INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS

The idea that social and political institutions can be designed in order to achieve specific human ends goes back, at least, to Plato’s presentation of the appropriate form of the just city-state in the Republic. Since then, scholars from numerous traditions and disciplines have analysed how laws and norms function to distribute social, cultural, and natural resources, and to organize relationships within the field of their operation, thereby both constraining and enabling human action. Transform an institution by changing laws, or challenging dominant norms, and it is likely that the scope for social action and the shape of social relations will also shift. Building on this tradition, the papers in this special issue explore how particular legal, political, and normative interventions into existing institutions might serve to promote a more just society.

In considering the transformative potential of institutional interventions, however, it is important to be modest about the capacity of any institution, or any institutional design, to predictably control human behaviour. As Michel Foucault argued, institutional power has been misunderstood, in part because power is not something that can be held, or possessed; it only exists through being exercised (see, for example, Discipline and Punish; History of Sexuality). On this view, social and political power is not so much an external imposition on preformed human subjects as it is an expression of the subjectivities that are formed in and through various institutional contexts, for example, schools, hospitals, prisons, and asylums; and through the everyday disciplinary practices around sexuality, the family, and medicine. The approaches taken by the authors in this special issue are generally in agreement with the conception of power as productive of subjectivity. At the same time, they seek to build on this approach by attending to the affective dimension of the productivity of power and the specific ways in which the embodiment (the sex, race, ethnicity, class, and so on) of social actors is experienced, imagined, and lived in institutional settings. Those who aim at institutional transformation, the authors suggest, must attend to the specificity of the lived experience of social actors. This explicit focus represents an important development in scholarship because, even when scholars of institutional transformation have paid attention to affects, to the body, or to the imagination and social imaginaries (and often they have not), they have for the most part focused on one in isolation from the others, rather than tying them together in an integrated way. Such oversights matter not only theoretically but also in terms of the efficacy of the ideas generated concerning how to bring about transformation, because the imaginative, embodied, and affective dimensions of institutional life are always present in, and critical to, the forms of human sociability.

The institutional relevance of affect, embodiment, and the imagination or imaginaries has been obscured, in part, by the way in which each has been theorized as a property of individuals. Thus, for example, affects have typically been conceived in terms of visceral “forces” or “intensities” that are transmitted and shared between bodies, where such forces work to augment or diminish a person’s capacity to act (Gibbs; Fotaki, Kenny, and Vachhani; Watkins). A conception of affect as inherently relational as opposed to an approach that casts it in terms of “inner states, feelings, or emotions,” however, reveals affect to be “inextricable from an approach to power, understood as relations of reciprocal efficaciousness between bodies – human as well as non-human – in a particular domain” (Slaby and Mühlhoff 27). Embodiment, similarly, if conceptualized as natural or given, obscures the ways in which embodied being and experience are always enmeshed in fields of meaning and power, enabling and constraining the subject positions and opportunities of different bodies (Butler, Gender Trouble; Gatens, Imaginary Bodies). Finally, if we understand imagination as the product of an individual mind, we fail to recognize the way in which social imaginaries structure experienced realities and constitute the background condition or framework through which human reality is mediated (Castoriadis).¹

Once we recast affect, embodiment, and imagination in these ways, it becomes evident that if we are to achieve justice through institutional transformation, the strategies we adopt need to engage the everyday lived experience of social actors in recognition of these dimensions. It is for this reason that the editors and contributors to this issue take an integrated approach. We seek to stress the central role of affect in modulating the agency of embodied actors and in motivating adherence to institutional rules. At the same time, we aim to foreground how institutions can act as crucial sites for moulding and remoulding individual sentiments, habits of behaviour, and imaginaries that shape agency and motivation.

In what follows, we offer a sketch of some existing research within institutional theory. In particular, we consider recent work in new institutionalism, organizational and institutional studies, social movement theory, and performativity. Our approach involves critically assessing the extent to which theorists in these fields have attended to the conjoined influence of the imagination, embodiment, and affective phenomena on processes of institutional change, with special reference to the achievement of social justice. In the final part of this introduction, we introduce the articles that follow. We hope this issue serves to raise important questions and provokes future research on the role of affect, embodiment, and imagination in scholarship on institutions and justice.

1

In social science literature, institutions are broadly defined as sets of rules and norms, both explicit and implicit, that work to structure social interactions, and which give rise to normative expectations and stable patterns of behaviour (Crawford and Ostrom; Hodgson; Azari and Smith). As Geoffrey Hodgson puts it, “institutions are the kinds of structures that matter most in the social realm: they make up the stuff of social life” (2). Institutions are indispensable to our ability to navigate our social environment. By generating shared expectations for norms of behaviour, and by enabling them to predict how others will act, institutions release individuals from the cognitive burden of having to constantly engage in time-consuming deliberations in their encounters with the world (Gatens, “Institutions”; Patalano). At the same time, institutions have uneven and differential impacts on people who occupy different social locations, both in the sense that the opportunities they afford are often limited to specific identities, and in the sense that they distribute different burdens and benefits depending on the social value of different identities (Young, Justice; “Lived Body”; Medina).

