Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Feeling Liberal on Earth

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00295132-7086772

1945-8509

Kathleen Frederickson,

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

In Coming to Our Senses: Affect and an Order of Things for Global Culture, Deirdra Reber offers an astute and erudite analysis of how contemporary mass media texts from the United States and Latin America deploy figures of homeostatic collective well-being even as they simultaneously serve capital's imperative for growth. What Reber identifies in these contemporary materials stems from a theory that was already nascent in the eighteenth century. No longer, she suggests, is it adequate to adopt a Cartesian view that contends that the fractious passions of the body and the body politic are governed by a rational “head”: even in eighteenth-century political philosophy, this view finds a counterpoint in a governmentality that appears to be the “headless” result of a collective “feeling soma” that self-regulates in order to optimize its affective well-being. As Reber emphasizes in a series of compelling and informed readings, in the present moment this latter mode has come to predominate over the more rationalist Cartesian alternative.Coming to Our Senses understands the deployment of the homeostatic feeling soma to target a global imaginary. Rather, though, than handling a global archive of source materials, Reber charts how her objects of analysis lay claim to global significance. The book's transnational archive is predominantly “hemispheric,” focusing on US and Latin American films, texts, and advertising campaigns, mostly from the last twenty years. Planetary ecological discourse often designates the scene of the “global culture” in the title. Not only is sustainability discourse the topic of one of the book's chapters, but the image of a human collectivity happily in line with a healthy planet appears in many of the sources she cites. But these appeals to the global also reflect the enormous geopolitical power and reach of the objects in Reber's analysis. Though there are notable exceptions, in the main, the book examines mass-market, often large-budget productions. This preference is especially prevalent with respect to Reber's US sources, which include film and television productions such as WALL-E (dir. Andrew Stanton, 2008), Avatar (dir. James Cameron, 2008); Nike and Coca-Cola ad campaigns; and best-selling nonfiction by the likes of former FDA commissioner David Kessler. Even her Latin American archives consist primarily of materials that have also circulated widely in Europe and the United States: the book examines major, award-winning films such as Diarios di motocicleta (dir. Walter Salles, 2004) and Amores perros (dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2000) and the extensively screened Brazilian-Canadian collaborative film adaptation of Jose Saramago's novel Blindness (dir. Fernando Meirelles, 2008).As the reference to Michel Foucault's The Order of Things in the title suggests, the book's most incisive—and, arguably, most significant—intervention lies in its revision of Foucault. Reber notices a shared set of features between Foucault's early work and contemporary affect theory, even though, as she points out, “the organizing principles of [Foucault's] episteme are inherently bounded by reason” (21). Just as Foucault's power “decapitates” the power of the sovereign in favor of a biopower that is decentralized and immanent, so too does Reber privilege the dispersed, heterogeneous field of a “headless” capitalism (xiii). In spite of this revision, it is important to note that Reber's theorization of “affect-as-episteme” (46) remains deeply Foucauldian in many of its methodological commitments. The book offers a perceptive and careful discourse analysis that sees biopower at work in a decentralized network of aesthetic, social, and political objects.These objects are produced in a capitalism that Reber analyzes more in its justification of itself than, for instance, in its social relations of production. When Reber discusses the origins of this discourse of the immanent, homeostatic, and “horizontal,” she turns to Adam Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand, first in his Theory of Moral Sentiments and later in The Wealth of Nations. These are of course a pair of texts that demonstrate the connection between affect and capital that Reber deems so crucial to the contemporary moment: one book is about “sentiments,” the other is about “wealth.” Smith's invisible hand, Reber argues, “assumes the responsibilities of a higher transcendent power of organization, but puts an end to the discrete and external verticality of that power by internalizing it” (28). She is perfectly aware of the coercive effects of that power: the chapter on glial cells and crowdsourcing, for instance, emphasizes that crowdsourcing language deliberately obscures how profit concentrates into fewer and fewer hands. In this respect, and though it cites only a few of these, the book represents a response to several theorists of different versions of “flow.”Nevertheless—readings of Smith, Hume, and Bentham notwithstanding—because the bulk of the book focuses on fairly contemporary materials, Reber's genealogical argument is less well supported than some of her other claims. Citing Raymond Williams, Reber articulates a preference for using the imperfect tense over the preterit. Doing so allows her to understand the gradual “decapitation” of the rational (and especially colonial) head and the move toward affect-as-episteme as a large, open-ended shift spanning from the late eighteenth century to the present moment. Any claim on such a scale is likely to invite criticism for what it omits or leaves underexplained—indeed, Foucault was repeatedly faulted on this score. That said, the book's organization around mostly contemporary objects of analysis risks forgetting some of the major changes in modes of production since the eighteenth century, just as developing a sharp and perspicacious lens on historical continuities risks missing more subtle distinctions. Most crucially, perhaps, some greater account of the interrelationships between colonial reason and capitalist affect would round out the explanation of how the book connects these two “terminological constellations” (22). Reber describes herself as interested in “verticality, and transcendence, on the one hand, and affect, horizontality, and immanence, on the other—in conjunction with colonialism and free-market capitalism, respectively” (22–23). As Reber knows, it is not, after all, the case that capitalism and the “vertical” force of colonialism exist only as dialectical opposites. More attention to how the vertical force she associates with colonialism enables the rise of capitalism would allow Reber access to more causal language on the historical transformations that explain how transcendent, colonial reason acts as a precondition for the rise of affective “headless capitalism.”On some important level, to focus on such scruples is to read the book for something other than what it seeks to do. But these methodological queries also reveal