Ross (2006) - Coming in From The Cold - Constructivism and Emotions

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European Journal of International
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066106064507
2006 12: 197 European Journal of International Relations
Andrew A. G. Ross
Coming in from the Cold: Constructivism and Emotions
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Coming in from the Cold: Constructivism
and Emotions
ANDREW A. G. ROSS
University of Oregon, USA
A variety of constructivists have begun to address emotions in IR,
viewing emotional events and memories as important dimensions to the
social construction of identity. But it is not clear that constructivist
tools, designed in most cases for interpreting discursive representations,
are equipped to study affective phenomena. This article offers a critical
assessment of constructivisms ability to theorize affects noncon-
scious and embodied emotional states in global politics. Using as an
example the ontology developed by Alexander Wendt, the article
suggests that common presuppositions in orthodox constructivism in
fact obstruct the study of affect and its role in social and political life.
To grasp the depth, intensity, and fugitivity of emotional phenomena,
constructivism needs to rethink its attachments to reective agency,
ideational processes, and symbolic meaning. Through a brief discussion
of the American response to 9/11, the nal section develops several
propositions on the role of affect in forging political identities.
KEY WORDS 9/11 affect emotion identity materiality
micropolitics
There are promising signs that emotion is gaining recognition as an
important topic for international relations (IR).
1
Over ve years ago, Neta
Crawford argued that IR theory had tended to ignore the subject
(Crawford, 2000).
2
Now, scholars of various theoretical persuasions are
seeing that relations among states and non-state actors are infused with
emotional signicance, and are contending that these impassioned connec-
tions pose new problems for security, ethics, and other areas of global
politics. Realism has long held an interest in emotions, especially fear, but
European Journal of International Relations Copyright 2006
SAGE Publications and ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research, Vol. 12(2): 197222
[DOI: 10.1177/1354066106064507]
most structural realists kept these concerns in the background as they
focused on systemic sources of international conict. Only in the last ten
years have realists inuenced by political psychology returned to the
impulses said to cause group conict (Druckman, 1994; Mercer, 1995;
Sterling-Folker, 2002). During the same period, but especially over the last
ve years, constructivists inuenced by poststructuralism have studied
emotional dimensions of political identity. There is now important work
available on: political aspects of trauma (Edkins, 2003, 2004; Fierke,
2004), memory (Zehfuss, 2003), and humiliation (Callahan, 2004;
Saurette, forthcoming); the emotional dimensions of aesthetic expression
(Bleiker, 2006); and the role of emotions in humanitarian intervention
and conict resolution (Pupavac, 2002, 2004). It is as yet unclear,
however, whether these ideas will gain acceptance in the wider eld of
constructivism and whether, if accepted, they will contribute to a more
compelling account of emotion than that offered within realism. To be
sure, both realists and constructivists face daunting tasks ahead if they
are to understand the memories, habits, and passions that make global
politics both volatile and inspiring.
My specic concern here is with the work to be done on the constructivist
side. In many respects, constructivists seem uniquely qualied to study
emotion. They have already arrived at important theoretical frameworks for
understanding identities and norms, and it seems only a small step from here
to the idea that emotions mediate our receptivity to these phenomena.
Indeed, the latter contention is variously expressed in the poststructuralist
research cited above. Notwithstanding these promising connections, how-
ever, there remain signicant obstacles preventing constructivism from
taking emotions seriously. Because the study of emotions carries us into
unfamiliar layers of human agency and fugitive dimensions of social life, it
stretches the assumptions and frameworks that dene constructivism. For
example, constructivists commonly emphasize the symbolic meanings con-
tained in discourse (Laffey and Weldes, 1997; Wendt, 1999); the task of
excavating this meaning is, for many, what sets constructivism apart from
explanatory modes of inquiry. But are all emotions the kind of thing that can
be said to have meaning? If, as I will suggest, some emotions are too
inchoate, unexpected, or inarticulate to be imbued with meaning, perhaps
hermeneutics, symbolic interactionism, and other constructivist tools are not
yet calibrated to study them.
3
Poststructuralists have made important
attempts to broaden the study of identity to include memories and affects
that lie outside intentional agency and symbolic meaning,
4
but these ideas
have not been folded into more orthodox forms of constructivism.
5
The
result is that the latter contain as yet no account of how norms, identities
and other intellectual phenomena are sustained by deeper ranges of human
European Journal of International Relations 12(2)
198
expression. The stakes of this omission are surely high, since it allows realists
to monopolize the topic of emotions and cast them as basic impulses
insulated from the social world and inhospitable to peaceful coexistence and
moral achievement.
6
If constructivism is coming in from the cold, it still
lacks the concepts needed to respond to the realist challenge and to explore
fully the emotional terrain of global politics.
The purpose of this article is to identify and develop some of these
concepts. I do so through a selective critical engagement with one strain of
the constructivist literature in IR. I focus on the soft constructivism
developed by Alexander Wendt in Social Theory of International Politics
(1999), not out of a conviction that Wendts version of constructivism is
either the best or the worst available, but in order to facilitate the deep
explication of conceptual and ontological problems warranted by the
phenomenon of affect. Only by exposing, for example, the relationship
between cognitivity and materiality in the soft constructivist account of
human agency are we in a position to understand how receptive it might be
to the study of emotions. Wendts Social Theory represents the most explicit
and sustained presentation of a constructivist ontology available in IR
theory; as such, it provides an exploratory terrain on which to investigate
problems shared by other constructivists. I suggest that, by appropriating
conventional models of intentionality, Wendt loses purchase on modes of
belief and identity that are inspired and absorbed before being chosen. And,
by separating material and ideational forces, his constructivism is left to
decide whether emotions are biological impulses of the body or cognitive
constructions of the mind a decision that scientic and philosophical
research on emotion has increasingly refused. Exposing these presupposi-
tions in Wendts ontology will also illuminate kindred traces of intellectual-
ism within other species of constructivism. Research emphasizing
representations of identity as meaning-laden expressions, for example, may
not fully capture the role of affect in social life. If constructivists are to see
emotions as vehicles of socialization, these shared assumptions will need
critical modication.
My argument also reects a selective concern with the specic challenges
posed by nonconscious and corporeal dimensions of emotion.
7
Recent work
inspired by Gilles Deleuze has shown how nonreective habits and moods,
or affects, tinge our intellectual beliefs and judgements and prepare us for
the identities we come to hold (Connolly, 2002; Deleuze and Guattari,
1988; Massumi, 2002). Circulations of affect pregure, for example, public
enthusiasm for nationalist mobilization or military intervention. Whereas
feelings are subjective ideas, affects cut across individual subjects and forge
collective associations from socially induced habits and memories.