Working within this framework, institutional theory has proliferated in recent decades. It has come to acknowledge that human behaviour is not just effected by explicit or “formal” rule-systems but also by tacit or “informal” rules and norms, “socially shared rules, usually unwritten, that are created, communicated, and enforced outside of officially sanctioned channels” (Helmke and Levitsky 727). Working alongside explicit legislation and written rules, such implicit mores and unwritten rules coordinate, discipline, and manage our actions. Sometimes the implicit and explicit influences reinforce each other; interestingly, however, they sometimes undercut or oppose each other. For example, alongside explicit rules and regulations requiring formal contractual equality amongst all employees in the workplace, there may sit an implicit norm that women should give way to men’s assertion of their authority. Such tensions between implicit and explicit social expectations can make the workplace a site of oppression for women, through unequal pay rates, sexual harassment, and prejudicial treatment in promotion opportunities, even as such behaviours are formally prohibited. Moreover, the existence of explicit rules officially “ruling out” the injustice can be deployed by those invested in the status quo distributions to invalidate the claims of those who point out that in practice, implicit factors persist in impeding equality.

Rejecting the rational and atomistic individualism present in more traditional theories of institutional design, new institutionalism seeks to examine the ways in which various informal institutions interact with formal institutions, and the effects of such interactions (Goodin; Shepsle). One strand of new institutionalism – feminist institutionalism – has sought to examine the role of informal norms and rules of gender in institutional life (Chappell and Waylen; Kenny; Mackay, Kenny, and Chappell; Krook and Mackay). Feminist institutionalism aims to highlight the concept of power in the analysis of institutions, exposing how institutions can perpetuate or disrupt gendered and raced power relations on a broader social scale, and how these same power relations can aid or impede efforts toward initiating institutional change. Departing from “rational choice” models that account for the emergence and stability of social institutions in terms of agents’ rational calculations of how to maximize their interests, feminist institutionalists recognize that individuals are not disembodied and isolated entities who act only in accordance with rational self-interest (Jennings). Rather, they are envisioned as embodied agents who exist in networks of relationships, and whose particular embodiment and personal commitments will feed into their preferences, choices, and perceived possibilities for action, as well as influencing their ability to succeed and be taken seriously by others in formal institutional settings. Feminist institutionalism has explored how formal institutions including the military and Catholic Church function to obstruct as well as support feminist activist movements (Katzenstein), and have documented the impact of standard parliamentary procedures and gender norms on the capacity of female legislators to accrue, and maintain, authority and credibility (see Hawkesworth).

Although embodiment and power relations have been central to feminist institutionalism, the literature nevertheless lacks a sustained engagement with the ways in which institutions are felt and experienced by gendered subjects, and with how emotion and affect flow through gendered institutional spaces. Feminist institutionalists aim to uncover and examine how particular institutions intersect to facilitate or constrain opportunities for gender-based reform (see Krook and Mackay). Yet in approaching this task, marginal consideration has been given to how clusters of overlapping institutions might open up or foreclose opportunities for resistance and change through engaging the imaginative and affective capacities of institutional actors – in particular, through encouraging, producing, or prohibiting particular emotional dispositions among gendered subjects. Sara Ahmed’s work on diversity within institutions represents an important starting point for this project (On Being Included; Living a Feminist Life). She considers “how some more than others will be at home in institutions that assume certain bodies as the norm” (On Being Included 3), and critically reflects on how affects that flow through gendered and racialized institutional spaces can create feelings of belonging for some, at the same time as they make others feel out of place (see also Puwar). Ahmed explores the affective experiences of those undertaking diversity work within institutions, and how “institutional feelings” (Nash and Owens) of frustration, alienation, and despair can curtail efforts to transform unjust institutional spaces.

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The research field of institutional design was initially concerned with the kinds of economic, legal, and political institutions that a well-functioning society should have, and with devising principles of good design to ensure that any new institutional arrangement could be readily implemented and rendered robust. Again, however, much of the existing work on institutions within the field of organizational studies elides the significance of the embodied and affective dimensions of institutional life. Theories of institutions in this domain have focused predominantly on the structural and schematic dimensions of institutions, rather than the micro-level interactions and experiences of the individuals who populate them. This emphasis on the structural over the individual can be linked in part to the fact that, in some versions of institutional theory, individuals are portrayed as “cultural dopes” (Lawrence and Suddaby 219) whose thoughts and actions are presented as determined wholly by the institutions in which they are embedded. As Mona Lena Krook and Fiona Mackay point out,

institutionalists tend to underestimate agency because the repertoire of action is so constrained by the rules of the game that actors may be thought of as trapped by institutions. Critics regard institutionalism [ … ] as an approach that overprivileges stability, pointing to the frequency with which change is explained as an effect of an exogenous shock and the resulting crisis. (ix)²

Such approaches afford little room for individual spontaneity and creativity within institutional settings, nor for individuals’ potential capacity to modify institutional rules, norms, and arrangements. As Tim Hallett and Marc Ventresca stress, however, at the level of micro-level interactions and experiences, institutional actors have real power to instigate processes of institutional disruption and change. In their view “institutions are interpreted and modified as people coordinate the activities that propel institutions forward” (215).³

Still, even when it does attend to the experiences and agency of individuals acting within institutions, and how they might modify and reshape those institutions, much theory in this field remains essentially cognitively rather than affectively based. Within cognitive institutionalism, for example, institutions are understood as being grounded in shared individual beliefs and mental attitudes that give rise to collective behaviours and practices (see North; Mantzavinos, North, and Shariq). As Roberta Patalano notes, institutions are perceived here to “embody ways of thinking and cognitive attitudes that have stratified over time and have been transmitted through generations, thus acquiring an intrinsic form of inertia” (224). Any disruption of institutions will then rely on shifts in cognitive thoughts and attitudes. Much of the research on “institutional work” demonstrates this tendency to look to cognitive strategies to effect shifts in institutions. These strategies include, among others, deliberate techniques of social suasion, the construction of new rule systems, and explicitly pointing to associations between new and existing practices to facilitate their adoption (Lawrence and Suddaby).⁴

