I want here to explore feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s professional encounter with critical theory in Britain. I draw here on her published reflections on her education, set largely in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For Ahmed, theory’s reified masculinism was a point of departure in her process of coming to consciousness as a feminist. Ahmed, who resigned her professorial position at Goldsmiths to protest widespread sexual harassment, initially encountered “theory” as an undergraduate in the literature department at the University of Adelaide. When she moved to Cardiff University’s then-new Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory for her doctoral work, she learned a major lesson: that theory in the abstract was predominantly theory in the masculine.

What I glean from Ahmed’s writing is that her coming-to-consciousness-against-theory took place in four key moments.

1. In the first moment, in Adelaide in the late 1980s, Ahmed traversed the theory boy-style superiority complex. She quickly rejected the philosophy department only to discover the power of theoretical capital.[1] “I remember, when I was an undergraduate student, thinking that the people who took the ‘theory’ courses in my literature department were cleverer!” (2000:98). This perception of cleverness was, I think, a moment where Ahmed felt a structure of ideology flicker over her, a norm trying to establish itself. One way that critical theory has intimidated, and in this has also protected its patriarchal heritage, is by presenting itself as a task of the clever Other who was only potentially the self.

2. In a second moment, pursuing her doctorate in Cardiff, Ahmed faced pressures to reshape her own identity in keeping with French Theory’s fetishized patrilineages:

When I was doing my PhD, I was told I had to give my love to this or that male theorist, to follow him, not necessarily as an explicit command but through an apparently gentle but increasingly insistent questioning: Are you a Derridean; no, so are you a Lacanian; no, oh, okay, are you a Deleuzian; no, then what? If not, then what? Maybe my answer should have been: if not, then not! [2017:15, my emphasis]

In this impoverished theory space — “theory is used to refer to a rather narrow body of work,” she reports (2017:8) — the key social imperative revolved around the question: What are you? This demand for an identity in theory needs to be read alongside Ahmed’s eloquent description of racial hailing on the street in Britain:

I am walking down a street in Cardiff. And I am stopped by someone; he is walking the other way. How interested he seems. In what, am I what? ‘Hey, where are you from?’ […] I know what the question is asking of me. I resist giving the answer I am being asked to give. ‘Australia,’ I say. No, I mean originally. […] He knows I know what he is asking. I give in, wanting to move on. ‘My father is from Pakistan.’ That’s it. The conversation is over. I have given the right answer, the answer he was waiting for, even hoping for. [Ahmed 2017:116]

Sometimes identity demands are a progressive force, but here are they are a reactionary one, a moment of colonial and racial discipline. Such a sense of discipline was mirrored in the theory case: “Are you a Derridean?” and so on. Such questions are also an ideological hail, teaching you who you are by telling you to pause for authority. They are also a moment of essentializing taxonomy, where intellectual space is given a set of propertarian names and divided up after the fashion of a Great Enclosure. Manifestly, the three patrilineages in Cardiff — Derrideans, Lacanians, Deleuzians — were all French. Yet these three French men and their lineages were also almost not-national, taken out of historical context and reframed as abstract nodes in an intellectual space which cast itself as the only one that mattered. Interestingly, there was a certain affective surplus in this process of interpellation. Just why was Ahmed called not just to affiliate with French Theory, but also to give it her love?

I suspect that love became mandatory because theory-fetishism had become an obligatory mode of academic reproduction, and reproduction always demands a mandatory affective excess. To love theory is not a form of sexual romance but a form precisely of fetishism: a love of a reified thing, an object that also functions as an academic brand. That does not mean that fetishism is pathological. Indeed, it is enabling, but what it enables is an institutional system premised on misrecognizing “theory” as a thing. In emphasizing the forms of branding and reification that organize theory, Ahmed helps us see that ”theory itself” is premised on fantasy structures of hierarchical recognition, aspiration, elite-building and commodification.

3. For all their supposed radicality, these structures can also become remarkably antipolitical. That is apparent from the third moment of Ahmed’s encounter with theory, where theory’s masculinity emerged as a moment of harsh boundary maintenance on the part of her teachers.

