Transcribed by Elif San







AA: Hello for Status. I am Anthony Alessandrini. Today I am very happy to have a chance to interview Elisabeth Anker, who is an assistant professor of American Studies and Political Science at George Washington University in Washington, DC. I will be talking to her about her new book, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom, which was published last year by Duke University Press. Professor Anker, thank you so much for joining us. 
 
EA: Thank you very much for having me here today.

AA: Could you start talking a little bit about what made you write Orgies of Freedom [Feeling]?

EA: Sure. There are many ways to answer this question, I think on multiple levels. And the first is just political. I started graduate school right when airplanes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that seem to me to be a… It became a political horizon, in part because I was so surprised at the US response and how violent it was, and in part because it seemed to shape a whole new way of US formations of Empire. So, on the one hand, for a political theorist who is really interested in grappling with contemporary forms of domination, it seemed obvious to me to that to grapple with what had happened in the post 9/11 era. Secondly, in a more academic sense, I was a political theorist taking a class on film, trying to decide if film was interesting to me. And I ended up writing my final paper just for the seminar class, thinking about the media coverage of 9/11 as a filmic text. And to have this space to do that—to be introducing a film in this way, but to be applying it to modes of media and political discourse—also helped to shape the formation the book where I read these larger formations of political discourse as melodramas. And last is actually a kind of question about the academy and structure—I had somebody, who is not the professor of that class but another professor, encouraged me to publish the paper. And the paper itself was not great—was still a seminar paper—but just to have the sense that, to take my work seriously, to have somebody else who I respected, to encourage me to think all of these ideas as kernels for larger productions of knowledge really stacked with me, and the writing experience become more smooth because of that. So I think when we also think about roles of mentorship and what it means to be a professor, I think, that becomes really important, when we start germinating the small ideas that become larger box. 

AA: You started talking about this a bit, I was gonna ask you about being trained as both a political theorist and someone who is also trained in film studies. I was wondering how this dual disciplinary background affected your personal writing of the book? 

EA: I think there is always an interesting conversation that happens when disciplines that usually do not talk that much to each other are put in conversation. I think there is always something interesting that emerges. And luckily, when I first started researching this book, Political Theory and Film Studies were always spoke to each other, and now I think there is so much greater dialog that is happening that my book is a part of. One of the things it helped me to do with is to think about how political theory itself and politics work in genre forms in ways that we normally think only culture operates. And then, conversely, how do we think about filmic texts as forms of political theory? And also cinematic modes of being that exceed formal qualities of film but that echo out and reverberate into our political life? On the other hand, I think it is always difficult to write a book in a way where you are trying to speak to different disciplines. I think it is really hard to satisfy the different disciplinary demands of each discipline without sacrificing rigor. That is something that I struggle with—I continue to struggle with—and I think all of us who are trying to do interdisciplinary work continue to struggle with meeting those different demands. But I think it is always a productive dialog, regardless.

AA: So, this goes to that question of genre and how it enters to the political theory. In the book you talk about how, what you call, melodramatic political discourse authorizes US Empire. So, how do you say melodrama is coming to play this kind of direct political role? Is it just form of a narrative that legitimates other kinds of pre-existing political activity, or does melodramatic political discourse actually create political effects of its own?

EA: That is a great question, and it is something that I struggle with. I think melodrama works in both domains. I think it is something that legitimates other forms of political action. But something that I also came to terms with in the writing of this book is how do we think of discourses as having agency and as having political agency. And I think there is a move in new materialism—to think about non-human forms of agency. Especially for new materialism, to think about things as forms of agency. And there is a way in which I line with that, but I also think that discourses themselves—political discourses—have concrete material effects in our world, which is not to say they are always super potent in many ways. But I think, for the purposes of my book, it was really important to emphasize that we are really comfortable with the assumption that state power creates its own forms of legitimacy. And I think, that is an age-old assumption in political theory, especially for thinkers, someone like Max Weber, that state power its produces its legitimacy. I ended up thinking the reverse, not that that is not true, but: How can we analyze the way discourses of legitimacy—like melodrama—discourses that legitimate state power actually produce the very state power that they are legitimating? So, how does something like melodrama produce state power as it is a fact? How does the way that it tells us that political power is a moral imperative in order to save victims and to restore sense of imperial freedom? How does that discursive work actually produce the state power that it legitimates as a moral imperative? That is the pattern that I was most interested in and analyzing.  

AA: Let’s follow on that question of melodrama and power. Do you see melodrama as an essentially conservative or anti-democratic form, or at least in the US context—whether you think about another context as well? Or is it that melodrama has been put to particular uses since 9/11? Or can melodramatic political discourse function in a more politically progressive way?