Some approaches within the organizational and institutional change literature have recognized the embodied and affective dimensions of entrenched patterns of action, and the importance of altering affective bonds and attachments in order to bring about deep and sustainable change. In the public health literature, for example, efforts to understand how to generate normative and behavioural change in relation to issues such as sexual violence (Banyard, Moynihan, and Plante; Carmody et al.) or HIV transmission (Fisher and Fisher) have recognized the limits of institutional and behavioural change models that have worked primarily at the level of knowledge (Fishbein and Ajzen). Drawing on social psychological studies on obedience and conformity (Asch; Milgram; Zimbardo), many have seen the productive potential of altering the image, behaviour, or explicit value commitments of influential figures around whose behaviour others coordinate themselves (Fisher and Fisher). In the literature on institutional violence – and, in particular, endemic violence and torture in the security sector – a number of studies have looked at the embodied and affective processes whereby torture becomes normalized within a subculture, often through attaching positive feelings to the group to be protected (e.g., the nation or ethnic group), and highly negative feelings to the enemy group (Huggins, Haritos-Fatouros, and Zimbardo; Haritos-Fatouros; Celermajer, Prevention).

Similarly, there is a body of criminological literature that recognizes the profound shaping effect that informal norms, embedded in relationships of belonging, play in the operation of security sector and law enforcement agencies (Bullock and Johnson; Ericson). In so far as this research helps to explain why formal legal reforms are often ineffective in overcoming aberrant behaviour amongst the police, it offers a critically important resource for developing more effective strategies for reform (Celermajer, Prevention; Chan).

Some organizational theorists have sought to integrate emotion into their work (see Ashkanasy, Härtel, and Zerbe; Sturdy; Van Maanen and Kunda; Albrow; Vince and Broussine). However, much of this work is undertaken from a managerial perspective, with the goal of contributing to the smooth, efficient, and profitable running of organizations. For example, Neal Ashkanasy, Charmine Härtel, and Wilfred Zerbe explore themes such as the destructive and disruptive function of employees’ anger in the workplace (6) and how to “implement emotionally intelligent solutions to maximize [organizational] outcomes” (9). The examination of techniques of emotion management to strengthen capitalist enterprises has drawn strong criticism from theorists who are concerned with its apparent legitimation of relentless capitalist expansion and exploitation (Cooper, Ezzamel, and Willmott 681).

As against this problematic tendency in organizational studies to focus on the management of emotions as a way of minimizing disruption to capitalist objectives, Arlie Hochschild (“Emotion Work”; Managed Heart) explicitly articulates the ways in which the management of dispositions works to reproduce unjust institutions and further exploitative capitalist enterprises.⁵ In response to the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which emotions are designated as “appropriate” or “inappropriate” in particular contexts, individuals are constantly performing what Hochschild calls “emotion management.” This is particularly evident in the workplace: “the smoothly warm airline hostess, the ever-cheerful secretary, the un-irritated complaint clerk, [and] the undisgusted proctologist” are all expected to cultivate appropriate emotional dispositions to keep business running smoothly and effectively (Hochschild, “Emotion Work” 563). The enforcement of states of feeling as a service to customers, and the emotional labour performed by the worker in trying to embody the appropriate feeling for one’s job is, for Hochschild, a potential site of self-alienation. Moreover, such emotional labour usually fails to be distributed equally throughout an organization or amongst differently embodied subjects. The commercial organization of feeling can, for example, work to reinforce gender stereotypes. Hochschild’s theory also illuminates the way in which patterns of ethnic and racial prejudice manifest in employers and customers assuming a certain privilege in relation to workers of colour, who are imagined as “naturally” possessing behavioural traits such as subservience or over-attentiveness. More recently, Melissa Gregg has extended Hochschild’s concerns regarding the workplace as a site of emotional exploitation in light of contemporary developments in the conditions of work. Gregg documents how online technologies, accelerated workloads, flexible working arrangements, and job precarity have combined to generate a new form of “affective labor” (3). One of the effects of this perceived need always to be available and work-ready is an exhaustion of people’s capacities for intimacy outside professional spaces and pursuits.

An emerging body of work in institutional studies does focus explicitly on the links between affect and institutions, and highlights the entwinement of cognition, imagination, and affect. Patalano, for example, argues that the imagination has the creative potential to modify how we perceive, represent, and feel toward the world, investing objects with new value or disvalue, and as such, that imagination and affect play a critical role in shaping, and reshaping, our mental schemas and cognitive attitudes and the institutions that reflect and reproduce them (233–34). Further, socially shared significations or “social imaginaries” and their sedimentation in institutions can serve to structure how individuals imagine the world, and also give rise to collective emotional investments. Drawing on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, Patalano argues that “innovation in the structure of society” is “possible only when new imaginary representations of social life are developed” (233). For those seeking to implement effective institutional change, then, interventions must occur at the level of the social imaginary. Further, the embeddedness of particular imaginaries within concrete institutions and in the affective commitments of institutional actors must be acknowledged.