I still remember submitting a critical reading of a theory text in which woman was a figure as one of my essays… I was concerned with how statements made by the teacher, like “this is not about women,” were used to bypass any questions about how the figure of woman is exercised within a male intellectual tradition. When the essay was returned to me, the grader had scrawled in very large letters, “This is not theory! This is politics! [2017:8]

To police the boundaries of theory, for this teacher, was an act of anger or at least of energetic venting. It was to scrawl, rather than discuss; to assert, rather than think. As with Theory Boy, the adulation of theory goes along with a wish to pin it down within heavily policed boundaries. And this wish for a fixed image of theory went along with a brutal rejection of questions about women and gender, a rejection sometimes policed, Ahmed adds, by women instructors. This introduced stark contradictions between theory and academic practice. “I met academics who wrote essays on feminist theory but who did not seem to act in feminist ways,” she recalled (2017:14).[2] This sounds like an impossible trap.

4. Yet in a fourth, feminist moment, Ahmed found a way out of the fundamentally melodramatic drama of theoretical inclusion. Rather than writing a critique of theory that would implicitly center it in her work, she ultimately chose instead, in Living a Feminist Life, to deflate, dedramatize, relativize, and partially normalize it.

Even though I am relatively comfortable in critical theory, I do not deposit my hope there, nor do I think this is a particularly difficult place to be: if anything, I think it is easier to do more abstract and general theoretical work… I think that the more difficult questions, the harder questions, are posed by those feminists concerned with explaining violence, inequality, injustice. The empirical work, the world that exists, is for me where the difficulties and thus the challenges reside. Critical theory is like any language; you can learn it, and when you learn it, you begin to move around in it. Of course it can be difficult, when you do not have the orientation tools to navigate your way around a new landscape. [2017:8-9]

Ahmed thus closed her narrative about critical theory by deconstructing precisely the sense of superiority, singularity, and openness that had organized its aura in her undergraduate days. Reframing empirical work as harder than theory, she reversed the original dogma that theory was where the cleverer people went. And insisting that critical theory is “like any language,” she reduced it from a master discourse to merely one discourse among others. Her conclusion became one of mandatory ambivalence, verging even on ironic appreciation. “I will come out with it,” she declared: “I enjoy and appreciate much of the work that is taught and read as critical theory” (2017:10). Her very enjoyment worked to deprive theory of the abject energy that a more extended critique of its masculinism might have conferred upon it.

But Ahmed’s act of dedramatization in turn calls attention to the two dramatizations that were at play here: theory’s self-dramatizations, which Ahmed sought to undo, and the dramatization of the subject who is critical of theory, on the other. Here, as love-of-theory became ambivalence-about-theory, Ahmed enacted a particular gesture of negativity. In declaring “If not, then not!” she negates the very grid of legibility that was supposed to organize her academic world.

Yet for Ahmed this moment of negation, period, was coupled to a dissociative, structural optimism. “I do not deposit my hope there” was coupled to “I enjoy and appreciate much of the work.” The critique of patriarchal discipline ends in ambivalence: I would suggest that this ambivalence is a already powerful feminist gesture. Curiously, a contradictory and even violent academic environment can become a good place for a subject to develop ambivalence. The very badness of an environment can finally become functional, liberating one to look elsewhere for one’s optimism.

Needless to say, this unexpected use of a bad structure does not justify its existing in the first place.

[1] Ahmed’s education began with an early rejection of the Adelaide philosophy department, a department which only taught “sadly… pretty much straight analytical philosophy,” and failed to address her intellectual interests “in how we know things, in questions of truth, in perspective and perception, in experience and subjectivity” (2017:28).

[2] She added that these academics “seemed routinely to give more support to male students than female students, or who worked by dividing female students into more and less loyal students” (2017:14). Elsewhere, she recalls that “One tutor got so cross with me in an argument about Derrida’s use of the figure of ‘woman,’ that she threw her cup of coffee down on a table and stormed out of the room. The coffee spilled all over me. I was startled, often, by the trouble I seemed to cause” (2015:181).

