Feeling Accountable: Affect and Embodied Ethics in Times of Crisis

Abstract

Calls for strengthening the U.S.’s federal ethics systems have proliferated in the popular media, among good governance watchdog groups, and beyond. Framed as an ongoing crisis, the situation has prompted democracy reformers to advocate for more stringent accountability mechanisms, oversight, regulations, and laws. Drawing from new directions in scholarship, this article uses approaches from affect theory to reconsider assumptions about reason, language, and the rule of law within government ethics reform. In so doing, I suggest that perspectives from affect theory expose overlooked areas within current accountability mechanisms and subsequent failures of enforcement, arguing that recent theoretical interventions help us rethink good governance practices by calling into question the ratio-centric, agential framing of government accountability. By mobilizing new theories of crisis and emotion, this article considers how administrative bodies—made up of corporeal bodies—might feel accountable. Building on the work of scholars who link the roles of habits and environments to embodied actions, this article proposes that examining the affective composition of an ethics crisis has wider implications for theorizing moments of institutional reckoning.

I. Introduction

In her popular book, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United, legal scholar Zephyr Teachout opens with a historical anecdote from the Revolutionary Period. She describes an incident during which Benjamin Franklin received a jeweled snuff box from France’s King Louis XVI. ¹ Although gift-giving was a customary gesture within the diplomatic conventions of the time, the snuff box immediately took on a host of negative associations for the contemporary American public and political elites because it “suggested inappropriate attachments and dependencies.” ² The Founders worried, not that the gift would serve directly as a bribe, but rather that it would create positive associations with its giver and thereby motivate preferential treatment in the future.

As Teachout’s example suggests, from as early as the Revolutionary days, American attempts at self-governance have conceived of ethics relationally. Corruption, as a result, was never merely as simple as a potential quid pro quo. Rather, “the belief that temptation and influence work in indirect ways, and that corruption is not merely transactional” featured prominently in the minds of the Founders. ³ Rules and laws, in response, came into being to discern and root out possible sources of influence, which might sway government officials’ decision-making. Despite the focus on the regulatory aspects of anti-corruption policy, there was also an early intuition about the influential role of feelings, passions, associations, atmospheres, and attachments—in other words, the body-environment interactions involved in forming and informing behaviors.

Often, we think of bribery or corruption as the use of money or material goods in exchange for services or favors. Admittedly, public corruption in many instances plays out in exactly this way and certain government officials will invariably misuse their positions of power to self-deal, take kickbacks, and abuse the public trust. ⁴ However, what if we widen our analytic gaze to factor in feelings, attachments, and atmospheres into our corruption calculus? This question occupies the following analysis, focusing specifically on which factors contribute to cultures of corruption, or alternatively, to cultures of compliance.

Recent years have renewed an increasingly energetic and urgent debate surrounding federal ethics rules in Washington. In light of egregious and well-publicized examples from the executive branch of government, calls for strengthening the U.S.’s federal ethics systems have proliferated in the popular media, among good governance watchdog groups, and beyond. Framed as a crisis, the situation has prompted democracy reformers to advocate for more stringent deterrence mechanisms, oversight, and government ethics regulations. ⁵ Frequently, this takes the form of calling for stronger laws, along with more targeted rules and regulations. For example, recent recommendations to “prioritize ethics as a rule-of-law issue,” by emphasizing “the investigation and prosecution of ethics laws” have emerged as possible safeguards. ⁶ In particular, much of the emergent discussion centers on bolstering existing ethics laws and rules by empowering the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), “expanding the scope of financial disclosures” among federal officials, strengthening protections for agency Inspectors General (IGs), and calling for increased tax transparency for sitting presidents and vice-presidents. ⁷ Aimed at identifying conflicts of interest—primarily, but not exclusively, understood in financial terms—and rooting out public corruption, these proposals have set their sights on closing existing loopholes, promoting ethical leadership, and codifying norms into laws. Such discourses and recommendations—with emphases on the rule of law, rationality, and transparency—elevate the role of language and public reason in calls for structural reforms to the current government ethics regime.

In the face of these rules, regulations, and laws, however, public corruption persists. Despite their continued efforts, reformers—both within and outside the government—have confronted ongoing frustration surrounding calls for public servants to behave ethically and honorably. In response, rather than focusing on the often-asked questions of why public officials knowingly violate the rules, whether power itself corrupts, or which rules or laws are best for disincentivizing misconduct, this article engages with an altogether different set of questions. Instead, it examines what U.S. government ethics accountability might look like outside of the framework of language and the law.

Using the recent ethics crisis in government as a site from which to examine discourses around reason and language in decision-making, this article analyzes the situation through the prism of affect theory to show how current policy efforts have encountered stumbling blocks that continue to stymy the efforts of reformers and regulators alike. Suggesting that approaches from affect theory expose often-overlooked areas within current accountability mechanisms and subsequent failures of enforcement, I argue that new theoretical interventions help us rethink good governance practices by calling into question the ratio-centric, agential framing of government accountability. In attending to ethics reform efforts’ alignment with central concepts of modernity such as rationality, interiority, and autonomy, the following analysis aims to reveal how the current reform discourse sidelines the bodily dimensions, attachments, and environments involved in ethical conduct. ⁸ By examining the role of human bodies in relation to institutional bodies, this article considers what “embodied ethics” might look like as a supplemental tool for conceptualizing, and thereby potentially combating, corruption today.

