Rationality is not unnecessary. It serves the chaos of knowledge. It serves feeling. It serves to get from this place to that place. But if you don't honor those places, then the road is meaningless. Too often, that's what happens with the worship of rationality and that circular, academic, analytic thinking.
     -- Audre Lorde

I urge each one of us to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.
     -- Audre Lorde

Since the purpose of these brief essays is to comment on the direction in which cultural studies is turning, I would suggest in a polemical fashion that cultural studies has lost its way in many regards. Which is not to say that the project of cultural studies was ever a teleological one, which, once finally realized, would see a transformed academy. Nevertheless, one of my greatest disappointments in surveying the variegated paths of what gets called "post-disciplinary" work in cultural studies contexts is the uninterrogated question of the constitutive role of affect. Here, my argument might take two directions. The first of which is the question of why affect has been excised from questions of subject formation, but this is not the place in which to discuss such an immense topic. So, instead I will talk about how some of the lessons of a writer such as Audre Lorde might be instructive in thinking about the ways in which the tyranny of the linguistic turn in cultural studies might at least be given a thorough shaking at the foundations.

The reference to Lorde is not accidental. Her work has, for many years, been taken up within US feminist discourse (though more often than not her work occupies the place of the "Black Lesbian on the Syllabus" than anywhere else). But a radical re-visioning of books such as Sister Outsider and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name requires that we look at the ways in which she imagined a non-utopian vision of affect and its place in intellectual work for social justice. Before Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's introduction of the notion of constitutive antagonisms as the condition of possibility for a radical social democracy, Lorde had talked extensively about how acknowledgment of difference is a far cry from a bureaucratic multiculturalist's dream of social harmony.

What Lorde did was to insist on a rejection of what one might call "compulsory sentimentality," (to paraphrase Adrienne Rich) and idea not at all the same as an understanding of the difficulty of recognition, a problem which can be traced, in the West, at least as far back as Hegel.

What do all these speculations on Lorde, Laclau, and Hegel have to do with cultural studies having lost its way with regard to affect? My answer is simple: The feminist phrase "the personal is political" which arose in the context of '70s feminist activism and scholarship has precisely not been taken far enough. (Let me not make the mistake that others before me have made: to consign affect to the realm of the "feminine," which only serves reinforce long-running patriarchal notions of women as subjects of feeling and men as subjects of rational thought.) In Lorde's work as the well as the many contributions in the text Homegirls: A Black Feminist Anthology, there is an understanding that the psyche is a political and social formation (though that notion is not couched the sort of post-structuralist, psychoanalytic language I so easily lapse into). What happened to that crucial feminist claim "the personal is political"? I would like to see its return to the center of a politically responsible cultural studies scholarship. By politically responsible, I mean a certain ethical attitude: charity does begin at home. Lorde's notion of the difficulty of recognition places the burden upon scholars and students to begin to recognize each other as subjects of affect; subjects who feel pain, loneliness, despair, joy, pleasure, ecstasy and a litany of affects which could run on forever. If this difficult work is not done, how can the pursuit of a politically transformative cultural studies scholarship continue?

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WORKS CONSULTED:

• Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (NY: Verso, 1985)
• Audre Lorde. Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1994)
• Audre Lorde. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1982)
• Brian Massumi. "The Autonomy of Affect." Cultural Critique (Winter 1987)
• Barbara Smith, ed. Homegirls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983)
• Hortense Spillers. "'All The Things You Could Be By Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother': Psychoanalysis and Race." Boundary 2 (Vol. 23, No. 3 Fall 1996)