Ty Solomon

‘I wasn't angry, because I couldn't believe it was happening’: Affect and discourse in responses to 9/11

While the recent interest in affects and emotions in world politics is encouraging, the crucial relationships between affect, emotion, and discourse have remained largely under-examined. This article offers a framework for understanding the relations between affect and discourse by drawing upon the theories of Jacques Lacan. Lacan conceptualises affect as an experience which lies beyond the realm of discourse, yet nevertheless has an effect upon discourse. Emotion results when affects are articulated within discourse as recognisable signifiers. In addition, Lacanian theory conceptualises affect and discourse as overlapping yet not as coextensive, allowing analyses to theoretically distinguish between discourses which become sites of affective investment for audiences and those that do not. Thus, analysing the mutual infusion of affect and discourse can shed light on why some discourses are more politically efficacious than others. The empirical import of these ideas is offered in an analysis of American affective reactions to 11 September 2001.

The affective underpinnings of soft power

The concept of soft power occupies a prominent place in International Relations, foreign policy, and security studies. Primarily developed by Joseph S. Nye, the concept is typically drawn upon to emphasize the more intangible dimensions of power in a field long dominated by overtly material (i.e. military) power. Recently, some scholars have reframed soft power — specifically the key notion of attraction — as a narrative and linguistic process. This literature, however, has downplayed some of the other deep-seated underpinnings of soft power, which this article argues lie in the dynamics of affect. Building upon the International Relations affect and aesthetics literatures, this article develops the concept of soft power as rooted in the political dynamics of emotion and introduces the concept of affective investment. The attraction of soft power stems not only from its cultural influence or narrative construction, but more fundamentally from audiences’ affective investments in the images of identity that it produces. The empirical import of these ideas is offered in an analysis of the construction of American attraction in the war on terror.

Micro-moves in International Relations theory

This article posits empirical and political reasons for recent ‘micro-moves’ in several contemporary debates, and seeks to further develop them in future International Relations studies. As evidenced by growing trends in studies of practices, emotions and the everyday, there is continuing broad dissatisfaction with grand or structural theory’s value without ‘going down’ to ‘lower levels’ of analysis where structures are enacted and contested. We suggest that empirics of the last 15 years — including the war on terror and the Arab Spring — have pushed scholars into increasingly micropolitical positions and analytical frameworks. Drawing upon insights from Gilles Deleuze, William Connolly and Henri Lefebvre, among others, we argue that attention to three issues — affect, space and time — hold promise to further develop micropolitical perspectives on and in International Relations, particularly on issues of power, identity and change. The article offers empirical illustrations of the analytical purchase of these concepts via discussion of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring uprisings.

WMD, WMD, WMD: Securitisation through ritualised incantation of ambiguous phrases

We seek to reinvigorate and clarify the Copenhagen Schools insight that ‘security’ is not ‘a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance [‘security’] itself is the act’. We conceptualise the utterances of securitising actors as consisting not in arguments so much as in repetitive spouting of ambiguous phrases (WMD, rogue states, ethnic cleansing). We further propose that audience acceptance consists not in persuasion so much as in joining the securitising actors in a ritualised chanting of the securitising phrase. Rather than being performed to, the audience participates in the performance in the manner in which a crowd at a rock concert sings along with the artists. We illustrate our argument with a discussion of how the ritualised chanting of the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ during the run-up to the Iraq War ultimately produced the grave Iraqi threat that it purportedly described.

‘Affect is what states make of it: Articulating everyday experiences of 9/11′

This article considers the politics of affect and official discourses of ‘9/11’. Drawing on the work of William Connolly and others, it is argued that to understand the resonance of dominant constructions of ‘9/11’ it is necessary to revisit their successful incorporation of prevalent American affective experiences of September 11th. To date, this relationship between affect, resonance, and discourse has been underexplored in International Relations. Its investigation offers important empirical insights on resonance, as well as theoretical innovation in connecting established work on narrative and discourse with emerging work on bioculture and affect. To this end, the article introduces a framework for the future analysis of affect, culture and discourse within International Relations. The article concludes, however, that, notwithstanding its importance to resonance, in ‘crisis’ situations such as ‘9/11’, affect is what states make of it.