1. Ethics and Anti-Corruption

Ethical considerations, far from the realm of abstractions, play out on a practical level. From government responsiveness to the distribution of services, ethics issues have implications for wide-ranging concerns. Corruption itself—public servants placing self-interest above the public interest—constitutes a worldwide, and well-documented challenge, perpetuating “the inequalities and discontent that lead to fragility, violent extremism, and conflict.” ⁹ Given some of the more egregious examples within the global context, the United States may present an unlikely candidate for the present discussion, especially considering its comparative stability. The rationale behind using this example to illustrate a wider set of issues is its timeliness and the perceived urgency of the conversation around government ethics within the U.S. context.

From as far back as the Watergate scandal, public corruption cases have captured the public imagination and prompted democracy reformers to call for more stringent ethics rules within the federal government. The United States has a well-developed ethics regime and calls for reform often include bolstering existing enforcement mechanisms and infrastructures. The Office of Government Ethics (OGE), specifically, which functions as the supervising ethics office for U.S. government agencies by setting “policy for the entire executive branch,” has emerged as one possible counterweight to misconduct. ¹⁰ In addition to housing legal opinions, and disseminating rules and regulations, OGE also has a force of Designated Agency Ethics Officials, who work within government agencies to promote compliance. OGE’s programs of “written, enforceable rules that set the standard for ethical conduct,” providing help with complying with those rules, “a personal financial disclosure system to help detect and resolve potential conflicts of interest,” and promoting “an ethical culture through ethical leadership,” ¹¹ all center the concepts of laws, regulations, and compliance.

Even trainings and educational programs, which speak to creating agency-wide ethical cultures, often place a high premium on the impartiality of government officials in decision-making by emphasizing that government officials must comply with financial disclosure requirements. Financial disclosures, among other tools, aim to show how government officials can “hold each other, federal employees, and themselves accountable, knowing that transparency and honesty are the surest ways to avoid conflicts and promote public confidence in government.” ¹² Procedural, rules-based ethics trainings and guidance such as this highlight the role of compliance in government accountability. Making officials are aware of the rules and laws, and modeling ethical conduct on the part of high-ranking agency officials, in this line of thinking, should help disincentivize misconduct.

Such emphases, however, on the intentional, volitional subject—the person who, once aware of the rules, will comply with them—may obscure from view additional factors contributing to conduct. Existing infrastructures, relationships, and power dynamics, and environmental factors may all contribute in ways that challenge the supremacy of reason, language, and law alone in ethical decision-making. To this we now turn.

2. Affect Theory

When thinking about the connections between feelings and politics, topics of political mobilization, impassioned and polarized disagreements, and charismatic leadership all spring immediately to mind. Discussions of political rage, sadness, despondency, enthusiasm, hope, and fear often characterize these conversations. ¹³ These topics have emerged as areas of scholarly exploration on the intersection of passions and politics. However, the following discussion brings theories of affect and habit into conversation with a seemingly less likely candidate for discussions of political emotions and feelings: the realm of government regulations. I want to suggest that, despite the apparently bloodlessness of a subject such as government ethics regimes, affects, nonetheless, point to surprising, and underexplored, avenues for rethinking governance technologies and environments from the perspective of embodied actions.

An illustrative path into these issues, I argue, is through the theoretical vantage point of affect theory. Affect theory, or better yet, affect theories, which focus on bodies and emotions, suggest that decision-making results from dynamics beyond language and reason alone. Such interventions indicate that our actions, attitudes, and attachments take shape at not only the cognitive, but also the visceral, level. The two registers are intimately intertwined. At its most fundamental level, affect theory “asks what bodies do—what they want, where they go, what they think, how they decide—and especially how bodies are impelled by forces other than language and reason.” ¹⁴ Taking inspiration from postmodern critical theory, feminist studies, rhetorical and communication studies, postcolonial theory, and most recently, religious studies, among others, affect theories touch on a range of concepts and extend into far-reaching scholarly conversations. As such, these theories encompass many interrelated concepts, definitional concerns, and multiple trajectories. ¹⁵ For the purposes of the present discussion, I use affect theory to focus on the non-cognitive, non-linguistic, and bodily factors that inform our interactions, and by extension, institutions.

Approaches from affect theory, in particular, give us a new means to evaluate the extent to which ethical and political considerations play out across bodies. Specifically, this emerging area of scholarship calls on us to think relationally and holistically, decentering the autonomous subject from our analytic focus and conceiving of the self as “constituted not by a sovereign, top-down, reasoning I, but by a tangle of forces.” ¹⁶ Rather than thinking of ourselves as self-contained, exclusively rational actors, what if we instead link to one another relationally in registers beyond our cognitive awareness and reasoning abilities? Teresa Brennan, for example, posits a “transmission of affect” model that seeks to explain how emotions move from one person to the next. ¹⁷ This movement of affect is not purely cognitive and self-contained as previously thought. Rather, there is a physiological, biological dimension involved in transmitting feelings from one person to another. As Brennan asserts, “[t]he origin of transmitted affects is social in that these affects do not only arise within a particular person but also come from without.” ¹⁸ In this view, there is no discrete boundary between the “individual and the environment,” which suggests that other, non-cognitive factors play determinative roles in shaping our embodied actions. ¹⁹ Emotions, feelings, and other non-cognitive and relational forces, as theorists such as Sara Ahmed have argued, “are not only about the ‘impressions’ left by others,” but also “involve investment in social norms.” ²⁰ These structures of feelings, it seems, have the capacity to guide comportment and establish behavioral expectations, often in ways of which we are unaware. Building on such perspectives, Donovan Schaefer’s key understanding of the inseparability of affect from power—namely, his reformulation of Foucault’s “power-knowledge” as “power-knowledge-affect” ²¹ —calls for increased attention to the role of affects in structuring power and in disciplining bodies. ²²

