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Tag Archives: Ahmed

Ahmed, Will, and Cloud Atlas

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

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affect, Ahmed, film

“There is, by the way, an area in which a man’s feelings are more rational than his mind, and it is precisely in that area that his will is pulled in several directions at the same time.” –Ralph W. Ellison, Invisible Man, 573

“It is as if the very tendency to use the language of injustice is explained as a symptom of willfulness.” –Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 224

Cloud Atlas (Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, 2012) opens with images of a man on a beach, a forest, a business transaction between men, a signed paper thrown into a small chest and locked. But the story begins with a touch of eyes. This touch is slight and tenuous, a connection less like a plea or moral command than a slim needle sliding into thin cloth. In sewing, a hem is basted by hooking fabric with big loops of thread, loose and approximate, just to hold it in place. This look was like that. Atua (David Gyasi) is tied to a pole and being whipped. Adam Ewing (Jim Sturgess), lured by the noise, peers through the undergrowth to see its cause…and his body is the fabric hooked by Atua’s eyes.

11026146_1057108907635818_2998842459022812386_n [My thanks to Carson Webb for finding this image for me!]

The film’s premise is that action, will, or choice in this life impresses lives in other times and places. More specifically, the premise is that a willful action—what Sara Ahmed calls an action that refuses the social will, or that takes its own way, or that insists obstinately on self-will or perversion—such action is more the rudder of history and more the story of justice than social cooperation and quotidian projects of consent. “Willfulness,” Ahmed writes, “becomes a sweaty concept if we can reveal the labor of its creation” (Willful Subjects, 18). The paragraph continues with an aside: “To be called obstinate or perverse because you are not persuaded by the reasoning of others? Is this familiar to you? Have you heard this before?” Cloud Atlas flows lucidly through a temporal and affective cascade of just this echo, of just this chiding repetition, and the good and evil rendered to humanity by the insistence and limitation of refusing the rod of compliance (Willful Subjects, 18).

The film (and David Mitchell’s book on which it is based) is reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2002 novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, a sci-fi alternative history organized around a jadi (group) that sticks together through the bardo between death and life, and returns to live in loose association for ten different lifetimes, each in a different century and different country. Instead of a kind of Tibetan reincarnation organized around the staying power of personality traits (the fighters, the compassionate, the questioners), Cloud Atlas is organized around what Sara Ahmed discusses as the plasticity and “setting” of character through the molding of will (Willful Subjects, 70). Mitchell’s (and the directors’) regulative principle doesn’t lie on the axis of religion so much as justice, not the truth or speculative generativity of reincarnation so much as the truth of something like epigenetics (the sedimentation of stress and action into inheritable genetic dynamics ancillary to DNA/RNA replication and transcription) and the generative speculation of how a willful act—or, equally, a willful failure to act—can realign both the obvious orientation of one body’s life and the temporal waves and currents of history that are so diffuse and huge that maybe we should call them hypernatural (in materialist resistance to Morton’s hyperobjects because these hypernatural dynamics do not recede from us; quite the contrary). Maybe, indeed, this is something like the “transnatural” dynamic of love that Ètienne Souriau writes about in L’Ombre de Dieu. Adam, caught by Atua’s eyes, orients his life away from slavery and toward abolition. Other times and places ring the harmonics of his willfulness in actions against racial, gendered, sexual, and environmental injustices. [Class, as always, is invisible. Hardly any grist for that particular mill, especially in Hollywood.] Like Ahmed’s book, the film is a profound meditation on how individual choice is and is not real, on how individual lives both matter and don’t matter. Social or individual will, Ahmed notes, indicates a disjuncture or self-variance in that it registers a present command to bring about what is not yet accomplished (Willful Subjects, 29). We might say that Ahmed and Cloud Atlas, differently, show how that material-affective gap is more real and more influential than either pole of the self-society binary. And without mentioning love, both scholar and film make it clear (like Ellison) that the feelings of care, commitment, eros, and friendship are the rational powers that thread the willfulness of will.

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Disgust in God Loves Uganda

14 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by mghamner in Uncategorized

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Ahmed, disgust, God Loves Uganda, Kuntsman

In her Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond (Peter Lang: 2009, 50-52), Adi Kunstman draws tellingly on Sara Ahmed’s discussion of disgust in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: 2004) to note how textual forms of anti-homosexual hate speech both reify the object of disgust (gay, lesbian or queer bodies) and rebound back on the communities that speak and publish them, strengthening the borders of the assaulting communities and also materially calling them into sustained being. For Etienne Souriau (Les Différents modes d’existence, 1943; La Correspondance des arts, 1947) this double constitution is instauration—the simultaneous creation of an object and subject, in this case the disgusted object of the queer body and the pure community that bounds and protects itself through feeling disgust at it. Hate speech instaurates the hater and the hated, the disgusted and the disgusting.

Though Kunstman does not underscore the importance of screens in these particular paragraphs on disgust, her book does emphasize the importance of screen textuality in generating what she calls “homes.” Cyberspace, for Kuntsman, offers unique, non-fungible ways in which individuals can come to a sense of personal and collective belonging through screen presences and screen interactions. Recognizing this fact, she seems to be arguing, should attune scholars and activists to the ways in which online flaming isn’t just like a violation of personal bodily space, but really is an intimate assault.

The paragraphs in Kunstman brought to mind the recent documentary God Loves Uganda (Roger Ross Williams, 2013), a film that is a kind of PTSD experience for those of us who have seen Jesus Camp (Ewing and Grady, 2006), perhaps especially because of the role of Lou Engle (leader of the Evangelical Christian group The Call) in both films, though GLU focuses more on IHOP (International House of Prayer) than The Call.

The disgust circulating diegetically in the film is decidedly instaurative: IHOP forms as a viable community (congregating in the US, dispersing to Uganda, collecting money, spending money, praying together and training Ugandan missionaries) in and through its desire to completely eradicate homosexual activities in Uganda. Their disgust at homosexuality materially generates their mission and core identity and also funds and ideologically supports a parliamentary bill that will make homosexuality illegal and will enact the death penalty on repeat or serial offenders (extra-diegetically, the bill became law on 2/24/14). But the film also opens another loop of disgust, that between the white and African evangelical actants and non-evangelical viewers of the film. I am disgusted at their disgust, a fact that produces no small amount of irony. What am I protecting in my visceral separation from the ardent evangelical message? Whatever the answer—however smart and right the answer—the affective dynamics are still disturbing.

One scene in particular drove home this doubly doubled disgust and returns me to Kuntsman’s careful attention to screens: a Ugandan preacher anticipates a tolerant response to homosexuality by mockingly referring to sodomy as ‘what goes on in the privacy of the bedroom’ (I am paraphrasing from memory). “But what, he intones, does go on in those bedrooms???” It is a shocking and ugly turn, from a common liberal bourgeois gesture toward the quiet unaskingness that allows the civility of civil society (profoundly insufficient, but better than lynching) to a voyeuristic lure. The preacher makes good on the temptation embedded in the question. As I watch the screen, a screen behind the preacher displays unflattering pictures of two men engaging in sex acts. The preacher’s words scale down to simple, sheer assertions; argument is unnecessary, it seems, before this evident disgust.

And for me too: my cognitive reaction flattens into a sheer affective refusal, a disgust at the disgust he is embodying and proselytizing. A difference, perhaps, but it remains unseen: The preacher’s disgust trembles with an aura of excitement that his country might turn his disgust into legal hatred. My disgust trembles in fear at the same possibility.

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