Patalano expands our understanding of processes of institutional change in relation to imaginaries, imagination, and affect, but her account remains largely schematic. In our view, to move the field forward, scholars must also adopt a particularized, context-sensitive approach to institutional change that fleshes out how these processes play out in specific cultural and political contexts. As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, the imaginative and affective aspects of institutional structures and shifts will vary according to the specific cultural, political, economic, and geographical location of the institution and institutional actors under consideration.

A number of thinkers, foremost in the literature Martha Nussbaum, have explicitly considered the role that emotions play in creating, consolidating, shaping and shifting political institutions. In Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, for example, Nussbaum considers the means through which institutions can encourage and support the creation of citizens’ commitments to justice, civic love, and friendship in liberal democracies, commitments that are, in turn, critical to the stability of such political systems. Inspiring political figures like Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi can arouse constructive public emotions like compassion and fellowship to inspire people to seek a more just society. The construction of political emotions such as love, forgiveness, and remorse can also, however, take on less personal forms through national stories, education and theatre, and in monuments and memorials.⁶ In a similar vein, Johanna Moisander, Heidi Hirsto, and Kathryn Fahy highlight the ways in which institutions “are partly defined and upheld by emotions [ … ] and affective ties” (966). They point out that these ties may be manipulated by powerful institutional actors in the service of particular political projects, for example, feelings of belonging to the European Union. Correlatively, others have shown that the provocation of the emotions that in turn transform political institutions and address injustice can also emerge from “below.” Analysing attempts to address historic, persistent, and systematic racism, for example, Celermajer (Sins) examines how the expression of the experience of injustice from people who have historically been silenced and marginalized can provoke shame, that can in turn be mobilized to motivate significant transformations in how those groups are positioned, regarded, and treated in the social imaginary.

In this regard, theorists have tracked the ways in which the affective frictions that emerge when people’s lived experience contradicts institutional norms or roles can lead to endogenous institutional change. Douglas Creed, Rich DeJordy, and Jaco Lok (“Being the Change”), for example, describe how the process of “role claiming,” particularly for individuals who experience marginalization within institutions, takes place in response to institutional inconsistency. The conflict that LGBT ministers in the Protestant Church experience between Church values and their LGBT identity, for example, provoked a sense of shame and self-hatred, but these feelings also prompted an urge to claim and reconcile their institutional identities and to challenge institutional prescriptions that demonize LGBT people and exclude them from the love of God.

Looking at macro-institutional transformation, a number of scholars in the field of transitional justice have considered the role that affect plays in constituting new and more just political and social orders in the aftermath of widespread political violence and repression. Jon Elster seeks to connect the action tendencies of different types of “retributive emotions” (including anger, indignation, contempt) with different legal and administrative mechanisms adopted in the transitional justice process, as well as explaining different approaches to transitional justice in light of the temporality of emotions. Approached from a slightly different angle, Bronwyn Leebaw describes how transitional justice mechanisms were justified, in part, to stave off the threat posed by the strong retributive emotions of those who had suffered under a previous regime. Assessing the research on how such transitional efforts had fared, she concludes that, in many cases, “transitional prosecutions have been ineffective as a response to vengeful or volatile emotions” (114–16). More importantly in terms of the concerns of this special issue, she notes that over-emphasis on the “therapeutic goals” of transitional justice, understood as a type of response to the emotional state of victims, can have the perverse effect of eclipsing other goals such as economic and political justice and structural change (see also Meister; Niezen).

Mihaela Mihai’s incisive engagement with the role of emotions in transitional justice goes beyond simply arguing against the tendency to valorize “positive” emotions (forgiveness, for example), and to see negative emotions as those that transitional justice ought to overcome. She calls for the recognition of the motivating power of “negative” emotions (anger, indignation), insisting that in the constitution of new political institutions, justice demands “second order redress enfranchisement” that is attentive to the negative emotional responses of victims and perpetrators (42). Moreover, she argues that institutional reform must not simply attend to emotions generated by past abuses but must also do the work of “emotional socialization,” with transitional mechanisms playing a pedagogic role in the “formation of context-appropriate emotions and their expression in culturally sensitive responses” (64). Particularly useful in her analysis is the recognition of the multi-directional relationship between emotions and institutions, whereby negative emotions (in this case) motivate the development and influence the shape of institutions, at the same time as institutional arrangements and performances shape the normative landscape of emotions.

3

In keeping with our broad definition of institutions, some recent work goes beyond a consideration of formal institutions or organizations that are marked by clearly specified procedures, rules, and hierarchies – for instance, the state, the law, or corporations – to encompass informal institutions such as race and sexual difference. These informal institutions are marked by implicit hierarchies and tacit rules that shape human subjectivity and behaviour. At the same time, a growing area of work on the body and emotion reflects a preoccupation with the affective and emotional dimensions of social and political life, and the role that affective phenomena play in both facilitating and constraining social justice outcomes. Affect theorists have paid close attention to how “politically salient ways of being and knowing are produced through affective relations and discourse” (Pedwell and Whitehead 116).⁷ From this perspective, affective experiences are not conceived as inwardly focused, private experiences confined to a particular subject but as intersubjective and intercorporeal phenomena that can serve to produce and reproduce historical relations of social domination. Alia Al-Saji is among those scholars who have examined the role of affect and the body in processes of racialization (see also Blickstein). Al-Saji documents how affects that flow between differently raced bodies are imbricated with sedimented and recalcitrant structures of vision that produce habits of social perception that are oppositional and hierarchical rather than relational and fluid, with deleterious consequences for racialized others (“Phenomenology”; Hesitation). Nevertheless, in her view, possibilities always exist for rendering our affect-laden perceptions more responsive and self-aware rather than rigid and closed. This will require individual efforts to cultivate new perceptual capacities that can work to disrupt “racializing habits of seeing and affect” (“Phenomenology” 136).⁸