Taken together, such insights point to the inseparability of bodies from each other, from environments, and from structures of power. Specifically, these perspectives enable a more expansive understanding of agency, taking into account a wider array of bodily, environmental, and structural influences potentially informing action. ²³ Bringing such approaches into conversation with discourses around the current government ethics regime, I consider what government accountability might look like outside of language, law, and public reason—and, by implication, whether there are ways of reconceiving disciplinary apparatuses for ethics enforcement in light of new theories. The remainder of this article, then, examines the concept of embodied ethics through the themes of crisis, shame, and habit, in order to expose some of the underlying assumptions about agency, rationality, and bodies within current reform and accountability efforts.

II. Crisis

Calls to reform the U.S. federal ethics regime—both old and new—have framed the situation in terms of a crisis, one requiring an immediate and structural remedy. Back in 2017, a proliferation of popular media headlines such as “U.S. Facing Historic Ethics Crisis, Outgoing Official Says” told the story of the U.S.’s government ethics as a state of ongoing crisis. ²⁴ More recent reports, such as guidance for the year 2021 from a coalition of good governance organizations, continue to paint a similar picture: “When political agendas dictate whether or what type of information is made public, when Congress’ ability to conduct meaningful oversight is thwarted, and when there are no reliable records of what has been said or promised behind closed doors, we face a crisis in our democracy.” ²⁵ These depictions paint a clear picture of emergency, and, correspondingly, of urgency.

What are the rhetorical stakes and implications of interpreting a situation as an ethics crisis? There exists an expansive scholarly literature on crisis and political crisis management. Often understood as a threat to the established order, a moment of reckoning, or a time of uncertainty, the notion of crisis conjures up ruptures within the status quo, trauma, danger, and even physical violence. Moreover, much of the scholarly literature on political crisis and crisis management has focused on rationality, especially within conversations surrounding crisis leadership. Specifically, the discussion often centers on how leaders should cultivate reasoned responses to threats—human-made or natural—and how they might prevent a crisis from turning into a full-fledged disaster by preparing a rational course of action before emotions take over. ²⁶ Strategies of “strategic crisis management,” which focuses on preparing in advance of a potential occurrence, and “operational crisis management,” which refers to the implementation of a plan in response to an event, tend, understandably, to focus on fostering reasoned decision-making in disaster preparedness and response. ²⁷

In recent years, however, the concept of crisis has undergone theoretical reconsiderations. These new theorizations point to different valences of a crisis situation—specifically, its rhetorical, temporal, and ultimately, embodied functions. ²⁸ Janet Roitman’s work, in particular, proposes a new framing for the concept. Designating an event or situation as a crisis, in Roitman’s view, constitutes a form of knowledge production, an “observation that produces meaning.” ²⁹ In her understanding, although we tend to see crises as ruptures with the status quo, there is an oxymoronic quality about conceiving of a crisis as an enduring state of affairs. A crisis constitutes a critique of the present, which points out the “is” of how things are, versus the prophetic “ought” of how they should be. ³⁰

Looking at it from the perspective of threat, Brian Massumi highlights the roles of affect in our response to perceived crises. It is not just our minds that participate in designating a situation as a crisis; our bodies also participate in telling ways. Referring to the Bush administration’s rhetoric surrounding the Iraq War, Massumi writes, “in the past there was a future threat,” in other words, “[t]he threat will have been real for all eternity. It will have been real because it was felt to be real.” ³¹ Crisis, in this understanding, “legitimates preemptive action” by positioning a possible event as a looming threat that has yet to materialize. ³² Crisis, thus, presents a rhetorical call to action, framed in affective terms. We do not just speak about crises; we feel and inhabit them. The rhetorical framing of crisis, coupled with its association with a future time, mobilized preemptive action in the present. In Massumi’s example, fear, anxiety, and terror, all came together pedagogically, teaching members of the American public to anticipate a yet unrealized act.

What if we think of crisis as an analytic tool and temporal marker, part of a wider—and often unremarked—landscape of “ordinary affects” pulsing through material environments? ³³ Bringing Roitman into conversation with Massumi, here, points to the conjunction of the rhetorical and temporal functions encompassed by the concept of crisis. Put differently, these theorizations suggest that crises, plural, play out in embodied and affective ways. As Chris Schilling frames it, “crises and creative actions emerge as pre-reflectively intentional subjects engage with the complexities and contingencies of the world around them, and discover the possibilities of action made available to them by their bodily potentialities and situated lives.” ³⁴ A crisis, in other words, brings people into different states of contact and connection with their material environments. As affect theories suggest, fear, stress, and anxiety, rather than remaining contained within individual subjects, pulse relationally through people and their surroundings. When seen from the vantage point of ordinary affects—the often unremarked, non-cognitive aspects of interaction—a crisis, as a sustained, rather than immediate, state of affairs, may function like trauma, lingering, resurfacing, and suffusing environments in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Our engagements with time and threat have bodily dimensions and latent consequences.

