Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom - Brossura

Anker, Elisabeth R.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 082235697X ISBN 13: 9780822356974

Casa editrice: Duke University Press, 2014

Riassunto

Melodrama is not just a film or literary genre but a powerful political discourse that galvanizes national sentiment to legitimate state violence. Finding virtue in national suffering and heroism in sovereign action, melodramatic political discourses cast war and surveillance as moral imperatives for eradicating villainy and upholding freedom. In Orgies of Feeling, Elisabeth R. Anker boldly reframes political theories of sovereignty, freedom, and power by analyzing the work of melodrama and affect in contemporary politics. Arguing that melodrama animates desires for unconstrained power, Anker examines melodramatic discourses in the War on Terror, neoliberal politics, anticommunist rhetoric, Hollywood film, and post-Marxist critical theory. Building on Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of "orgies of feeling," in which overwhelming emotions displace commonplace experiences of vulnerability and powerlessness onto a dramatic story of injured freedom, Anker contends that the recent upsurge in melodrama in the United States is an indication of public discontent. Yet the discontent that melodrama reflects is ultimately an expression of the public's inability to overcome systemic exploitation and inequality rather than an alarmist response to inflated threats to the nation.

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Informazioni sull'autore

Elisabeth R. Anker is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Political Science at George Washington University.

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Orgies of Feeling

Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom

By Elisabeth R. Anker

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5697-4

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
INTRODUCTION - Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom, 
CHAPTER 1 - The Venomous Eye: Melodrama, Media, and National Identity after 9/11, 
CHAPTER 2 - The Melodramatic Style of American Politics: A Transnational History, 
CHAPTER 3 - Felt Legitimacy: Victimization and Affect in the Expansion of State Power, 
CHAPTER 4 - Orgies of Feeling: Terror, Agency, and the Failures of the (Neo)Liberal Individual, 
CHAPTER 5 - Heroic Identifications; or, You Can Love Me Too—I Am So Like the State, 
CHAPTER 6 - Left Melodrama, 
CONCLUSION - Melodramas of Failed Sovereignty: The War on Terror as a Women's Weepie, 
NOTES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

THE VENOMOUS EYE

Melodrama, Media, and National Identity after 9 /11

You couldn't call yourself an American if you hadn't, in solidarity, watched your fellow Americans being pulverized, yet what kind of American did watching create?

—Amy Waldman, The Submission

Melodramatic political discourses depict the nation-state as a virtuous and innocent victim overwhelmed by villainous action. They draw upon a moral economy that locates goodness in national suffering, and that locates heroism in unilateral state action against dominating forces. Melodramatic discourses often depict war and state surveillance as moral imperatives for both the amelioration of nationwide suffering and the achievement of nationwide freedom. In melodrama, the United States becomes virtuous by the very experience of being injured, as if acts of violence against the nation demonstrate the nation's exceptional virtue. This chapter first sketches the primary genre conventions that form melodramatic political discourse, sketches that will be complicated, unraveled, and challenged throughout the book. While melodrama, like all genre forms, is somewhat unstable, melodramatic political discourse has a distinctive set of characteristics that give it a recognizable integrity, even as its conventions mutate across media platforms and historical events. Melodramatic conventions influence one of the most heightened dramas in U.S. history, the media coverage of the 9/11 events. The second half of this chapter scrutinizes media coverage from September 11, 2001, to investigate the operations and effects of melodramatic political discourse in this context; it asks: How does a melodramatic narrative of victimization and retribution negotiate the ambiguities of political crisis? In what ways does melodrama rearticulate dominant ideals of U.S. nationhood through depictions of terror? What conceptions of political agency does melodrama enable, and what political practices emerge as its effect?