Indeed, just as affective dynamics can work to reproduce relations of subordination and domination between differently embodied identities, they may galvanize processes that resist these relations. As Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve note, affects can “coalesce” into other kinds of affective states, dispositions, and formations (feelings, sentiments, emotions, and atmospheres) that can “help to instigate and help enact processes of collectivization,” including the formation of resistant social and political communities and movements (14, 18).⁹ This reframing opens up the field to considerations of collective imaginings and affective solidarity.

In her work on solidarity, Clare Hemmings explores the idea that an ethical approach to institutional change needs to engage with theories of the body and materiality. She argues for the concept of affective solidarity as a means of integrating ontology and epistemology in feminist politics, suggesting that “to know differently we have to feel differently” (150), which is to say that epistemology can be grounded in affect. Recent work in social epistemology (see, for example, Medina) draws similar close connections between certain ways of knowing and certain ways of being, and the social and political consequences of this connection. Medina also insists that work on and by emotions happens not only at the individual level but can be done collectively. Social movements, for example, can be understood as collective endeavours to engage and express affect in order to transform institutions, including sexism, racism, exploitative political forms of life, and speciesism. Through the collective expression of affect in actions such as chanting slogans, marching, performing a repeated repertoire such as “Hands up, Don’t shoot,” “I can’t breathe,” or street theatre, the green movement, Occupy, the LBGTQI movement, #MeToo, the Black Lives Matter movement, and others endeavour to engage the collective social imagination. These collective actions challenge and attempt to transform institutions such as race, heteronormativity, or earth and animal exploitation. In this regard, William Connolly’s work on how patterns of injustice and exploitation are amplified by hegemonic institutions (Fragility), and how radical democratic political movements and actions can create counter-resonances (Facing the Planetary) has been particularly important (see also Coles).

Although it falls outside literature that explicitly defines itself in terms of institutions, research on social movements, particularly on “new social movements,” has in recent years recognized the importance of affect for mobilizing people to become involved in social movements seeking to bring about social and political transformation (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta; Jasper; Berezin, “Emotions and Political Identity”; “Secure States”). Indeed, reviewing the development of this literature, James Jasper and Lynn Owens contend that

emotions fill several gaps in the literature on movements: they provide theories of motivations absent from structural explanations, they advance cultural approaches beyond the simplicity of frames and identities, they bring attention to the role of bodies in political action and they highlight interaction and performance. (529)

Viewed originally as indicative of the irrationality induced when individuals dissolve into a crowd (Canetti), either caught up in the affective contagion of the mob, or provoked by a demagogue, the curation of emotions such as anger, fear, resentment, hope, and love in social movements has come to be understood as a critical part of their operation and of the “atmosphere” they create.¹⁰

Importantly, some of this social movement literature speaks directly to the ways in which dramaturgical, performative, and rhetorical processes are deployed to create affective responses to particular types of characters or positions (particularly to “opponents of the struggle” and “protagonist heroes”) and to “galvanise and focus sentiment” (Snow et al. 470). Robert Benford and Scott Hunt use the example of a disarmament event where two survivors of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb spoke about their experience, followed by a former US military pilot who recalled having flown over the site immediately after it was ravaged, but midway broke down and embraced the survivors. Benford and Hunt describe the performers’ accounts as “forceful affective prods for those who witnessed the event” (45), inducing emotions that could then empower witnesses to believe in their capacity to effect change.

Indeed, analysing social movements in terms of performativity highlights how the affectively expressive body can contest and re-present aspects of social imaginaries in ways that acknowledge, even as they challenge, the imaginary dimensions of human social and political life (Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries; Butler, Notes). Emphasizing the centrality of affect to performance, Jill Dolan writes: “[L]ive performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world” (Dolan 2). In this regard, counter-performances, such as street or protest theatre, make explicit, often through humour or absurdity, “visible deep-seated assumptions (about national paranoia, privacy and savage capitalism) that go unacknowledged” (Taylor, “The Decision Dilemma” 88).¹¹

4

The papers in this issue share a commitment to theorizing the connection between affect, the body, and the imagination in relation to processes of institutional change. The authors have developed accounts that critically attend to the imaginative, affective, and embodied aspects of specific local, national, and global practices, associations, and institutions. These accounts are guided by two key questions: first, how do imaginings, affects, and embodied dispositions function to maintain unjust practices or unjust institutions in a given context? Second, how might imaginings, affects, and embodied dispositions be harnessed to spur constructive institutional transformation?

José Medina’s contribution, “Racial Violence, Emotional Friction, and Epistemic Activism,” draws on the work of Iris Marion Young to argue that addressing racial violence, and the racial insensitivities that sustain it, requires more than identifying individual perpetrators and bringing them to justice. “Thick” critical engagements with multiple publics and institutions are also needed; engagements that are not only cognitive and argumentative but also affective, imaginal, and action-oriented. Medina uses the term “epistemic activism” to describe critical activities of denouncing, contesting, and resisting the cognitive-affective attitudes that facilitate complicity with racial violence. His analysis of epistemic activism centres on two case studies: the historical efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to fight against widespread practices of lynching, and the more recent establishment of a lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Medina critically analyses the distinct ways in which these specific examples of epistemic activism serve to promote counter-imaginaries that engage the empathic imagination, and which work to disrupt white insensitivities by generating empathic feelings of anger and grief for black suffering, and shame toward the complicity of white communities and institutions in perpetuating this suffering.

