Last night I attended a talk by Lauren Berlant, a professor at U of I, Chicago. She is coming to her ideas out of affect theory, a critical perspective that I am a long way from getting my head around. Her framing of "precarity as a grounds for political solidarity" struck me, though. It was the first time I understood a critical theory perspective to have a real world purpose rooted in action, which she says is to "make political demands on the grounds of care."
I agree with Berlant that we (under the influence of western culture and globalization) need a varying perspective to "take on the problem of comfort in inequality." It is as if, with the roof blown off the myth of meritocracy, we've settled for sideways mobility. We've come to accept that life will be unstable, that security is not a possibility. Politics has played with our emotions, made us cautious of taking up hope.
What an interesting point of commonality; it's not that we all feel the same way, but that we all potentially don't feel in similar ways. That we have taken on this "not knowing" as a western cultural trait. And upon recognizing this commonality in precarity, use the affect as a means to make political demands on the grounds that we do care, do desire to feel for ourselves and others who inform our feeling state.
Could it be that Marxism gets emotive?
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.2berlant.html