8
More-
over, they are experienced by decision-makers and publics alike; as I will
Ross: Constructivism and Emotion
199
suggest, the memories and other affects induced by the 9/11 attacks
provoked American voters and elites to converge in their endorsement of
military intervention abroad. The American response has thus been shaped
more by these affective states than by the beliefs about social roles for
example, the role of enmity described by Wendt advocated by elites.
Exploring this affective dimension does not negate the presence of strategic
calculations; on the contrary, the latter were all the more viable where there
were already affective dispositions conducive to military action.
The rst three sections of the article address what emotions are, how
nonconscious affects challenge soft constructivist assumptions about inten-
tionality, and how their composite nature demands a revision of Wendts
image of materiality. The nal section of the article considers the relationship
between affect and identity. Here, I suggest that assumptions about
intentionality, meaning, and materiality have shielded many constructivists in
IR from investigating the embodied social practices through which social
identities are internalized. I consider briey the American response to 9/11
in order to illustrate ways in which constructivism might investigate the
affective strata on which collective identities are incipiently forged.
Rethinking Emotions
Since the 1960s and 1970s, the prevailing view in philosophy, psychology,
and cognitive science has been that emotions are a species of belief. An
emotion, in this view, is a cognitive judgement about whether some
experience is rewarding or threatening to the self. Each emotion contributes
to this assessment or appraisal through a distinct cognitive structure
(Lazarus, 1991; Ortony et al., 1988). Martha Nussbaum has recently
suggested, for example, that grief is predicated upon a series of distinct
beliefs that an injury or loss has been experienced by someone, and that
the injured person is signicant to the grieving individual (Nussbaum, 2001:
3945).
9
Most so-called appraisal theorists see bodily states as derivative of
these cognitive beliefs, although not all regard appraisal as a conscious
process (Grifths, 2004). Some simply broaden their denition of cognition
to include nonconscious processing (Lazarus, 1984); others argue that
emotions are cognitive but nevertheless nonpropositional and not involved
in higher levels of cognition (Oatley and Johnson-Laird, 1987).
10
Most
appraisal theorists, however, have assumed that appraisal is conducted
consciously and that, as such, it is available through the self-reports of
human subjects.
11
Constructivist accounts of emotion, it should be said,
have largely accepted these core features of the cognitivist view. Con-
structivists share the idea that emotions are cognitive beliefs rather than
bodily states, adding only that these beliefs are socially or intersubjectively
200
constituted.
12
One theorist writes Turning our attention away from the
physiological states of individuals to the unfolding of social practices opens
up the possibility that many emotions can exist only in the reciprocal
exchanges of a social encounter (Harr e, 1986: 5). Cognitive theories,
including their constructivist variant, have tended to afrm a strict separa-
tion of the physiological and cognitive dimensions of emotion.
Cognitivists are inspired in part by dissatisfaction with the allegedly
deterministic 19th-century theories of Darwin, Freud and, especially,
William James. James developed a physiological account, which has
remained a key reference point for scientic and philosophical research on
emotion throughout the 20th century. In 1884, James argued that feelings
are responses not to mental recognition of some stimulus but, rather, to
bodily states alone Without the bodily states following on the
perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless,
destitute of emotional warmth (James, 1967: 13; 1950: 450). In his widely
cited example, we dont run from a bear because were afraid of it; were
afraid of it because we run (1950: 450). Jamess rigid formulation of this
theory invited equally uncompromising criticism. Beginning in the 1920s,
critics argued that Jamess theory could not withstand new experimental
evidence of the physiological response associated with emotions.
13
Walter
Cannon argued, for example, that this evidence disproved Jamess claim that
no emotion could be felt in the absence of visceral stimulus, suggesting that
emotions must somehow be produced in the absence of visceral sensations
(1984: 1446).
14
Cannon did not deny that the visceral responses were
involved in emotions, or even that these might be what normally set
emotions apart from other mental states; he did deny that the bodys
response was a necessary element of any emotion and that it was as varied as
James made it out to be (LeDoux, 1996: 46). Early critiques of James thus
inspired cognitivists to explore what they considered the real command
centre of emotions the cognitive machinery giving rise to visceral changes
in the rst place.
While many theorists are persuaded by the cognitivist approach to
emotions, others remain dissatised by its inability to capture their depth
and intensity. Non-cognitivists have rightly returned to the Jamesian view.
15
Notwithstanding the allegedly decisive criticism James provoked, a careful
reading of his psychological and philosophical writings tells a more complex
story. When Cannon and others fault James for missing the similarity of
bodily responses associated with diverse emotions such as anger, fear, and
shame,
16
they miss the nature of his concern for the radical diversity of
emotional experience. James complains that descriptive psychology had
retreated into endless classication of emotions as absolutely individual
things (James, 1950: 449) because he rejects the notion that manifold
201
emotional experiences could be reduced to a singular emotion with the
status of a thing. Exposing the complexity of the bodys response to objects
of emotion goes a good distance, James thinks, toward understanding why
our descriptions of emotional experience are indeed so varied (1950: 454).
17
It is here that Jamess psychology of emotions intersects with his later
philosophy of radical empiricism. Understood as diverse sensations emerg-
ing from the bodys periphery, emotions become our rst piece of evidence
that sensation might be a much richer thing than is commonly supposed
(James, 1950: 517). It is emotions, he argues, that bring us closer to a pure
experience that exceeds familiar linguistic concepts (James, 1976: 73).
Emotions in the Jamesian view are the bodys rst responders in its relations
with the bodies around it.
Jamess theory has also been widely misrepresented as a seminal contribu-
tion to a reductionist or hydraulic model, for which emotions are
uncontrollable bodily eruptions (Solomon, 1976: 148). In fact, Jamess view
was never so simple. He did regard emotions as bodily responses over which
conscious agents initially have little control. However, James thought that,
notwithstanding this physiological origin, emotions take on social and
cultural meanings If they [emotions] are deep, pure, worthy, spiritual
facts on any conceivable theory of their physiological source, they remain no
less deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensational
theory (1950: 453). Emotions may result from bodily changes, but this is
only a story about their complex genesis; it says little about the full
composition of an emotion and its relation to cognitive faculties. For James,
the bodily dimension of emotions does not remove them from the
reections of a thinking agent. What it does mean, though, is that active
modication of the self must take place partly at the level of bodily practice.
It is for this reason that he suggests: We must . . . go through the outward
motions of those contrary dispositions we prefer to cultivate (1967: 22;
emphasis in original). In the vocabulary of constructivism, this means that
the involvement of the body in emotions is part of their social nature.
