Theory as Communicative Practice: Ethics and affect
“If we conceive of theory as a purely analytical project then the dangers of cooption and complicity are extraordinary. So one needs to think both in terms of ethics and affect, and of course as soon as you introduce either of those then you’ve moved beyond a formal theoretical apparatus and you start to engage with creative artists in all kinds of extraordinary ways.
But you also engage with something else, it seems to me. I suppose there’s still enough of Marxist critical theory within me to hang on to that argument of Seyla Benhabib where she says that there are two theoretical environments which enable critical theory to redeem its promise. One she says is the explanatory diagnostic manner, which is a kind of analytical moment I’ve been talking about. So I can expose what happens in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, I can show how those two sites which the Bush Administration works so hard to prize apart are intimately connected. I can show analytically how the global war prison is folded into the larger project of the war on terror. But Benhabib says the other crucial moment which we seem to forget about is the anticipatory utopian moment. It seems to me that the anticipatory utopian moment is simply inconceivable without either ethics or affect. I’m using those as kind of simply-minded short-hand, but without people understanding that theory helps imagine a different world but of [sic] actually exploring the ethical implications of these alternative futures., without having people invest in that with a sense of hope and joy rather than simply despair and horror, then the anticipatory utopian moment is forever deferred.”
from “Affect, Ethics, and the Imaginative Geographies of Permanent War: An Interview with Derek Gregory” Theory & Event Volume 12, Issue 3, 2009
