Affective States

Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions

Mateusz Laszczkowski, Madeleine Reeves

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785337192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, political and social theory has been transformed by the heterogeneous approaches to feeling and emotion jointly referred to as 'affect theory'. These range from psychological and social-constructivist approaches to emotion to feminist and post-human perspectives. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and ethnographic contexts—from engineering in the Andes to household rituals in rural China, from South African land restitution to migrant living in Moscow, and from elections in El Salvador to online and offline surveillance among political refugees from Uzbekistan and Eritrea—the chapters in this volume interrogate this 'affective turn' through the lens of fine-grained ethnographies of the state. The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life.

Chapter 1

NEGOTIATING UNCERTAINTY

Neo-liberal Statecraft in Contemporary Peru

Annabel Pinker and Penny Harvey

The turn to ‘affect’ in anthropology embraces a range of possible avenues for empirical research, particularly with respect to the interest in exploring how to address ethnographic insights into embodied or sensory engagement, emotion, and feeling in ways that do not reinstate mind-body dichotomies or return us to individualized, internal, or psychological states of being. The question of how affect should be differentiated from the categories of feeling and emotion supports attempts to focus on the intersubjective (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009) or that which exceeds established meanings (Massumi 2002), as opposed to recognizable, conventional, narratable subjective experience. The affect concept thus appears to respond to the current analytical commitment to foregrounding the uncertain effects of relational practice and to balancing intentionality, reason, and belief with non-discursive or non-representational understandings of embodied practice. But the term is used in many different ways, its roots being diversely grounded in experimental psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and critical theory (Berlant 2011; Connolly 2002; Massumi 2002; Thrift 2008). With regard to political practice and state power, the dominant trend has perhaps been to extend Foucault’s interest in subject formation to how ‘states’ come to appear as autonomous agents and to the development of feelings, such as fear, hope, and desire, for or about ‘the state’.

Our interest in the analytical possibilities of affect goes in a somewhat different direction. We started with the political, that is, with relations of contestation and negotiation and with an ethnographic interest in the multiplicity, ambiguity, and distributed locus of the state in contemporary Peru. Here, as in other places, ‘the state’ is frequently invoked as a coherent and singular locus of power that variously bears down on or ignores local people, thus provoking emotional responses that range from disgust, despair, or desire to disinterest. However, both ‘the state’ and ‘affect’ are problematic starting points with respect to located fields of practice that are amenable to ethnographic study. We chose instead to explore regulatory practice as a site of creativity and experimentation. We were not looking at how people avoid regulation; rather, we were more interested in how regulatory ambiguity, inherent in a multiple and distributed state, becomes a site of opportunity. More specifically, we looked at how legal and technical norms emerged in relation to a newly created instance of the state, the regional government.

Throughout the twentieth century, projects of state formation in Peru have been enacted in response to the challenge of how to build a modern, national economy from the entrenched social, cultural, and geographical differences that mark the contours of this polity. Children are still taught at school to think in terms of three clearly demarcated ecological regions: the modern urban coastal deserts, the largely rural indigenous/peasant Andean highlands, and the more isolated and sparsely populated Amazonian lowlands. Children are also taught that Peru is a rich nation despite the poverty in which so many of its citizens live. Indeed, the poorest regions are rich in minerals and in oil. The Cusco region in which we have been working is also rich in tourism. It is among the world’s most favored destinations, the national industry centering on the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Machu Picchu, a fifteenth-century Inka settlement high in the Andes Mountains that escaped detection by invading Spanish forces.

Over the past two decades—subsequent to a prolonged civil war in which tens of thousands of people died, state institutions were weakened, and political parties all but disappeared—successive Peruvian governments have embraced neo-liberal economic policies, most notably ensuring favorable conditions for foreign capital investment and macro-economic growth. These policies are supported by lending institutions, such as the World Bank, which have also promoted a radical program of political decentralization. Our study of regional government is firmly located in this somewhat contradictory state space where the needs of macro-economic growth at the national level sit alongside a new commitment to regional autonomy. The regional governments, newly formed in 2004, intrigued us, as they are overtly experimental—new instances of the state where the possibilities of what state power might be, and what it might become in and through these spaces, are self-evidently in question. Much of this questioning arises from the fact that decentralization is highly partial: the regional state has only limited fiscal autonomy and no legislative or juridical power. And yet the regions have a moral power associated with their specific territoriality and the wealth generated from local resources, which is of particular significance in relation to mining, water, and tourism.