This recognition may point us towards new possibilities for confronting the challenges of perceived and experienced crises as well as our attunement to forces beyond reason and rhetoric at play in our conceptual schemas. An ethics crisis—rather than a violent rupture such as a natural disaster, military coup, or war—has a sustained, corrosive quality to it. In this way, it links to trauma in its capacity for doing long-term damage and prompting moments of reckoning.

III. Institutional Bodies

Connecting theories of crisis to institutions shines a light on the question of whether administrative bodies—made up of corporeal bodies—might feel accountable. From Hobbes’ De Corpore Politico to a more recent focus on neoliberal efforts to reclaim the corporate body as deserving of rights and responsibilities, the concept of the body politic has a long history in political thought. ³⁵ Even as far back as Plato, considerations surrounding the intersection of a “corporeal body politic” with a “civic body politic” helped frame understandings of civil society as an assembly governed by mutual agreement. ³⁶ Thinking about the body—individual, relational, administrative, public, and corporate—with respect to illustrative examples from the recent crisis within the U.S.’s federal ethics system calls attention to the undertheorized concept of affects within anti-corruption contexts.

From the early twentieth century onwards, theorists have often conceived of bureaucracies as having a routinized, “rational character,” and thereby as potentially less susceptible to the vicissitudes of individual action, feelings, and, possibly, caprice. ³⁷ Whereas scholarship, frequently, has cast politics and political movements as inspiring passions and deeply emotive environments, bureaucracies are associated with the opposite: rational and somehow depersonalized places characterized by “competence, efficiency, security, regularity, certainty, fairness, and even the cultivation of universal reasoning.” ³⁸ Recently, however, theorists have begun putting affect theory into conversation with government mechanisms, calling for increased attention to the role of bodies and emotions in seemingly depersonalized spaces.

To what extent, if any, do public, administrative bodies have the capacity to shape feelings in the human bodies within them? More specifically, do organizations have embodied norms? Considering the intersection of administrative, institutional, and physical bodies points to new understandings of the roles of non-cognitive, sub-rational forces potentially at play in bureaucratic environments. In particular, looking at administrative bodies through the lens of assemblages—“ad hoc groupings of diverse elements”—helps focus our discussion. ³⁹ Scholars, for example, from a wide range of disciplines “and others have explored the contributions made by affect to public culture, whereby affect refers to how moods and aesthetic sensibilities influence ethics and politics as much as do words, arguments, and reasons.” ⁴⁰ Such conversations take into consideration the roles of environments, factoring in forces permeating the “human-nonhuman assemblages they form.” ⁴¹ These interconnections suggest that viewing bureaucracies as sites devoid of feelings potentially overlooks other dynamics pulsing through material environments and bodies within those spaces.

Relatedly, and equally of note, it is possible that certain bodies do not have the capacity to feel, or at the very least may negate feelings as a deliberate strategy. Emerging conversations within affect theory around the idea of unfeeling bodies as places of dissonance, dissent, and critique have come increasingly to the fore. These “structures of unfeeling” suggest that, even if we are unable to code an action or individual as a site of feeling, emotions may still be present. ⁴² The notion of “unfeeling,” rather than causing emotions and feelings to recede from view, instead suggests “other ways of organizing life that might be suppressed, overlooked, adjacent, incipient, insurgent, resurgent, or still to be imagined.” ⁴³ Put differently, sometimes a seeming rejection of feeling itself constitutes its own affective configuration, one which might easily go unnoticed. ⁴⁴ Simply because feelings go undetected does not necessarily mean that they are not present.

New scholarship on this topic suggests that attending to the affects pulsing through bureaucratic settings allows “for the affect-dependency of even apparently passionless institutions.” ⁴⁵ These often-overlooked affective possibilities, in this assessment, “complicate common mischaracterizations of government regulations by inviting us to see bureaucracy’s full palette of passions.” ⁴⁶ In this view, despite their common depiction as devoid of feelings or as stultifying in effect, bureaucracies encompass a full range of passional dimensions and actions that play out across bodies. Rather than stifling feelings, bureaucracies simply house and contain them. This suggests a relational approach to understanding public bodies, considering the bodily, social, material, and environmental factors at play within institutional contexts.

Bureaucracies, simply put, function as sites of “situated affectivity.” ⁴⁷ This “situated-ness” means that we interact relationally with our environments in formative ways. As Jan Slaby puts it in his discussion of workplaces environments, “socially distributed affectivity—such as emotional style and modes of affective engagement,” rather than originating within self-contained, purely autonomous individuals, is “prior to and formative of individual emotional repertoires and affective-bodily styles.” ⁴⁸ In this way, the “attachments, affective ties, and relational constellations that make us who we are” all come into play within our places of work. ⁴⁹