EA: I do think melodrama has been used in a conservative way certainly in the post 9/11 moment. I think we can also see it in the Cold War, in discourses that legitimate US neoliberalism. But melodrama also has a really strong leftist pedigree that originated in France as a way to legitimate the French Revolution. And from there on, it was used to legitimate multiple iterations of revolutionary power in France. It was actually quite consciously harnessed by the Soviets as a way of legitimating the Bolshevik revolution and supporting the different uses of state power in its wake. So melodrama also has a strong leftist pedigree, we could say. And I think part of what happens in these different iterations is different things get categorized as villainy, different things get categorized as what constitutes victimization, who is been harmed and why, and then what constitutes the heroic response. So in my book one of the things I think a lot about is what I called “left melodrama”, which is the way that melodrama in the contemporary moment, certainly in leftist political theory, ends up. Melodrama becomes the way in which we come to grapple with large-scale forms of exploitation and transnational violence as through these sorts of—in precise terms of good and evil, villains, victims, and heroes. Part of the work that happens when we start to categorize kind of large-scale economic and political shifts, like neoliberalism, through the terms of melodrama is both that we lose the specific forms of exploitation that happen under different political formations. And, secondarily, what I am also worried about is the way that when leftist use melodrama, there is a way in which those people who are counteracting certain things, like neoliberalism, are able to categorize themselves as unimplicated in the problems that they are diagnosing. So, in melodrama, if you are victim or a hero, you are unimplicated in the villainy that you are diagnosing. And I think there becomes something dangerous, especially for leftist theorists in the US academy, to make this assumptions—not only that neoliberalism is terrible, but that by criticizing it, they are unimplicated in the forms of violence that it can harness. So, something that I am always wondering about is how people use melodrama? Is it possible, I guess, to use melodramatic language in ways that does not presume that you are unimplicated in the violence that you are looking at in particular ways? And also, if you do acknowledge your complicity—by being a member of a citizenry that supports neoliberalism or Empire in a certain way—if you acknowledge your own complicity, does that necessarily have to breed the spare or paralysis? Can we use acknowledgment of complicity as a starting point—not an ending point—for leftist political projects? I think it is an open question as to whether melodrama can acknowledge those forms of complicity in its narratives of good and evil, villains, victims and heroes and its promise that intense pathos bring about a coming freedom.

AA: Yeah, just to drawn us the idea, the good versus evil story—you mentioned at the very beginning how 9/11 and the events that follow 9/11 were key to the book and to this narrative that you are telling. Would you say that the melodramatic narrative of good versus evil has changed at particular moments since 9/11?  Or is it that the narrative stayed the same with different characters and at different moments along the way? 

EA: There is a way in which it stayed somewhat similar in the way that we could see Obama drawing on the language of melodrama to substitute ISIS for Al-Qaeda and in order to legitimate certain forms of military violence. But there is also a way in which melodrama’s narrative does shift at particular moments. I think when we think of War on Terror melodrama—this melodrama’s narrative promises that goodness can eradicate evil and can bring about a coming freedom—has never happened. It is a promise that’s endlessly deferred. We can almost call it, like in a Derridean sense, that it is a freedom to come. It is always this promise of eradicating terror and bringing freedom that does not happen. So because of that, this underlying sense of unfreedom ends up being relocated onto new sources of evil. So we can think of immigration and narratives of immigration especially from a right wing standpoint—illegal immigration as they call it— as a way of re-harnessing melodrama for different political projects. There is actually a scholar at NYU, Christina Beltran, who is doing some really interesting work to think how melodrama inhabits narratives of immigration. The source of unfreedom and violence is not terrorists, but often immigrants from Mexico who are coming here and trying to get jobs, trying to live, trying to make their lives work. When the source of unfreedom shifts, then the narrative of melodrama shifts. When we are thinking about War on Terror melodrama, the narrative problem is: the source of evil is terrorism and America gets defined in a particular way as a response to that. So if the terrorists are violent and intolerant, then what it means to be a member of the US citizenry is that you are peaceful and that you are tolerant of difference. In immigration melodrama, if the evil enemy are illegal immigrants, out to steal US jobs, then that kind of countervailing description of goodness, of what it means to be a good American, also shifts—and it means that you are hardworking, or that you are honest, that you try to pull yourself up by bootstraps. So, often times that kind of stereotypes and the ways that we categorize evil end up shifting the whole notion of what it means to be a American in these different melodramas.

AA: As you mentioned—I mean, you mentioned this rhetoric in the way it arises around the things like ISIS or immigration, and critiques often use the word “hysteria” to describe that rhetoric when they want to criticize it. Is your idea of melodramatic political discourse different from this notion of political hysteria?