Five Conventions of Melodramatic Political Discourse

The first convention of melodramatic political discourse is a moral economy of good and evil that shapes its depictions of political events and national identity. Good equates to the U.S. nation-state, evil equates to the sources of national injury, and as these moralized identities circulate they reinforce each other—so that claims of national goodness are enabled and sustained by the injuries caused by evil Others. As Peter Brooks describes melodrama more broadly, "[Melodrama's] starting point must be in evil.... The force of evil in melodrama derives from its personalized menace, its swift declarations of intent, its reduction of innocence to powerlessness." Melodrama's moral economy originates in evil, and it relies on evil to identify goodness and generate a narrative trajectory. This moral economy thus aligns with what Friedrich Nietzsche has called "the venomous eye of ressentiment"—a strategy of identity production in which goodness is produced out of injury by evil, and the legitimation of reactive vengeance becomes part of that identity. Goodness is identified only after one suffers at the hands of evil. Nietzsche describes identities produced by goodness as such: "He has conceived 'the evil enemy' 'the Evil One,' and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a 'good one'—himself!" The category of goodness arises with and through the naming of evil; in this temporal reversal, goodness is dependent on a prior identification of its opposite for its content and character. Goodness is produced by retrospectively positing a moral self that seems to exist before "the evil enemy," even as it emerges through and from the antagonistic relationship with evil.

In the melodramatic moral economy of U.S. political discourse, goodness is produced by just this type of temporal reversal, constituted through the prior act of goodness's defilement by evil. In Nietzsche's concept of the venomous eye, evil is not just the constitutive opposite of goodness; it actively aims to harm goodness. In melodramatic political discourse, the venomous eye of ressentiment works to understand good Americans as under siege by evil action. Yet the temporal reversal of melodramatic identity production occludes this retrospective process and imagines the identity of the "good" nation and "good" citizen to exist independently of the appearance of an evil antagonist who wants to maim the nation. In melodrama, goodness comes to appear as a stable identity of U.S. nationhood even as the nation first requires harm by evil to establish the content of goodness. The qualities that make up goodness thus shift depending on the evil that serves as its definite opposite; so in melodramas of communism the nation's goodness is predicated on individual freedom, the free market, and capital accumulation, among other things. In melodramas of terrorism the nation's goodness is predicated on tolerance, individual freedom (again), and the judicious use of violence—violence that is deemed moral because it is democratically legitimated and state organized, among other things. In each of its iterations, the ascription of "goodness" to the nation through the venomous eye of melodrama disavows its dependence on a diagnosis of evil and proceeds as though its own goodness exists independently of an evil Other out to harm the nation.

Second, melodramatic political discourse designates political actors and agency through characters of victims, villains, and heroes. The nation's antagonists are villains—invaders foreign to the proper national body—while the nation is often at once the victim and the hero, both what suffers from villainy and what has the strength to overcome its adversary through the force of its goodness. (I examine the dynamics of heroism more in the fourth convention; here I focus more on victimization.) Melodrama's moral economy overlaps with these designations so that its depictions of victimization confer goodness on those who suffer unjustly. America becomes a virtuous nation through the harm it suffers. In melodrama, victimization is also equated with innocence, so that the nation's injury often retrospectively designates a previctimized nation that was innocent and pure. This dynamic is part of what Brooks and Thomas Elsaesser note as melodrama's theological inheritance in Judeo-Christian worldviews that link suffering to goodness and retrospectively posits a state of innocence before villainy strikes. The connection between virtue, victimization, and suffering is a grounding presupposition of melodrama's moral economy, even as it is often, though not always, divested of explicit religious references. In melodramatic political discourse, the nation's injury offers proof of its goodness.

In melodramatic political discourses only certain injuries qualify for inclusion in the construction of victimization and suffering. Whether villainy is defined as terrorism, communism, immigration, an overweening welfare state, or another designation, any harmful action or socially produced suffering that is not caused by the accepted definition of villainy is generally not viewed as a publicly recognized form of victimization. The victimized national identity this creates includes the sense that proper Americans love freedom and suffer from its injury but excludes politically produced injuries that wound Americans but are not directly related to the accepted definition of nationwide villainy. The nation's melodramatic national identity thus unifies the nation at that same time that it elides the systemic class, racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, and gendered injuries that beset a nation riven daily by structural and socially produced conflict, and this identity disavows many other forms of political injury and violence as part of the experience of nationhood it constructs. As Lauren Berlant describes melodrama, it makes spectacles of injury stand in for, and thus exclude, the underlying social conflicts that contribute to the differentiated forms of suffering people endure. In political discourse melodrama often elides any form of social suffering that cannot be reduced to an effect of the villain it explicitly names to be the cause of national pain. The suffering produced by common experiences of structural inequality, racism, homophobia, gun violence, corporate globalization, local governmentality, environmental degradation, military action, "collateral damage," and Islamophobia remain unmarked—and at times, calling attention to them is deemed an assault on the nation itself. The mark of a good American, in melodrama, is the capacity to suffer with others, but only in their experience as joint victims of sanctioned villainy. In other words, melodrama's moral economy generates national identity out of an attachment to a shared virtue injured by villainy, and at the same time both homogenizes and renders illegible more commonplace effects of political violence not produced by the evil that melodrama diagnoses.