Jamess theory has recently received scientic support from neurobiolo-
gists who regard emotions as primarily nonconscious responses of the brain
and body. Joseph LeDoux and Antonio Damasio, for example, agree that
emotions are appraisals of external stimuli but disagree with the notion that
such appraisals might be uniformly available to consciousness. LeDoux
offers experimental evidence to suggest that emotions are part of an
evolutionarily more sophisticated system of emotional appraisal that bypas-
ses the relatively slower functions of the conscious mind.
18
Conscious
feelings, he argues, are the frills that have added icing to the emotional
cake (1996: 302). Damasio aims to recover and qualify Jamess insistence
on the necessity of a visceral dimension of emotions. Damasio accepts
202
Jamess discovery that the body and its visceral processes are fundamentally
involved in emotions but relaxes the claim that these processes might be
directly implicated in all emotional experiences (Damasio, 2004: 7). The
brain, he argues, develops an articial mechanism for simulating bodily
responses, to stir the mind into action.
19
Thus, Jamess hunch about visceral
response was correct, but he missed an important corollary operation
executed by the brain. According to Damasio, the body is not a simple or
closed system; it develops a varied network of enhancements, which are
both partly outside consciousness and subject to education and socialization
through experience.
Understanding emotion as part of an open, adaptable system is what sets
apart this nonreductionist research within neuroscience. For example, a
related and growing body of neuroscientic research has identied two
autonomous systems of affective response one for positive stimuli or
rewards and one for negative stimuli or threats (Cacioppo and Gardner,
1999). Although this research agrees with LeDoux and Damasio that
appraisal is conducted below the level of conscious awareness, it divides all
responses of the brain and body into two distinct systems, each with a
relatively stable function. By contrast, Damasio regards the distinction
between positive and negative affect as less important than the nesting
patterns among levels of emotional response. Lower levels of emotional
response, such as habits and moods, are integrated into higher forms of
emotion, such as anger or joy Each reaction consists of tinkered
rearrangements of bits and parts of the simpler processes below (2003: 38).
Damasio is reluctant to give these processes a determinate form. For him,
education and experience become folded into brain processes in ways that
alter the nested system of emotion (1994: 179).
20
Thus cultural inuences,
as well as the creative operations of the brain itself, modify nature in ways
that make it difcult to identify stable emotional systems.
The relative openness of research in neuroscience alters the possibilities for
its historical application. The research cited above on positive and negative
affect has, for example, been appropriated by political psychologists who
underestimate the social complexity and adaptability of affect. George
Marcus argues that the system of positive affect, which generates enthu-
siasm, regulates the everyday habits that govern normal participation in
political life. He contrasts this with negative affect, or anxiety, which surveys
sensory data for disruptions that might demand new ideas, creative
solutions, and other adaptive responses (Marcus, 2002; Marcus et al., 2000).
Marcuss affective intelligence model overstates the distinction between
enthusiasm/habit, which he thinks gives a conservative valence to normal
political behaviour, and anxiety/surveillance, which enters only under
unusual circumstances (2002: 817). His favourable acceptance of dualistic
203
models of affect thus seems to result from a normatively thick typology of
political behaviour. The forced distinction between habit and surveillance is,
however, deterred by the nonreductionist tenor of work by James, LeDoux,
and Damasio. This work lends itself to more open-ended applications and is
attentive to the complex mixing of biological and social processes. These
sources thus offer constructivists not irrefutable evidence but contestable
insights into biological dimensions of social processes. These insights might
be used to formulate non-deterministic, historically informed inferences
about the role of affect in political life.
Such a formulation would combine an understanding of affective pro-
cesses with historical analysis of the social practices and events that condition
them. Although neither LeDoux nor Damasio directly study the social and
political consequences of his research,
21
theorists inspired by Deleuze have
moved in this direction, viewing affect as part of a rich eld of cultural
construction and micropolitics (Connolly, 2002; Massumi, 2002). Reaching
beyond the clinical parameters of neuroscience, this work species the social
experiences and historical circumstances through which affective responses
are modied. In this view, everyday events such as popular demonstrations,
public speeches, cinema, media representations, and internet transmissions
are involved in forging new affective dispositions. Each induces affects that
shape our receptivity to social and political movements, ideologies, and
identities. For Deleuze, affects are not subjective states but resonances that
connect individuals in collectivities such as a nation or political movement.
In his collaborative writings with F elix Guattari, the fascist movements of the
mid-20th century form the paradigmatic case of such resonance (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1988: 214). But, as William Connolly has argued, affective
dispositions condition involvement in a wide variety of political communities
associated with religion, workplace, and political doctrine (Connolly, 2002).
Beyond the nation, popular commitment to transnationalism is conditioned
by affectively charged memories of global events such as World War II
(Robbins, 1999), while global communications technologies are increasingly
allowing for affective connections within transnational diasporas (Appadurai,
1996). As I will suggest, it is possible in each of these cases to study the
social practices giving rise to affective responses, and to assess the macro-
political forces and structures these responses together inspire.
Rethinking Constructivist Ontologies
Wendts constructivism offers a useful entry point into the ontological
problems posed by the micropolitics of affect. Central to Wendts Social
Theory is a contention that the social dynamics of international politics
require a new account of interests. Constructivists should see interests as
204
above all social and ideational phenomena; contra realism, material forces
determine interests only in exceptional circumstances (Wendt, 1999:
11415). The problem, for Wendt, is that this revised conception of
interests is blocked by prevailing assumptions about the nature of human
agency. Human action is motivated, the conventional view suggests, by two
successive and separate components desire and belief.
22
Wendt argues
that, through the continuing inuence of Hume, rationalists have been able
to view desire (or passion) and belief (or reason) as essentially distinct
phenomena desires motivate action; beliefs qualify or represent the world
in which action is to take place. Further, although rationalists have been
reluctant to specify of what desire consists (1999: 115), they have
nevertheless insisted on a strict separation of desire from belief. Rightly
dissatised with this distinction, Wendt proposes a cognitive theory of
desire (1999: 119; emphasis in original).
Wendts theory effectively pushes cognition further back into the
behavioural terrain hitherto occupied by desire. He recodes most desires as
forms of belief cognitive appraisals of the possibilities and conditions of
action. Wendt appeals to eclectic sources to establish an account of
motivation as a cognitive schema whose terms are dened by social
institutions, according to social norms and ideas (1999: 122). In his
account, desire consists of knowledge about prevailing social standards, for a
desire without belief would be a mere urge without direction (1999: 123).
