Late-Liberalism and Righteousness: Affective Reflexes and Experiments in Retraining

Elizabeth Povinelli describes late liberalism as the ‘governance of social difference in the wake of the anticolonial movements and the emergence of new social movements’. Taking museums and the impact of the turn towards participatory practice as a focus, I draw on both Povinelli’s ‘cunning of recognition’ and Brian Massumi’s diagnosing of Abraham Lincoln’s phrase ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ to understand late liberalism as a loop or circuit where impossible to realise ideals, and ‘part-concept’ tensions create ongoing problematics which require daily negotiation in ways that draw political energy centripetally towards reform. Righteousness is proposed as an affective reflex ‐ a kind of starter fuel ‐ that works to kick into life the late liberal loop of museum constitution. Reflex ‐ holding the sense of an in-the-moment reaction ‐ is approached through activating two trajectories within theorisations of affect. The first trajectory is that of the relationship between affect, intuition and attachment as developed by Lauren Berlant. The second trajectory explores affect and intensities as taken up in different ways through Lawrence Grossberg and Brian Massumi’s engagements with Deleuze and Guattari. Methodologically, the article proceeds through specifying a contribution that experimental academic writing might make to conjunctural analysis ‐ working with Patricia Clough’s suggestion that experimental writing offers ‘methods … for cutting out an apparatus of knowing and observation from a single plane … with the aim of eliciting exposure or escaping it, intensifying engagement or lessening it’. In particular it is suggested that experimental writing might offer methods not only for generating political analysis, but also for retraining reflexes to enable political interventions. In the case of the righteous reflex of late liberalism it is suggested that retraining might be supported by turning the types of analytical attention offered by attachment and intensities into political techniques of detachment (following Berlant) and modulation (following Massumi). If the changing nature of museum workers’ reflexes can be amplified and then cultivated to suspend the righteous reflex, then different kinds of practice (not defined by inclusion and representation) might be given new space to emerge.