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There is an undeniable power in the visual. It is a mode of sensation that is arguably the dominant way in which the human experience is a mediated one. This is the approach behind the common claim that images are more visceral than words, or that a picture is worth a thousand words. As early as 1884, William James argued that perceptions like sight and sound have more direct connections to the subject via emotional responses than either perception or emotion have to rationality.1 The idea that perception of the visual somehow carries more or different meaning than is possible through words has been a widely accepted view in most disciplines but notably in art, philosophy, media studies, marketing, psychology, and neurobiology, to name a few. Recent literature has attempted to lay out various approaches to understanding this privileged position that the visual has vis--vis feeling and meaning. The approach I will explore, and the one that is the most promising, is the investigation of how our experiences of sights and images are linked to affect. I hope to evaluate and extend the claims made by Sarah Ahmed in Affective Economies by applying her ideas about the circulation of affect to images in the media coverage of the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, March 2011. I will argue that the analysis of the visual in this context strengthens and contributes to the political relevance of Ahmeds conceptual treatment of affect.

Affective Economies2 Ahmed proposes an economic metaphor for the way affect circulates. Adapting the Marxian position on the logic of capital, Ahmed claims that signs are not the source of the
1 2

James, William. What is an emotion?, Mind vol.9, No.34, pp. 188-205. Apr., 1884 Ahmed, Sarah. Affective Economies in Social Text 79, Vol. 22, No. 2,. Duke: 2004

Quintero affect with which they are associated. In Marxs view, capital is the value that is accumulated by the circulation of commodities. In her example, the representations of minorities in white-supremacist rhetoric (here signifiers are the commodities) are not themselves icons of hate (emotion as value).3 Just as in economic systems, the hate-value accumulates via the circulation of its signifiers, and the result is something like affective capital. This is a hasty summary, but it captures the core point that I take away from Ahmed: the circulation of signifiers is a form of work that turns out an affective product. It is through the circulation of a narrative of hate that those who hate come to identify with one another as subjects, and the people who are the target of such a narrative come to be the hated object. This suggests that emotions are not simply within or without but that they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds.4 If the framework of affective economies is to be a fruitful way of understanding the power of the visual, we will need to ask of these images, what work is being done? Is this work something other than the aligning of subjects and objects along affective lines? If we are to confirm the unique relationship between images and affect, we will need to ask further, how is this work particular to the visual? To begin I will unpack and apply several ideas upon which Ahmeds economic view is built. Stickiness The idea of stickiness is interesting, relatively unproblematic, and can readily be adapted to an analysis of the role of visuality in media coverage of the event in Japan. I wonder here if there is not, then, an affective equivalent of an economic collapse, perhaps as a new way of interpreting the ennui that supposedly sparks many radical cultural movements 4 Ahmed 117.
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Quintero Ahmed suggests that emotions are sticky. For instance, hate becomes stuck to the object of the foreigner through loathsome imagery in anti-immigration rhetoric. The emotions associated with words like flood, swamp, and overwhelmed adhere to object. The subjects who share that association of emotion and object together as a we. Stickiness, then, is this combination of adhesion and cohesion. It is an interesting metaphor, and it bears exploration. In the language of chemistry, specifically when talking about something liquid, the properties of adhesion and cohesion are closely related to concepts like viscosity, surface tension, internal friction, and others. The stronger and more easily formed these adhesive and cohesive bonds are formed, the stickier the substance. Thus something with high cohesion and low adhesion sticks to other things but not to itself. This will act much like ink. The reversal of these properties will act like liquid mercury, which will tend to stay together, and will not wet the glass it is in. Something low in both adhesion and cohesion will be granular, like sand. Something properly sticky is like glue, which will stick to easily to many things, and stick those things to each other. We can transfer these metaphors, as Ahmed has done, to objects and subjects of political significance. An image of a certain national flag, for instance, is immensely cohesive. All such images stick together, like mercury, more than they stick one thing to another. There is a unity of the subject represented in the image. The images of war, such as an explosion or a gun, may be more highly adhesive. The images figure 2 and 2a, for instance depict burning buildings in the Fukushima prefecture, but could easily be transplanted to many scenarios that include the image of a burning building. These potential settings for such imagessuch as a different natural disaster, a their new cohere

