Some of my readings have been primarily concerned with the production of inequality through interactions between bodies and the state, as explained through the Foucauldian paradigm of discourse and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Some of my other readings have pushed me to consider the exclusionary aspect of discourse and question why people behave and act the way they do. I’ve learned that in order to come to an understanding of embodiment, the concept of the body must first be understood as something “deeply historicized and socialized” (Nguyen and Peschard 2003). In viewing the body this way, our body then, becomes our primary vessel of navigation in the social world; how our bodies experience the social world and it’s inequalities is expressed through our emotions. What remains unexamined is what our bodies are experiencing from the social world and how do we embody the social world? How do the violences of everyday life interact with larger, overarching violences, like structural violence and social suffering? What are people doing to cope with said violences? How are these things affecting them? Moreso, what are they doing to eradicate them?
The concept of “affect” was introduced to me a competing paradigm to Foucauldian discourse, which seeks to explain why people do what they do – why they behave according to the habitus (which, is something Bourdieu never fully articulates) – what our bodies are experiencing during the constant interaction with the social world, how we come to embody the social world, how the various forms of violence interact with one another, how we cope with violence, how violence affects us, and what we are doing to get ahead of them. The theoretical paradigm of ‘affect’ comes to look at the pre-discursive forces that condition the body, consciousness and the senses and implies a way of apprehending social life that does not start with the bounded, intentional subject (Mazzarella 2009). This theoretical paradigm is very much influenced by the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and maintains that, “society is inscribed on our nervous system and in our flesh before it appears in our consciousness” (Mazzarella 2009:292). What this means is that our bodies – our affective bodies – preserve the memories of our social interactions and bring them into our present; thus, we have the potential to act upon these memories – that is, we have the agency to either repeat the occurrence or change it. What we do, however, is exactly what concerns the authors – Biehl and Locke, Lowe, and Allison.
João Biehl and Peter Locke (2010), both professors of Anthropology and Princeton University, apply Deleuze’s ideas of becoming and emergence to address “lives in contexts of clinical and political-economic crisis” (317). According to Biehl and Locke (2010), Deleuze’s ideas about becoming and emergence were concerned with “those individual and collective struggles to come to terms with events and intolerable conditions and to shake loose, to whatever degree possible, from determinants and definitions” (317). Essentially, Deleuze’s ideas of becoming and emergence are symbiotic in nature; “becoming” implies that at least two systems “come together” to form an “emergent assemblage” or system. The assemblages come together to form an emergent assemblage. Using these ideas, Biehl and Locke (2010) were primarily concerned with how people “become” or maneuver their ways through the “dynamism of everyday” (318) and paid close attention to how people “moved through” (Biehl and Locke 2010) the violences of everyday life by “complicating the a priori assumptions of universalizing theory” (Biehl and Locke 2010) by “breaking open” alternative pathways. For them, Deleuze’s ideas opened up an “anthropology of becoming”, which specifically looked at how things change in everyday life, how our bodies handle change, how our bodies get through change, and how our bodies either accept or reject change. Their work engaged with “the complexity of people’s lives and desires – their constraints, subjectivities, projects – in ever-changing social worlds” (Biehl and Locke 2010:320) and understood that “collective categories and alternative solidarities can come through only in the understanding of individual lives and stories” (Biehl and Locke 2010:320), with the hope to “convey the messiness of the social world and the real struggles in which [their] informants and their kin are involved” (Biehl and Locke 2010:321). In searching for how people navigate through the “messiness of the social world” and create meaning from the flux of the social world, Biehl and Locke endeavor to examine the precarity of our bodies’ emotive interactions with the social world.
The concept of precarity plays a significant role in the theoretical paradigm of affect. Moments of precarity are underscored during times where affective bodies’ are met with the decision to either “re-live” the memories of the past or change it. For example, the interaction of two systems or two entities or even two bodies or two of any of the aforementioned, “become” and “emerge” as a singular assemblage. The uncertainty, or the precarity of the becoming and the emergence of the assemblage can be argued to be what may hinder bodies from change and to be what may cause bodies to “re-live” memories. As Anne Allison (2012) from Duke University maintains, “precarity can also be the conditions for social change, new forms of collective coming-together, even political revolution” (349). Precarity, then, can be a beneficial state for societies recovering from economic and social hardships like Japan, as it offers the younger generations of 21st century Japan the opportunity to “break open an alternative pathway” (Biehl and Locke 2010) from “ordinary refugeeism” (Allison 2012:351) that can overcome their violences of everyday life and ultimately, defeat social suffering. However, Allison’s informants were rather nihilistic – they embodied a “social precarity”, which Allison (2012) defines as “a condition of being and feeling insecure in life that extends to one’s (dis-)connectedness from a sense of social community (349). The embodiment of social precarity amongst Japanese youth caused them to feel “devoid of the tokens of social status and connectedness” (Allison 2012:357) and to be rendered “socially dead” (Allison 2012:356). The social uncertainty of the collective youths interviewed by Allison is argued to be spreading globally and people are losing clarity and confidence over who they are and where they fit in (Allison 2012:357). The beneficial aspect of precarity is lost among Japanese youth and is instead, replaced by a “cloud of insecurities implicated [in] specific social and biological forms in speculation about future possibilities” (Lowe 2011:626).
Celia Lowe (2011) of the University of Washington would comment on Allison’s young informants’ embodiment of social precarity and nihilistic attitudes, saying that they are completely caught up in a “cloud of uncertainty” and a “cloud of speculative possibility that has made specific demands on them as a national population” (629), much like the H5N1 influenza. Her metaphor of “cloudy reassortments” is to highlight the processes of global exchange/global assemblages, underscoring the fleeting and constantly changing nature of said processes, which are arguably akin to cloud formations/assortments. The multifaceted nature of clouds “queries the boundaries of species” (Lowe 2012:644), in the same way the multifaceted nature of the social world questions the limits of bodies. In a cloud of uncertainty and in a social world of constant flux, how are people handling, getting through, succumbing, overcoming, and experiencing the violences of everyday life and the pressures of structural violence? These readings not only attempt to answer these questions through the theoretical paradigm of affect, but also attempt to explain how our bodies respond to precarity in it’s various forms and how “becoming” and “emerging” are ongoing processes, frequently met with precarity.