From the initial stages of my fieldwork, I became aware of how the narratives of my participants were laden with emotion. I found myself drawn to the simple, yet provocative question posed by Ahmed: What do emotions do? (2004). I was wary, however, of any attempt to analyse people’s expressions of emotion, both overt and covert, without reducing their responses to the level of the individual. In attempting to locate my participants’ emotional responses as echoing something of the wider discourses in circulation, I looked towards theories of ‘affect.’ Feminist scholars, who understand emotions as ‘collaboratively constructed and historically situated’ rathe r than individualised phenomena (Boler, 1999:6) inform my understanding of emotion/affect.
My interest in affect draws inspiration from Walkerdine and colleagues’ study Growing Up Girl (2001), which provides a compelling analysis of how cultural and social processes are experienced affectively. When analysing how girls' fear of failure operates within the production of educational success, they suggest that this anxiety is ‘lived as psychic but it is produced socially and needs to be understood as profoundly psychosocial’ (Walkerdine et al., 2001:145). While we never enter an encounter or space without history or affect, the origins of our responses are often untraceable to us. An understanding of emotions as socially produced and negotiated in relation to the subject positions that are discursively available to us highlights the importance of exploring emotional investments in order to understand how social constructions becoming meaningful to people.
A turn towards theories of affect can help offer insight into ‘a realm beyond talk, words and texts, beyond epistemic regimes and beyond conscious representation and cognition’ (Wetherell, 2012:19). In exploring how emotions are both discursive and pre-discursive, Wetherell draws on the works of Burkitt (1997, 2002), who considers that emotions are not objects residing inside the self, but are relations to others, responses to situations and to the world. Burkitt argues that the available narratives to describe feelings realise the affect. What may begin as only inchoate can turn into an articulation, mentally organised and then expressed, in ways that connect with and reproduce particular power relations. Feelings, which are often in process and unarticulated, form
part of the ‘affective-volitional stream of everyday life that moves us to one end or another’
(Wetherell, 2012:24).
Sara Ahmed, who traces the word ‘emotion’ to its Latin roots, ‘emovere,’ meaning ‘to move, to move out’, takes up the idea of emotion as movement (2004:11). Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions located in individuals, emotions can be understood as forces which mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective (Ahmed, 2004:119). Ahmed’s idea of affective economies alerts us to how particular emotions circulate and are distributed across social and psychic fields, causing some signs to increase in affective value the more that they circulate. She demonstrates how language works as a form of power ‘in which emotions align some bodies with others, as well as stick different figures together, by the way they move us’ (2004:195). The material circumstances in which words are produced are lost, yet the traces of these contexts are carried through the words. As a result o f this disjuncture, emotions, as signs, appear natural, personal, and ahistorical. These signs ‘stick’ to bodies, shaping them and generating the material effects that they name, in ways that are performative. What is repressed from consciousness is not the feeling per se, but the idea to which the feeling may have been first connected (Ahmed, 2004:120).
When considering the lingering emotional implications of apartheid policies on South Africans today, Fanon’s (1967) concern with the psychopathology of colonisation and the individual, social, and cultural consequences of decolonisation has pertinence. With a background in psychiatry, Fanon was especially interested in racism’s psychological impact upon colonised peoples and colonising agents, and the mutual constitution of the coloniser and colonised. His work shows that bodies are shaped by histories of colonialism, which makes the world ‘white,’ a world which is ready for certain kinds of bodies and puts certain objects within their reach. Such histories s urface on the bodies of people, or even shape how bodies surface (Ahmed, 2004).
In this understanding, race is a social as well as bodily given; what we received from others as an inheritance of this history. For Marx, ‘human beings make their own history, but they do not make it arbitrarily in conditions chosen by themselves, but in conditions always-already given and inherited from the past’ (cited in Balibar, 2002:8). According to Ahmed (2007:154), such an inheritance can be considered in terms of orientations: we inherit the reachability of some objects, those that are ‘given’ to us, or at least made available to us, within the ‘what’ that is around. In the context of my research, and no doubt contexts elsewhere, ‘whiteness’ is an orientation that puts certain things within reach. This does not just include physical objects, but also ‘styles, capacities, techniques, habits and aspirations’ (Ahmed, 2007:154).
3.8 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have traced the different literature that has influenced the d irection of my thesis.
While there is not the space to include all the abandoned texts and returned library books, I have shown the importance of acknowledging the various work to have shaped the backdrop and foreground of my analysis. By engaging with scholarly critiques of the traditional, Western understanding of ‘youth transitions,’ my interpretation of transitions emphasises the importance of contextualising and historicising young people’s experiences, without inadvertently privileging or reifying certain trajectories over others (Morrow, 2013:98). This requires recognising aspiration as rooted in social, cultural and spatial inequalities and not as an individual disposition or psychological state (Kenway and Hickey-Moody, 2011). In moving away from a linear model of transitions towards
‘uncovering the complexity and ambiguity of youth transitions in post-colonial worlds’ (Christiansen, 2006:14), I have drawn upon poststructural approaches to subjectivity to help me explore how young people negotiate contradictory and multiple subject positions. This requires recognising that while subjectivity is an open-ended process, subjects are not constituted within a limitless horizon of possibility and race, class, gender and space, among other factors, remains p ertinent in shaping the available discourses through which young people imagine their futures.