Economies of attachment: Promissory objects,differentiation,and other futures?

Abstract

In this response to Anderson's formulation of a theoretical framework for understanding attachments, I propose a third concept to join those of forms of attachment and scenes of attachment: economies of attachment. The concept of economies of attachment attends to how specific promissory objects become forms of attachment and how promissory objects compose ongoing and ordinary attachments as well as the fleeting and temporary moments suggested by scenes of attachment. It seeks to understand how particular promissory objects appeal to particular subjects; that is, how attachments emerge from and pattern social, economic, political, and affective economies. To explore this proposition, I return to Berlant’s discussion of ‘aspirational normalcy’ and consider normativity as a promissory object that might magnetise those who are unable to fit the normative ideal. I argue that as well as differentiating promissory objects, attachments also differentiate the subjects they appeal to. This is to explicate the significance of objects in theories of attachment and, more specifically, the futurity of promissory objects. While normativity as a promissory object involves the conservative differentiation of subjects, the empirical question remains of how promissory objects may be involved in the creation of alternative futures and presents.

In setting out a ‘cultural geography of promises’, Ben Anderson makes a welcome contribution to interdisciplinary research on affect, culture, and temporality. Thinking across geographical, feminist, queer, new materialist, and actor-network theory, Anderson (2023) argues for the significance of attachment to conceptualisations of people's lives, elegantly drawing together this non-cohesive work to propose a distinctive framework for understanding that ‘[a]ttachments produce what matters to life’. Attachments ‘“bring closer” a promissory object’; they are a specific kind of relationship that is focused on an object (which might be a person, an artefact, an experience, an atmosphere, etc.) that promises something better, or at least different. In so doing, attachments not only illuminate ‘what matters to life’ but also ‘carry past space-times into the felt present, and condition and partially create future space-times as the experience unfolds’. To seek to understand attachments, then, is simultaneously to seek to understand how what people value – their promissory object/s – sustains them in the present and into the future. Anderson puts it as such:

What characterises a promissory object is that it opens a valued future – whether of continuity from the present, or return to a lost past, or of something better – and enables the present to be better navigated and rendered more habitable. Attachment works to organise the present in itself and in relation to the past and future in a way that offers something to the subject held in the attachment.

Or, as Lauren Berlant might put it:

whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject's sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world (2011: 24).

Berlant is here explaining their concept of cruel optimism. Their work, especially in the book, Cruel Optimism, is central to Anderson's conceptualisation, not least because what distinguishes attachments from other relations is the optimism that the promissory object establishes. Attachments (unlike other relations) are optimistic in that promissory objects (unlike other objects) provide the assurance that makes the present liveable through its promise of a more ‘valued future’. And, of course, as Berlant's work details and as Anderson argues, while promissory objects and attachments are sustaining, they are not necessarily positive or good. Here, I return to some of Berlant's arguments in Cruel Optimism in order to explicate some of what I see to be the further potential in Anderson's proposition. To be clear, this response is a dialogue with Anderson's article in that it seeks to elucidate ideas already nascent. In particular, I draw out the role of the promissory object in the differentiation of subjecthood, highlight the significance of futures, and propose that the economies through which attachments emerge and are patterned are important considerations in theories of attachment.

Economies of attachment

Distinguishing attachments from the broader ecology of terms – relationality, connection, network, association – Anderson argues that attachment produces what matters to life in two main ways. First, attachment enacts forms or the ‘interlinked set of promissory objects which together offer a fantasy of the good life and are made available as a resource for subjects to organise living through’. Anderson provides a series of examples of forms of attachment: ‘the couple of the family as ways of organising intimacy; nationalism and multiculturalism as ways of organising relations with and between others; a named sexual or politicised identity’. Second, there are scenes of attachment: ‘any occasion in which an attachment crosses a threshold to become part of the foreground of life and thought, becoming central to how everyday life is felt and social action thereafter proceeds’. Scenes are where a promissory object is ‘intensely felt’; scenes are of ‘limited duration’ and ‘stand apart from the ongoing flow of action that gives everyday life its everyday character’. Examples of scenes include ‘a yearly event commemorating a valued national past; a moment of joy when dancing to beloved music in a basement; relief as Brexit happens’. At stake in forms and scenes of attachment are therefore the clusters of promissory objects that become intensive through specific and temporary affective events.

