Ahmed blog

"Given that the event became an object that allowed certain forms of violence and detention of others in the name of defense, we need to ask: what role does security play in the affective politics of fear? Importantly, security is bound up with “the not”—what is “not me” or “not us,” as Michael Dillon has suggested. Security is not simply about securing a border that already exists, nor is fear simply a fear of what we are not. As I argued in the previous section, anxiety and fear create the very effect of borders, and the very effect of that which “we are not,” partly through how we turn away from the other, whom we imagine as the cause of our fear. Borders are constructed and indeed policed in the very feeling that they have already been transgressed: the other has to get too close, in order to be recognized as an object of fear, and in order for the object to be displaced. The transgression of the border is required in order for it to be secured as a border in the first place. This is why the politics of fear as well as hate is narrated as a border anxiety: fear speaks the language of “floods” and “swamps,” of being invaded by inappropriate others, against whom the nation must defend itself. We can reflect then on the ontology of insecurity within the constitution of the political: it must be presumed that things are not secure, in and of themselves, in order to justify the imperative to make things secure."

This kind of sounds like Brennan's backformation of the self-with-others as natural; we feel "alone" because we are normally packed into groups of people. My major problem with that kind of assumption is that we can also feel crowded, overexposed, which implies we have a normal state of aloneness from which we have been shaken -- we can be too strongly affected, to the point where it is uncomfortable.

Ahmed's point about borders is a compelling one, the kind that fills my liberal heart with little flowers and rainbows. Borders, in and of themselves, challenge crossing and define difference; borders are the difference in and of themselves. Without borders, we all slide together in a big happy heterogenous soup of difference.

The problem with the happy soup for me is that each person is aware of the naturalness of borders, or their apparent naturalness. Each person comes equipped with an internal observer, who, no matter how much independence seems socialized, appears to be inborn. Psychologists theorize the crap out of when this separation of self from the mother must happen, but everyone knows that it does. Artificial or not, we construct a border or run across a border very young, and everybody does it.

What is the difference between nature and culture at this point? Can any state be said to be "normal" or "natural" for a human? Brennan suggests that humans naturally affect each other and clump together, but our reliance on visual information and habit keep us thinking of ourselves as separate. Ahmed suggests that borders are fake, with the implicit second statement that removal of these borders removes the tension of difference. But people construct or are equipped with an internal observer in order to relieve the tension of togetherness -- couldn't borders be constructed to relieve a tension we don't have as much academic contact with, the tension of unity?

One of the most difficult things for many academic writers, especially feminist writers, to do is shut up about themselves and truly commit their writing and scholarship to the unified betterment of mankind. Unsurprisingly, most writers actually want to talk a whole lot about themselves, and for feminists this often translates to pretending your essay about your experience in grad school is some kind of embodied metaphor for globalization. Everyone knows, somewhere, that this isn't coalitional academic activism, but publishing these kinds of essays allows feminist scholars to relieve themselves of the pressure of being all women, writing for all women, researching for a selfless greater good. It lets them grab a substitute for the individual achievement everyone seems to crave in one form or another as soon as they're born. Everyone's seen the episode of Friends where Phoebe discovers that she only likes doing charity because it makes her feel good, makes her the center of attention. Rather than humans tending towards oneness and constructing borders, or the traditional route of tending towards borders and bringing ourselves toward unity, what if the "natural" state for everyone is balance?

I have problems with the idea of the "natural" for an intelligent species. I don't think there's any way you can say what's natural for a human to do, because our habitat, our lives, are unnatural in the way we normally think of nature. No state of nature like that suggested by John Locke can really exist for humans, because we spontaneously organize. If we're not the strongest, we find ways to make ourselves valuable to our communities. Theology, medicine, and voodoo all become natural survival adaptations as much as they are cultural constructions, because they're how we make our living.

I think this is the root of why I don't like it when Brennan and Ahmed suggest that if we could list a little more toward one side, we'd be better off because it would be more "natural." There is no human natural except that which each person negotiates half by himself and half with his community; trying to define it for everyone is obviously going to make nearly everyone feel desperately unnatural.