AE: Thanks, it is a great question. Hysteria is a really interesting concept with a long, complicated lineage. It is often hysteria is a psychological condition. It often connects to women. It is a description of women. I believe that etymology of hysteria means that something is wrong with your womb. So often it is tied to women, it is tied to understanding of women as being sexually repressed in a certain way. And often times, hysteria connotes a sense that you are out of control. That your responses are…. That you are not in control of your emotions, that your emotions control you. Melodrama operates in a different register. It is less a psychological condition of out of control of emotion than a performance of heightened emotion. So, it is less about being out of control. And especially if we go back to Nietzsche and we think about Nietzsche’s reading of “orgies of feeling”, which I liken to melodrama—which is obviously important to the book—he understands this orgies of feeling is in a way self-inflicted. That in a way you are choosing to experience these really heightened emotions in melodrama in part because they seem to promise you something. In melodrama the promise of heightened emotion is that eventually will lead you to feeling free, to feeling unburdened by the constrains of the world. So for me, the gender connotations of hysteria are different and the psychological make up is different. I guess, in addition to way that he understands agency, in melodrama there is a kind of greater sense of control or desire that is going along with it, wherein hysteria is something can be blown off, because it seem to be crazy women who have no control over their bodies. I hope that helps to explain some of the differences. 

AA: No, it definitely does. I mean, you mentioned in the last response you made the title of the book Orgies of Feeling comes out of the work of Nietzsche, who might not be someone that one would ordinarily think of as a thinker that think through some of the issues you are thinking about through post 9/11.  Could you talk a little more about why he is an important figure for your argument? It started to come out in that distinction that you are making between hysteria and melodrama. How does Nietzsche help you think this through? 

AE: Obviously canonical political theorists are really helpful for me in thinking through this contemporary condition. Some the thinkers that I drawn on are Marx, Freud, Weber, Foucault, Benjamin, just to name a few. But Nietzsche really is the most influential thinker for me and thinking about melodrama, in part because I think if we are going to address the political effects of a language of good and evil, it is impossible not to address Nietzsche’s sore throating challenge to that, to think through his genealogy of moralization. For Nietzsche, the concept of evil actually structures the onset of modernity. And it is a way of linking the power of moral categories to specific affective intensities, something like an orgy of feeling. In thinking about melodrama and political experience of good and evil in the post 9/11 order, Nietzsche seemed to be somebody that I had to grappled with, even as I am working with and against him. But his readings of political subjects—how we are shaped by these languages of good and evil, what we expect to get out of them—the way that in a language that Nietzsche is looking at, the connection between how suffering ends up signifying that you are good. So, there is a way in Nietzsche’s language where to show someone that you are suffering, that you have been a victim, is also at the same time not only to show that you have been injured, but also to show that you are a good person and that you are a moral person. So there is a way in the contemporary moment, especially in national narratives where claims of national injustice or national suffering in the wake of an event like 9/11. Therefore, also seem to prove at the same time that the nation is good, that the nation is virtuous. And importantly, that the nation is innocent of any wrongdoing. Nietzsche’s language of good and evil and his understanding of the morality of victimization really helped me to think through those problems and to diagnose them.

AA: It feels like one of the really important arguments you make in the book is that melodrama—and again, this goes to some large questions of political theory—that melodrama is not the creation of some set of elites, but instead it is this genre that has this broad, pervasive, popular appeal that can be drown upon at key moments. So, I guess I do wanna ask you, for opponents of US Empire, or members of political left, would the idea be the seize upon melodrama in order to turn it against the Empire, or would the strategy be to work to create a different sort of discourse, with which to oppose this melodramatic political discourse, especially in the contexts you that were just talking about—these contexts of injury?