This has implications for ethical reasoning and decision-making, common areas of focus for procedural, rules-based ethics trainings and conversations. When thinking about compliance with rules within institutional structures, the concept of risk illustrates some of the forces at play in the arena of decision-making. In particular, one of OGE’s functions is to help each governmental agency “manage risk.” ⁵⁰ Legal risk management, which refers specifically to assessing regulatory and deregulatory measures’ responses to legal risks, also plays out at the personal level. For example, recent scholarship has suggested that “[t]he concept of risk and emotion express moral judgements.” ⁵¹ Embodied and ethical decision-making factor into any risk-assessment calculus. Rather than understanding emotions associated with risk-taking as “involuntary responses to stimuli such as threats and danger,” we should see them as “social constructions, produced through shared understandings.” ⁵² Physical, environmental, and social factors thus inform seemingly individual calculations of risk and assessment of danger, even within white-collar settings. According to Deborah Lupton, people assess risks by “deciding how these phenomena cohere with their values about what is acceptable and harmless against what is dangerous or threatening.” ⁵³ In so doing, “[t]hey are making judgments based on affective and aesthetic sensibilities.” ⁵⁴ Rather than simply assessing situations in purely detached, rational, and autonomous ways, often, “fear and anxiety” or even “excitement and pleasure” within “the body as it moves through space and interacts with other bodies and with objects” factor into our risk assessments. ⁵⁵

When facing closer scrutiny, the concept of risk assessment itself may hide from view the underlying mechanisms. Risk assessment, at first glance, suggests a detached calculus involving weighting the odds in purely autonomous, cognitive, and legal ways. However, this may not present the full picture. The notion that decision-making does not result exclusively from a language-driven model helps reframe our understanding of accountability mechanisms and their obstacles for enforcement. The idea that “forces run through us, we are made by them, and our decisions reflect the priorities of those forces rather than an abstract assessment of the world around us according to a standard of detached calculation” complicates the current framing of ethics standards. ⁵⁶ Although calls to action and ethics guidance rely on prescriptive statements and appeals to reason, what if “rhetoric works on listeners through a range of devices that are not necessarily thoughtful—nor even necessarily discursive”? ⁵⁷ Instead, according to Monique Scheer, “[u]nderstanding emotions as actions of mind and body means that they are not epiphenomena of people’s activities but linked with other doings and sayings involving certain spaces, objects, sounds, and other people.” ⁵⁸ These theoretical interventions suggest that appeals to public reason fail to account fully for the non-cognitive, sub-rational, and relational dimensions at play. Such scholarship develops a promising direction for examining the questions of government ethics and accountability. Applying affect theory to the current crisis highlights the ongoing discourse’s rationalistic understandings of judgement, autonomy, and attachment, in ways that have implications for ethics enforcement.

IV. Cultures of Compliance

1. Shame

“Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares.” ⁵⁹ This, according to Mark Meadows, then-Chief of Staff to President Trump, summed up attitudes towards numerous alleged violations by U.S. government employees of prohibitions on using resources and properties to endorse partisan political activities. Uttered during a televised interview, Meadows’ comment points to a wider issue. Instead of denying or decrying any of the allegations, Meadows, strikingly, appealed to a lack of interest in enforcement. Rather than focusing on potential Hatch Act violations, the limit placed on “partisan political activity of federal employees,” ⁶⁰ the discussion of this section centers on the following question instead: What happens when alleged rulebreakers and/or lawbreakers refuse to be shamed? Recalling previous references to the concept of unfeeling, does shamelessness undermine the power of ethics when potential violations are met with seeming indifference?

These related questions are especially relevant because calling “bad actors,” that is, violators of ethics rules, to account represents a popular tactic for keeping public officials accountable. That, by definition, constitutes a core function of watchdog groups and the free press: discovering issues and bringing about public reckonings in response to detected misconduct. Public scrutiny and corresponding public pressure, among other strategies, have thus become favored routes for rooting out misconduct. Similarly, within government, agency ethics officials may impose sanctions for violating standards of conduct and take disciplinary action against officials who violate rules and regulations. ⁶¹

In questioning current ethics enforcement mechanisms, however, it appears that we must consider alternatives that account for felt, relational, and embodied possibilities. When considering effective and proportional disciplinary measures and accountability, shame presents a pathway into these issues. Scholars such as Silvan Tomkins, ⁶² Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ⁶³ Sara Ahmed, ⁶⁴ and most recently, Donovan Schaefer ⁶⁵ have spotlighted the concept of shame in configuring both bodily and cognitive responses. These theorizations point to the ways in which shame functions in structuring “different kinds of orientations towards objects and others, which shape individual as well as collective bodies.” ⁶⁶ Shame, in this view, may serve as a motivator, or alternatively as a demotivator, for embodied actions.

In the first place, shame is painful, extending into our physical beings, often in intensely uncomfortable ways. As Ahmed phrases it, “[t]he very physicality of shame—how it works on bodies—means that shame is also involved in the de-forming and re-forming of bodily and social spaces, as bodies ‘turn away’ from the others who witness the shame.” ⁶⁷ Eyes downcast and bodies pivoting, we, quite literally, cannot face the source of our shame. Significantly, this physical response, in its intensity, carries with it educative possibilities. For Ahmed, the concept of shame connects intimately the idea of reconciliation—both personal and collective. ⁶⁸ Put differently, shame can serve an educational function, calling attention to historic injustices and failures to live up to an ideal. ⁶⁹

The question remains: Is it possible to teach public officials to conduct themselves in ways that would deter future misconduct? Recently, Michalinos Zembylas has taken up this work on the intersection of shame and reconciliation to consider the role of “pedagogies of shame” aimed at “rehabilitating the political and ethical value of shame.” ⁷⁰ Arguing that “shame can function in pedagogically productive ways,” provided that we “manage to engage in critical conversations that expose the complexities of shame and its transformative possibilities,” Zembylas, calls attention to the instructive capacity of shame. ⁷¹ In his view, under ideal circumstances, “pedagogies of shame can be productive when they identify different manifestations of shame experienced by individuals or groups without telling moralizing tales or claiming that there is (or should be) teleological transcendence of shame.” ⁷² Shame, then, in this assessment, functions best when applied contextually and without reference to generalities or ethical platitudes.