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
—. 2015. “Being in Trouble: In the Company of Judith Butler.” Lambda Nordica no. 2-3:179-192.
—. 2000. “Whose Counting?” Feminist Theory no. 1 (1):97-103.

But I was more intrigued by Plato’s remarkable, zany account of the origins of ambivalence, which I don’t think has gotten so much recognition. We have to be a bit anachronistic to read “ambivalence” into this text, to be sure, since the term in its modern psychological sense was coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1911. Nevertheless, I want to explore here how Plato comes up with something that really seems like a concept of ambivalence avant la lettre. It emerges in the text from his long meditation on the nature of a guardian, which is premised on the initial assumption that the guardian’s nature (or anyone’s nature) has to be singular and coherent.

SOCRATES: Do you think that there is any difference, when it comes to the job of guarding, between the nature of a noble hound and that of a well-bred youth?

GLAUCON: What do you mean?

SOCRATES: I mean that both of them have to be sharp-eyed, quick to catch what they see, and strong, too, in case they have to fight what they capture.

GLAUCON: Yes, they need all these things.

Hilariously, the dog is being set up from the outset as the being that cumulates vision and muscle, and therefore gets to be the founding image of a human guardian class. These two facilities are also something like the two branches of what we now call the national security services —  “sight” metaphorically gets us the “intelligence services,” and muscular strength stands in for the “armed forces.” That is, the guardian is a miniature state apparatus. Of course, it also needs some moral virtues:

SOCRATES: And they must be courageous, surely, if indeed they are to fight well.

GLAUCON: Of course.

SOCRATES: Now, will a horse, a dog, or any other animal be courageous if it is not spirited? Or haven’t you noticed just how invincible and unbeatable spirit is, so that its presence makes the whole soul fearless and unconquerable in any situation?

GLAUCON: I have noticed that.

SOCRATES: Then it is clear what physical qualities the guardians should have.

GLAUCON: Yes.

SOCRATES: And as far as their souls are concerned, they must, at any rate, be spirited.

GLAUCON: That too.

So the guardians are also supposed to have coherence between mental and physical characteristics. Their spirited and invincible “souls” go along with their finely honed physical faculties. And yet a problem occurs to Socrates: who would want to live alongside these fighting machines?

SOCRATES: But with natures like that, Glaucon, how will they avoid behaving like savages to one another and to the other citizens?

GLAUCON: By Zeus, it won’t be easy for them.

SOCRATES: But surely they must be gentle to their own people and harsh to their enemies. Otherwise, they will not wait around for others to destroy them, but will do it themselves first.

GLAUCON: That’s true.

SOCRATES: What are we to do, then? Where are we to find a character that is both gentle and high-spirited at the same time? For, of course, a gentle nature is the opposite of the spirited kind.

GLAUCON: Apparently.

SOCRATES: But surely if someone lacks either of these qualities, he cannot be a good guardian. Yet the combination of them seems to be impossible. And so it follows, then, that a good guardian is impossible.

GLAUCON: I am afraid so.

I don’t think it’s far-fetched to construe this image of “a character that is both gentle and high-spirited” as an image of ambivalence, in two senses. (1) Affectively, the guardian should be able to inhabit mixed affect. (2) Sociologically, the guardian is supposed to inhabit a tense double role, solicitous towards the in-group and “harsh” towards the outside. Of course, it now seems obvious to social researchers that people can occupy ambivalent, contradictory roles. But that only makes it more entertaining to see Socrates state that role ambivalence is outright impossible (because it contradicts the intrinsic coherence of one’s nature).

It goes without saying that Plato’s equation of someone’s “nature” with their personal characteristics belongs to a social metaphysics of virtue and character that has become archaic, though certainly not altogether incomprehensible to us. Nevertheless, we see that curiously, ambivalence comes across here as a sort of upper-class virtue, one of the things that gives the guardians their exceptional and necessary qualities. Fortunately for the argument, Socrates soon finds his way out of his initial view that ambivalent natures are impossible:

SOCRATES: We deserve to be stuck, my dear Glaucon. For we have lost track of the analogy we put forward.

