Affect Theory Part 2
"Depression, A public feeling" by Anna Cvetkovich
Public Feelings: Depression should be viewed as a social and cultural phenomenon, not a biological or medical one, which reveals something of the social, psychic, affective and political nature of our public and individual lives:
"In finding public forums for everyday feelings, including negative feelings that can seem so debilitating, so far from hopefulness about the future or activism, the aim is to generate new ways of thinking about agency ... The goal is to depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a possible resource for political action rather than as its antithesis. This is not, however, to suggest that depression is thereby converted into a positive experience; it retains its associations with inertia and despair, if not apathy and indifference, but these feelings, moods, and sensibilities become sites of publicity and community formation. One of the larger goals for Public Feelings is to generate the affective foundation of hope that is necessary for political action;
Queer Theory has provided 'models for the depathologization of negative feelings such as shame, failure, melancholy, and depression, and the resulting rethinking of categories such as utopia, hope, and happiness as entwined with and even enhanced by forms of negative feeling'.
It rethinks distinctions be- tween positive and negative feelings so as not to presume that they are separate from one another or that happiness or pleasure constitutes the absence or elimination of negative feeling. Depression, for example, can take antisocial forms such as withdrawal or inertia, but it can also create new forms of sociality, whether in public cultures that give it ex- pression or because, as has been suggested about melancholy, it serves as the foundation for new kinds of attachment or affiliation.
"A Clamor in my Kindergarten Heart: Class, Academia, and Anxious times" by Sarah Appel
Anticipating as well as responding to the 2008 economic collapse and the mass-scale global resistance movements arising in its wake, a number of cultural scholars and activist groups have recently published work advocating for what Ann Cvetkovich has called a "shared and social rather than individual" consideration of emotional health (2012, 107).
Influenced by Walter Benjamin's concept of "left melancholy" as well as accounts of the medieval condition of acedia (a "weariness or distress of the heart"), Cvetkovich stages an analytical account of her own longtime struggle with depression as a means to politicize a condition typically viewed through a narrow clinical lens. Suspicious of dominant medical models of depression that "simultaneously relieve one of responsibility (it's just genes or chemicals) and provide agency (you can take a pill)," Cvetkovich argues that depression may have more to do with racism, colonialism, and other "invisible forces that structure comfort and privilege for some and lack of resources for others" than biochemical imbalances (24-25). Conjuring associations of acedia with sin and even demon possession that have much to do with the kind of ascetic condemnation of restless wanderers and "idle" souls that informed later incarnations of the Protestant work ethic, Cvetkovich reclaims such allusions to frame depression and similar affective states as caused by "demons that visit from the outside"—rather than the inner demons typical of clinical ideology—that can therefore only be exercised through social means (105). Through her involvement in queer activism and Public Feelings projects committed to exploring how "affective responses, even negative ones... are both a necessary part of politics and a possible resource," Cvetkovich remains invested in the social justice potential of emotions (109). [ii] Such an embrace, she believes, can help counter "the loss of hope in how to bring about political change" that she sees as central to the contemporary spiritual sickness characteristic of societies that belittle forms of strong affect—anger and despair among them—as damaging to individuals indoctrinated with the imperative to remain tirelessly productive and complacent to the demands of the neoliberal market economy.
""In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins".
-Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illumi- nations: Walter Benjamin, Essays, and Reflections
The "puzzle of our motivation [to work]" that Weeks raises in her discussion of the differences between a "calling" to work for God and the calling to work as an end-in-itself with no necessary or even expected payoff (Cvetkovich 2012, 18; Weeks 2011, 46-47).
Z thoughts
The antisocial and antipolitical
mental health struggles reflect political and economic structures
cities are sites of capitalist accumulation (rebel cites)
mental health is much worse in cities
A report by World Health Organization (WHO) (World Health Organization) has enumerated that mental disorders account for nearly 12% of the global burden of disease. By 2020, these will account for nearly 15% of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) lost to illness. **Incidentally, the burden of mental disorders is maximal in young adults, which is considered to be the most productive age of the population.
"**".. anxiety and depression are more prevalent among urban women than men and, are believed to be more prevalent in poor than in non-poor urban neighborhoods' (Naomar Almeida-Filho _et al _2004).
Increase of nuclear families in urban society has led to increase in cases of violence against women in general. Among them, intimate-partner violence links to alcohol abuse and women’s mental health. Analysis of community-based data from eight urban areas in the developing world indicates that mental and physical abuse of women by their partners is distressingly common with negative consequences for women’s physical and psychological well being (Lori L. Heise _et al _1994).