: Experimenting with Anger

In “The Uses of Anger,” Audre Lorde (1997 [1981], 280) states that

anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies, with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.

Anger is loaded with information and energy.

For Lorde, anger is a tool that can be used to combat both personal and institutional oppression and is perhaps our most powerful energy source for political change. Lorde clarifies, however, that it is in the “painful process” of translating anger into action that the potential for change lies. Directing our bodily intensities, such as anger, into intentional and careful ethical thought and action can provide the initial motivation to gain a deeper understanding not only of systems of power but of one another. As stated above, Kony 2012 does this translation for us. The pain that inevitably accompanies the process of translating our rage, grief, or love into action will certainly be reduced in having a third party do it for us, but the comfort this grants us evacuates our capacity to be intentional with our thoughts and feelings (even if we ultimately decide that our translation was mistaken). To be clear, thinking of anger as politically and epistemologically useful does not mean that being angry at or toward others is useful. Reflecting on and converting our bodily intensity into political energy is a learning process that gives us the tools to work through not only our own anger but also the anger of others.

Example: As rape cases come up in the media, we are constantly confronted with discourses of “victim blaming.” Women are blamed for what they were wearing, how they were acting, who they were with, and their sexual histories. Men’s potentially altered futures are lamented and the media suggests that their “loss” is more poignant than the loss of survivors. Our rage fills us. How does our anger move us? At whom is our anger directed? On what basis are those around us angry? How can we channel our rage into something intentional, political, and ethically poignant?

PRACTICE #2: Experimenting with Comfort

In discussing the relationships among comfort, normativity, and heterosexual privilege, Ahmed (2004, 147) states that comfort suggests “well-being and satisfaction” as well as “ease and easiness.” She goes on: “To be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins. One fits, and by fitting, the surfaces of bodies disappear from view” (148).

Following Tuck and Yang’s (2012, 3) assertion that a consideration of land is central to the project of decolonization, we suggest using Ahmed’s definition of comfort to consider the ways we move through space. Are there places we do not go to? Are there places we love to go to? Why do we love going there? Where are the places we only drive through? Who lives there? Who walks through this space? Are there spaces where we feel we do not belong, where our body comes into view—what does this feel like, why is our body brought into view, by whom and how? Are there ways to escape this, to become comfortable once again? Are there places where we feel “at home” where other bodies are brought into our view—which bodies, and what kind of view?

Example: Walking from the east end of Toronto to the west end of Toronto, I passed through various neighbourhoods—Leslieville (up and coming), Riverdale (wealthy), Regent Park (notorious), the Eaton Centre (touristic), Bay Street (financial), Kensington Market (community-focused). I paid attention to which sorts of bodies filled which spaces, whether I felt “at home” or “in view” in neighbourhoods and why. What were the things I had heard about Regent Park? The Eaton Centre?

PRACTICE #3: Experimenting with Solidarity

In explaining the genealogical method, Foucault (2003, 361) states that, as genealogist, one need not separate oneself from one’s corporeality (as positivism demands); on the contrary, genealogy narrows “its vision to those things nearest to it—the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion, and energies” and approaches the most taken-for-granted and seemingly private and natural inclinations with a “joyous” suspicion (361). Dominant conceptions of the body posit it—and especially its processes, whether biological, physiological, or neurological—as natural, stable, and, most significantly, passive. What happens when we shift our thinking and draw our attention to the vital aspects of our bodies? What does it mean to think of our biology as socialized and historical? What would it look like to actively work on anxiety triggers that have been established through not only a personal but also a racial and colonial history?

Example: As white Canadian women, we may think through the implicit understandings (see Shotwell 2011) that inform both our emotional and affective resistance to finding solidarity with the Idle No More movement and our trust in the Canadian government. We might ask ourselves these questions: How much knowledge do I possess about treaty agreements and violations? Do I believe that the Canadian government is working toward the same social justice goals that I am? How do racial stereotypes about Canada’s First Nations people foster this resistance to solidarity? What habits (spending habits, habits of speech, eating habits, and so on) may be threatened by discussing the extent to which my (white) privilege has been and continues to be made possible by past and present colonialisms? What taken-for-granted personal or cultural skills (such as driving, taking transit, doing homework, or getting to school on time) might I possess that make suggestions of assimilation seem nonviolent or even practical? To what extent do I feel the weight of the history of colonialism in my body as I walk through my day? What does this weight (or lack of weight) tell me about my experience of oppression, and thus my capacity to fully understand it?

PRACTICE #4: Experimenting with Violence and Grief

Judith Butler (2004, 20) argues that liberal versions of politics and personhood fail “to do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, and implicate us in lives that are not our own, sometimes fatally, irreversibly.” With an eye to international relations, and particularly through Kony 2012, we have examined which subjectivities are capable of action and what images and figurations move us to particular modes of action. Butler suggests that “international norms . . . insist that certain kinds of violences are impermissable, that certain lives are vulnerable and worthy of protection, that certain deaths are grievable and worthy of public recognition” (32). In the Kony 2012 campaign, the figure of the child soldier makes invisible not only the adult soldier but also the context of the conflict, and it hampers our ability to see ourselves as implicated in these conflicts. Rather than encourage a move to imagine ourselves (or our children) in the place of the other, we suggest that we must ask through which frames these images become understandable, moving, and grievable. What images are erased through these framings, and how do they reaffirm our subjectivity rather than undo us?