Quintero war, terrorism, arson, or a domestic accidentvary greatly. The images are in this way inky. Figure 3 is not so generic, but still draws on emotions that have circulated before it, such as my experience of anger seeing families displaced after hurricane Katrina, or my love of my own family. My viewing of this image invokes an emotional response shot through with my knowledge of other such scenarios, and their affective aspects. Many subjects can align themselves affectively with this image, because this kind of image can be aligned with many objects. This image is like glue, and this is why the family suffering misfortune is one of the most common genres of image when covering tragic events. This visual port indeed confirms what Ahmed tells us about the stickiness of affect. These images work to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social.5 What are we to take away from this conclusion? On one hand, it is an elegant way of understanding this notion of the circulation of affect. The idea of different kinds of stickiness seems an apt explanation of the power of images. The stickier an image isthat is, the more subjects, objects, and relationships with which it can be alignedthe more visible it will become. On the other, it may be old hat. For example, to the viewer of figure 3a, the women crying represent an unknown number of Japanese individuals currently mourning. Moreover, the image of funeral-goers is affectively enriched by the widespread significance of death and mourning. I agree that the image would not have the richness of emotion and meaning if it did not tap into these circulating affective channels.

Ahmed 119

Quintero Ahmeds notion of affective economics certainlyindeed, conspicuously lends itself as the most sensible explanation of why even generic images can invoke a personal emotional reaction. In a sense, to say with Ahmed that such figures of [pity, sadness, longing, etc.] accumulate value precisely because they do not have a fixed referent is to substitute theoretically-informed language for the child-like observation that this picture makes me sad because it makes me think about death.6 Is it not included (if not articulated rationally) in this second statement that the photograph is simply one nodal point in the economy, rather than its origin and destination? 7 A sympathetic reading will see past this objection, as the theoretical articulation may inform a more fruitful examination of actual affective economies than this commonsense supposition alone would allow. I think this is the right conclusion to make, and that Ahmed would not take issue with the objection. In, fact, she would perhaps persuade us to recognize the shortcomings of just such an explanation as the childlike one above. This is why she urges that, rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective.8 It is in an attempt to begin such a project of (re)consideration that I will analyze the affective weight of the visual through a study of images presented in popular media coverage of the disaster in Japan. Affect of the visual

Ahmed, 123. I have replaced the originals use of hate with the emotions more relevant to this image. 7 Ahmed 121. 8 Ahmed 119
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Quintero If the choice to focus on the visual is to be a reasoned one in this study, we must decide what work is being done by these images, and if their affective production can even be interpreted at all. My attempt to do just that provides an interesting contrast to what I have just described as the fruitfulness of Ahmeds work. Whereas the notion of an affective economy relies on the general applicability, shared-ness, and nonresidence of emotions, the unique contribution of the visual also draws on the particularity of images. I would like to highlight two narrative themesnatural destruction and containmentwhere it is clear that the visual contributes different affective content than the textual. Destruction as the Unknowable Photographs from the natural disasters in Japan and their aftermath show incredible destruction and instantly convey particularities that require unpacking. This is significant for two reasons. One is that most of the images have not, to my knowledge, received such a treatment in mass media coverage. Thus, for instance, If I go to the New York Times website and read the articles alone, their impression on me will fail to convey certain affective content that the photos provide. It is doubtful whether images such as 4, 5, 6, and 7 could be effectively explained through text.9 Especially to a viewer unfamiliar with the reality of a tsunami, they depict the destruction in terms that are surrealalmost fantasy. The boat atop the building in figure 6 is displaced: it seems to be impossibly balanced, as though a child had placed one of her toys atop another. Even the exposure of the bottom of the boat suggests that something is amissin our ordinary experience with ocean craft, the bottom should be obscured by water. The house in figure 4 is essentially intact, despite the fact that it is floating away from where it is supposed to be. Personally,
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images from www.nyt.com global edition. Accessed March 19, 2011

