Abstract
National movements or nationalist movements are frequently approached as collective groups of thinking–feeling–acting bodies whose social and political struggle is marked by a clear directionality and a simultaneously inclusionary and exclusionary politics gathering around markers of sameness and difference. These movements may appear as extraordinary, ‘hot’ and dramatic events, or as ordinary and banal occurrences enacted by bodies of different kinds (Billig, 1995; Jones and Merriman, 2009; Merriman and Jones, 2009). This focus on active, embodied agents or subjects has served studies of nations and national identities fairly well, but a number of scholars have begun to ask whether there are aspects of national movements, communities, nations, and national identities which are missed with such an approach. How do nations ‘matter’ beyond the differentiated bodies of national citizen-subjects and symbolic material objects? What kinds of affects, atmospheres, performances and materials are apprehended by bodies of different kinds?
In this intervention, my focus is not on some thing named ‘affective nationalism’ but on the molecular movements and affective relations holding particular bodies in tension, which may or may not be registered as national feelings, passions or revulsions. In particular, I want to ask a series of conceptual questions around movement and nations. What if, after Massumi (2017: 101), we were to take the principles of movement, activity and unrest as incessant and central to the unfolding of all actions and events? 1 Could movements, affects and bodies be all there is to nations, nationalist politics and feelings of national identity? 2 What if – drawing upon the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari (1988) – we were to approach national movements, groupings and identities as perceptible ‘molar’ representations or identifications which are always in a state of becoming ‘molecular’ and imperceptible? 3 If we refocus our attention on the processes, affects and sensations which underpin national formations, then we might choose to depart from the idea that it is perceptible, ‘aggregated’ molar movements which form or transform more-or-less stable nations and national identities. Rather, our attention could turn to the ongoing processes and micropolitical actions through which a multitude of affective ties hold a large number of incessantly moving, variegated material bodies in tension. Molecular movements and affective circulations are incessant and imperceptible, until they gain consistency, become perceptible and are registered or territorialised as the molar aggregations we label ‘nations’, ‘national identities’ and ‘national movements’.
In an earlier paper, I argued that the relational and partial emergence of national feelings, moods and atmospheres which are apprehended or sensed by some bodies – but not others – could be approached using the concept of the ‘refrain’ (see Merriman and Jones, 2017), as well as through Law and Mol’s (2001: 615) idea of a ‘fire topology’ or spatiality, characterised by a ‘flickering relation between presence and absence’. While ‘fire’ may serve as a colourful or shapely analogy for simultaneously hot and banal nationalist sensibilities, Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on affect, territorialisation and molecular politics could also be mobilised to understand this continual foregrounding and backgrounding of feelings of nation-ness; not as an absence or presence, but rather as feelings, sensations or ‘structures of feeling’ that are always in the process of becoming perceptible or imperceptible to bodies held (or not) in relational tension (Merriman, 2019). 4 This strand of processual thinking forces us to rethink conventional approaches to pre-formed, bounded subjects, as well as work on ‘the political’ which attends solely to macro-political actions and forces. Indeed, I want to argue that scholars writing on nations, nationalism and national identity can learn a lot from post-structuralist writings on the relationship between affect and micro-, minor- and molecular politics (Guattari, 1984; Guattari and Rolnik, 2008; Jellis and Gerlach, 2017; Merriman, 2019).
It has become rather commonplace for critics of affect and non-representational theories to ask whether such approaches are capable of supporting ‘new models of progressive politics’ (Barnett, 2008: 198). Brian Massumi (2015: ix) has stressed that affect is ‘proto-political’, being concerned with ‘the first stirrings of the political, flush with the felt intensities of life’, and the trick here is to expand conceptions of ‘the political’ to take account of transversal ‘molecular’ and ‘micro’ political movements, actions and events, as well as perceptible ‘molar’ or ‘macro’ political relations established around material and social markers of difference such as race and gender (Bissell, 2016; Jellis and Gerlach, 2017). In attending to the partial, relational flagging of nations – and the welling-up of feelings, atmospheres and collective affiliations aligned with the nation – I would emphasise that molecular and micro political forces, movements and affects can bring about more fundamental molar shifts in atmospheres, moods, materialities and habits (see Ahmed, 2004; Closs Stephens, 2016; Closs Stephens et al., 2017). In contrast to many early works on the politics of affect which focussed largely on the engineering of affects by powerful (state) actors and agencies for manipulative ends (Barnett, 2008), it is also important to acknowledge the ways in which affects are engineered with the intention of creating more hopeful, joyful and ‘happy atmospheres’ (Closs Stephens, 2016: 181). Progressive futures and inclusive atmospheres can emerge from molecular or micro-political actions, events and movements associated with a range of bodies held in tension, but it is not just the molar or macro-political potential of affect theories which is questioned by some critics. References to ‘the body’ in Spinozan and Deleuzian affect theory have, of course, been criticised for tracing a rather abstract, blank, universal, unmarked and ‘pre-figured’ body (see Tolia-Kelly, 2006, and section ‘Affective nationalisms and race’ in this issue). This is, of course, the point, for although these (more-than-human) bodies are inevitably and incessantly figured, fleshed out, essentialised and differentiated in and through innumerable practices, many affect theorists do not want to mark or figure such bodies a priori using essential pre-established categories of difference. Speaking of pre-figured bodies in the abstract does not universalise a particular body, subject or experience (however marked); rather, it insists that such markings are inscribed and differences formed in the unfolding of (national) events, emerging from specific affective ties and tensions between bodies, even if that unfolding generates familiar refrains and repetitious exclusionary practices which must be highlighted and ultimately challenged and undermined.
With the de-coupling of national communities from an essential or fixed relationship with territories in many theories of nations and nationalism – including those focussing on the performance of national identity, the social and psychological relations underpinning national communities, etc. – the question of ‘where’ nations are constructed, performed, located or sited continues to arise, although I do not see significant differences between social constructionist approaches, theories of performance or theories of affect in this regard. If we take movement to be primary, and if bodies of all kinds – including non-human material bodies, architectural environments, landscapes, etc. – are caught in affective tension and possess differential capacities to affect and be affected when entangled in particular relations, then these incessant movements, interactions, tensions and happenings are what produce spaces and perform national spatialities, with meaningful sensations gathering around particular differentiated bodies, sites and materials held in tension, whether physically or virtually.
