Attention under repair: asceticism from self-care to care of the self

This essay examines the contemporary mindfulness movement as a cultural response to a larger problem of attention in the United States. As raw material for both capital (re)production and subjectivity, attention is a zone of indeterminacy and struggle for workers in a so-called immaterial economy. This essay suggests that the rise of concern around “paying attention” from the 1950s onward is driven by post-Fordist labor requirements more than networked technologies. First, it examines mindfulness as a technique of attention management for businesses and gives a broad survey of its current popularity and prevalence in US culture. Second, it proposes viewing techniques of attention like mindfulness through a triple lens of repair: (1) as managerial tools to repair psychic labor capacity for capital; (2) as practices that subjects use to repair alienation; and (3) as sites for reparative reading. Third, the essay illuminates the ties between Eve Sedgwick’s repair and Michel Foucault’s care of the self in order to suggest that resistance to practicing the self is founded on a paranoid defense. Its central argument is that attention is a method in Foucault's care of the self, and, as such, a potential portal into pleasure and political change rather than a mere feedback loop into capital.     

First-Year College Student Affect and Alcohol Use: Paradoxical Within- and Between-Person Associations

Based on 10 weekly telephone interviews with first-year college students (N=202; 63% women; M=18.8 years, SD=.4), within- and between-person associations of positive and negative affect with alcohol use were examined. Multi-level models confirmed hypothesized within-person associations between weekly positive affect and alcohol use: Higher positive affect weeks had greater alcohol consumption, more drinking and heavy drinking days in the same week, and less plans to drink the following week. However, between-person, average positive affect did not predict individual differences in alcohol use. The negative affect—alcohol use association was complex: Within-person, higher negative affect was associated with less drinking days but between-person, with more drinking days; lability in negative affect was associated with greater average alcohol use and more drinking and heavy drinking days. Health promotion efforts for late adolescent and emerging adult students are advised to recognize these paradoxical effects (e.g., promoting dry celebratory campus-events, strategies to manage negative mood swings).

The Gender Ethics and Politics of Affection: The ‘Feminine’Melodramatic Mode in Walter Salles' Central do Brasil (1998)

This article reads Walter Salles's Central do Brasil (1998) through a reappraisal of the film's relationship to melodrama in order to emphasise the significance of the association of affect with ethical judgment in thinking about the complex and contradictory gender politics of the film, thereby challenging the conventional tension between pathos and logos. Using a number of filmic and psychoanalytic theories, this article argues that Central do Brasil's melodramatic search for a ‘space of innocence’ in the Sertão could offer less a nostalgic return to anachronistic forms of living than a survival strategy for living in late modernity. Finally, this article argues that Central do Brasil, while lamenting the state's withdrawal from the public sphere, calls for an ethical imperative that is associated with a ‘feminine’ responsible and generous capacity to embrace the other as a necessary form of social and political action for the redefining of citizenship in Brazilian neoliberal society.     

Journeys to the limits of first-hand knowledge: politicians’ on-site visits in zones of conflict and intervention

ABSTRACT

This article explores the practice and political significance of politicians’ journeys to conflict zones. It focuses on the German example, looking at field trips to theatres of international intervention as a way of first-hand knowledge in policymaking. Paying tribute to Lisa Smirl and her work on humanitarian spaces, objects and imaginaries and on liminality in aid worker biographies, two connected arguments are developed. First, through the exploration of the routinized practices of politicians’ field trips the article shows how these journeys not only remain confined to the ‘auxiliary space’ of aid/intervention, but that it is furthermore a staged reality of this auxiliary space that most politicians experience on their journeys. The question is then asked, second, what politicians actually experience on their journeys and how their experiences relate to their policy knowledge about conflict and intervention. It is shown that political field trips enable sensory/affectual, liminoid and liminal experiences, which have functions such as authority accumulation, agenda setting, community building, and civilizing domestic politics, while at the same time reinforcing, in most cases, pre-existing conflict and intervention imaginaries.     