Our decision to focus on the regulatory force of legal and technical norms reflects the fact that one of the things that regional governments can do is administer public works. They can manage the funds assigned to them to develop their regions in ways that best meet the needs of local people. It is through the management of projects and the facilitation of local ownership of such projects that the regional government acquires material, cultural, and political legitimacy. In managing public works, the regional state works through the deployment of technical expertise. However, the conditions for managing such projects are set externally—not simply by the national government, but also by international regulations and normative procedures that are part and parcel of the financial and legal arrangements to which the central state is committed as part of its strategy to attract foreign investment. In short, we have been particularly interested in tracking how political creativity and skill rests in large part on the capacity to engage the possibilities inherent in the regulatory apparatus of the state.

Our project contributes to a growing body of scholarly work that has sought to unsettle conceptualizations of the state as a singular, rational, and stable entity. Anthropologists have drawn attention to the difficulty of distinguishing ‘the state’ among “an excess of statehood practices” (Aretxaga 2005: 258), suggesting with Foucault that the complex and overlapping forms of government that have emerged with neo-liberal configurations of power have rendered the duality of state and non-state inadequate as an analytical tool (Rose 1999; Rose and Miller 1992). We have taken up the possibilities that ethnographic methods afford to approach the state as a configuration of dispersed and flexible practices, while continuing to recognize the power of state imaginaries. In this way, we have attended to the uses of documents (Kelly 2006; Poole 2004; Riles 2006; Tarlo 2001), infrastructures (Collier 2011; Harvey 2005; Lampland and Star 2009), and the troubling margins between signifier and signified, legibility and illegibility, the real and the magical in those spaces where state power gathers force (Das 2004; Poole 2004; Taussig 1992, 1997; Tsing 2004). These approaches to the state emphasize ambivalence and uncertainty, arguing that state power is reproduced through practices that are less than coherent or fully rationalized, emerging rather as shifting, illegible, decentered, contingent, or capricious. It is here that we return to affect and recent interest in a political anthropology that sets out to explore the force of uncertainty and ambiguity in the constitution of political life (see, e.g., Berlant 2011; Navaro-Yashin 2007, 2012; Nuijten 2003; Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009).

In this regard, we have found William Mazzarella’s approach to affect particularly useful. Mazzarella’s (2010: 299) suggestion that “any social project that is not imposed through force alone must be affective in order to be effective” speaks very directly to our research concerns. His study of the affective explores the relationship between ‘intensity’ and ‘qualification’. By ‘intensity’ he is referring to corporeal or visceral sensation that is indeterminate, as yet unformed—a force that moves without intention or explicit articulation. ‘Qualification’, by contrast, is the field of representation, the particular force of meaning, of determinacy, of articulation. Yet rather than identifying affect with one side of this binary, in terms of ‘intensity’ as opposed to ‘qualification’, he argues that it is in the tension between them—between virtuality and actualization in more Deleuzian terms—that power is manifest as the capacity to move, “to harness our attention, our engagement, and our desire” (ibid.: 299). In the ethnographic case that we present here, we aim to show how this relation plays out in practice. More specifically, we seek to show how this charged movement between intensity and qualification allows us to approach the regulatory and the technical as sites in and through which the modern state is at once consolidated and undone.

The ethnographic task of tracking the implicit is complex. Fieldwork takes a long time because it takes a while to know about the many things that are left unsaid, either because they are too obvious or because they are as yet unformulated. One of the most common criticisms of studying affect ethnographically refers to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of empirically tracking and interpreting the movement of affects through the gestures, facial expressions, mood shifts, glances, and host of other micro-exchanges that animate them. A gesture or a tone of voice might imply a particular disposition or mood—or perhaps not. Yet such variability is only an accentuation of the uncertainties that permeate most ethnographic work. Our concern here is not to defend the empirical validity of studying affect, for this could imply that empiricism should be seen as anthropology’s highest aim. Rather, we argue that a focus on affect troubles anthropological claims to empiricism by calling attention anew to the intrinsically relational, and by extension uncertain, quality of the ethnographic method. This defining attribute of ethnography continually vexes any attempt to finally disentangle what we think we know about others from the worlds we inhabit ourselves (see also the introduction to this book). In focusing squarely on the gestures, involuntary flinches, moods, and other fleshy micro-phenomena that have always figured more or less explicitly in ethnographic work but have tended to go unnamed, affect returns us to this question of how we purport to ‘know’ what others know, and what counts as anthropological knowledge. Instead of attempting to demonstrate how the study of affective practices may be made to comply with empiricist demands, then, we argue that the turn to affect is helpful precisely in offering a renewed emphasis on what has always been characteristic of ethnographic work: that its ‘findings’ are crafted out of fields of doubt and indeterminacy.