Building on the framework that Anderson proposes, I’d like to stay with the ‘everydayness’ of attachments to explore the objects that become promissory and how these promissory objects compose ordinary life beyond an intense ephemerality. This is to consider further what promissory objects become (semi)stablised as forms of attachment and how such promissory objects become felt, in intense but also humdrum ways, by some subjects more than others. It is to focus on the magnetism of some objects to some subjects; it is to consider for whom the work that promissory objects do to signal a better future, and in so doing make the present bearable, is necessary. In these ways, this response aims to begin to draw out the significance of objects to Anderson's argument and to explore whether attachments function in ways other than as forms and scenes.

Returning to Berlant's argument in Chapter 5 of Cruel Optimism is helpful here, and especially their designation of the ‘feeling of aspirational normalcy, the desire to feel normal, and to feel normalcy as a ground of dependable life, a life that does not have to keep being reinvented’ (2011: 170). Berlant here describes how ‘aspirational normalcy’ functions in two films, La Promisse (1996) and Rosetta (1999) written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. For Berlant, both films depict, differently, ‘a story from the perspective of the economic bottom's thick space of contingency’ in ‘the political and affective economies of normativity’ in contemporary capitalist culture in Europe (specifically, Belgium) (2011: 167). They are case studies ‘to think about normativity as aspirational and as an evolving and incoherent cluster of hegemonic promises about the present and future experience of social belonging’ (2011: 167). This short – but characteristically brimming with insight – quotation highlights that clusters of promises (can) become normative and that these normative promises are aspirational for those at the bottom or margins of a highly unequal society who do not, but want to, experience stability within an uncertain and ever-moving world. Normativity is a promissory object that organises an aspirational, and conservative, attachment.

Read through the concept of forms of attachment, aspirational normalcy provides a lens through which to consider how specific objects are tethered together to become promissory and how these specific objects are part of political and affective economies. Indeed, this point is signalled by Anderson in his explanation of forms of attachment; it is not coincidental that normative modes of organising intimacy, inter/national belonging, and sexual identity are prime instances of forms of attachment, because forms of attachment are both dense and enduring, ‘primarily because of how forms are bound up with norms and the lure of normativity’ which ‘afford a sense of the ongoingness of things, and detaching from them can involve disruptions to that sense of normalcy’. Developing Anderson's concept of forms of attachment through that of aspirational normalcy opens up a consideration of which subjects would find the detachment from the promissory object most destructive; which subjects in particular want and need the attachment to the promissory object to keep going. As the feminist, queer, and Black theory that Anderson draws on has long examined, the normative is particularly constraining for those whose gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability do not meet its ideals; and, concurrently, understood in terms of attachments to promissory objects, the normative might also be particularly aspirational for these subjects (and this attachment is problematic; cruel as well as sustaining).

This point can be elaborated further by considering the ordinariness of attachments to promissory objects. The concept of scenes of attachment attends to the intense yet fleeting illumination of a promissory object, which fades into the background of everyday life even as it continues to shape it. What an attachment to aspirational normalcy indicates is that the scene of attachment may be much more expansive than a punctuated occasion. For example, while Berlant discusses certain episodes of heightened affect in La Promesse and Rosetta, they also note the ‘ongoing practice’ of attaching to aspirational normalcy as part of the ‘ongoing prospect of low-waged and uninteresting labour’ that the protagonists endure (2011: 164). The ongoingness of attachments to aspirational normalcy is rendered as particularly intense at certain moments, but it is also compositional of everyday life in its mundane ordinariness. For those who don't, but want and need, to feel the dependency of the normative, promissory objects are a prerequisite for inhabiting a present that is just about liveable. That is, an attachment to the promise of a future that is somehow dependable in its normativity is a required and ordinary element of inhabiting the present.