Third, melodramatic political discourse traffics in intensified affect that relies on certain kinds of identifications with the suffering of others. Melodramas display gestural language and spectacles of unjust victimization that can cultivate heightened affective experiences of distress, terror, sorrow and pity, and anticipation. The original invention of the term mélodrame by Jean-Jacques Rousseau highlights this aspect of the genre: Rousseau combined the Greek words melos and drama to describe a play in which nonverbal communication, gestural language, and heightened melos (music) conveyed emotion and ideas to the audience more powerfully than words alone. While the term rapidly outgrew Rousseau's definition, it continues to account for the way that melodrama both conveys heightened emotions and solicits them in an audience. Melodramatic political discourse draws on heated gestures of suffering that encourage pathos in people who feel pain of others' victimization, who feel suffering, terror, grief, and astonishment at spectacles of horrifying villainy that afflict other Americans. Affective intensity is thus not only performed within melodramatic scenarios but also encouraged in spectators and citizens who consume these scenarios and rearticulate them according to their own fantasies, material conditions, and lived experiences.

Melodrama's ability to generate heightened emotions in its participants highlights the importance of identification in the work of melodramatic political discourse. Linda Williams emphasizes the role of pathos in melodrama more broadly, and as Aristotle describes in his canonical definition of pathos, the term seems to require a kind of identification with the suffering of others. Pathos, for Aristotle, details how a scene of wounding or killing arouses great pity in spectators; pathos includes both an experience of watching the large-scale suffering of others and "being acted upon" through the emotions by this watching. Ben Singer similarly describes melodrama's affective work as a "visceral physical sensation triggered by the perception of moral injustice against an undeserving victim." In feminist film theory, audience identification with victimization is one of melodrama's defining terms; identification links the performance of suffering to spectators' affective experience (which does not, however, mean that the performance is mimicked in its reception or that the performance and the spectators' experience are the same). What makes U.S. melodramatic political discourse different from other kinds of melodrama, however, is that it often encourages identification not only with suffering Americans but also with the very exercise of state power. Melodrama often mobilizes identification with state action. This identification with the demonstrable exercise of power also differentiates melodrama from other forms of U.S. patriotism and national identity, which cultivate identification more with shared civic traits that stand in for the nation, rather than melodrama's additional identification with the exercise of power itself.

Fourth, melodramatic political discourse diagnoses situations in which citizens are overwhelmed by forces outside their control, and this discourse puts an experience of powerlessness into a comprehensible, narrative form. Melodrama, as Martha Vicinus writes, "sides with the powerless." Melodramatic political discourse creates a narrative that makes sense of the feeling of being besieged by a dominant power, whether powerlessness seems to come from communist infiltration of U.S. institutions, from nefarious immigrants out to steal the jobs of virtuous citizens, or from the overwhelming power of capital in the countermelodrama of left political discourse that I explore in chapter 6. And yet melodramatic political discourse emphasizes the experience of powerlessness in order to chart a course of action that will restore the power of the virtuous. Melodramatic political discourse illustrates the experiences of besieged and overwhelmed people, and also heralds the overcoming of that experience. Melodramatic political discourse thus goes further than filmic and literary melodramas, especially domestic melodramas, in its dramatization of overpowered individuals. It both emphasizes scenes of unjust social suffering and posits the heroic overcoming of injustice and suffering through the rapid accretion of power and the eradication of evil. Melodramatic political discourse merges the experience of victimization to that of heroism, turning the nation-state into a victim-hero so that its overwhelming experience of weakness is precisely what promises control over the antagonist that imperils it.

