Detachment,disaffection,and other ambivalent affects

I remember … a couple of days after the leave vote there was the European championship that was on … was it the Euro’s in France? ⁷ And I walked down the Highstreet, like, pushing me son down in the pram, and everyone had their St George flags ⁸ in the window. I was looking at them. I was so ashamed of that flag; I don’t want to be any part of that and that’s how I felt. And you shouldn’t be ashamed, you should be proud of where you’re from. ⁹

Aaron, North East England. Autumn 2016

In the wake of the UK’s referendum on EU membership, Aaron recalled a desire to be free from national attachment: ‘I don’t want to be any part of that’. Aaron’s description of his felt shame reveals the grip of nationalism even while apparently throwing it into question. Despite his statement about his desire to be separate, his shame reveals an ongoing interest.

Shame has long been a concern for work on nationalism, which has asked what the enactment, feeling and expression of shame does to proximity, the performance of innocence and our relations to others (cf. Ahmed, 2004; Higgins, 2019; Povinelli, 1998; Probyn, 2005). In this intervention, we start with Aaron’s desire for detachment because it raises a series of challenges for emerging research on the affective spaces and politics of nationalisms. We agree that atmospheres and other collective affects are central to how people perform, attach to, invest in, and are otherwise touched by varying forms of nationalism. Nationalisms are, have always been, and always will be affective formations. But in starting with Aaron’s desire for detachment, we call for greater attention to modes of (non)relating that might be considered compromised in some way. As we suggest, attention to such modes foregrounds the attachments and detachments that are central to how people sense forms of nationalism that are ambivalent, politically ambiguous and not always coherent. ¹⁰

Attention to affect/s is necessary if we are to understand what it feels like to participate in the performance of nationalisms and apprehend their harms and damages as well as the lure and grip of their promises. Nationalisms are felt as more or less intense affective presences that are occasionally foregrounded, but often part of the background of daily life as they blur with a host of other affects. They are always lived and felt differentially, mediated, as they are, by other affects and structures (Ahmed, 2014). In Aaron’s account, the affective presence of nationalism registers as shame in an ordinary scene that summons two national events: an international football tournament and Brexit. His interrupted pride and feelings of shame are occasioned by the sight of St George flags, but are also shaped by a variety of other things, including: normative modes of social belonging that allow him easy access to political forms of (national) identification; shock at the referendum result; conversations with colleagues and tabloid stories; worry for his wife (who was in the process of applying for UK citizenship); and concern for his son’s future.

For us, in bringing research on the practices and forms of ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig, 1995) together with recent interdisciplinary interest in atmospheres, structures of feeling and other ‘unformed objects’ (Stewart, 2013; cf. Closs Stephens, 2016; Merriman and Jones, 2017), the key insight of recent geographical scholarship has been that the material and affective are inseparable. This recent work has sought to stay with the specific relations that exist between the divergent objects, practices, and events of nationalism as well as the becoming-palpable of what we hesitantly call ‘nationalist affects’ (hesitant since affects can never be simply identified with a single social-spatial formation). ¹¹ Such a concern places emphasis on forms of intensification: how the material and symbolic infrastructures that are nationalisms both condition and catalyse specific affects that are folded into lived belonging and forms of identification. An example in the UK might be the annual scenes of commemoration and remembrance – that mark those who served in the two World Wars and later conflicts – through which pasts are enacted as part of a national story of heroism, sacrifice, and stoicism. Through such examples, this approach emphasises the often-intermittent rhythms of nationalist affects. Yet, we suggest that the emphasis on occasions of intensification – and the scenes and sites of strong feeling – risks leaving out a range of more ambivalent and less coherent relations with nationalist formations. It risks overlooking how Aaron’s shame (felt as an unwanted, but intense, attachment or interest) and his desire to not ‘be any part of that’ can coexist with a continued belief that ‘you should be proud of where you’re from’. The recognition that he should be proud and yet is not becomes an occasion for sadness that might be read as a feeling of ‘alienation from the nation by virtue of not being affected in the right way’ (Ahmed, 2014: 26). Yet, his continued interest makes alienation an unsatisfactory narrative as it interrupts the process of detachment and prevents its completion.