These arguments are fundamental to Part II of Social Theory, in which
Wendt outlines the prevailing schemas or cultures of anarchy. Each
schema represents a set of beliefs that give meaning to material forces
beliefs about what role or model of state behaviour is most appropriate
(1999: 262). The central contention of Wendts constructivism is that these
schemas have motivational force of their own and explain more of state
behaviour than do conventional accounts of material forces. Constructivism
is thus capable of addressing the inuence of beliefs, identities, and norms
on interests effects largely overlooked by realism.
Having established that interests are primarily governed by beliefs about
appropriate goals, Wendt develops an account of state behaviour for which
interaction is regulated specically by the social meanings associated with
material forces. His analysis of interactionism aims to correct Waltzs
premature removal of interaction from system structure. Rather than
discredit interaction as a unit-level phenomenon, Wendt establishes it as
integral to the international system. And central to interaction for Wendt is
the reciprocal recognition of identities. Identity, for him, is part of the
belief structure involved in motivating action To have an identity is
simply to have certain ideas about who one is in a given situation (1999:
170). Thus, agents act according to ideas about who they are. Consistent
205
with his modication of the rationalist understanding of intentionality,
Wendt extends to these ideas a motivating force of their own; they are, he
argues, a property of intentional actors that generates motivational and
behavioural dispositions (1999: 224). The concept of identity thus allows
Wendt to lodge intentionality at the centre of social interaction.
Especially important to this intentionality is the idea that identity consists
above all of consciously adopted roles.
23
Although the ontology in Part I of
Social Theory delineates four forms of identity,
24
Wendts discussion of the
states system in Part II privileges role identities. Social roles are, he
explains, micro-structural components of a social system rather than
properties of agents. As a role identity such as friend, rival, or enemy
achieves widespread recognition, it becomes a macro-structural force that
gives meaning to the social environment of the international system.
Borrowing from Mead, Wendt explains that, over repeated interactions,
actors gradually bring subjective identity (Meads I) into step with an
objective, socially sanctioned identity (Meads Me) (1999: 329). But, to
what extent do actors assess and adopt the meaning of the Me consciously?
Mead ultimately views role-taking as a self-conscious practice, and Wendt
too notes that role-taking is seen at some level as a choice, of a Me by the
I. . . (1999: 329; emphasis in original).
25
Wendt qualies this, however,
with the statement no matter how unreective that choice might be in
practice. But he doesnt tell us what occupies the space between reective
and unreective choice. Assuming it is possible to make a choice that is
unreective, on what basis is the choice being made? What are the
nonreective inuences contributing to it? We know from Wendts earlier
discussions that it cannot be desires or material interests. Is it public
opinion? Subliminal norms? Emotions? Wendt ultimately offers us little to
work with. Moreover, his ontology of motivation seems to close off the
problem by requiring that roles be consciously adopted beliefs. Inter-
actionism cannot, for him, be a merely formal theory of behaviour akin to
rational choice. For rational choice, an actors consciousness of choices is
initially irrelevant an intentionality is imputed without the need for
empirical verication of actual intentions. Intentions are unnecessary since
formal theories are designed to yield empirically testable hypotheses about
behaviour, not descriptions of reasons for action. For Wendts inter-
actionism, however, choice must also be an empirical actuality, for it is
conscious reection upon competing role identities that conrms Wendts
claim that social construction extends beyond the level of mere behaviour.
26
In this way, Wendts appeal to interactionism is tied to and regulated by his
cognitive theory of desire.
This afnity between social identity/interaction and intentional, cognitive
agency leaves Wendts soft constructivism intellectually over-prepared, as it
206
were, to study the multiple ranges of human agency. In the later chapters of
Social Theory, Wendt gestures toward the importance of these phenomena.
He recognizes, for example, that the form through which cultures of
anarchy are internalized is highly variable a Hobbesian anarchy
internalized to the second degree must rely, Wendt thinks, on tacit norms,
its principles being sufciently violent and alienated to preclude overt
codication (1999: 272); alternatively, a Hobbesian anarchy internalized to
the third degree may rely upon unconscious forces of aggression. These
ideas lead him to suggest that the role that unconscious processes play in
international politics is something that needs to be considered more
systematically, not dismissed out of hand (1999: 278). While suggestive,
these remarks are nevertheless a weak remedy for the intellectualist bias of
Wendts ontology. To begin with, they seem to reect the idea that
unconscious internalization constitutes a strictly pathological form of
socialization, characteristic of primitive or Hobbesian forms of anarchy.
Higher cultures of anarchy would, in such a view, be internalized through
the normal, cognitive channels. But, more importantly, these isolated
remarks make no attempt to integrate nonconscious levels of agency into a
constructivist account of what human beings are and how they act.
Composite Emotions and Materialist Explanation
My concern here is not to dismiss Wendts social constructivism per se;
investigating how ideas and identities operate as motivating forces and
channels of socialization is an important direction for constructivist research.
My concern is with the assumption, which seems to underlie his discussion
of these topics, that cognitive beliefs about social ideas might be the primary
or exclusive means through which social structures and values are repro-
duced. For Wendt, expanding the range of application of cognitive activity is
tantamount to establishing the salience and signicance of social dimensions
of political life. Sociality is rst and foremost a cognitive phenomenon for
him. These assumptions permit, in turn, a relatively truncated account of
material phenomena. Wendt argues that individuals, while principally
motivated by desire qua belief, are nevertheless subject to pre-social
(biological) needs; this concession constitutes what he calls a rump
materialism (1999: 1303). The presence of this discussion illuminates
Wendts engagement with rationalist theories of motivation. Earlier, he had
promised that constructivism would overcome the Humean dualism of
desire and belief . It is now clear that, rather than alter the oppositional
structure of this dualism, Wendt merely extends belief further back into
terrain hitherto occupied by desire and consequently reduces the scope of
desire conceived as a brute material force. Wendts constructivism in fact
207
afrms the opposition of material and ideational stuff even as it works to
expand the domain of the latter.
But if emotions are, as the neo-Jamesians suggest, composite states, the
material/ideational dualism will need a deeper revision than soft constructiv-
ism allows. As noted earlier, some neuroscientists regard corporeal dimen-
sions of emotion, as well as cognitive feelings, as susceptible to modication
through education and everyday experience. Deleuzians regard affects as
supple vehicles for social norms. Affects are the habits and memories that
prepare in us a receptivity to norms, identities, beliefs, and other intellectual
phenomena. But, as James argues, the bodily origins of an emotion do not
completely govern its composition. What makes a theory of bodily responses
a materialism, for James, is the presumption that these material phenomena
are base reexes (1950: 453). But for him, while sensations are reexes,
there is nothing sacramental or eternally xed in reex action (1950: 454).