Example: In compelling campaigns for girls’ education, girls are figured as vulnerable and fragile and are presented as objects to invest in for the good of the future of families, communities, and the men in the girls’ lives. How does this framing ignore the desires and motivations of girls? What is it about education that compels us to fund programs in ways that, for example, complicated narratives of schooling and gender inequality do not? What are the framings that move us to donate, and how does the movement for girls’ education maintain a particular subject position? What are the futures made possible for us and for girls through this framing? How much do I know about the educational system in any of the countries discussed in campaigns and how do particular assumptions about the Majority World inform my understanding of “need”? How do I conceptualize learning and education? How does donating money bring me into relation with others?

Conclusion

We chose to focus on the Kony 2012 campaign video not because it is unique but because it is symptomatic of our contemporary political and emotional climate and its distancing from critical, embodied pedagogies. Like the creators of most images, films, commercials, and documentaries, the makers of Kony 2012 deployed familiar narratives that resonate with racial and colonial histories. The effectiveness of the video relied on a lack of critical, embodied thought about the video itself or the issues it presented. Kony 2012 moved so many bodies because it was built upon the scaffolding of internalized, uncanny narratives about race, gender, and class that are so common that their implications or validity are rarely questioned. Why people were moved in particular ways by the representation of Joseph Kony—the villain—in this video is a key question that partially (if not entirely) speaks to the ways in which discourses of racialization are organized into one’s being. What was it about the plight of Ugandan children that moved us into an enraged frenzy? How does being the ones doing the saving make us feel, and what histories (and presents) continue to place us, structurally, as the savers and others, somewhere else in the world, as needing to be saved? And, lastly, the Foucauldian question: Who benefits?

We argue that being undone, as Butler describes it, is to be undone internally—that who I am and the patterns of thinking and feeling I use to navigate the world are troubled and shaken. This undoing is material as well as discursive in that the affective and emotional impact of an undoing is felt but its quality and intensity is contingent upon the social, historical, political, and economic ways of knowing that structure our bodies and minds. We have a strong sense that it is highly unlikely that Kony 2012 made people come “undone” in this way; rather, it tightened and strengthened inner scaffoldings along with existing structures of inequality. That being said, what makes Kony 2012 an important site for thinking through the ethical politics of affect is that the documentary highlights precisely how moving feelings and bodies is vital to the reinscription of difference and the reinforcement of dominant ways of knowing. It shows us the material impact of intense emotions and thus the exciting and unpredictable potentiality of embodied intensity. However, our main point is that because it is impossible to do one or the other in isolation, thinking and feeling through intense encounters (with people, inanimate objects, YouTube videos, ads, books, scholarly material, etc.), while not a smooth or comfortable process, is of vital ethical and political importance in a contemporary global climate characterized by expanding entities that seek to squash uncertainty, risk, and critical engagement with the way things are. The kind of learning we encourage is characterized by careful and active engagement with the kind of undoing that makes one question oneself (in relation to others, to land, to economic policies, to official national or regional discourses) through relating immediate affective and emotional responses to histories of oppression as they are lived in our present.

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality. London: Routledge.

———. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York and London: Routledge.

———. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.

Armstrong, Nancy. 2002. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New Delhi: Sage.

Braidotti, Rosi. 2012. “Interview with Rosi Braidotti.” In New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, edited by Rick Dophijn and Iris van der Tuin, 19–37. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Psychology Press.

Clough, Patricia. 2010. “Afterword: The Future of Affect Studies.” Body and Society 16(1): 222–30.

Connolly, William E. 2002. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Currie, Dawn. 1999. Girltalk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Davis, Angela. 1997. “Interview With Lisa Lowe—‘Angela Davis: Reflections on Race, Class, and Gender in the USA.’” In The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, 303–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Edited and translated by Seán Hand. London: Athlone Press. Originally published in French as Foucault (1986).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004[1987]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translation and foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published as Capitalisme et schizophrénie, vol. 2, Mille plateaux (1987).

Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Originally published as Les damnés de la terre (1961).

Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, 351–69. New York: The New Press.

Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. Thirtieth anniversary edition. New York: Continuum. Originally published as Pedagogia do oprimido (1968).

Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Heyes, Cressida. 2007. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. London: Oxford University Press.

Jewitt, Carey, and Rumiko Oyama. 2001. “Visual Meaning: A Social Semiotic Approach.” In Handbook of Visual Analysis, edited by Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt, 134–56. London: Sage.

Jiwani, Yasmin. 2009. “Helpless Maidens and Chivalrous Knights: Afghan Women in the Canadian Press.” University of Toronto Quarterly 78(2): 728–44.

Latour, Bruno. 2004. “How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies.” Body and Society 10(2–3): 205–29.

Lorde, Audre. 1997 [1981]. “The Uses of Anger.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 25(1–2): 278–85.

Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Protevi, John. 2009. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shotwell, Alexis. 2011. Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Stabile, Carol A., and Deepa Kumar. 2005. “Unveiling Imperialism: Media, Gender, and the War on Afghanistan.” Media, Culture, and Society 27(5): 765–82.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1(1): 1–40.

Weedon, Chris. 1997. Feminist Practice and Poststructural Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

Westen, Drew. 2007. The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. New York: Public Affairs.