Procedural Justice,Outcome Favorability and Emotion

This study investigated the effects of procedural justice on discrete emotional responses. Based upon the cognitive appraisal model of emotion, it was argued that the experience of procedural justice (or injustice) allows individuals to derive meaning from favorable and unfavorable allocation decisions. Thus, procedural justice works with outcome favorability to produce a variety of emotional states. These ideas were tested in a laboratory experiment. As predicted, two happiness-related emotions (happiness and joy) and a sadness-related emotion (disappointment) showed only a main effect for outcome favorability. Two anger-related emotions (anger and frustration) were highest when an unfavorable outcome occurred because of an unfair procedure. Higher levels of guilt and anxiety were reported when an unfair procedure resulted in a favorable outcome. Contrary to predictions, a third happiness-related emotion (pride) showed only a main effect for outcome favorability.     

The politics of affective citizenship: from Blair to Obama

Politicians have long mobilised emotion in order to gain voters' support. However, this article argues that the politics of affect is also implicated in how citizens' identities, rights and entitlements are constructed. Examples are drawn from the positions of UK, US, Canadian and Australian politicians, including Tony Blair, David Cameron, Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama. Emotions analysed include love, fear, anxiety, empathy and hope. The article argues for the importance of a concept of ‘affective citizenship’ which explores (a) which intimate emotional relationships between citizens are endorsed and recognised by governments in personal life and (b) how citizens are also encouraged to feel about others and themselves in broader, more public domains. It focuses on issues of sexuality, gender, race and religion, and argues that the politics of affect has major implications for determining who has full citizenship rights. The Global Financial Crisis has also seen the development of an ‘emotional regime’ in which issues of economic security are increasingly influencing constructions of citizenship.     

Beyond Rational Choice: the Hot/Cool Perspective of Criminal Decision Making

This paper proposes a general framework of criminal decision making that assumes both ‘cool’ cognition and ‘hot’ affect, i.e. feelings, to influence criminal choice. Drawing from judgment and decision making research and social psychology, the hot/cool perspective extends rational choice and deterrence theories by explaining how affect is likely to influence criminal decisions alongside cognitive considerations, such as the perceived costs and benefits of crime. It is shown how the hot/cool perspective offers a more realistic account of criminal decision making processes than existing decision models and approaches and also allows for the explanation of criminal behaviors that are difficult to explain in terms of rational choice.     

Binding: a resource for exploring interpersonal meaning in three-dimensional space

This paper takes an in-depth look at Binding, a recently theorised resource for analysing interpersonal meaning in three-dimensional space. Binding is concerned with the dialectic between affect and space. Extremes of Binding can evoke claustrophobic and agoraphobic responses to space, whereas median choices produce comfort zones of security or freedom. In considering how security and insecurity are experienced in the spatial realm, the paper also compares Binding with the resources language has for expressing similar meanings. While the examples used in this paper are drawn from the domestic sphere, Binding is relevant to spaces across an endless range of fields – the natural environment, schools, workplaces, retail sites, hospitals, museums – as well as virtual and literary spaces. It can be used to inform the design and analysis of all three-dimensional space – natural or built.     

“Trust your instincts – act!” PREVENT police officers’ perspectives of counter-radicalisation reporting thresholds

ABSTRACT

The UK PREVENT programme aims to address radicalisation by identifying and supporting “at risk” individuals that are deemed vulnerable to extremism. Central to this process is the willingness of professional practitioners to report information to authorities, a duty consolidated through the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. Despite this, little is known about the thresholds to report from a policing perspective. How risk performs beyond fixed indicators which pre-figure terrorism is also underexplored. This qualitative study provides insight into PREVENT police officers’ accounts of the reporting stage of PREVENT. A thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews identified the mobilisation of intelligence on the basis of “gut feelings” and “instinct”. Professional partners were encouraged to trust their own subjective judgements in the absence of observable risk indicators and tangible evidence. A simplified risk logic was said to provide several operational benefits, for example, aligning the PREVENT team with non-specialist actors. To unpack the data theoretically, this article is inspired by the “affective turn” in human and social sciences. Finally, the findings are supported by an examination of national counter-terrorism policing campaigns, PREVENT briefing documents, and Home Office initiatives. The key propositions have wider implications for policy and practice.