Recognizing the richness of sensation allows him to track the material
involvement of emotions without constructing a materialism as such. To
theorize affects as material dimensions of social life is not, therefore, to
advocate a materialism. At least in the eld of emotion, we need not make
an either/or decision between materialist and ideational explanation.
To capture emotional dimensions of global politics, constructivism needs
to resist the idea that either material or ideational forces are causally
determinative in a given situation. In Wendts account, belief about identity
takes on a motivational capacity of its own and, through it, the proportion
of human agency occupied by socially constituted values, norms, and ideas is
greatly expanded. The result is that the residual, pre-social dimension of
desire plays a diminished role, motivating agents directly only during hotel
res when instinct surfaces to trump norms. Wendt thinks, for example,
that material forces such as the distribution of material capabilities, the
technological composition of material capabilities and geographical condi-
tions still represent determinative causes in some situations (1999: 11011).
Thus, while it is central to Wendts constructivism that material forces are
usually and mostly constituted by social meanings, this is not all they are. He
explains, The relationship between material forces and ideas works both
ways (1999: 112). If ideas constitute material forces most of the time,
material forces set limits upon the scope and composition of ideas. Wendts
rump materialism is said to be an alternative to the vulgar or reductionist
materialism endorsed by neorealism insofar as the former views material
forces as normally constituted by socially dened interests. The material
ground of human nature, for example, is always connected to socially
constituted identities and interests (1999: 130). This qualication does not,
however, allow for a synthetic understanding of the material and ideational
processes involved in composite emotions.
208
A neo-Jamesian conception of emotions avoids giving priority to either
materiality or ideas in a given case and sees bodily and cognitive processes as
co-involved in every affective response. Emotions are, in other words, a
special mode of human agency for which conventional models of causal
determination are inadequate. To understand this problem of causality, we
might revisit briey the reasons why Jamess theory of emotions intersected
with his radical empiricism. In Principles of Psychology, James emphasizes the
causal nature of his investigation (1950: 4534), but what does he mean by
causal? Conventional views of efcient causality suggest that causal inquiry
must identify repeated, predictable conjunctions of cause and effect. James
regards these conventions as too structured to capture the variability and
individuality of emotions-as-bodily-changes. While he regards bodily sensa-
tions as necessary to all emotions, he insists that sensation is innitely
complex, subtle and overlapping a much richer thing than heretofore
supposed. Indeed, so rich that establishing clear causal relations between one
discrete sensation and an emotional feeling becomes difcult. James agrees
with Bergson that the relations we perceive never fully exhaust the ux of
lived experience (James, 1977). Radical empiricism does not presuppose in
advance that sensations conform to regular causal relations; it regards
emotion as a synthesis of bodily responses, social norms, and overt beliefs.
The composite nature of emotions is part of what makes them an especially
sensitive way of connecting to a world of complex social relations.
Emotion, in the neo-Jamesian view, calls for a signicant revision of social
scientic conventions concerning causal explanation. Indeed, constructivism
is not wholly unprepared for such a revision, as one last discussion of Wendt
illustrates. The primary objective of Wendts constructivism is to outline the
constitutive effects of social ideas ideas constitute the identities and
interests from which behaviour is motivated. While ideas also act causally, it
is their constitutive effects that Wendt aims to theorize; ideas are sources of
motivation without being direct or efcient causes of action. Unfortunately,
however, Wendt applies this innovation only to ideational forces. To the
extent that material forces shape the social world, they do so as causal forces
they affect society in a causal way (Wendt, 1999: 111; emphasis in
original). Thus, for Wendt, to theorize materiality one must develop an
account of the causal effects of material forces in short, a materialism.
27
If
the relationship between material forces and ideas goes both ways, the
movement of specically constitutive effects goes only one way. Wendts
constructivism points to the need for an alternative ontology for which the
materiality of the body is constitutively involved in identity-formation and
socialization. The interesting question in this view is not whether material
forces exert any residual inuence in a social world (ideas all the way
down?).
28
If materiality in the form of bodily emotions is regularly involved
209
in judgements, decisions, and other forms of agency, the crucial question is
how is it involved? As I suggest below, the concept of identity represents
one area in which to address this question.
Toward a Theory of Affective Identity
Constructivism in IR has succeeded in establishing identity as a key
component of global political relations. Many constructivists share, however,
some version of Wendts assumption that identities are above all meaning-
laden representations. Identities, in this view, have all the coherence and
determinateness of consciously held beliefs about social roles. Admittedly,
not all constructivists agree that identities are in fact consciously recognized
by the agents who express them; an important element of the constructivist
logic suggests, quite rightly, that actors need not be conscious of social
identities for these to have discursive reality. Constructivists are thus able to
trace, using interpretive methods, the circulation of identities in historical
narratives, popular culture, and other discursive representations. One need
not deny the importance of this work to see that it does not, however,
address the question of how these identities are internalized below the level
of consciousness. Wendts neglect in accounting for the space between
reective and unreective acceptance of identity is widely practised by
constructivists, although many are increasingly calling it into question. As
poststructuralists and others at the margins of constructivism are recogniz-
ing, we can support the contention that identities involve roles, symbols, and
other forms of social meaning and still want to learn about the nonconscious
processes that reproduce and transmit them.
Investigating these processes differs from existing research on emotional
dimensions of identity by relaxing the expectation that such emotions involve
reection and meaning. Theorists of national identity, for example, have
generally presumed that individuals actively reect upon the symbols and
legitimating principles associated with some construction of national iden-
tity (Bloom, 1990: 61; Hall, 1999: 39). Instrumentalist accounts of nation-
alism and ethnic conict presuppose a similar cognitive connection between
symbols and the identities of which they are said to be symbolic.
29
It is this
cognitive content of social discourse, instrumentalists suggest, that allows
leaders to deliver speeches that are predictably conducive to the construction
of a specic identity elites allegedly appeal to historical symbols or
representations known to be associated with an identity. Focusing on the
cognitive resemblance of symbols overlooks, however, the communicative
conditions under which symbolic expressions have emotional impact; the
result is a tendency to assume that any expression of ethnic origins has
emotional resonance. For example, Walker Connors account of elite
210
discourses takes for granted the correspondence between the cognitive
content of ethnic origins and the magnitude of a speechs emotional impact.
30
Requiring cognitive resemblance between utterances and identities conceals
modes of expression that prepare us affectively for social identities.
