The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Chapter 1’s focus text is excerpted from a Christian Aid fundraising letter about landmines. In her analysis of this letter, Ahmed explores the power relationships involved when pain is used in public discourse. Ahmed argues that the language used when pain is invoked to motivate audiences depends on a system of signs that highlight the suffering of bodies while obscuring the active agents of this suffering. Further, this language encourages the audience to appropriate the pain of others and transform it into a personal sadness that is sympathetic without being empathetic. Ahmed points out how the letter promises a kind of empowerment to its readers, who will experience release from their pain through the action of supporting Christian Aid and through identification with the charity’s ability to effect change. The Christian Aid letter, argues Ahmed, is one example of a larger tradition of Western elision of histories of reciprocity: It casts the Western audience in the role of the generous benefactor who can choose to alleviate suffering without acknowledging the ways in which the West’s riches accrue from that very suffering.

Because pain is subjective and contextual, Ahmed is more concerned with what pain does than what it is. She explores the idea of pain as a force of “intensification.” She deploys the Freudian argument that the ego and a sense of individuality form when perceptions of bodily sensations such as pain identify the skin as a boundary of the self, mediating the relationship between the internal and the external. What the presence of sensations and impressions creates—the sense of self—the absence of sensations and impressions can destroy. It is almost as if the body itself vanishes from one’s perception in the absence of these stimuli, but “[t]he intensity of feelings like pain recalls us to our body surfaces: pain seizes me back to my body” (Location 670 of 6419). Pain is experienced as something external invading the self; when there is no obvious physical object involved, people often create metaphors of the physical, as when someone says that betrayal is like a knife in the back or speaks of a metaphorical wound when describing emotional pain. An attempt to move away from or eliminate pain is an attempt to reestablish the border between internal and external.

Pain, like other emotions, is both a recognition of a particular affective state and an interpretation of that state through the lens of memory:

[T]he sensation of pain is deeply affected by memories: one can feel pain when reminded of past trauma by an encounter with another. Or if one has a pain one might search one’s memories for whether one has had it before, differentiating the strange from the familiar (Location 641 of 6419).

Thinking about pain generally includes a consideration of cause and an attribution of responsibility, and one’s thinking about these can also be influenced by past experiences and memory. Different forms of touch are interpreted differently according to one’s beliefs about the characteristics of the other doing the touching, and one’s beliefs about the other can also be influenced by perceptions that the other causes pain.

Because pain reinforces the feeling of separateness, a common response to pain is the desire to reach out to others and have one’s pain understood by them. Inherently lonely, pain motivates one to seek social connection, placing others in the position of witness to an event they actually cannot fully understand. Ahmed gives an example from when she was a child witnessing but not truly comprehending her mother’s pain from what was then believed to be multiple sclerosis. She points out how love made her want to connect with her mother and share her pain. This illustrates that empathy for those in pain is ultimately illusory: Ahmed’s desire only reinforces the distinction between them, because her mother is the one in pain, and what Ahmed feels is not that same pain but only a willingness to share it. Despite this stance, Ahmed does not want to discount the possibility that people can remain open to feelings they do not fully understand or share. She suggests that ethically responding to others’ pain may actually require this openness. The frustration of trying to comprehend others’ pain highlights the unknowability of the self’s pain to others, potentially motivating further openness and a willingness to act to diminish others’ pain despite a lack of complete understanding.

The final section of Chapter 1 deals with the political utility of pain. Ahmed introduces a version of Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, agreeing that basing identity on a wound and creating a reactive politics around injury is problematic. She adds that this is a form of fetishization, erasing the location of a wound in a specific time and space; further, it opens some sufferers up to exploitation by a global marketplace that commodifies suffering as a spectacle. It reinforces pre-existing power structures when those with privileged voices can manipulate this system to compensate their own perceived suffering while others are ignored—as when white males claim harm from social changes distributing privilege more equally. Ahmed’s solution to this problem is not, like Nietzsche, to insist that the wounded forget their own suffering but for the larger society to recognize the specifics of injuries to both individuals and communities and redress those that genuinely deserve redress.

As an example of one attempt at this process, Ahmed discusses the 1996 report Bringing Them Home, which is part of Australia’s investigation into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families from their children. Although the report offers a chance for individual Indigenous people to detail their pain, Ahmed notes that those responsible for that pain are not individually asked to account for their part in the suffering. The stories of the Indigenous are appropriated into a “national” pain and used to invoke a sense of shame that implicitly identifies the nation as white and non-Indigenous. It suggests that the incorporation of Indigenous people into this white collective can lift the burden of this shame. Ahmed suggests that despite these flaws, the report can have utility for responsible readers who remember that Indigenous pain is not their pain and who maintain openness as they work to understand. She demonstrates by recounting in detail her own reading of one testimony within the report.