AGAINST AFFECT: reason or reaction?

As someone who (1) has written a whole book about the structural conditions compelling people to perform spectacles of damage and vulnerability and their overcoming and (2) tends to think that the rise of Massumian affect theory in the 90s was a way to appear to rejuvenate white Western theory with a new methodology while keeping theorists focused exclusively on the white Western canon (why center Deleuze and Spinoza when The Souls of Black Folk and its sorrow is right there showing you how to theorize and theorize with extra-propositional knowledges), I thought I might be receptive to Lisa Downing’s Against Affect, which centers on affect theory and what she calls its “Tyranny of Vulnerability.” Though we may have some similar inclinations, we follow through on them in very different ways.

One of the things I find least satisfying about this book is that for a project that claims to be grounded in Foucault, it lacks any whiff of genealogical spirit or curiosity. Against Affect has a very explicit will-to-truth – reason’s discipline ought to rule over affect’s excessiveness – but it doesn’t ever ask about the will-to-truth behind the “affective turn.” WHY did this specific “affective episteme” arise at the time it did and what will-to-truth did it/does it serve?  In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault observes that the genealogical method “will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice.” In other words, genealogy studies the conditions that motivate a phenomenon’s emergence: what motivated people to take it up at that specific time in this specific form? What purpose did it serve, and for whom, and why was that purpose meaningful to those people then? Foucault’s genealogical method comes mainly from a reading of Nietzsche’s claim that “in all events a will to power is operating” (Genealogy, First Essay, section 12). Nietzsche and Foucault’s point is that this will to power/will to truth changes over time, such that the purpose of punishment might change as normative biopower “cuts off the head of the king”. From this perspective, the will-to-reason or will-to-Enlightenment in Downing’s 2026 book could be very different than the one in Kant’s 1784 “What is Enlightenment?” or Foucault’s 1984 reflection on this text of Kant with the same title. 

But to get back to my point, Downing’s book doesn’t study affect theory of the affective turn genealogically. This is absolutely a me problem: Downing didn’t write the book I wanted to read, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there are any problems with the book itself. 

However, the book has other problems.

Though she argues for a “feminist neo-Enlightenment” where reason is not just in theory but in fact universalized or “redistributed,” the text takes a “cool girl” approach to reason that suggests that feminized people can do reason too (just like they can, in classic cool girl fashion, like beer and sports), and that those feminized reasoners are superior to regular, uncool femininity. Treating reason as a concept or practice (unclear which it is for Downing?) that disciplines affect qua-unruly-excess, Against Affect continues to abject figures traditionally associated with femininity, racial non-whiteness, and Black femininity in particular. 

Downing defines reason less by its necessary and sufficient features or protocols and more by its effect, namely, “tempering the fashion for emotional outpouring” (25). As anyone who has read The Sonic Episteme (or the History of Sexuality volume 2) would recall, in Western philosophy this idea of “tempering” goes back to ancient Greek concepts of self-mastery or sophrosyne. For Plato especially, sophrosyne was both a form of moderation or tempering and a hierarchical relationship: to be moderate was to exhibit the natural hierarchy of ruler and ruled. Just as Plato thought that self-mastery or “sound-mindedness” (another common translation for sophrosyne) was the capacity to subordinate the unruliness of the visible world to the orderliness of the ideal world, Downing treats “reason” as that which should domesticate and discipline the unruliness that affect theory represents or unleashes. For example, she argues that “the present norm is a glut of idealized feeling” (42), and reason is a solution to that glut – “it is reason that refutes affective excess” (116).  The opposition here is less reason vs affect and more disciplined vs unruly. For example, Downing argues that 

When fear freezes our ability for clear thought as it did in the pandemic…and dis-ease overwhelms us, it threatens to unmake us. ‘Feeling’ is clammy and contagious; ‘reason’ is crystalline and pure–it stoppers the tide of fear-panic-overwhelm (116).

Clear and unadulterated, Downing argues, reason rescues us from potentially overwhelming phenomena. As scholars like Falguni Sheth and Kara Keeling have shown, “unruliness” (Sheth) and “boundarylessness” are figures for racial non-whiteness generally and Black femininity specifically. Reason domesticates the force of the phenomena which may overcome or undo our disciplined boundaries (and Downing really does mean “disciplined boundaries” in a Foucaultian sense, she connects reason to norms and normativity throughout the text).

To argue that white women and non-white people can exercise the reason necessary to discipline and purify such unboundedness is to argue for their place in multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy – they may have identities that are traditionally objected from the classically liberal public sphere (also the sphere of universality and reason), but now we think some of them can can exhibit behaviors that warrant their inclusion in white supremacist patriarchal privilege, in large part because their self-discipline shows they are able and willing to police unruliness in others like them. In Downing’s account, unruliness and boundarylessness is still abject, it’s just that some women and non-white people can help police that with reason. This isn’t the first thing Downing’s account has in common with the contemporary alt-right, which literally recruits people like former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio to ICE.