More nuanced theories recognize the unspoken or tacit dimension of
rule-following (Onuf, 1989: 512; Kratochwil, 1989: 556) and the
importance of dormant or potential identities (Waever et al., 1993: 31),
but these observations have not been developed into a broader account of
the nonconscious, affective dimension of identity. Poststructuralist research
has gone furthest in this regard, by addressing the inarticulable dimensions
of identity. In his analysis of the Bosnian conict, for example, David
Campbell suggests that ethnic identities are not pre-existing, ideational
things, available to and chosen by volitional agents; they are instead created
through repeated performances, which only appear as part of an identity
after the fact. Appealing to Derrida, Campbell argues that these perfor-
mances ultimately acquire their legitimacy through mystical foundations
that are within language but outside representation (1998: 26). Deconstruc-
tion thus discloses only traces of this violent foundation of identity (1998:
200). As a result, Campbell tends to view performance from the perspective
of the product it engenders discursive representations of ethnic identity
rather than the bodily performance itself. His deconstructionist analysis
reveals the need for a more direct investigation of affectivity as part of the
non-representational or mystical dimension of language.
The inarticulable dimensions of identity have been importantly addressed
in recent studies of trauma and memory in international politics. Most
notably, Jenny Edkins argues that experiences of trauma can provoke new
dispositions that disrupt otherwise stable political identities. In her Lacanian
account, some part of us cannot be represented through the symbols
available in language, and exposure to trauma can move us to remember this
formative decit (2003: 12).
31
What sets Edkinss analysis apart from other
work in IR theory is its emphasis on trauma as an inarticulable interruption
of identity. For Edkins, trauma exceeds the conscious awareness of
intentional agents We are not able, even in a preliminary way, to say
what happened. It is beyond the realm of what we expect as intentional
action (2003: 39). Edkins practises admirable caution and modesty in
approaching the non-intentional and inarticulable dimensions of trauma and
memory. But do these challenging dimensions of affectivity necessarily
prevent us from tracing the habits, comportments, and memories through
which trauma is retained? Perhaps trauma is a version an especially
complex and intense one of the affective experience that characterizes the
everyday life of micropolitics.
32
A Deleuzian perspective gives us a way of
talking about these experiences even as they remain unspeakable for those
211
involved. While emotions may at times be mystical and ineffable, these
qualities should not bar constructivists from studying them. Analysis of
micropolitics requires generating meaningful inferences about the social role
of affectivity without resorting only to subjective self-reports expressed in
surveys or other qualitative research methods. Social scientists can meet this
challenge by examining ne-grained historical and ethnographic accounts
and distilling from them processes unexplained by theories emphasizing
normative change and instrumental agency. Certainly, these methodological
problems demand more attention than I am able to give them here.
Although micropolitics is not limited to spectacular or violent events,
9/11 provides a useful reference point for investigating affect. It is perhaps
undeniable that narrative constructions of identity and other symbolic
representations of the nation were intensied after 9/11.
33
As some
theorists have begun to suggest, however, 9/11 also provoked a wider
repertoire of emotionally imbued responses involving aesthetic experience,
trauma, and memory. What kind of emotions were these? The nature of
Americans emotional responses to 9/11 has become the subject of some
controversy in public discourse. Critics charged that the war in Afghanistan,
launched within just one month of the attacks, was a knee-jerk, impulsive
expression of revenge. But what does it mean to say that Americans
responded with vengeance? Surely few Americans accepted the identity
constructions of victim and perpetrator seemingly required for an overt
feeling of revenge. On the other side, conservatives contend that the
predominant response was not an ugly vengeance but a legitimate
expression of anger, and they lament the speed with which that feeling
subsided (Bennett, 2002; Elshtain, 2003: 7). But are these descriptions of
anger any more capable of capturing the diversity of affective response to
the attacks? Did many Americans actually feel something akin to anger, and
if so why did these feelings dissipate so rapidly?
One way of responding to these questions is to view these affective
responses not as coherent feelings, such as vengeance or anger, but as
affective energies whose precise form is subject to the vicissitudes of public
discourse. This view focuses on the exchanges and fugitive crossings that
make emotional responses so mutable and difcult to identify.
34
Rather than
cause a specic feeling, the events of 9/11 induced a general upheaval in
public moods. Among foreign policy hawks, the terrorist attacks sparked an
immediate desire to remove the Taliban and a revitalization of aspirations to
invade Iraq (Kessler, 2003). On a popular level, the attacks activated a
variety of historical memories and popular habits not cognitively related
to 9/11 as such. Popular imagination quickly forged analogies, for example,
to the attack on Pearl Harbor (Weber, 2003). Many Americans reverted to
wartime habits fear of further attacks; acceptance of heightened security
212
measures and McCarthyist intelligence practices; and a demonization of
opposition to war. The spectacle of the attacks, and their reproduction in
visual and televisual media,
35
activated the bodily habits and memories
identied by James, Damasio, and Deleuze. Many of these affects already
existed as virtual, embodied memories, and the events of 2001 folded them
into contemporary perceptions and judgements.
36
The response to 9/11
was not an automatic response of anger or revenge; it was a synthetic process
that crystallized a variety of memories and emotional states into a public
mood or moods conducive to militarist response.
As September 11 became more distant, as visual reminders of it became
fewer, and as the military activities in Afghanistan progressed, the intensity
of this micropolitical synthesis diminished. Critics outside the US became
uncomfortable with the idea that the war on terror might be expanded to a
series of interventions in the Middle East. But before many Americans could
develop too much scepticism of their own, the Bush Administration stepped
up its cultivation of affective support. Denouncing Saddam Hussein,
broadcasting homeland security warnings, and memorializing 9/11 all
made it possible to sustain public enthusiasm for continuing the military
response into Iraq. Catchy slogans, casual body language, and ambiguous
forms of religious discourse enabled the Bush Administration to capture
popular energies without directly appealing to peoples capacities for
political judgement (
O Tuathail, 2003: 863; Goodstein, 2003). By espous-

ing the essentially ambiguous principle of freedom, for example, Bush was
able to secure broad support for the idea that America needed to take action
to protect its signature values. This affective mobilization made it possible,
moreover, to enact foreign policies with what many observers considered
dubious justications especially the assertion that Saddam Hussein had
been partly responsible for the 9/11 attacks (
O Tuathail, 2003: 866) and the

slippage between claims that Iraq had weapons programmes and claims that it
had actual weapons of mass destruction. This is not to suggest that Bush
intervened in micropolitical processes with the degree of control supposed by
instrumentalists. He used modes of expression whose ambiguity and experi-
mentality facilitated mobilization, but it seems unlikely that he or his advisers
could have planned all the crossings and resonances they evoked.