In what follows, we have tried to address these issues by setting out what we learned about the framing of one particular public works project. We then move to discuss how this framing was no guarantor of meaning; on the contrary, it provided the grounds for experimentation, anxiety, and possibility. We elaborate two examples that problematize any stable dichotomization between emotion and affect, qualification and intensity. Rather, we show how the state appears in a space that teeters between determinacy and indeterminacy, between the stable certainties promised by regulatory frameworks and the doubts generated through their ambiguities and overlaps. Engaging Andrew Barry’s (2002: 270) point that an action is political to the extent that it opens up the possibility of disagreement, we use these examples to show that the state does not emerge via the resolution or arbitration of uncertainty. Instead, it is a highly political space, a field of negotiation in which outcomes are hard to discern, where care, tact, and skill—and attention to emerging possibilities—are what it takes to effectively invoke and/or embody the state. In this sense, we suggest that while state power has stabilizing effects, these effects are arrived at as a consequence of the affective force of ambiguity and uncertainty.

A Contested Technical Study: Plans for the Ollantaytambo Bypass

In 2005, Peru’s Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism, MINCETUR, took out a loan of $4.8 million from the World Bank to finance the Vilcanota Valley Rehabilitation and Management Project, which was geared broadly toward improving environmental, touristic, and economic conditions in what is known as the Sacred Valley, that is, the area between Machu Picchu and the city of Cusco. In 2009, after MINCETUR had failed to make any headway with the venture, the Bank restructured the loan, diverting some 60 percent of the project components to the regional government of Cusco. This was the first time that the World Bank had granted authority for its funds to be administered by a regional government in Peru. The relationship was consolidated in May 2011 with the signing of an agreement to finance a second stage of the Vilcanota Project, this time via a direct loan of around 100 million US dollars to the regional government.

As initially conceived, the project’s planned activities consisted of implementing visitor centers in the Sacred Valley, designing studies for the rehabilitation of archaeological sites, setting up a regional solid waste management system, undertaking the resettlement of households vulnerable to flooding below Machu Picchu, carrying out engineering and environmental assessments and investments in urban infrastructure, training local tourism service providers, formulating urban and rural land use plans, and offering capacity building for municipalities. In 2009, when the project was restructured and the regional government gained control of more than half of its components, a number of revisions were made. These included the insertion of a proposal to fund a technical study for the construction of a road bypass around the village of Ollantaytambo, the site of one of the most significant archaeological complexes in the region and currently also the primary embarkation point for the train that takes tourists to Machu Picchu itself.

The commitment of funds for the technical study reflected long-held anxieties about the increasing traffic through the village. Ollantaytambo is not only a key tourist destination, but also a bottleneck for interprovincial trade between lowland provinces and the departmental capital of Cusco. Heavy freight lorries currently pass through the heart of Ollantaytambo, and there are concerns that the vibrations are damaging the foundations of the Inkan-built platform that supports the archaeological complex, quite apart from the mundane dangers that heavy traffic poses to local people and to tourists. The aim of the proposed bypass was thus to resolve the problem by diverting traffic around the platform. The Tourism Ministry, based in Lima, was charged with contracting an engineering consulting firm to draw up the technical study, and in July 2009 a Peruvian-Spanish consortium, CPS-INECO, was selected for the task.

The study elicited and condensed a whole range of regulatory ambiguities, which will be examined in more detail below. However, it is also important to emphasize from the start that it was not in any way a lack of regulation that generated the problems we discuss. On the contrary, it was instead the complexity—surfeit, even—of institutional and regulatory presence that laid the grounds for the experimental engagements that this project exemplified. World Bank projects are highly structured, and this case was no exception. A great deal of effort was invested in elaborating the normative frameworks and the lines of responsibility. A lengthy document detailing the terms of reference for the study was drawn up with the participation of a wide range of stakeholders, including the municipality of Ollantaytambo. The document specified that the contractor of the technical study, and thereby its key executor, was MINCETUR, the Tourism Ministry. The Transport Ministry had institutional responsibility for declaring the project viable in technical terms. However, other aspects also had to be considered. The Culture Ministry would have to approve the archaeological study evaluating the likely impact of the planned road on the archaeological complex. Furthermore, both the local state (the municipality of Ollantaytambo) and the regional state (the regional government of Cusco) would have to consent to the proposals made by the technical study, indicating in this way the social viability of the project. In addition, the terms of reference specified that several layers of supervision would be put in place in order to ensure the project’s compliance with the environmental and social safeguards required by both the World Bank and Peruvian state law. Meanwhile, a team responsible for overseeing the project in terms of World Bank safeguards was to be based in Cusco’s regional government. Other actors with an interest in the technical study were to be integrated through the formation of a committee set up to monitor the project as it progressed. Apart from the key institutions already mentioned, among the actors with seats on this committee was FETRANSA, the company that manages the state-concessioned railway on which train operators run their services between Cusco and Machu Picchu.