Quintero the only sources of reference I have for a whirlpool like the one in figure 5 are the image of toys in a bathtub and the monster Charybdis from Homers Odyssey. Figure 7 depicts shipping containers in such a way that they appear miniature, like a model or like a pile of small red rectangles that would fit inside a bowl. These cultural referents carry affective dimensions that are simply not present in any journalistic article. Fantasy and displacement are particular attributes of this natural disaster that do not reside in the images themselves. My association of fear of the unknown, loss of home, and the discomfort at the exposure of ordinary things in exceptional conditions are products of my learning the affective dimensions of these objects in other contexts. Certainly these surreal images serve a cohesive function. Much like soldiers depict the solidarity of having experienced the unimaginable, the viewer of these images imagines an event that can only be understood by those who experienced it. In this way, the feeling of strangeness from looking at these photos is unlike looking at images of an area struck by a hurricane. I am intimately familiar with the experience of a hurricane. I know the sounds, the sights, and the emotions of waiting through a large storm. I cannot attempt to imagine the corresponding experiences of the residents of Northeastern Japan, and these images serve to remind me of that. I am aligned with a certain subject, the onlooker, which is contrasted with the subject of the victim. Containment Another very striking theme in images from the coverage is that of containment. Drawing on Heidegger and Freud, Ahmed writes:

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Fear responds to that which is approaching rather than already here. It is the futurity of fear, which makes it possible that the object of fear, rather than arriving, might pass us by. But the passing by of the object of fear does not mean the overcoming of fear: rather, the possibility of the loss of the object that approaches makes what is fearsome all the more fearsome. If fear has an object, then fear can be contained by the object. When the object of fear threatens to pass by, then fear can no longer be contained by the object.10

The theme of containment is present in the use of maps and geographic imagery, as well as in depictions of contamination. Figure 8, for example, presents an attempt at graphically representing the energy radiating from the epicenter of an earthquake. Energy here is characterized as something pure, physical, invisible. It is energy that causes buildings to fall, not the ground. It is energy that creates a tsunami, not the water. The map represents the destructive energy by categorizing the heights of the waves. It is expected the viewer will be concerned for those areas in the red zone, and relieved if he or she is not in one of them. Even the use of red as a danger color acts as a manner of containment. Red zones are a danger level we can comprehendthe most destructive waves are thought to be on par with the highest level of danger we as humans can handle. The knowledge of things like the redline on a car, the red warning light, the security code red suggests that the waves are dangerous, but comprehensible. This, in contrast to the image of a boat on top of a house, is something we can understand. Moreover, we know where this damage is geographically. Despite the fact that energy is moving and that there could be another earthquake in any number of locations at any time, for now the danger is contained. The same thought applies to figure 9, which is a before and after comparison of satellite imagery. Here, the danger is contained geographically as well as temporally. We

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Ahmed 121

Quintero know that the destruction happened at that specific place and has since ended. The predominance of images like these satellite and aerial photos and maps speaks to the desire to contain the danger posed by natural disasters. However, the concern of the media discourse quickly changed from the threat of natural disaster to that of a manufactured one. The discourse of containment proved harder for the threat of nuclear contamination than for the aftermath of the earthquake. The use of maps was still prevalent, such as the image figure 10, which depicts the potential trajectory of nuclear fallout, or figure 11 used in a live news broadcast to delineate which areas were safe and unsafe. Here the goal is the sameto locate the danger spatially and thus reassure the viewer of the safety of other areas. Ahmed would say that in this way the media alleviates anxiety by containing the affect (fear) in a specific object. I suspect that the specificity of such containment is more effective at alleviating anxiety for US citizens even than the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission stating that is is basically impossible for the Japanese nuclear plant to produce radiation levels that could endanger US territories. Such maps contribute to the affective containment of fear more so than depictions of the actual efforts to contain the threat. Images such as figures 12 and 13 show Japanese peopleor people who in other words are potential carriers of radioactive particles which could contaminate other areasbeing scanned for levels of radioactivity. These scans were conducted on residents fleeing the area, travelers leaving Japan, and people and goods coming into the US from Japan. This is a proactive effort to prevent the danger that people face in Japan from coming to the US. Nonetheless, these images of a young boy and an older man being screened by men and women in protective gear for an invisible, transmittable carcinogen carry with them affective values accumulated from experience with other

Quintero similar scenariosbe it the meltdown on 3-Mile Island or the SARS pandemic. These images also define an infected, foreign other that threatens the domestic us. Certainly the affective work of these images becomes more accessible and less innocuous if we identify them as nodes in an affective economy. In the narratives I have identified, we are presented with a surreal kind of destruction that we are seeking to contain. There are many other narrative themes, such as nation, religion, technology, and others, which deserve this kind of affective analysis but which are beyond the scope of the work at hand. I would also hope in the future to undertake a comparison of affective economies in textual narratives as compared to the visual. I hope to have convinced the reader of the role of the visual as a unique locus of affectaffect which stands only to grow in impact as more of these images are circulated and can inform the experiences of more viewers.

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