Complementing Medina’s insights concerning the capacity of images to provoke affective experiences that can be ethically and politically transformative, Eliza Garnsey’s “South Africa’s Blue Dress: (Re)imagining Human Rights through Art” explores how artistic memory may function as a form of symbolic reparation for human rights violations. Garnsey focuses on a particular artwork in the South African context: Judith Mason’s The Man Who Sang and the Woman Who Kept Silent, more commonly known as The Blue Dress. Drawing on visual and archival research, as well as her extensive fieldwork in South Africa’s Constitutional Court, Garnsey explores how Mason’s artwork inhabits the space of the Court, as well as wider socio-legal discourse. She argues that The Blue Dress facilitates a reimagining of human rights in three interrelated ways: first, the artwork is a symbolic reparation that recognizes the harm suffered under apartheid; second, the artwork is an alternative record of women’s experiences of sexual violence that are largely absent from official records; and third, the artwork is a form of judicial consciousness that keeps the past alive so that a different future can be imagined. As Garnsey explains, The Blue Dress instantiates an “ethics of responsibility” in post-apartheid human rights discourse that incorporates a responsibility to remember past violations in order to prevent future ones, and the responsibility to recognize past triumphs of human rights in order to support future ones. Garnsey’s analysis of how The Blue Dress works on the embodied, imaginative, and deliberative capacities of those actors who inhabit the space of the Court illustrates powerfully that there is much at stake in decisions over the kinds of artistic works that are displayed in institutional settings.

Mihaela Mihai offers important insights into the relationship between affect, art, imagination, political memory and agency. “The ‘Affairs’ of Political Memory: Hermeneutical Dissidence from National Myth-Making” explores the mechanisms through which hegemonic, institutionalized imaginings of violent pasts and hierarchies of interpretive authority are established, and how they may be disrupted through acts of “hermeneutical dissidence.” Central to this discussion is the concept of the “scandal” and “the affair.” Mihai explains that scandals and affairs can be socially and politically transformative to the extent that they expose the constructed, contingent, and provisional nature of dominant normative frameworks, and work to test institutional, symbolic, and emotional investments in these frameworks. She examines two examples of “hermeneutical dissidence” that presented challenges to dominant memory regimes and evolved from outrage-provoking scandals into transformative affairs, “seducing” into existence new publics and political alliances. Specifically, Mihai analyses how film director Louis Malle and writer Herta Müller used different media to contest romanticized images of heroic, masculinist resistance that underpinned national mythologies in post-Second World War France and in post-communist Romania, as well as the hierarchies of honour that such myths of national resistance sustained. Mihai explains how these contestations opened up space for differently articulating the relationship between the past and the future, and for imagining a richer repertoire of political action for the future. Through analysing the conditions under which acts of hermeneutical dissidence may at once confirm, but also partially displace, doxastic and visceral investments in hegemonic imaginings of history and the norms these imaginings sustain, Mihai’s contribution offers a deeper and more thorough understanding of the mechanisms through which challenges to dominant imaginaries may come to galvanize shifts in cherished institutional orders.

In “Character is a Sacred Bond: Reflections on Sovereignty, Grace, and Resistance,” Richard Sherwin contends that Western modernity is approaching a spiritual crisis that is marked by a breakdown of trust in state and corporate actors, and a sense of “disenchantment” in association with the loss of “the sacred.” For Sherwin, a relevant challenge associated with the search for “re-enchantment” is to identify the means through which shared fundamental values may be rejuvenated and reinvigorated, naming anew fundamental beliefs that bind liberal democratic states. Sherwin asks how we might reimagine the source and nature of these fundamental values. The response that he proposes envisions a deep interpenetration among three legally, politically, and personally constitutive phenomena, namely: the sacred, sovereignty, and character. As part of this analysis, Sherwin examines how shared normative beliefs that bind together liberal democracies are embedded in narratives and stories that are themselves imbricated with discrete character and emotional ideals. Specifically, Sherwin asks: what character type, what emotional ideal, what deep story do people hold most sacred? What emotional and character ideals are optimal in order for a particular kind of political society to arise and be sustained? What emotional field shall we occupy when we do politics and law? And bound by what sovereign values or ideals, embodied within what sort of character, and emplotted in what sort of political or legal narrative? Drawing on the example of Emma Gonzalez’s widely circulated public protest against gun violence in America, as well as William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Sherwin claims that in the moments of resistance displayed by different characters – real and fictional – we are all called upon, as citizens in public life, to occupy an emotional space that could transform political institutions. For Sherwin, if trust, normative consensus, and meaningful freedom are to be attained and preserved in liberal democratic societies, we need to reflect critically on the characters and emotional ideals that bind us.