Going back to the block quote above, if you read Downing’s account of reason as the antidote to overwhelm and thought “huh, this sounds like Kant’s account of the sublime,” then I’d agree with you. For Kant, one can experience the sublime when you are threatened with things that are so physically or mathematically large (like the Matterhorn or the idea of infinity) that they threaten to overwhelm us. But when we remember that neither the force nor the size of either of these things surpasses the force and size of capital-R-Reason, we experience the feeling of the sublime. Reason rules over mere sensation, and Kant remixes Plato for the 18th century.

For Kant, the sublime is inherently gendered: when their natural irrationality is sufficiently disciplined, women are capable of merely the charming, but they don’t have the fortitude for the sublime. As Christine Battersby writes, “Women (and various racial and ethnic types originating from outside Europe) remain excluded from his account of the ‘universals’ of reason and of taste, of freedom and personhood that are operational in ‘our’ (male and European) enjoyment of the sublime” (9). Though Kant explicitly associates unruliness and unboundedness with women and non-white people, they are only socially productive and evidence of a free, self-legislating subject when they are appropriated by white masculinity. “Instinct, madness, the emotional and the capricious remained ‘feminine’ characteristics and were eulogised; but they were no longer thought of as specifically FEMALE characteristics. Instead, these characteristics were increasingly debarred to women or presented as part of a ‘natural’ condition that women themselves were unable to transcend” (Battersby 8). The performance of domesticating otherwise unruly femininity and/or racial non-whiteness positions the performer as ruling over what cannot rule itself.–i.e., as white and masculine. We are back at Plato’s natural order of ruler and ruled, thought this time through Enlightenment notions of race and gender.

As I have written about before, the racial politics of the sublime are central to a very British wing of the contemporary alt-right, the Landian “Dark Enlightenment.” That piece builds on Christopher Haworth’s study of the Dark Enlightenment’s use of industrial music zines from the 1970s and 80s:

Drawing on industrial musicians like Psychic TV’s use of sublime escoterism and occultism, these Dark Enlightenment figures evoked a “whiteness [that] manifested in the protection from harm it provided to authors and artists to immerse themselves in the anti-rational, abject, and censored-including explorations of right-wing escoterism or the supernatural thinking that informed the Third Reich” (Hayworth 231). This music confronted listeners with all kinds of dis-order that threatened to overwhelm them, but this functioned like a test against which Dark Enlightenment denizens could prove their strength and rationality.

The occultism and escoterism of industrial music zines serves the same role in Dark Enlightenment thought as affect serves in Downing’s book: it is the undisciplined other that evokes the sublime against which reason can demonstrate its disciplining or “tempering” force. In both of these contexts, “reason” is the status and affect of disciplined mastery. The DE is just more explicit about its investments in mastery.

Against Affect spends 116 pages evoking the boogey of unbounded affect before finally spending 22 pages saying more or less that maybe Audre Lorde got it right with her concept of the erotic. As someone who was trained to look at what a text does over and above what it says, my take here is that the book performs disciplined mastery. Much in the same way that resilience discourse requires the performance of damage to set up the spectacle of overcoming, Against Affect evokes the specter of uncontained affect as the prerequisite for its performance of disciplined mastery. In this regard, what is performed is not so much reason as reaction. In the First Essay of The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche explains that “reaction…says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself’; and THIS No is its creative deed.” Though Downing may distance herself from the political reactionaries of the Dark Enlightenment, her method here in this book is nevertheless a technique of reaction, a saying “no” to affect as creative deed.

As I have said many times while teaching philosophy, “critique” doesn’t necessarily mean to find fault: especially entomologically, its emphasis is more on analyzing things and understanding what the parts are and how they work. Against Affect seems to conflate analysis with negation. As someone who is invested in the value of critique for theorizing, I hope this post has communicated several other ways to go about it: I’ve asked what motivates a thing’s uptake and studied what Sara Ahmed call’s theorizing’s “gestures” or maybe what you could call the argument’s rhetorical form. I also don’t think suspicion or the lack of suspicion in and of itself is theoretically valuable: what matters more is that suspicion always is directed up, to those in positions of power, and credence is directed down, to those who have been epistemically underprivileged and oppressed. Which is all to say I think Downing and I mean something different by critique or critical thinking or analysis or whatever it is that it’s philosophy’s job to do. 
For Downing, returning to reason is a return to queer anti-normativity; she makes many gestures to this throughout the text. For example, she explains “I would suggest that a method of antinormative redistributive reason is a recuperative strategy that queer theory would do well to tarry with in the current hyperaffective climate in which the episteme of affect is the new normativity” (39). As the author of a forthcoming book arguing that biopower has evolved beyond its original normative form into something new that aligns with the math used in contemporary tech and finance, I am certainly biased when it comes to calls for renewed normativity or antinormativity: the front lines of the battle have moved from discipline and anti/normativity to vibes and legitimation. When Idaho turns being trans in public into a felony, they aren’t treating LGBTQ+ people as abnormal; this Idaho bill criminalizes trans people. I wrote a whole book where I make that argument and you can read it this November from Duke UP. (It also talks about how vibes are different than affect.) If the fight has moved on from norms or antinormativity, doubling down on antinormative disciplined mastery seems to cancel out the efficacy of those first two terms – antinormative discipline – and leave just the performance of mastery. And in the end that’s what I’m most suspicious of in this in Against Affect.