In melodramatic political discourse, then, the dramatization of powerlessness is a strategy of power, a way to promise that victims can reclaim global (and individual) control out of political crises of impotence and injury. Nietzsche's diagnosis of "the venomous eye of ressentiment" is again relevant, as it attends to the counterintuitive transformation of victimhood into power. Diagnoses of besieged virtue legitimate revenge against the cause of injury; they are, Nietzsche argues, "the most fundamental of all declarations of war." In Nietzsche's analysis, the venomous eye is a critical strategy of power born of fear, rage, and impotence, a way to condemn conditions of unfreedom, to mark them as unfair and unjust. But the identity of the goodness it produces also legitimates and even enables retribution as a way to gain power over what it experiences as dominating. The venomous eye performs a mode of critique that aims to wrest control from crises of impotence and injury by reclaiming the capacity to experience power. Melodrama's venomous eye legitimates revenge against whatever is deemed evil and aims to actualize that revenge as an expression of American strength. By harnessing moral power to the legitimation of vengeance and destruction, the venomous eye of melodramatic political discourse reclaims power out of crises of diminished agency.

Fifth, melodramatic political discourse anticipates the triumph of freedom as its conclusion. The discourse's conventions promise a climax in which the national victim-hero prevails in the quest to overthrow the evil villains who have tried to destroy the nation's freedom. Melodrama promises that dominating powers will be overthrown, victimization will be redressed, and the experience of freedom will be achieved for the virtuous: melodrama equates the promise of overcoming villainy with the promise of freedom. Its teleology of freedom crosses with liberal interpretations of freedom and agency popular in U.S. politics to produce a normative image of sovereignty as a culminating achievement for both individual subjects and state power. Melodrama attaches to national norms and founding fantasies of sovereignty that propose that individuals determine their own fate and deserve to experience agency unbound by the demands of others. In the venomous eye of melodramatic political discourse, the narrative begins with pathos but ends with the spectacle of heroic sovereignty envisioned as freedom.

Culminating with the end of evil and the triumph of the virtuous, melodramatic political discourse often draws more from the conventions of early twentieth-century stage melodrama and its trajectory into stereotypically masculinized action melodrama than it does from the domestic drama or the woman's film. While melodramas generally end their narratives by highlighting virtuous people, domestic melodramas and "women's weepies" often stop there, and sometimes even show the failure of protagonists to overcome villainy even as they valorize the victim's goodness. In Marcia Landy's analysis, domestic melodramas show "a constant struggle for gratification and equally constant blockages to that attainment." Yet in melodramatic political discourse, unconstrained freedom, not constant blockage, is typically the promised teleology for virtuous victims. Melodramatic political discourse is therefore more in tune with the spectacles of "thrills, chills, and spills" common to stage and early cinema melodramas, which often end with the success of the plucky and self-reliant hero. The discourse's narrative expectation is a happy-ending conclusion that not only makes virtue legible but also emancipates virtuous people from the overwhelming forces that aim to destroy them. Even though melodrama culminates in a heroic reclamation of freedom, its heroic story line is in opposition to tragic constructions of heroism. Tragedy tarries with the inevitable losses endemic to political life and grapples with contingency as a powerful force in shaping the agency of individuals and political events. Tragic heroes are unable to wrest their fate away from tragedy's predetermined path, yet they are also split subjects, riven by accountability for their own flaws and pain. Melodramatic political discourse, by contrast, disavows the hero's accountability for either its own suffering or the suffering it causes others. In linking heroism to individual citizens and state power, melodrama's narrative seems to herald the ability for virtuous Americans (and the state) to master their own fate, remain virtuous in their self-identity, and experience sovereignty.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Orgies of Feeling by Elisabeth R. Anker. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Duke University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 082235697X
• ISBN 13: 9780822356974
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 354
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
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