Abstract
On a hot summer’s day in July 2016, two weeks after the UK voted to leave the European Union, I sat on top of the garden shed with my children watching the Wales National Airshow, organised by Swansea City Council. The then UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, had recently announced he would be resigning; the British Conservative party were yet to choose a new leader; no politician seemed able to capture the national mood. Outside our home in South West Wales, we sat on several blankets as the tarmac roof was too hot to touch. The children wavered between being awestruck and terrified and looked to me for reassurance. I in turn made the appropriate noises of admiration as the Red Arrows – the Royal Air Force’s Aerobatic Team – gathered speed by flying the Hawk T1’s into the countryside before sweeping back across the seashore to mark the sky with the colours of the Union Jack. My children were too young to know the significance of the colours. And anyway, we were too busy trying to name them. The Spitfire, the Hurricane and Lancaster Bomber – cultural icons from the Battle of Britain (1940) and the RAF’s role in the Second World War – flew alongside Eurofighter Typhoons (built by BAE systems) and Chinook helicopters (used in the Falklands, the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars, the Balkans and Afghanistan). These killing machines drew beautiful circular patterns on the clear blue sky. Around 200,000 people watched the show for free on Swansea beach front. Later, I learned that a handful of adults and children were admitted to the Burns Centre at Morriston Hospital: flying planes can be dangerous (Weber, 2002), and sitting in the blazing sun can cause injuries too.
What might this story tell us about the theme of this forum, ‘Affective Nationalism?’ This moment took place in 2016 but I could be describing a scene from several other decades in the 20th century. This was a ‘national’ event, deemed to be the largest such show in Wales, assembled around icons of Britishness charged with memories of empire. Yet ‘the people’ did not necessarily interpret the event according to these narratives. Whilst we can read the event through the registers of identity, difference and coloniality, doing so exclusively would miss ‘the affective field of potential’ through which the event took place (McCormack, 2013: 132). For the three of us, the event was felt in the waves of clapping and cheer that erupted from the beach, the thundering noise of the planes rattling the roof we were sitting on and the resonances that travelled between our skins, the tarmac and each other. Whilst the show was a visual spectacle, it also involved twisted stomachs and tensed limbs. It operated through a combination of wonder, boredom, anxiety and surprise. Engaging the politics of affect invites us to consider how this event was felt, alongside the lively unfolding of the event itself. It suggests that we pay attention to the intricate entanglements of war and tourism (Lisle, 2016), power and boredom. And furthermore, thinking about affect and politics together encourages us to loosen a symbolic reading of an event such as this one, as already heavy with meaning. Instead, we might consider through ‘descriptive detours’ (Stewart, 2011: 445) the multiplicity, contingency and tenacity of various landscapes of power.
In the run up to this airshow, I only encountered murmurs of resistance – such as among the networks that welcome populations described as refugees and asylum seekers to the city. As the first ‘City of Sanctuary’ in Wales, Swansea is home to many people who have arrived to escape the sounds of low-flying planes. There was also some resistance to the symbols of Britishness among Welsh language activist movements. However, these are both marginal constituencies in the city, and anyone who hid indoors disgusted by the whole charade risked being called a ‘killjoy’ (Ahmed, 2010). This points to the difficulties of identifying ways of opposing the state without reproducing the identities and differences that are themselves creations of the state. But in reading this airshow through a multiple and mobile frame (Lisle, 2016), we can see the different elements drawn in and put to work in it. For example, reflecting on the airshow staged by the Nazis at Tempelhof airfield, Berlin, on 1 May 1933, Adey (2010: 60) argues that its aim was not only to direct the gaze towards the aircraft but towards the airfield and activities of the personnel who maintain it. In his study of British airshows, Rech (2015: 538) argues that the ‘gaze of an attentive public’ is as central to the event as aerodynamic skill. Any study of ‘affective nationalism’ at this national airshow would need to consider these aspects, as well as the heteronormative cultures at work in a branded ‘family day out’, the political economies of cities and their branding exercises, and the ways ‘political atmospheres are inherently and always racialised’ (Legg, 2019; see also Tolia-Kelly in this symposium). But perhaps here we also encounter some of the difficulties with the concept of ‘affective nationalism’ in that it may be too totalising in explaining this event. It risks inviting us to project identities, differences, positions and groups onto a gathering that was also happenstance: a scene that was heavily orchestrated, but which also folded into other rhythms, histories, habits and journeys.