This case offers two principal insights into the nature of affect and its
relationship to identity. First, it conrms that emotions are strictly neither
individual nor collective. The Deleuzian view suggests that affects are
nonsubjective they do not dene the self but exist as strata, alongside the
numerous other habits, memories, and beliefs that together comprise a
particular construction of the self (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 163). An
affect is not a property of an individual but a capacity of a body that brings
it into some specic social relation, such as a nation or political movement.
213
A collective identity is sustained by habits and memories shared by members
of a group, but for each member these affects coexist with other affective
circulations that connect her or him to additional constituencies. Under-
standing affect in this way thus helps explain the phenomenon of over-
lapping identities. Micropolitical connections overlap in contradictory ways
because they are forged in part before subjects consciously recognize the
identities toward which they pull. A collective identity thus expresses not an
aggregate of individuals but a block of affect cutting across multiply attached
and continually adapting agents. Only by streamlining these cross-cutting
connections do the events discussed above make it possible for the nation to
appear as a simple aggregate.
Second, the response to 9/11 points to the synthetic quality of affect
its capacity to combine already-existing affect with contemporary experi-
ence. Thus, long-term memories of historical events, such as the attack on
Pearl Harbor, become folded into responses to more recent events. As
Edkins demonstrates, memory has an iterative quality that ensures its
persistent return (2003: 41). Practices of memorialization ensure that these
memories are sustained among successive generations. These syntheses also
allow affective experiences from disparate social elds (e.g. religion or
workplace) to become assimilated into a temporary affective economy. So,
religious faith among American evangelicals could become appropriated by
the Republican Party to support post-9/11 foreign policy.
37
Affective
resonance bypasses standards of symbolic resemblance between sources of
frustration and their alleged remedies, and between sources of enthusiasm
and their purported objects.
38
Conclusion
Constructivists in IR have successfully installed the category of identity into
the lexicon of IR scholarship. Having done so, they are now in a promising
position to examine the manifold channels through which identities are
reproduced in global politics. This research might consider the complex and
volatile emotions that mediate political relations among nations, institutions,
networks, and other global bodies. But careful attention should be paid to
the range of emotional expression. While feelings can perhaps be assimilated
into intentionalist and dualist ontologies, nonconscious dimensions of
emotion present greater challenges. Affects infuse our beliefs and judge-
ments in ways that regularly escape our attention but nevertheless connect
us to collective agencies. Popular responses to a global event such as 9/11,
for example, do not exhibit the cognitive coherence of a role identity such as
Wendts enmity. Nor do these responses consist only of feelings like
revenge, which involve explicit construction of victims and perpetrators
214
identities. An event such as 9/11 involves a broader, more complex affective
economy whose synthetic capacity accounts for the vitality and dynamism of
global politics.
It is tempting to conclude from the case of 9/11 that affective
micropolitics has been more actively pursued by supporters of militarism and
other actors on the political right. While advocates of liberal democracy may
have thus far neglected the potential of affect (I believe they have), future IR
research within and beyond constructivism might look for evidence of
micropolitical practices amenable to critical engagement, democratic plural-
ism, and ethical generosity. The unstable or fugitive quality of affect does,
after all, suggest that micropolitics may be implicated in social practices that
are not strictly instrumental products of affective mobilization. There is
good reason, in other words, to look for critical micropolitics beyond the
ofcial interventions of political elites on the left.
39
As Edkins suggests, the
trauma of 9/11 might be used to expose the ambiguity and instability of
conventional identities and categories (2004: 255). The challenge for those
committed to global ethics is to develop modes of expression that
appropriate affective energies and apply them to projects and policies
conducive to ethical generosity.
40
Micropolitical activists might thereby
cultivate affective identities without chauvinism, patriotism, and other all-
too-familiar markers of exclusion.
Notes
1. This article would not have been possible without the generous contributions of
a variety of friends and colleagues. I would like to thank those who commented
on a very early version of the article at the Annual Conference of the Canadian
Political Science Association in 2003, and at a meeting of the graduate student
colloquium in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.
For their careful readings of various versions of the article, I am particularly
grateful to: Mark Blyth, Lars Toender, Erin Rowe, and the editors and
anonymous reviewers of the EJIR.
2. Quite rightly, Crawford argues that emotions are a part of IR theory, but an
implicit and undertheorized part (Crawford, 2000: 119).
3. See Massumi (2002: 121) and Latour (2003) for critiques of the aversion
within a variety of constructivist literatures to emotions and other biological
media.
4. Included here is the work cited above on trauma, humiliation, and aesthetic
imagery, which I consider complementary to my own. In the nal section of the
article, I discuss in particular recent work by Edkins (2003, 2004), as well
as Campbells deconstructionist treatment of national identity (1998), both
of which make important contributions to a non-intentionalist account of
identity.
215
5. Although I focus later on Wendt as the primary exponent of orthodox
constructivism, his work expresses assumptions in other constructivist scholar-
ship (e.g. Katzenstein, 1996). Finnemore and Sikkink offer provocative sugges-
tions on the role of emotions in international norm dynamics (1998: 916), but
scholars working in this area have nevertheless tended to regard norms as
ideational phenomena that only sometimes spread through affective channels.
6. Versions of this argument are offered by the realist literature cited earlier
(Druckman, 1994; Mercer, 1995). For an analysis of the relationship between
these perspectives and constructivist research, see Sterling-Folker (2002).
7. Drawing upon Damasios typology (2003: 436), I distinguish between
cognitive feelings and corporeally mediated emotions or affects. Only
feelings, in his account, are fully available to consciousness. My use of affect is
roughly equivalent to what James, closely engaged with 19th-century psycholo-
gies that used the German term affekt, calls emotion (Massumi, 2002: 278,
35; Connolly, 2002: 5178). In the IR literature, compare also Crawfords
denition of emotion, which is attentive to its multiple dimensions (2000:
125).
8. I resist a common assumption, shared by IR and neighbouring disciplines, that
emotions must be either individual or collective. This assumption is visible, for
example, in recent work by Pupavac, who regards emotions as too individualized
to play a role in post-conict recovery (2004: 163), and Fierke, who brackets off
psychological and physiological responses (understood to be individual) to focus
instead on the social context of emotion (2004: 475, 482). While I agree with
much in this work, I hesitate to accept the distinction both theorists appear to
make between social and individual dimensions of emotion; in my view, there is
nothing inherently individual about the body or its affects.
9. For a sympathetic discussion of Nussbaums view in IR, see Fierke (2004:
4734).
10. Oatley and Johnson-Laird argue that an emotion, in an attempt to coordinate to
conicting plans and goals sets the whole [cognitive] system into an
organized emotion mode without propositional data having to be evaluated by
a high-level conscious operating system (1987: 33).