Despite shame’s instructive possibilities, challenges also abound. Using shame to educate, and possibly to modify future behaviors encounters its own set of issues. In New York Times coverage assessing the implications of President Trump’s second impeachment, the headline tellingly reads, “Beyond Impeachment, A Push for Ethics Laws that Do Not Depend on Shame.” ⁷³ Shame, here, proves insufficient and highlights the lack of effective laws and rules at the executive branch level. According to the author, President “Trump’s conduct proved that many of those changes—and longstanding checks and balances dating to the constitutional convention—relied more on tradition and shame than on enforceable law.” ⁷⁴ Similarly, a New Yorker article from 2017, describes the failure of enforcement of ethical standards as a failure of shame’s capacity to mobilize action: “the shaming effect of the government’s top ethics watchdog going public no longer had the same impact.” ⁷⁵ In the words of Walter Shaub, the then-Director of OGE, historically “to have OGE criticize you would have been a career-ender in the olden days—now it’s just lost in the noise.” ⁷⁶ These assessments, whether correct or incorrect, point to the perceived challenges associated with an overreliance on shame’s educative function in governance contexts. The “shaming effect,” in this way, encounters impasses when those called to account refuse to be shamed.

Recent theoretical interventions support this assessment, at least in relation to the potential limitations of harnessing shame to achieve desired outcomes. According to Zembylas, leveraging the concept of shame as a teaching tool and behavioral guide can go wrong from the start. As he acknowledges, “pedagogies of shame must also consider the limits, potential failures, and even impossibilities of being taught from shame in some circumstances.” ⁷⁷ Rather than simply being ineffective, worse still, shaming techniques, in certain circumstances, may achieve the opposite of their intended goal. Returning to Ahmed, she notes that shame’s role in public discourses of reconciliation may steer in a sinister direction, ritualistically converting shame into pride via acts of public apology in ways that allow “the endless deferral of responsibility for injustice in the present.” ⁷⁸ Rather than catalyzing action, shame often postpones true transformations, reparations, and reckonings.

Ahmed’s strong caution comes into sharper focus in Schaefer’s recent examination of shame’s function in U.S. politics and political mobilization. In his analysis of former President Trump’s interactions with his base, Schaefer describes how President Trump deployed a “repudiation of shame” technique to energize supporters. ⁷⁹ Tired of the inescapable “shame panopticon,” a favored technique of contemporary liberal politics, President Trump’s supporters sought refuge from feeling accountable and responsible for historical and present wrongs. ⁸⁰ Feeling increasingly under attack, “has led some of the former masters to a state of shame-exhaustion, in which it becomes easier to repudiate shame altogether than respond to the moral demands placed on them.” ⁸¹ Renouncing shame, in this context, means refusing to bend under the burdensome weight of responsibility—individual, collective, or historic.

From this it follows that “shame exhaustion” or shame burnout is a real phenomenon and, apparently, so are its consequences. For the purposes of government ethics, then, favored techniques such as public pressure campaigns or criticism from agency ethics officials calling out bad actors or calling individuals to account, while necessary and productive in certain instances, may also encounter unforeseen stumbling blocks in the form of actively prompting resistance, reticence, or retrenchment. Feeling accountable—either individually or collectively—may prove insufficient for preventing, motivating, or reckoning with, problematic actions and actors. Examining shame and considering its limitations shines a light on the underexplored embodied dimensions of our regulatory system.

2. Habit

If a potential consequence of mobilizing shame to achieve particular behavioral outcomes has the potential to enable inaction, or, worse still, to provoke counterreactions, how then do we confront bad conduct and forestall potential future injustices without further entrenching opposition arising from defensiveness or shame burnout? Whereas operationalizing shame encounters limitations, harnessing habits may present a more promising avenue for further exploration.

It has become a truism that regulatory systems rely on norms as much as they do on laws. This has been widely acknowledged within the good governance community and beyond. Frequently, the proposed answer to violations of norms and expectations is to impose stricter laws and more stringent regulations. ⁸² The norms themselves, and how to cultivate them, however, often remain unexplored. Considering habits and their roles in upholding norms points to new possibilities for embodying ethics.

Tellingly, when discussing the function of OGE, Walter Schaub, its former director, highlights the role of training, rather than of oversight and investigation alone. Remarking on the efficacy—or inefficacy—of OGE’s potential tools for increasing a culture of ethical government at the federal level, Shaub says that “the funny thing about ethics training is it’s more important that you do it than what is actually said while you’re doing it, because it forces government officials to sit down and focus on remembering that public service is a public trust and they’re serving the people.” ⁸³ What is striking about this seemingly offhand remark is Shaub’s gesturing towards the affective assemblages needed to cultivate and sustain ethical organizational cultures, environments, and individuals within them. For Shaub, it is form, rather than content, that matters most. Although he does not say this explicitly, his remarks suggest the potential of habit-oriented interventions. Government officials, in other words, need not become well-versed in the agency-specific ethical guidance. Rather, the very act of undergoing training helps orient individuals towards ethical actions and mindsets by impressing upon them the weight and responsibility accompanying their role as public servants.