Social Logics and Normalisation in the War on Terror

Many have noted how the Bush administration’s linking of Iraq to the war on terror lent a certain degree of legitimacy to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Few scholars who have noted this linkage, however, have theorised about the specific discursive mechanisms that allowed Iraq to be incorporated and normalised within the war on terror. This article utilises the theoretical framework of Ernesto Laclau to analyse how ‘Iraq’ was (re)constructed as a threat through the war on terror. The productive power of the discourses constructing ‘Iraq’ is examined in the wording of poll questions as sites of reproduction and naturalisation of the dominant understandings of Iraq and the war on terror. Rather than tools used to measure public opinion that exists independently of them, this article argues that polls are better viewed as vehicles through which foreign policy and security discourses are stabilised and naturalised.

Resonances of neoconservatism

Since 2003, scholars and pundits alike have vigorously debated the role of neoconservatism in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq. Few, however, have examined the power of neoconservatism in terms of its resonance on an affective level. To more fully understand the influence that neoconservatism has had in recent US foreign policy debates, this article argues that scholarly analyses should also examine what could be termed its discursive efficacy. Neoconservatism incorporates many images and symbols of what many Americans would consider as being ‘American’, and the affective force of this discourse is vital in understanding its resonance with audiences. Employing insights from psychoanalytic theory, this article argues that a critically under-examined aspect of neoconservatism’s varying influence on US foreign policy debates is found in the kinds of identifications that it offers audiences. The article, in this sense, contributes to the growing literature on neoconservatism, and raises the under-explored issue of resonance for the study of security discourses.

Norms and human rights in international relations

The three volumes on human rights reviewed here constitute the first wave of in-depth case studies of human rights from a constructivist approach in international relations. By acknowledging the theoretical contributions of these works, identifying their shortcomings and engaging in critiques of the authors’ conceptions of identity and norms, this article provides direction for future studies on human rights through the constructivist framework.

Attachment, tautology, and ontological security

Three days after the attacks of 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush stood atop the still smouldering remains of the World Trade Center in New York. Although he had a megaphone in hand, some in the crowd shouted that they could not hear him. Seizing the moment, the president answered, ‘I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.’ The ‘crowd roared with approval,’ CNN (2001) reported, and responded with a booming chant of ‘U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A.’ The power of such collective expression was also on display on 25 January 2011 in Cairo – the first day of the Egyptian uprising. The first day of protests featured repeated chanting of thawra: thawra hatta an-nasr; thawra fi Tunis; thawra fi Masr – ‘Revolution until victory; revolution in Tunisia; revolution in Egypt.’ As Al Ahram (2011) news reported, ‘With these words, Egyptians broke the fear barrier and took to the streets, empowered by Tunisia’s uprising.’ What insights regarding emotions, politics, and security may be gleaned from these two very different scenes? In one sense, there is little question that both of these events were saturated in a variety of emotions – both likely to be a mix of fear, anger, hope, and others. Such public performances work to unite a multitude of people whose differences may, in fact, be many, yet the collective chanting of such time-honored political symbols (‘U-S-A,’ ‘Revolution’) constructs the appearance of unity. In this sense, the collective expression of the words themselves have an emotional binding power able to propel massive political changes – whether it be foreign military intervention or toppling a government. It is precisely in this relationship between words and our attachment to such words where scholars of Security Studies may wish to further interrogate to pursue the study of emotions. For such commanding symbols point to more than discursive power alone. They also produce the emotional glue that often holds together collectives, and thus goes to the heart of what scholars have recently called ontological security, or security of the self (Mitzen 2006; Steele 2008). To be sure, scholars of Security Studies have been attentive to the power of language in recent years and even to the power of words to tie together a range of meanings while remaining largely undefined (Hansen 2006). Yet, as these two scenes illustrate, there is often more bound up with signifiers such as ‘U-S-A’ and ‘revolution’ than discursive condensation. Indeed, such terms are often the selfreferential linguistic walls past which further clarifications of policy and self cannot be articulated, and thus likely play a role in ontological security practices. For Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek, these kinds of symbols play a key role in ontological security precisely because they are often the sites in which subjects are most affectively devoted. Butler, for

WMD: The Career of a Concept

The danger posed by “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) was the Bush administrations chief justification for invading Iraq. Amid the din of the chorus that ceaselessly repeated this phrase in 2002–2003, hardly anyone stopped to ask: what is “WMD” anyway? Is it not a mutable social construct rather than a timeless, self-evident concept? Guided by Nietzsches view of the truth as a “mobile army of metaphors [and] metonyms… which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,” we present a history of the metonym WMD. We describe how it was coined by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1937, and subsequently how its meaning was “transposed” and “enhanced” throughout Cold War arms negotiations, in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and in US domestic law. We also discuss how, in the run-up to the Iraq war, “WMD” did not merely describe an Iraqi threat; it was rather “embellished poetically and rhetorically” in ways that produced and inflated the threat.