Resonant with Sherwin’s reflections, Danielle Celermajer’s contribution opens up questions regarding the affective field that individuals are led to occupy in relation to violent political practices; in particular, torture. Whilst Medina and Garnsey concentrate on the role of images and narratives in galvanizing visceral commitments to the protection of human rights, Celermajer focuses on how affect-laden stories, presented as thought-experiments, may work to undermine human rights institutions. Specifically, Celermajer considers the increasing support among US citizens for the use of torture as part of the “global war on terrorism,” despite widespread anti-torture activism and compelling evidence of torture’s highly limited ability to elicit reliable intelligence. In “The Tick-Tick-Ticking Time Bomb and Erosion of Human Rights Institutions,” Celermajer seeks to understand this growing support with reference to the now ubiquitous “ticking time bomb” scenario. In particular, she explores the affective work that this narrative and its imagined dramatization perform in legitimizing practices of torture. Far from an innocent heuristic, Celermajer argues that this imagined scene catalyses a process of racially inflected and affectively laden identifications and aversions that bypass reflective reason and induce subjects to endorse the practice of torture. In her analysis of how the fabric of beliefs, emotions, and values that sustain important institutions might be undone, Celermajer opens up broader questions regarding how imagined scenarios can be used to institute affects that freeze and immobilize, and which function to overwhelm responsive and responsible processes of deliberation. Her account foregrounds the importance of employing more productive strategies, beyond fact-giving and logical argumentation, that would encourage more dynamic and fluid forms of affective experience and identification, which might, in turn, enable more people to shift positions as they confront new evidence and experiences.

In “Toward a Democratic Groove: Cultivating Affective Dynamics in Institutional Transformation,” Romand Coles and Lia Haro explore the possibilities afforded by the idea of “democratic groove” for disrupting the standardized and lifeless neoliberal ethos that pervades institutional life and inhibits transformative action. Drawing on the idea of musical groove, they suggest that cultivating practices that heighten enthusiasm, receptivity, and creativity in a political context might not only shift and ignite affective dynamics and orientations in a way that enlivens and nourishes democratic participation but also transform the institutions that enable or constrain it. Challenging both the idea that such forms of improvisational co-creation can only occur outside formal institutions, and that they undermine our capacities for discernment and reasoning, the authors suggest that democratic groove heightens such capacities in a “full-bodied way” that can create a transformative relay between informal and formal spaces. As against Bourdieu’s argument that the improvisational capacities of habitus in fact only allow for entrenched structures to persist in the face of changed circumstances, they suggest that this diagnosis of the limits of spontaneity might itself reflect a habitus conditioned against radical transformation. To illustrate how this might play out, the paper combines an exploration of the role of intercorporeal affective flows of democratic enthusiasm and popular improvisation in early democratic movements during the American Revolution with reflections on the authors’ own experience of the role of affective dynamics in political organizing and rich local transformation in Durham, North Carolina. In a piece that moves with the musicality of its own argument, Coles and Haro offer the tune of a radical democratic alternative that would foster improvisation and build enthusiasm for catalysing change today.

Emily Beausoleil’s “Listening to Claims of Structural Injustice” explores the potential and limitations of particular organizational efforts to cultivate an openness and attentiveness with respect to claims of structural injustice. Drawing on recent studies in social epistemology, critical race theory, and whiteness studies, Beausoleil focuses on how embodied habits of inattention, denial, and defensiveness that characteristically prevail among privileged groups prevent the claims of disadvantaged groups from receiving substantive uptake. Beausoleil’s paper addresses this topic through three interventions: first, it develops a novel account of listening that reveals why listening to claims of structural injustice often proves difficult; second, it examines how positions of relative advantage shape whether and how people listen to such claims; and third, it explores the implications that these challenges have for the design of democratic processes that seek to engage advantaged groups regarding structural injustice. To develop this account, Beausoleil draws recent scholarship on listening practices into dialogue with her fieldwork studies of ten organizations across Aotearoa New Zealand, and their efforts to actively engage communities regarding socio-economic inequality. As part of her analysis, Beausoleil discusses how organizations have gradually shifted from a reliance on conventional, factual, and unidirectional modes of engagement (i.e., informational websites, petitions) to incorporate a commitment to experiential, aesthetic, and dialogical modes of engagement that implicate the affective, imaginative, and perceptual capacities of their participants. For Beausoleil, institutionalized engagements of this kind hold much promise for rendering noxious epistemic habits among privileged identities a source of shame and discomfort.

The final two papers in this issue share a common theme: how to conceptualize and address damaging norms of sexual conduct in the sphere of heteronormative relations. Both papers address, in distinctive ways, the question of what might be required from individuals as well as wider social practices and institutional policies to disrupt damaging clusters of imaginings and affects that affirm male sex-right and female sexual submission.

Anna Hush investigates the role of the university and policy reform in entrenching rather than meliorating damaging sexual imaginaries that encourage sexual assault on campus. “The Imaginary Institution of the University: Sexual Politics in the Neoliberal Academy” considers the relationship between formal institutions and the “sexual imaginary,” defined as the set of affective and imaginative resources that produce certain forms of sexual subjectivity. Drawing primarily on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, Hush analyses the role of universities in shaping sexual imaginaries. On this view, universities continue to function as sites where problematic norms (e.g., norms of masculine dominance and entitlement) are reinforced and legitimized. With regards to the question of how universities might be restructured to effectively contest and reimagine these norms, Hush focuses on normative models of consent education, and critically examines the limitations of newer models to intervene constructively and meaningfully in the gendered norms that permeate university spaces. Against mainstream, neoliberal imaginaries that construct universities narrowly as institutions for the production of job-ready applicants, Hush suggests that they should be considered as key sites of sexual subject formation, in which practices of “epistemic friction” (Medina) may enable sexual norms to be challenged and reshaped.