Essentially, instructing government officials to comport themselves in certain ways and to uphold particular standards often proves insufficient for producing or inducing the desired behavioral outcomes. Appeals to reason or morality alone, alas, seemingly do little to modify conduct. However, Shaub’s assessments, coupled with recent theoretical interventions, suggest possible new paths forward. Rather than prioritizing laws or appeals to autonomous, cognitive reason to compel compliance exclusively, “we should,” as theorist Carolyn Pedwell urges, “focus on altering the physical, social, and affective environments in which habits are formed.” ⁸⁴ To initiate and sustain change within existing systems, we need an “ontology of change premised on more relational, processual, and ecological technologies of transformation” ⁸⁵ and a “means of working speculatively within existing (infra)structures and relations of power to reorient the tendencies that comprise them.” ⁸⁶ That would, as a start, entail focusing our efforts on supplementing our laws and rules with a more holistic approach: one attuned to the assemblages of affect and habit involved in informing behavior.

In this light, the following discussion explores the possible habits of good governance. Often, we tend to think of habit as a “mechanism of inhibition,” preventing us from engaging in destructive or harmful behaviors though repetitive, routinized actions. ⁸⁷ Operating below the surface, we may engage in them unknowingly. If true, then habits’ real capacity for social transformation lies in their under-the-radar qualities. If we are unaware of their presence, then we may be less likely to oppose their interventions, or so the thinking goes.

Perhaps this is why behavioral psychologists, among others, have dedicated so much time to figuring out how to break “bad” habits, and reroute behaviors towards developing “good” or healthy ones. More than that, habits, increasingly have become focuses for analysis because of their capacity to bridge the gap between “the human and the non-human” as well as to serve as “the meeting point between natural and cultural components of personhood.” ⁸⁸ Recent years, especially, have witnessed a resurgent interest in habits and their functions. Habits and “[h]abitual action is associated with a relative equilibrium in the relationship between the social and physical environment, biological need and bodily potentialities. It involves embodied subjects discovering routinised modes of behaviour that are more or less effective in ‘joining’ them to, and enabling them to manage, their surroundings.” ⁸⁹ Habits, in this way, may link people with their environments, often in ways that go unremarked.

In particular, habits have come to the fore in relation to their capacity for social transformation. Examining habits’ roles in innovating new technologies of governance has potential for the present discussion. Historically, “habit has more typically constituted a point of leverage for regulatory practices that seek to effect some realignment of the relations between different components of personhood—will, character, memory and instinct, for example—in order to bring about a specific end.” ⁹⁰ For those reasons, recent scholarship has suggested that “[h]abit is always figured in relation to these other coordinates of personhood, caught up with them in the processes of habituation, dis-habituation and re-habituation.” ⁹¹ The mechanisms underlying habituation, dis-habituation, and re-habituation link directly to the “government dimensions” of habits, as in, how they can be “redirected.” ⁹² The recent trend of nudge theory, especially, has endeavored to intervene in people’s decision-making by creating “choice architecture” designed to facilitate only good decisions such as choices that promote healthier lifestyles, relying on “indirect prompts,” rather than on “heavy-handed approaches.” ⁹³ People, according to this logic, retain free will by making their own decisions within a limited range of available options. In this line of thinking, you cannot make an undesirable or unhealthy choice, if those choices are unavailable to you.

The U.S. government, during the Obama administration for example, favored such behavioral-science-inspired regulation approaches to achieve “discrete policy goals.” ⁹⁴ Such utilitarian, outcomes-focused theories and practices, however, often disregard the wider environments in which such choices take place. ⁹⁵ Moreover, with their focus on individual “will and agency,” these interventions conceive of people as purely autonomous, rational actors who are able to select from a range of options. ⁹⁶ Approaches that attend to the affects, bodies, attachments, and environments, complicate this neat picture.

This focus on reshaping habits has consequences and plenty of accompanying complications. Conceiving of habits as potential catalysts for change offers promising possibilities for ethical governance, moving beyond the behavioral science “nudge” approaches. As Pedwell argues, “habit may conjure unthinking reflex, repetition, and stasis,” but “without the formation of habits, no substantive embodied, social, or political change can take shape and become rooted enough to endure.” ⁹⁷ This contention that habits are not only present within change, but also somehow integral to it, suggests that habit formation and modification may have far-reaching consequences. Habits, as Pedwell insists, “tend to remove thought from embodied action and the individual from the environment. They assume that new cognitive or affective knowledge is enough to instigate ‘ethical’ or ‘progressive’ change, without attending to the bodily and environmental factors that powerfully support and perpetuate existing patterns and behaviors.” ⁹⁸ If true, then reconfiguring habits and environments to move beyond a misguided, and overly narrow, focus on self-interest and rational behavior, may help address some of the current challenges in ways that are both non-coercive and not centered on a purely agential framing of subjects.

Thinking relationally about habituation suggests a wider view. In Pedwell’s assessment, “[i]f habituation is, by definition, the product of evolving body-environment interactions, then habits are never simply individual or personal and the categories human and nonhuman are both in flux and also inseparably intertwined.” ⁹⁹ For her, “[s]tructure, in turn, is an unfolding set of dynamics that must be continually inhabited from different angles to appreciate the processual qualities at play.” ¹⁰⁰ This interplay between human and nonhuman, rational and sub-rational, points to the processes underlying habit-formation and (re-)formation. As such, “speculative habit-oriented intervention” would need to account for “the interaction of cognitive thought and embodied action, conscious and nonconscious processes, and individual circumstances and environmental conditions.” ¹⁰¹ It appears that the ethical “habits of democratic reflexes” ¹⁰² themselves are what undergird and propel our democracy.

