Fires on the Border

Hennessy, Rosemary (2013) Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN and London), xxvi + 301 pp. $75.00 hbk. $25.00 pbk. Rosemary Hennessy offers a treatment of a well-known phenomenon, but one that has not often been well articulated and has only recently begun to be theorised: the complicated role of affect in social change movements. She addresses this within the specific setting of the Mexico–US borderlands, drawing primarily on her organising work with the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (CJM), interviews and the specifically Latin American tradition of testimonio. Hennessy navigates, and sometimes tries to bridge, a number of splits within several fields of enquiry that have been growing over the past three decades. Insights from feminist theory, queer theory, Marxist and post-Marxist theory shape her contributions to affect theory, grounding her analysis in the materiality of social relations as a lived embodied experience. At the heart of her argument is that there remains a surplus that can never be fully incorporated by capitalism: the human capacities for attachment and cooperation (p. xx). Hennessy offers an overview of debates within affect theory and helpfully notes her alignments with, and departures from, well-known contributors to the field. She departs substantially from the groundbreaking work of Brian Massumi, but retains his characterisation of affect as ‘bodily sensation that exceeds what is actualised through language’ (p. 43), which draws her to note the silences in what was told to her in meetings and interviews and to build on Foucault's and Taussig's theorising of the concept of the ‘open secret.’ Hennessy claims that we must better understand ‘the relation between felt sensations and the limits of their articulation’, writing that ‘This relation is precisely what constitutes affect-culture as a site of struggle, of capital investment and resistance’ (p. 45). Hennessy's concept of ‘affect-culture’ draws most heavily on Jonathan Flatley's contributions to affect theory, stressing both affect's semi-autonomy and its adhesion to cultural forms. She defines it as ‘the transmission of sensation and cognitive emotion through cultural practices’ and argues that affect-culture is inflected ‘in the circulation of cultural narratives that are themselves sites of struggle as they encode the mythologies that reproduce dominant power relations and alternative narratives that question or reinvent them’ (p. 50). Organisationally, the book is intentionally on less solid ground. The three chapters in Part I, entitled ‘History, Affect, Representation’, situate the subject matter historically and theoretically, occasionally shifting narrative registers and moving into ethnography. In Part II – ‘Sex, Labor, Movement’ – the style and content become more explicitly ethnographic. Each chapter tends to stand alone quite well, although there are some disjunctures among and within them that can be a little jarring. Hennessy acknowledges this unevenness, writing that this is ‘an account of realities that often do not neatly cohere or are at times painfully out of joint’ and that the style and sequence of the argument ‘mimics this discomforting cadence’ of the tempo of organising itself, which is never steady but always coming in fits and starts, with long periods in between that demand patience and perseverance (p. xxi). In this way, the book becomes a testament to the rewarding, thought-provoking messiness that can ensue when reductivist tendencies are shunned and complexity is given its due. Hennessy's work shines brightest in the chapters where all of the threads which she takes up are woven together densely, such as that entitled ‘Feeling Bodies, Jeans, Justice’, where she reads the larger themes of deregulation's wasting bodily effects and the neoliberal logic of randomness and the resignation that it can elicit in response through the marketing and off-shoring campaigns of the Levi Strauss denim company and the resistance that it provoked among workers. Hennessy notes the normalising of a (depoliticised) post-gay subject in Levi Strauss's marketing and asks what relation this normalisation had to the deregulation of the bodies of those who were assembling the jeans. She asks, ‘Is bioderegulation a concept capacious enough to contain the spectacular deployment of homonormative bodies in transnational commercial sectors and the wasting of bodies elsewhere?’ (p. 164). While occasionally the argument seems perhaps overly optimistic – such as the suggestion that biopower can be marshalled in the cause of resistance (pp. 181, 198) (an interesting idea deserving deeper consideration) – her ‘preposterous suggestion’ vis-à-vis an epistemic stance outside of capitalism (p. xix) is most welcome, and her concluding section on love and the commons is richly provocative and highly apropos of this historical moment

Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics · Affect theory · Argument (complex analysis · Capitalism · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Marxist philosophy · Materiality (auditing · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philosophy