In her book Touching Feeling, Sedgwick (2003: 9) argues that affect theory is propelled by Michel Foucault’s promise of a form of critical theory that can go beyond the ‘repressive hypothesis’, which understands power as something operated over us by a single sovereign authority. Returning to his arguments in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Sedgwick argues that Foucault’s promise remains a challenge. Similarly, in considering the everyday ways we enjoy spectacles of violence, Debbie Lisle (2016: 20) argues that power must be understood as something that is embraced by us as well as exercised over us. For Lisle (2016: 22), ‘architectures of enmity’ operate in ways that ‘do not simply enroll and exclude particular bodies and populations, [but] also make themselves felt – and indeed, achieve their power – by enrolling and excluding objects, landscapes, infrastructures, atmospheres and materials’ (drawing on Shapiro, 2018). At this airshow, affect was evidently a ‘mechanism for power’ (Foucault quoted in Sedgwick, 2003: 110), in the sense that the event was staged in ways that required skill, practice, organisation and relied also on mobilising emotion. But affect further names how this event cannot be explained through accounts of power as repression, coercion or prohibition. For this was also a spectacle that was enjoyed and animated through cheers, clapping, Facebook selfies, bodies gathering together on the sandy beach and children running for ice cream. How do we distinguish between ‘participants’ in fields of power and ordinary people going about their day? How do we intervene politically when spectacles that celebrate the everydayness of military weapons, Britain’s superiority as a victorious nation and ideas about a united identity also emerge as just something to pass the time?
As Sumartojo argues in this symposium, the provocation of affect bids us to pay attention to questions of feeling and to the particular styles of our engagement. This enables us to ask: how does critique do something other than reveal ‘oppressive historical forces’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 11)? Affect theory has been critiqued for its concern with capturing ‘something supposedly ephemeral, beyond words and beyond representation’ (Wetherell, 2014: 149). Studying phenomena that cannot be measured, counted or verified tends to viewed with suspicion and leads to familiar calls to make the study of affect ‘practical’ again (Wetherell, 2014: 149). However, the search for knowledge often begins from a sense that we still do not fully understand how power works and how power might be interrupted. How do objects of state violence maintain their affective appeal? How are geopolitical structures reproduced in everyday ways and through embodied ideas about gender, white privilege and colonial power? How do such ideas attach themselves to new constituencies? Perhaps telling stories offers another route in to these questions, one that allows us to do more than identify these practices at work, by acknowledging also our own part in them.
This story about the airshow suggests that national attachments are felt, sensed and embodied as well as structured, organised and performed. Whilst resistance is often conceptualised as refusal or as an alliance of oppositional forces, approaching nationhood through an affective register indicates it is difficult to position ourselves outside of power structures looking in. Sometimes we cannot resist according to defiant terms because we are involved in the everyday work of caring, feeding and playing whilst living with discomfort, compromise and rage. Yet as Dempsey and Pratt (2019: 278) argue, resistance often takes place ‘in the intimate and the interpersonal’. Through our relations with friends, parents, colleagues, family and neighbours, we can support and stay alongside efforts to make spaces for other collective affects and an alternative aesthetics. But this is about more than questions of personal situation, because often it is difficult to resist in strong terms precisely because of a sense of the ordinariness and everywhereness of power and domination. Enveloped by stuff we find unpleasant, troubling and harmful, there is often no straightforward place to stand outside or against such structures, objects and atmospheres. The everyday, imaginative geographies of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are diffuse, multiple and contradictory; they are composed through strong and weak attachments. But they are also ambivalent, full of ‘fissures and gaps’ (Lisle, 2016: 23) through which they might be noticed and interrupted. Perhaps when we accept our own involvement, we may find we are able to grasp those fleeting moments when other ways of relating, organising and enduring might be pressed – as both joyful and ugly feelings continue to emerge and dissolve across the urban landscape.