In this instance, Aaron’s desire for withdrawal is not quite a refusal; his felt attachment through shame does not challenge the legitimacy of nationalism. Indeed, it demonstrates how hard it can be ‘to detach from normative forms of the political world’ (Berlant, 2011: 229). Whilst expressing a desire for detachment, the sadness that tinged the feeling of alienation – the failure to experience pride in something that should elicit it – evidences an inability, perhaps even an unwillingness, to withdraw entirely. Aaron’s memory of how he felt thus depicts a way of relating to the nation that in many ways defies categorisation, as it becomes caught up in the noise of a compromised attachment, or an oscillation between attachment and detachment that challenges any clean duality. Understanding the visceral nature of attachment and detachment, and other forms of incoherent, perhaps contradictory, affective relations and practices, may require that work on affective nationalism supplements the vocabulary of emergence and becoming that it has inherited from interdisciplinary work on affect (which takes its leave from Deleuze and Guattari via Massumi). It requires a differentiated vocabulary of relations and non-relations. Here we find inspiration from Lauren Berlant’s (2011) mode of inquiry as she tracks and listens to how people drift in and out of attachments to structuring fantasies that are, at once, fraying and difficult to invest in, and sustaining, as they offer a coherent world to hold onto and be held by (whether it be love and intimacy, the promises of normalcy offered by consumer culture, or secure employment). Much like Aaron’s suggestion that nationalism should be an occasion for pride, such structuring fantasies reveal normative visions of how things ought to be.

The kinds of mixed feelings Aaron describes and expresses do not quite fit with various stories of a contemporary condition marked by strong affects (despite recalling how he felt ‘so ashamed’). Whether an age of anger (Mishra, 2017), or the emergence of a culture of fear, new forms of virulent nationalisms powered by strong emotions have been the focus for a range of explanatory accounts that have endeavoured to make sense of the turbulent present. In starting from ambivalence and incoherence, work on nationalism is pushed to describe all manner of ways in which people encounter and engage with nationalisms outside of enthusiastic endorsement, outright rejection or even alienation (cf. Laketa, 2017 on stickiness and ethno-nationalism in Mostar). This is partly a matter of widening the range of affects that are attuned to in work on nationalisms so as to include politically ambiguous and less spectacular ‘minor affects’ (Ngai, 2005): irritation, unease, disappointment and confidence. But it is also a matter of staying with occasions when nationalist affects fall apart, fail to happen or dwindle. How, for example, do we understand occasions when people are ‘left cold’ by nationalism or some performative element of it; when they are released from a grip?

Of course, there are different registers of (dis)affection – the felt absence of being affected – that connect to, but are not equivalent to, the forms of dissatisfaction that are commonly invoked to make sense of the contemporary condition (cf. Gilbert, 2015, on ‘disaffected consent’ in relation to support for neoliberal policies and programmes in the wake of the financial crisis). In focusing on disaffection, we ask how work can better attend to the oscillation between forms of attachment and detachment that characterise, and sometimes coexist within, people’s ordinary relations with nationalism(s). Such a question considers how registers of disaffection might relate to ongoing participation in particular nationalist projects and fantasies, and opens up the possibility for approaching disaffections (such as boredom or indifference) as collective (national) affects that envelope and condition, rather than reducing disaffection to a matter of different individual attunements.

Aaron’s recollection of a moment of shame was just one small part of an interview on ‘everyday Brexits’ that contained a variety of contradictions. In this intervention, we have sought to foreground how such ambivalences pose challenges for how we research affective nationalisms and how we attend to the incoherence and inconsistencies of ‘nationalist affects’. In our concern for tracing how nationalist affects surface, fade and persist in ordinary spaces and situations – whether as shock, resonance, habit or something far less coherent – we want to push for alternative ways of telling stories about nationalism and the contemporary condition.