Finally, in “Reframing Honour in Heterosexual Imaginaries,” Millicent Churcher and Moira Gatens explore the relationship between honour and respectful recognition in the context of normative heterosexuality, and the implications of this relationship for sustaining and transforming problematic sexual norms. Building on recent attempts to move beyond an exclusive focus on consent as the major means of thinking through the ethics of heterosexual sex, these authors engage the concept of honour. Honour is a complex notion that houses a number of related normative values and affective attitudes, including respect, pride, and honesty. Churcher and Gatens examine how honour is distributed by heterosexual imaginaries in ways that privilege men in the sexual encounter, and argue that the cultivation of ethical heterosexual relations should involve a sexual honour code where both men and women see themselves, and are seen by their counterpart, as entitled to respect. To conclude, the paper examines and defends the cultivation of ethical, just, and honourable heterosexual relations as a necessarily embodied, intersubjective, and imaginative endeavour that involves challenges to, and shifts within, multiple social imaginaries.

Notes

We are grateful to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the School of Social and Political Sciences, and the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, at the University of Sydney, for providing funding for a research workshop held at the University of Sydney in August 2017, where earlier versions of some of these papers were presented. We are thankful to all of those who participated in this workshop for their valuable thoughts and contributions. Mihaela Mihai and Jan Slaby offered generous comments on an earlier draft of this introduction. The editors are very grateful for the expert and genial assistance provided by James Hypher. Finally, we wish to express our deep gratitude to Guy Scotton for bringing such care and diligence to the preparation of the entire issue for submission to Angelaki.

1 An important aspect of what Castoriadis terms the doubled instituting and instituted social imaginary is the human capacity to modify and reinterpret the symbols, myths, and legends through which societies are formed and thus to alter the social realities that we inhabit. For a nuanced account of the social imaginary, see Adams et al. See also Bottici.

2 See also Elizabeth Clemens and James Cook, who note the theoretical tendency “to equate institutions with stability or durability,” which leaves theories of institutions poorly placed to explain change or disruption (443).

3 The “agency–structure” problem fundamentally concerns the possibility of individual autonomy and agency in light of the ubiquitous and pervasive influence of social institutions that structure human thought and interaction. Those theorists such as Hallett and Ventresca who assume the possibility of individual agency and creativity within institutional spaces are committed to a view of individuals and institutions as irreducible to one another. This view is endorsed by Hodgson (“What Are Institutions?”). As he argues, whilst “historically given institutions precede any one individual” and mould their aspirations and activities (8), they simultaneously depend upon the aspirations and activities of individuals for their continued existence. Institutions cannot be self-sustaining without agents to reproduce them; at the same time, however, an institution does not simply disappear as soon as the thoughts and practices of individuals begin to diverge from the norms they establish (7–8). On this line of thought, institutions and individuals are connected in “a circle of mutual interaction and interdependence” (8). A structurally similar approach can be seen in Bourdieu’s notion of field and habitus and their co-constitution. Importantly, Bourdieu recognizes the embodied character of habitus, a recognition explicitly taken up by Janet Chan, Christopher Devery, and Sally Doran in Fair Cop.

4 Marginal consideration is given to the affective aspects of this kind of work, and how the affective dynamics of a particular institution or organization may obstruct institutional work of this kind. The concept of “institutional work” attempts to capture the work undertaken by individuals to create, disrupt, or maintain institutions (DiMaggio; Oliver; Lawrence and Suddaby; Clemens and Cook; Seo and Creed; Powell and Colyvas). Within this literature, institutional work is conceptualized as the ongoing, often unconscious, actions of individuals who can both stabilize and destabilize institutions, where these individuals are typically construed as disembodied entities, void of emotional attachments.

5 In a similar vein, Douglas Creed et al. analyse how the anticipation of shame acts as a powerful normalizing force. They write that “by connecting self-regulation and discipline to the enactment of institutional prescriptions, the sense of shame will necessarily play some role in the reproduction and maintenance of institutional arrangements” (“Swimming” 283).

6 As Nussbaum notes, the construction of love of one’s country or nation can also give rise to hostility or aggression to those perceived as outsiders.

7 For some examples of this approach, see Cvetkovich; Probyn; Ahmed (Cultural Politics); Berlant; Goodley, Liddiard, and Runswick-Cole; Ashley and Billies; Stoler (Race and the Education of Desire; Along the Archival Grain).

8 Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Iris Marion Young, and Henri Bergson, Al-Saji proposes a “phenomenology of hesitation” (“Phenomenology”) as a mechanism for interrupting engrained and habitual patterns of seeing and feeling that are objectifying and othering.

9 See Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve for an account of affect as “dynamic processes between actors and in collectives,” from which “individual affective states, emotions, and affective dispositions are derivative” (14).

10 On this point, see Sedgwick: “Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects” (19). On the notion of political “affective atmospheres,” see, for example, Angharad Closs Stephens (“Affective Atmospheres”; “National Atmospheres”).

11 The emergence of participatory arts such as street and protest theatre is tied to the “institutional critique” movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. This movement saw artists step outside the established (and largely bourgeois, conservative) institutions of the art world, and into the street, the cityscape, communes, and other independent scenes to engage in transformative critiques of life forms, ways of being, and affective styles. For a detailed analysis of the emergence of, and shifts within, the field of participatory art, see Bishop; Jackson.