GLAUCON: How do you mean?

SOCRATES: We have overlooked the fact that there are natures of the sort we thought impossible, ones that include these opposite qualities.

GLAUCON: Where?

SOCRATES: You can see the combination in other animals, too, but especially in the one to which we compared the guardian. For you know, of course, that noble hounds naturally have a character of that sort. They are as gentle as can be to those they are familiar with and know, but the opposite to those they do not know.

GLAUCON: Yes, I do know that.

SOCRATES: So the combination we want is possible, after all, and what we are seeking in a good guardian is not contrary to nature.

GLAUCON: No, I suppose not.

Oh good — the philosophical project of designing a race of supreme but benevolent overseers can continue after all! Now back to the dog analogies.

SOCRATES: Now, don’t you think that our future guardian, besides being spirited, must also be, by nature, philosophical?

GLAUCON: How do you mean? I don’t understand.

SOCRATES: It too is something you see in dogs, and it should make us wonder at the merit of the beast.

GLAUCON: In what way?

SOCRATES: In that when a dog sees someone it does not know, it gets angry even before anything bad happens to it. But when it knows someone, it welcomes him, even if it has never received anything good from him. Have you never wondered at that?

GLAUCON: I have never paid it any mind until now. But it is clear that a dog does do that sort of thing.

SOCRATES: Well, that seems to be a naturally refined quality, and one that is truly philosophical.

One has to love the easy slippage from behavioral dispositions to characterological qualities. Argument was easier in these days.

GLAUCON: In what way?

SOCRATES: In that it judges anything it sees to be either a friend or an enemy on no other basis than that it knows the one and does not know the other. And how could it be anything besides a lover of learning if it defines what is its own and what is alien to it in terms of knowledge and ignorance?

GLAUCON: It surely could not be anything but.

SOCRATES: But surely the love of learning and philosophy are the same, aren’t they?

A charming assertion, unsubstantiated by social analysis of “philosophy” (as a modern academic discipline) but no doubt presumptively justified here by the Greek definition of philosophy as “love of wisdom.”

GLAUCON: Yes, they are the same.

SOCRATES: Then can’t we confidently assume that the same holds for a human being too—that if he is going to be gentle to his own and those he knows, he must be, by nature, a lover of learning and a philosopher?

GLAUCON: We can.

I think the reasoning here is something like: If species A does behavior X and has nature Y, then it follows that if species B does behavior X, it must also have nature Y. The unargued premise being: a being’s behaviors follow transparently from its nature.

In any event, we can now “conclude” (at least if we accept the rest of the argument) that the guardian class needs to have this ambivalent nature in order to fulfill its function:

SOCRATES: Philosophy, then, and spirit, speed, and strength as well, must all be combined in the nature of anyone who is going to be a really fine and good guardian of our city.

GLAUCON: Absolutely.

SOCRATES: Then that is what he would have to be like at the outset. But how are we to bring these people up and educate them?

So ambivalence here emerges as the necessary dispositional structure of a good “guardian of a city.” The guardians must be contradictory by nature and ambivalent in behavior: oscillating between philosophy and brute force, kindness and brutality depending on context. What becomes interesting — but what I don’t have time to explore in any more detail here — is that this nature is not entirely innate, but also has to be produced and reinforced by education. So ambivalence is both a functional necessity and an educational product.

I just find that a bit fascinating: that one of the markers of the ruling class, for Plato, is their structural ambivalence. To be sure, this ambivalence is as much a bivalence of virtue as a flexibility of affect, so in that sense it is far from a strictly psychological account of ambivalence, but one can, I think, see the germ of ambivalence as a potential badge of class distinction. In a world where everyone fulfills a social function preordained by their natural capacities and aptitudes, it becomes a curious marker of superiority to have multiple capacities, multiple affective dispositions.