These normative arrangements demonstrate that there was a sense in which the organization of the bypass project was—and should be—clear-cut. According to the framework at least, everybody knew, in theory, which body was to be responsible for different tasks and who was in control. The problem was that things did not turn out that way. When it came down to it, the regulatory structures did not deliver on their promise of coherence and order. This was partly due to the destabilizing effects of Peru’s emergent decentralization. By virtue of the shifting configurations of power effected by this process, previously nationally owned services are being outsourced to private companies whose relation to the state remains contested and uncertain, and the jurisdiction of local and regional government bodies is thrown into question as they lay claim to greater autonomy. Further complicating matters was the lack of agreement over which problem the study should be aiming to resolve. This was a complex issue, for the problem could be posed in a number of different ways. For example, it could be seen as an issue whereby the need to preserve easy passage for interprovincial trade had to be prioritized. Alternatively, it could be framed in terms of the need to protect the local tourism economy and to preserve fragile archaeological ruins. More radically, the very fact that people were living within and gradually building into the old Inkan citadel in central Ollantaytambo was cited by some as a problem that could be resolved by moving the tourist trade associated with the embarkation to Machu Picchu out of the village.

When CPS-INECO ran a public consultation on their proposal for the bypass in November 2010, Ollantinos roundly rejected it, despite the broad consensus that a bypass should be built. What most Ollantinos objected to was not the bypass itself, but rather where and how CPS-INECO was proposing to build it. One provocation was CPS-INECO’s plan to make way for the new road by pulling down several of the terraces that undergirded the Inkan platform supporting Ollantaytambo. But what stung most was that the plan proposed to cut the bypass straight through the current railway station, located some five minutes from the central square, and to build a new station at a site 3.4 kilometers outside the village. Hundreds of tourists traveled daily from Ollantaytambo’s station to Machu Picchu, and the municipality argued that the implementation of CPS-INECO’s recommendations would threaten the village with the loss of income from tourism and the creation of a competing ‘satellite city’ of hotels and restaurants owned by big investors in the area surrounding the proposed new station. Ollantinos would thus be excluded from the tourist industry on which they depended.

A new Ollantaytambo mayor took office in January 2011, and the issue of where and how to build the bypass became one of the major preoccupations of his administration. His campaign had been fought with explicit accusations against his predecessor of attempts to gain personal benefit from the relocation of the train station. Even before he had formally taken up the reins of the municipality, the new mayor had made it his priority to formulate an alternative to CPS-INECO’s proposal. He wanted to alter the route of the bypass, arguing that the threat to the Inkan terraces and to the station posed by CPS-INECO plans could be avoided if the bypass were constructed along the slither of land between the existing railway and the river.

Meetings between CPS-INECO, the Tourism Ministry, and the municipality to resolve the conflict began in earnest soon after the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Affect and the Anthropology of the State
• Chapter 1: Negotiating Uncertainty: Neo-liberal Statecraft in Contemporary Peru
• Chapter 2: The Fines and the Spies: Fears of State Surveillance in Eritrea and in the Diaspora
• Chapter 3: “Recognize the Spies”: Transparency and Political Power in Uzbek Cyberspace
• Chapter 4: Moral Subjectivity and Affective Deficit in the Transitional State: On Claiming Land in South Africa
• Chapter 5: ‘Father Mao’ and the Country-Family: Mixed Feelings for Fathers, Officials, and Leaders in China
• Chapter 6: The Turn of the Offended: Clientelism in the Wake of El Salvador’s 2009 Elections
• Chapter 7: Living from the Nerves: Deportability, Indeterminacy, and the ‘Feel of Law’ in Migrant Moscow
• Afterword: Political Timequakes
• Index