AE: It’s really important to me to point out that melodrama is not just imposed by presidential administrations on innocent citizens, who are just being duped by the magnetions of political power. Of course I think political elites harness the language of melodrama, but I think there is a way in which they are also harnessing this language, because it resonates so powerfully among the populace. And so, for me the interesting question is much less: How are Americans duped into believing melodramatic narratives about US foreign policy and US Empire? But more interestingly: Why does melodrama appeal to such a broad segment of the population? And what do we imagine melodrama’s legitimation of violence and its legitimation of US citizens as good and innocent people? What do we imagine that will do? And what kind of deeper desires and fears is that playing into? I often feel quite strongly that figures like Bush or Donald Rumsfeld are not the originators of the story—which is not to say they do not harness it. So then the question for “how do we oppose US Empire or to oppose US melodrama?” becomes more interesting when we also think of it not just as opposing elite political power, but how might our own subjectivity in certain ways be shaped by this melodramatic desires? And I include myself in that, in the sense that, I think, we can often have partial affiliations with melodrama where we might be turned off by its language, its deep emotional intensity, and yet we cry at this suffering that melodrama shows. Or we might be turned off by its really dramatic language of good and evil, but then we might want to see the villains punished. So, I think there is a way in which melodrama is often playing on us, and there is a way in which we can have these partial affiliations with melodrama so that melodrama itself can have partial effects. So, how do we challenge these melodramatic discourses of Empire? On the one hand, as I argue at the end of the book, the seeds of the destruction of melodrama are in part already within the discourse itself. On the one hand, its promise to end terror and to bring about the unencumbered freedom that Americans often presume as a kind of national birth-right—those promises are impossible. The promise to end terror is the promise to end an intense affective fear—that is impossible. As I said earlier, the promise of coming freedom is also itself endlessly deferred. So I think melodrama wanes once its promises continue to recede into the horizon. And secondly, because of that melodrama’s narratives of the US Empire often play out—although we imagine them to play out in this really heroic action-oriented melodrama, where the hero fights the villains and the hero wins and saves the victim— what often ends up happening is that it plays much more than women’s weepy melodrama. Or the desire to overcome your constraints is always obstructed and always disappointed. So, when we look at these key moments, the moment of “mission accomplished”—you know, Bush has this very masculinized, heroic performance of presidential and sovereign power, claiming that the War on Iraq is over, and that the US has now won, and the War on Terror is most likely over, which, of course, as we now know is a complete fallacy—and, in fact, we use the term “mission accomplished” as an ironic epithet to show where nothing has actually been accomplished. That moment in 2003 was only the beginning of what we now think as the end of Iraq War. So there is a way in which melodramas narratives of heroic overcoming are impossible to be fulfilled and they often unravel. And more about obstruction than fulfillment. And yet there are still ways, I think, people can oppose melodrama, but I am not sure that counter-melodrama is necessarily the way to do it for some of the reasons that I alluded to earlier. My worry is always that in a melodrama we both misdiagnose the forms of power that we are fighting against by creating them in these broad strokes and moralizing categories of good and evil, or villains, victims and heroes. And also, that it presumes that if you are fighting against these problems you therefore are innocent of any of their effects in a certain way. And that I also think it as a dangerous standpoint, especially for people working in and through the muse of the US Empire often made in our name, certainly supported with our tax dollars. It is really important for us to think about the different ways in which we are complicit in these problems, while using that still as a groundwork fighting against them. But I am not sure that melodrama has it within itself. If the positions of agency in melodrama are villain, victim and a hero, there doesn’t seem to be any way in which you can both acknowledge your complicity and evil and then also become heroic and fighting it. I think there are perhaps other forms of political discourse that might be better equipped to fight against some of these problems. It is certainly in the global US geopolitical realm.


AA: This is great, because this gives us a sense of, as you say, where the argument ends up as you are coming to the conclusion of the book. So, I was wondering if you could talk just a bit about how your ongoing work is gonna carry forward some of the themes that you address in Orgies of Freedom [Feelings]?  

EA: Great, thanks. I end Orgies of Feelings actually with a question. If this kind of desires for freedom in US political life end up taking shape in the US in a way that often legitimates war, domination, and violence, what are other ways of imagining and desiring freedom can be offered that could be more expansive, democratic, and vital political practices? So, in thinking about how to answer that question, my next book is called Ugly Freedoms. And it thinks about the problem in which freedom comes to mean, or at least comes to legitimate these really ugly and terrible practices of war, of sovereignty, of sovereign power, which, I think, always has in it forms of domination. How freedom comes to mean free markets? How freedom comes to often be a justification for the devastation of the climate and our world? So, both looking at the ugliness of the way freedom has been understood, but also to look for minor, surprising, and small-scale practices of freedom that are not found in perhaps more desirable revolutionary forms of action, but also in situations that themselves would seem to be ugly and dire—situations of slavery, of occupation, of domination and dependence. And so, some of the ways that I am thinking about ugly freedoms, and also trying to recuperate possibilities for freedom even in these dire spaces are both in a literary sense.  I am looking at the figure of Gregor Samsa—the cockroach in Kafka’s story, The Metamorphosis— as actually a figure of freedom. I am looking at the TV-show, The Wire, which is often been described as a show that just shows the crushing violence of capitalism and neoliberalism, to also show all the moments in which the film shows the weakness and precarity of neoliberal policies. I am looking at the moments of freedom in the history of US slavery, and also thinking about both Palestinian and Israeli resistance to Israeli Occupation, and to look for these small, but I think powerful, practices of ugly freedom that become available in situations of occupation, and domination, and constraint.

AA: Well, these all sounds really fascinating. I have been talking to Elisabeth Anker. She is the author of the book, Orgies of Freedom: Melodrama and the Politics of…sorry, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom, which was published last year by Duke University Press. We definitely look forward to hearing more about Ugly Freedoms and more of your work. Professor Anker, thanks again so much for joining us.  

EA: Thank you very much for having me and for this conversation.