To the concepts of forms and scenes of attachments, then, a third concept – what I am provisionally calling economies of attachment – may be added. In the first instance, the concept of economies of attachment attends to how the promissory objects of forms of attachment become bound together through the glue of normativity. In the second instance, it sheds light on the double-bind of normativity; on how normativity is both exclusionary and might be appealing to those whose subjecthood does not fit with normative standards. In the third instance, the concept of economies of attachment understands the appeal of normativity held together by the promissory object as part of the ordinariness of everyday life; that is, in more enduring, banal, and often tedious ways than the intensity and temporariness of scenes of attachment.

Objects, differentiation, and futures

The concept of economies of attachment seeks to understand that attachments emerge through and are patterned according to economic, social, cultural, and political economies, at least in part. Attachments are felt and lived out in and as affective economies, constituting these affective economies in the process. To suggest this is to amplify the significance of objects in Anderson's conceptualisation of attachment, or perhaps, put slightly differently, to begin with the work that promissory objects do in processes of differentiation. ¹ The concept of attachment depends on the promissory object in that the attachment confers significance on it and in so doing becomes fastened to it. In Anderson's and Berlant's arguments, the optimism of the attachment to a promissory object is what provides the continuity of the temporality of subjecthood; in attaching to a promissory object that can never quite be attained, the subject moves towards a better future and makes the present bearable. What is less explored with the concepts of forms and scenes of attachment is the role of the promissory object in attracting the subject to attach to it. That is, for an attachment to take place and be sustained/sustaining, we need to look not only at the work that the subject who attaches and is sustained does but also at the work of the object that magnetises.

Thinking through the example of aspirational normalcy as a promissory object, that the normative is both not achievable for subjects at the bottom or margins of a highly differentiated society and is what those subjects might organise their lives around getting to, indicates that the promissory object differentiates as it is differentiated as an attachment (and not another type of relation). Anderson explains that ‘[a]ttachments differentiate’ because out of a range of possible and actual attachments, ‘[s]ome objects of attachment come to matter over the others we are linked to or associated with … Objects of attachment come to “feel necessary” to life’. To this process via which the attachments that ‘matter to life’ come to be differentiated from other relations, I would add that attachments also differentiate in that the allure of promissory objects matters differently to different people; that is, the concept of economies of attachment accounts for how the differentiation of subjecthood occurs in part through the objects that are promissory.

Here, the futurity of the promissory object is significant as it acts as a lure to subjects whose presents are difficult and require something else to keep going (Coleman, 2012). It is not only that the promissory object ‘brings closer’ the subject to the future but also that the promissory object ‘brings closer’ the future to the present. Another way of putting this might be to say that the promissory object provides ‘something of the continuity of the subject’ not only in luring them to the future – a linear model of temporality – but also in how the future is brought into, and comes to organise, the present – a non-linear temporality. In this response, I have sought to theorise promissory objects in terms of normativity and aspirational normalcy and through this have proposed the concept of economies of attachment. This is but one of the ways in which attachments might function though. As Anderson reminds us, attachments may be good or bad, or good and bad; the optimism of attachments is ambiguous. If the concept of economies of attachment alerts us to the role of the promissory object in the differentiation of subjects, then, it might also provide avenues for examining how promissory objects might function so that subjects can ‘be lured by the possibility of futures that are more than a mere extension of the present’, as Savransky et al. (2017: 2) put it. The empirical question remains of how the promissory objects that organise attachments might trouble socially conservative differentiation, or do differentiation differently. How do, and how might, promissory objects work to illuminate alternative futures in the present, and in so doing disturb and re-arrange the economies that differentiate unequally and unfairly?