consequential decisions about the stance Reber chooses in relation to theorists of capital. In an exegesis of Smith, for instance, Reber observes that when it comes to Smith's supposed “equivalency” of “morality and resources, both being guided by the invisible hand through the body politic in harmonious flow, we appreciate the notion that morality—as though an affective homologue of capital—is the blood of homeostatic capitalist dynamics” (85). Morality becomes both capital's affective homologue and its blood: the one invites investigation into analogy, the other into lineage. We can similarly observe this dual account—of two phenomena related by blood and as homology—at the end of the chapter on sustainability, in Reber's claim that “it is a logical aporia . . . that sustainability should ultimately unseat capitalism, because they are born of the same epistemic model—and that model posits as its life force the homeostatic flow of capital through its veins” (122). Here, capital flows through the veins of its own model, having supplanted Smith's morality as the blood of its episteme.This dual pattern, which Reber, crucially, draws from Smith, also invites us to ask about whether we should understand the “originary” capitalist texts as homologues for or the blood of the mode of affect-as-episteme that she deftly analyzes in her turn-of-the-twenty-first-century archive. It is telling that Smith's figure of the invisible hand occupies such pride of place in the book's understanding of the eighteenth century, while Smith's labor theory of value falls comparatively to the wayside. Similarly, the book's engagement with Marx privileges The German Ideology over what might seem to be an obvious go-to in the guise of Marx's famous argument, in the manuscripts of the year before, that capital, through the alienations of the wage relation, forces all of the “species being” into small ambit. In the book's conclusion, Reber claims her project as a humanist's version of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, using this analogy to proclaim “an apologetic return to Marx that has tacitly informed my thinking throughout” (245). But, just as Piketty (as he himself acknowledges) does not privilege an account of capital in the Marxist sense of that term—as a mode of production entailing free abstract labor and self-expanding value—so Reber mostly does not take on an analysis of the material and social relations of production.What the book offers instead is a rich elucidation of a set of wide-ranging discourses about capitalism, culture, and affect. Reber's examination of these discourses, moreover, allows her to identify what might seem to be improbably connected cultural objects in order to make laudably bold claims. The two chapters in the book's first section on “The Feeling Soma” offer cases in point. In order to make the case that human collectivity appears widely as an “organism regulated by homeostatic principle” (50), the first chapter in this section studies crowdsourcing, hybrid-car advertisements, dystopian film, and nonfiction writing about running. For Reber, all of these depict a human collectivity that both bests individual effort and, equally importantly, succeeds in feeling good. Sometimes, the chapter emphasizes, these depictions are expressly designed to mask efforts that are decidedly less interested in collective welfare than they might proclaim. Prius advertisements make money for shareholders, and “crowd sourcing only serves to generate an even greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands than ever before” (61). But as the second chapter—more pointedly focused on sustainability—observes, these conventions around collectivity nonetheless also appear in film and texts that criticize this concentration of wealth. The documentary film Crude (dir. Joe Berlinger, 2009), for instance, seeks to censure Chevron's contamination of Ecuadorian land, but the version of “people and planet” it puts forth to do so is so compatible with capitalism that Chevron/Texaco also make use of it in their own ad campaigns. This fact, Reber notes, is more than coincidental: even in its most radical “South-on-South” form, sustainability discourse “unwittingly assumes the discursive position of the true steward of originary free-market epistemology” (111).If this first section finds free-market epistemology even in “radical” models of sustainability and collectivity, the second section, on “Homeostatic Dynamics,” does so in health discourse. This section considers how the feeling soma diagnoses itself as healthy or not, in a mode that links physical, affective, and political registers. In the section's first chapter, on the concept of “well being,” many of the figures Reber studies are doctors whose medical training positions them—or ought to position them—as political as well as physical healers; for example: Che Guevara in Diarios de motocicleta and Che (Soderbergh, 2008) and the ophthalmologist in Blindness. Conversely, in film and television productions such as No Country for Old Men (dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007) and Mad Men (2007–15), Reber sees a diagnosis of how consumption breeds ill-being. When, Reber observes, Mad Men's protagonist Don Draper tosses out the Surgeon General's report on smoking, he does so on behalf of a consumer culture that seeks to mask a more fundamental ill-being. This interest in linking the discourse on well-being with capital recurs in the second chapter of the section, which examines how being able to walk merges with the conventions of the love story in ways that allow it to appear as a solution to capital's ills. A stronger pitch to disability studies scholarship would strengthen these claims; the book acknowledges arguments about “able-bodiedness” (172) but would surely find much to discuss with the sizable body of work about, for instance, the problems of disability-as-metaphor, a topic that is at the core of both chapters in this section. Unlike in the first chapter of the section, though, consumption is here as likely to be a remedy as an agent of disease. By Reber's account, films such as WALL-E, Avatar, and Ever Amado (dir. Victor Ruano 2007) all depict something she calls “rescue consumption” (199): the consumer here becomes the figure at “the basis of a democracy capable of healing the wounds inflicted by corporate capitalism” (200).Paradoxes such as this one exhibit the book's ability to offer shrewd commentary about how fictions of somatic self-regulation lie at the foundation of a nominally democratic capitalist imaginary. Reber develops sharp and engaging readings of, first, how capital advertises itself and, second, how even critiques of capital often hearken back to the Scottish Enlightenment texts that describe capital's virtues. The book may sometimes hesitate about what connects these “originary” texts to the present moment. But Reber's account of the aspirationally homeostatic feeling soma offers a useful interpretation of capital's history of itself and a thorough study of the circulation of ideas about collectivity, health, and sustainability. Coming to Our Senses is a worthy addition to the growing body of scholarship on governmentality and affect.