Abstract
This contribution is anchored in a sense of possibility, of potential. It rests on my own and others empirical research that has invited participants to nominate their own terms for understanding and engaging with the nation, terms that are often affective. It attends to how the national feels to people (Closs Stephens, 2016), and the excessive and ongoingly changing qualities of these feelings. Branching out from this sense of possibility, I will argue that affect offers a frame for understanding the nation that locates it in the everyday, foregrounds its complexity and dynamism and shows how it is animated by this contingency. This in turn orients us towards the future and a sense of the nation-in-progress. In what follows, ‘affective nationalism’ is understood as a mode of configuring one’s relationship to the nation – and to other people understood as co-national, or not – in terms of feelings. It also means how things come to be understood as national, and how these understandings course along and are energised by affect; in other words, how an object, symbol, event or story becomes affecting because it is understood in a national frame. Moreover, and as Closs Stephens points out in her insightful contribution below, things that are differentially understood as ‘national’ also connote varying affective associations; so, the term ‘affective nationalism’ carries a sense of instability, unpredictability and possibility.
Indeed, this sense of possibility – including that something might understood as more or less national, or perhaps not national at all – chimes with Massumi’s (2015: 57–58) treatment of potential, a feeling that always shimmers in our unfolding experiences of the world: Even in the most controlled political situation, there’s a surplus on unacted-out potential that is collectively felt … No situation simply translates ideological inculcations into action. There’s always an event and the event always includes dimensions that aren’t completely actualised, so it’s always open to a degree, it’s always dynamic and in re-formation.
The first is that it allows us to consider the nation as ongoingly constituted through our own and others’ activities, as continually made via the accreted and accumulated actions of many people in relation to others (Edensor, 2002; Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008). This is not to suggest, however, that the nation is somehow separate or outside what people do, feel and think, that it is an entity that acts in its own right. Indeed, Edensor (2002: 20) asserts that ‘national belonging’ is comprised and reinforced by shared cultural resources ‘grounded in spatial, material, performative and representation dimensions of everyday life’. Thus, the nation is made by not only what we do, but also by how we feel. An affective framing of the nation treats it as emergent via our own ongoing experiences, akin to what Skey and Antonsich (2017) term ‘everyday nationhood’.
Returning to Massumi’s (2015: 13) terms, this means the nation is implied when we recognise that we are always ‘immersed in an experience that is already underway’, when we apprehend that our worlds are in movement, never finished or even stable. Thinking through affect helps reveal our worlds as always in formation, shifting in the ongoing flow of sensory perceptions, encounters with people and places and unexpected thoughts or reflections that are commonplace in our everyday experiences. Indeed, building on Massey (2005), the nation emerges from a ‘throwntogetherness’ that coalesces temporarily and continuously. Moreover, the nation is not so much held or delimited by particular ‘bodies’, but emerges from relations between them, and is subject to the ‘feelings that circulate between and take hold of bodies’ that have differential affective capacities (Merriman and Jones, 2017: 601). It is this difference in how we might affect or be affected, that offers the potential I am concerned with here. It is also where politics obtains, because these capacities are not neutral or somehow free-floating, but are shaped by and through bodies and things that are differentially empowered and positioned. This is what Skey and Antonsich (2017) mean by the ‘importance of power and its uneven relations’ that shape affective encounters with the nation.
Tim Ingold’s (2011) notion of ‘wayfaring’ is also valuable in thinking about how affect and nation identity intersect and are ongoingly co-constitutive. Ingold conceptualises a process of making our way through the world that creates traces, paths or trails that emerge and unfurl in the changing everyday conditions of our surroundings. The trace enables us to visualise the perpetually unfinished nature of our everyday worlds, and to consider how we engage with our surroundings as we go, and what subsequent experiences and relationalities these engagements afford. This is the second move I suggest – that the environments we move through, affect and are affected by, and that we use to make sense of ourselves in the world, are replete with things that we understand as national. Thus, how we ongoingly relate to these is how our sense of nationhood is expressed, understood and felt, with potential always inherent in our experiences. Indeed ‘we come to know and understand the nation by means of the trace and the contingency and dynamism it implies. Thus, the nation is not outside or beyond us somehow, but knotted into experience’ (Sumartojo, 2017: 206). The knot (Ingold, 2011) also points towards affect’s potential – that the nation is entangled with everything else we might be doing, thinking or feeling. The nation does not somehow stand apart from other aspects of our everyday lives, but rather is always entangled in our experiential worlds, and as a result is as messy and contingent as any other aspect of those worlds.
In a 2018 study of Australian multiculturalism, for example, research participants were easily able to reflect on everyday nationhood because it was an active element of how they understood themselves and the other people and places in their worlds, even if it was not always what they were consciously noticing or thinking about. In part, this was because of how they felt their worlds, emotionally and sensorially, and how in turn these feelings were readily attached to more abstract aspects of their lives, such as national identity. Multiculturalism was a highly valued aspect of people’s everyday surroundings and encounters, and even when these experiences were puzzling or unfamiliar. Coming into contact with cultural difference was itself viewed positively and the affective frisson of difference was interesting, valued and couched in national terms (Edensor and Sumartojo, 2018).
The final implication of thinking affectively about the nation is that can help us face towards the future. This is precisely because thinking through affect treats the nation as an ongoing and emergent aspect of our lives that ebbs and flows along with everything else, as I say above. This implicitly uncertain movement can prompt feelings of anxiety, dread, optimism, hope or ambivalence, all of which relate to the future and can never be fully resolved because we never know exactly what will come next (see also Anderson, 2014). These ambiguous feelings are unstable and draw different people together at different times, rather than settling into fixed positions, and can co-exist with other seemingly contradictory moods. Closs Stephens extends on this below, via the idea of storytelling, a narrative form that can convey ambivalence or present multiple versions of experience.
Affect allows us to formulate the nation as unfolding and to adopt a future-orientation towards what it might yet become. Moreover, this forward motion can generate speculation that necessarily requires the future to be envisioned and imagined. If affect is always dynamic and emerging, and thereby invites speculation, then intervention becomes possible in new ways because these interventions are able to be imagined in new ways. Whether this points us to inclusivity and generosity, for example, or suspicion and aggression, the point is that these are versions of national future that are made possible by affective modes of speculation as much as by political ones. However, if we stick with affect’s sense of potential and becoming, then the future is never foreclosed; put differently, if we treat affect as potential, then we are able to orient towards a nation-in-progress and, more powerfully, able to imagine and thereby intervene in national futures in new ways.
This is one of the most powerful things that approaching the nation through affect can offer – a sense of futurity, emerging and entangled with our everyday lives – that moves us far beyond static or closely bounded imagined national communities. Instead, affect offers us a politics that is open and uncertain, that is always in formation, imbued with a sense of ‘political and ethical promise’ (Anderson, 2014: 15). It suggests that we can always potentially make the nation into something else, whether this is the grounds for optimism or despair.