Attack of the Affect Theory Reader! (Holy theory, batman!)

Assignment: Analyze something you encounter in everyday life using theoretical resources from these readings.

This week we read several selections from Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth's Affect Theory Reader, including articles by Sarah Ahmed, Elpsforth Probyn, and Lauren Berlant, as well as the editors' introduction and an afterword by anthropologist Kathleen Stewart. Since applications dominated my thoughts and feelings this past year, applications is what I shall write about.  I've also been particularly intrigued by the affect that circulates on thegradecafe forums, so this is a chance for me to start using that virtual space as a point of analysis.

Looking from the outside in (not having done it before), one might think that the PhD application process is most stressful during the preparation of one's application materials.  However, the portion of the application process in which one is waiting to hear back from schools with their decisions is a time that is really undercut by affective relations.  The "Writing Shame" article really spoke to me, when she talked about embodying her writing practice; though it's not a perfect parallel—Probyn is talking about trauma and shame—I found that my body too "contorted itself."  I ground my teeth and tightened my hands into fists at night, and found myself unconciously clenching my jaw during the day.  It is this period of waiting that is most strongly punctuated by, driven by, and filled with affective relations.

The end goal—perhaps we might say, the end happiness, or the delightful thing we are working toward—of the PhD application process is to get into a program, any program, a good program.  While one is preparing an application packet, this feels controllable; something we can work toward (so in this stage, the happiness of acceptance becomes our "reward for hard work" [30]).  But once applications have been sent in, it feels much more like something that just happens to us—the "hap" of happy, being favored by fortune.  In other words, preparing the application feels like work toward a goal, but waiting to hear back about decisions feels like an inbetween-ness, a place just governed by waiting and its attendant emotions that feels out of our control.

Even the end itself, of an acceptance to a program, can be broken down further, again using Sarah Ahmed.  The acceptance is the object that becomes "good" because it points us toward intellectual fulfillment, a possible future career; validation of our intellect and abilities; acceptance, and the feeling of being desired; prestige and social capital; and so on.

Ahmed says, "It has always interested me that when we become concious of feeling happy (when the feeling becomes an object of thought), happiness can often recede or become anxious" (33).  This is something that I often witnessed on an online graduate student forum (thegradecafe.com), a virtual space that absolutely swirls with affect.  Even now, after most admissions decisions have been made, there are threads circulating with titles like, "Does anyone feel like they made the WRONG choice?" and "How bad is it? - I feel like I am making the biggest mistake of my life ever!"  The affects that attended the final end goal, the final happiness of getting accepted to a good program, were also coating with anxiety.  Users express depressing with the changes that will come with pursuing their dream: some express regret at losing a relationship with a significant other who won't move, while others are simply anxious and overwhelmed by all of the changes that will come from such a shift.  In the thread "Big Move to Grad School: Exciting or Depressing to Move Long Distances?" the original poster says, "I had to move a really long distance once in the last five years, and the idea of making a second really long distance move to a different part of the country is seriously depressing me."

While on one hand we can easily point toward these anxieties as natural by-products of such a life change, I feel as though the grad cafe users who express anxiety after achieving their happiness are also suffering from a sort of "cruel optimism": Berlant defines her term as

a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. What's cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being; because whatever the content of the attacment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject's sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. (94)   

Berlant says that sometimes it's less about the object itself, and more about the investment we have in the objects, and the ways we project onto them, that keeps us attached to them.  It's the desire.  Perhaps all optimism is cruel, Berlant says, because we'll always fear losing it, and losing the continuity it brought to our lives. All of this can work on the object of the PhD acceptance: sometimes some people get so invested in achieving it that they forget if they even want it anymore.

Or, perhaps it's the "not yet" of affect: the acceptance to a PhD program is an object that will point them toward happiness, but it does not yet.  Right now it means change, stress, leaving family and friends.  It will eventually mean all of those good things I listed earlier like fulfillment and career, but it does not mean those things yet.  A PhD acceptance, for these people, remains a promise.