In her 2004 Social Text article, Sara Ahmed argues for an understanding of the social placement of emotions. Rather than view emotions as the private domain of individuals, Ahmed sees them as circulating between bodies and signs. Emotions enable communication between individuals and collectivities through a process she calls “surfacing.” She explicitly rejects the idea that emotions originate within a person or that they are manifested on the person’s interior. Instead, the author shows that emotions are instrumental in creating the exteriors and boundaries of bodies located within the material world. In other words, emotions do things.
Beginning by analyzing a quotation from an Aryan Nations web site, Ahmed addresses “love” and “hate” as particularly important emotions in both establishing the idea of a person and a nation as explicitly white and exploiting the idea that such a white person is threatened by “imagined others” who can take away what belongs to them or replace them entirely—a threat to the self or the “object of love.” She emphasizes that these contrasts of love and hate are embodied in both personhood and nationhood. Hate is an emotion that binds “the imagined white subject and nation together.”
Ahmed explains the meaning of “economics” along with her definition of “affect.” She uses the term “economies” not just for financial or monetary relations but, more broadly, for a system of values in which ideas or objects are circulated. The affective economy, in sum, is the system of circulation of “signifiers in relationships of difference or displacement.” Other important concepts that she explores are the function of emotions as “binding” people together. This is divided into “sticking” individuals to each other, or “adherence,” and by extension holding a number of people into a collective unit, or “coherence.”
“Economies of hate,” she elaborates, depend on “sticking”. The “backward” motion or historicizing of emotions makes them seem eternal and therefore natural. Closely related is “sliding,” the “sideways” motion by which emotions expand in the present and thereby apply to ever-larger numbers of people. Further elaborating the “economies” idea, she shows its derivation from the Marxist logic of capital: a thing gains in value through circulation. For emotions, circulation encourages people to invest in a concept because it is shared by others. This explains how hate may gain more value than other emotions not perceived as shared. Ahmed carefully notes that her understanding of emotions is distinct from that of psychoanalysis, as she does not identify this economic as psychic. An emotion cannot exist independently in the unconscious; it can only exist through shared identification with others who understand it in the same terms.
“Fear” is another crucial emotion that she explores along with “hate.” They are closely related in their social economic distribution. By associating particular characteristics with classes and nationalities of people, especially by race, “fear” becomes a justification for “hate” as a rejection of belonging. Here she effectively quotes Frantz Fanon, who wrote about the exploitation of fear of blackness through the characterization of emotion as linked to bodily function. The “sideways” and “backwards” motions are connected here as well, in that objects of fear become substituted for each other over time.
Ahmed further explores these ideas in her 2004 book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
https://books.google.com/books?id=fotjDwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/55780
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