11. On the presumed adequacy of self-reports, see LeDoux (1996: 523, 64).
12. Constructivists have asked how cognitive appraisals are shaped by prevailing
social norms (Schachter and Singer, 1962; Averill, 1980) and how social and
cultural discourses in turn represent emotions (Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990).
Many simply remain agnostic on the physiological status of emotions, focusing
only on discursive descriptions of emotion.
13. For an account of these debates, see Chapter 3 of LeDoux (1996).
14. Seeking to refute Jamess claim that, for each emotion, there is a distinct
physiological response, Cannon also cited experimental evidence suggesting that
different emotions appear in fact to involve the same physiological changes
(Cannon, 1984: 1467). See also note 16 which follows.
15. For a discussion of the Jamesian quality of recent research in neuroscience, see
Damasio (2004).
216
16. James argues that each emotion corresponds to a distinct set of bodily responses.
Cannon thinks, on the contrary, that all emotions triggered a singular nervous
response system and that individual differences may be ignored as minor
variations to the rule (1984: 146).
17. Damasio argues that even contemporary scientic methods are unable to capture
the diversity James had identied (2004: 10).
18. LeDoux focuses on the role of the amygdala, a small organ of the brain that
functions outside conscious awareness (LeDoux, 1996: 170).
19. A perception of an emotion-inducing object bypasses the body itself and is
shunted through an alternative neural process what Damasio calls the as if
body loop (1994: 156). This articial construct of the brain allows emotions to
be felt without visceral responses. Damasio thinks the majority of our emotional
responses operate in this manner.
20. LeDoux offers a comparable account of the brains ability to modify its responses
through learned associations (1996: 265, 303).
21. Damasio argues that, in historical circumstances such as Germany under
National Socialism or Cambodia under Pol Pot, members of a community may
develop an affective tolerance for witnessing or participating in violence (1994:
179). But for him these sick cultures are only pathological aberrations, and he
offers no account of how the events and memories of everyday life induce
specic affects.
22. Wendt uses desire interchangeably with interest and belief with ideas and
expectations (1999: 115).
23. For an interactionist discussion of the affective dimension of roles and
socialization, see Berger and Luckmann (1967: 77, 131, 138).
24. These are personal, type, role, and collective identities (Wendt, 1999:
22430). Critics have argued that Wendt treats personal identities (that which
constitutes a being as a distinct entity) as pre-social formations, constituted prior
to interaction (Zehfuss, 2002: 45).
25. In places, Meads interactionism seems to have a bias toward the cognitive
appraisal of social values and norms as roles (1934: 173).
26. For Wendt, a critique of Waltz on this point seems naturally to demand
consideration of cognitive beliefs. This connection is more clear in an earlier
article, where Wendt writes: Socialization is a cognitive process, not just a
behavioral one (1992: 399). Compare also Wendt (1999: 101, 224, 232, 327,
333).
27. He writes: What makes a theory materialist is that it accounts for the effects of
power, interests, or institutions by reference to brute material forces things
which exist and have certain causal powers independent of ideas (1999: 94).
28. Debates over Wendts soft constructivism have frequently gravitated toward this
image of materiality (Krasner, 2000). While many radical constructivists reject
the very terms of this debate (Campbell, 2001; Doty, 2000), few have explored
the ways in which material forces are involved in social life.
29. For example, Wilmer emphasizes the role of emotions but presumes that
emotional dimensions of identity possess a cognitive content (in this case,
217
consisting of basic selfother distinctions) available to elites (Wilmer, 2002:
2489, 187). In my view, the emotional processes involved in events such as
these are not exclusively those deliberately generated by elites and other
actors.
30. Connor assumes that specic types of cognitive content are likely to have a
disproportionately emotional effect (1994: 202) and does not ask how certain
kinds of expression and certain contexts of receptivity generate emotional
responses.
31. As Edkins scrupulously shows, trauma contributes to renegotiations of identity
only under specic circumstances. She argues that, while some memorials allow
for popular adaptation of ofcial sites (2003: 6772, 8491, 108), narrative
museums, such as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, impair the process of
memory by providing narratives that construct a stable identity for the sovereign
state (2003: 155).
32. In this view, it is possible in principle to specify what bodily practices induce and
sustain the experience of trauma. Edkins takes the absence of intentionality as
grounds for viewing trauma as beyond experience Trauma is not experienced
as such as an experience when it occurs (39). In my account, experience
is understood as multiply layered, some layers involving intentionality and some
not. This formulation avoids the in my view, awkward claim that trauma is
not experienced and accepts the task of investigating the micropolitical practices
that comprise that experience.
33. For a discussion of the tensions and inconsistencies in political appropriations of
identity following 9/11, see Zehfuss (2003: 51822).
34.
O Tuathail captures these exchanges in his account of revenge as part of an

affective economy that mobilized support for the war in Iraq (
O Tuathail,
2003: 868). My position differs from
O Tuathails in that he seems ultimately to

view affect as a kind of political pathology aficting the political right rather than
a normal dimension of political agency (8604).
35. On the role of aesthetic and other visual experience in stimulating responses to
9/11, see: Bleiker (2006),
O Tuathail (2003), and Weber (2003).

36. This affective climate presumably played a role in the relative absence of
opposition to war even among Democrats and intellectuals on the left (Balz,
2001).
37. For an account of these fugitive crossings, see Connolly (2005). He argues that
the Republican Party has attracted the support of evangelical Christians because
of afnities of sensibility that connect these groups even in the absence of a
shared ideology (2005: 871, 878).
38. My intention is not to suggest that affect should replace the analysis of discursive
symbols. Affectivity sheds light on how symbols come to be connected to their
objects. Retrospectively, we can say that a symbol resembles its object, but
tracing movements of affect allows us to track symbolic connections before they
are fully formed as resemblances. In the same vein, feminist theorists in IR have
suggested that gendered symbols often resonate with militarism and statecraft
(Cohn, 1987; Enloe, 1989).
218
39. To this end, poststructuralist scholarship in IR is increasingly turning to aesthetic
practices and their affective dimension (Bleiker, 2004; Campbell, 2003).
40. Pupavac has recently highlighted the risks of emotional or psychosocial
intervention in the eld of international conict (2002, 2004). She is rightly
critical of humanitarian practices that represent populations as traumatized
victims whose capacity for self-renewal and self-determination is compromised.
Pupavac seems to accept, however, the idea that emotional responses are
pathological and disruptive of the otherwise rational capacity of agents to
exercise self-determination (2002: 506). In my view, intervention in emotional
economies need not focus on the psychology of individuals nor mark those
individuals as lacking agency.
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