Despite the current ethics discourse’s focus on tools of persuasion and punishment for failures of compliance, we must also recognize that other factors enter into the calculus—bodies, minds, infrastructures, environments, and the complex interplay among them. As Schilling understands it, “human behaviour involves subjects who engage sensorially and emotionally (as well as cognitively) with their social world. The body is here viewed as integral to, and sometimes coterminous with, social action.” ¹⁰³ When coming up with new systems, technologies, rules, and educational trainings, we must keep these often-overlooked factors in mind. Telling people how to behave, as we have seen, yields limited results. As Pedwell puts it, “no amount of preaching good will or the golden rule of cultivation of sentiments of love and equity will accomplish the [intended] results. There must be a change in objective arrangements and institutions.” ¹⁰⁴ These changes, if they are to stick and improve the current ethics regime, may need to attend to “the nimbus of affects whose dynamics move along and make worlds, situations, and environments” as well as those factors’ roles in habit-formation. ¹⁰⁵

Identifying and cultivating these below-the-surface pulses and interactions, however, is no small task. Building on Pedwell and others who have theorized the role of habits in socio-political change, I want to suggest that we ought to pay closer attention to the pedagogical potential of habits. If we combine Pedwell’s crucial insight that habituation—informed by infrastructures and environments—may impel embodied action with the recent insights from affect theory which suggest the role of embodied feelings, relationships, and attachments in driving decision-making processes, then we are left with potential models for reconfiguring affect and environments for the purposes of enhancing current ethics regimes.

V. Embodied Ethics

Examining the bodily, lived, and felt dimensions of crisis, shame, and habit calls attention to the body-environment interactions that our current focus on laws and language can cause us to overlook. Reorienting the anti-corruption conversation to account for these underexplored areas, I want to suggest, helps theorize the notion of embodied ethics. Returning to the example of Benjamin Franklin’s snuff box referenced at the beginning of this article, it appears that prevention, then and now, remains crucial. Suspicion surrounding the snuff box’s assumed capacity to impel corrupt practices via preferential treatment illustrates the potency and potential of reconfiguring assemblages of affect. It seems that the American Founders already knew to be cautious on that front. To minimize the power of special interest influence, public officials would need somehow to become aware of the under-the-surface, non-cognitive and sub-rational pulls by trying either to identify (and thereby preempt) them or not to encounter them in the first place.

At its core, then, this article asks: What are the “permission structures” that embolden public officials to engage in behavior deemed as unethical, especially in contexts where disincentivizing punitive measures are well advertised? Lest this question be misunderstood, it is critical to note here that theories of affect and habit, which connect embodied actions with environments, do not excuse, or necessarily explain away, corrupt behavior as attributable to forces outside of individual control. Decentering the autonomous subject as the focus of analysis should not, in turn, lead to a denial of responsibility for misconduct. Nor do I want to suggest that ethics, as a nebulous and multifaceted concept, constitutes an unattainable personal standard for members of government. That is an altogether separate conversation from the one at hand and our discussion here pertains to whether agreed-upon standards can be enforced, incentivized, cultivated, and maintained. ¹⁰⁶ Instead of prompting us to abdicate responsibility or to condone corrupt practices, such theoretical interventions point to the wider contexts and factors that may facilitate exploitative, self-dealing, and outright corrupt behaviors, actions, and cultures. As Pedwell frames it, “habits are not simply individual capacities or modes of behaviour, but rather the product of revolving transactions between organisms and the milieus they inhabit.” ¹⁰⁷ It is not that humans are simply products of their environment. Rather, we interact with our environments, and vice versa, in ways we continue to discover and discern. If we are to embody and, thereby enact, ethical norms, then we would do well to attend to the factors that extend beyond language and law.

Above all, the discussions of this article aim to reframe the idea of government ethics as a matter of embodied practice, rather than of purely cognitive decision-making or of individual character—good or bad—alone. Practicing ethical rules means embodying them, instead of merely assessing individual ethical scenarios on a case-by-case basis. The difference between cultures of compliance versus cultures of corruption may be attributable, at least in part, to our factors outside of language, law, reason, and autonomy.

Throughout this discussion, I have argued that how we embody and enact ethics should occupy a more prominent place within analysis. Although the focus of this discussion has been largely theoretical, the hope is that recent scholarship will open up new ways of conceptualizing the presently unharnessed pedagogical potential of affect theory in relation to government ethics regimes—in terms of compliance, enforcement, and oversight. Ultimately, this article connects theoretical insights to the ongoing conversation about the crisis of federal ethics enforcement to suggest that affect theory approaches can help theorize moments of institutional reckoning. Without doing away with the necessary laws and rules, once we look past our current ratio-centric models and agential framing of managing ethics crises, we face a host of supplemental tools and socio-political technologies for creating ethical environments and cultivating ethical individuals within our government. Even though identifying the right combination of laws, rules, and pedagogies will undoubtedly present its own set of challenges, new theoretical insights into the interplay of embodied experience, institutions, and environments, have the potential to set us on a promising path for initiating, or reshaping, habit-oriented interventions within our democracy. Only then will we get closer to feeling, practicing, and experiencing accountability.