NOTES ON ASIAN AMERICAN JOY

1. A NOTE ON NOTES

A presentation title, “Notes on X,” might indicate that the speaker doesn’t know what they are talking about and that they don’t have their shit together. That’s the case here, by condition and choice. The condition is whiteness, which seeks to obliterate Asian American joy to consolidate its universal reach. The choice comes from a hunch that while Asian American joy does not exist, it can be sensed. Rather than trying to know Asian American joy, I set up camp in the realm of not-knowing and invite you in.

Here, let us try to detect Asian American joy rather than define what it is. Asian American joy disrupts the “is,” or the world designed by whiteness, a world built of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperialism, a world that is taken by many to be reality itself. Asian American joy also registers other worlds, worlds that neither exist nor don’t exist but that subsist as fields of potentiality, real though not actual. Because Asian American joy does not exist, it can tell us a lot about possible directions for Asian American studies and politics.

2. A NOTE ON ASIAN AMERICAN AFFECT STUDIES

The most influential accounts of affect in Asian American studies have explored melancholia as a defining affective structure of Asian American life. David Eng and Shinhee Han treat melancholia as a structural condition “underpinning our everyday conflicts and struggles with experiences of immigration, assimilation, and racialization.” Anne Cheng argues that melancholia “conditions life for the disenfranchised and, indeed, constitutes their identity and shapes their subjectivity.”

I am striving to develop Asian American affect studies in two different ways. First, I turn away from psychoanalysis and toward a line of affect theory that was initiated by Baruch Spinoza and that includes Brian Massumi and Marie Kondo. Second, I challenge the idea that melancholia is the only or primary affective structure of Asian American life. Instead, let us entertain the counterintuitive possibility that joy is the structure of Asian American life.

3. A NOTE ON MARIE KONDO

Marie Kondo is a world-famous tidying guru, born and raised in Japan and now living in Los Angeles. She has a lucrative tidying enterprise, which consists of six books, two Netflix shows, an online store, and a global consortium of tidying consultants. She is popularly known for a simple directive: keep only what “sparks joy” and discard everything else. “Spark joy” has circulated widely as a meme, used to critique just about anything, from bad relationships to cruel systems of power.

Kondo has been alternately demeaned and adored through xenophobic, racist, and sexist tropes. Here’s a sampler. Journalist Tanya Snyder writes that Kondo’s penchant for tidying rather than using possessions “should give you a pretty good sense of how alien her priorities are.” Resonantly, writer Molly Young suggests that Kondo’s animist disposition is “as lovely as it is alien.” This sentiment exemplifies what Leslie Bow calls “racist love,” which denotes how salutary feelings like love, pleasure, and delight can be some of racism’s most potent carriers.

Racist love and hate against Kondo were sparked for many reasons, one of which may have been the disallowed proximity of an Asian/American woman to joy. If joy belongs in white Western hands alone, then Asian Americans are supposed to be alien to joy, perpetually foreign to it. They are what Sara Ahmed calls “affect aliens.” Whiteness displaces Asian American joy and establishes a hegemonic joy from which Asian Americans are alienated.

4. A NOTE ON BODILY INTENSITY

To find Asian American joy, look elsewhere than whiteness and its regime of feelings. Let us turn to Kondo, Massumi, and Spinoza.

“Spark joy” is actually a partial and loose translation of the Japanese “tokimeku,” a translation that recruits Kondo to what Sara Ahmed calls the “promise of happiness.” Tokimeku means to throb, to palpitate, to flutter. If these inflections are preserved, then joy shifts away from emotion and toward bodily intensity. Kondo says, “When something sparks joy, you should feel a little thrill running through your body, as if your body is somehow slowly rising up to meet the item, embracing it even.” Here, joy is bodily intensity: the sensation of a body leaning toward something worthy of love.

Kondo’s affect theory can be developed with the help of Massumi, for whom joy is not happiness or satisfaction. The latter are emotions, or “the psychological capture of affect for the interiority of a supposedly individual subject.” Influenced by Spinoza, Massumi writes that joy is “an augmentation in powers of existence—capacities to feel, act and perceive.” Joy stems from encounters that instigate shifts which cannot be anticipated or controlled, and which are thus liable to stray from sociopolitical demands. As Vivian Huang writes in a creative reading of Kondo, “The capacity to spark joy always occasions the possibility to spark otherwise.”

Because Asian American joy is bodily intensity, it can feel like many different things. An increase in capacities to feel, see, and act may provoke excitement, wonder, anxiety, or dread. Whether and how joy is subjectively and socially registered depends on a “partition of the sensible,” Jacques Ranciere’s term for the delineation of what can be felt and by whom. Whiteness does not usually register Asian American joy as happiness or satisfaction. When it does, Asian American joy is merely a copy of white happiness in yellow and brown bodies. Whether whiteness denies or admits Asian American affect, what’s lost is Asian American joy as an increase in capacities to feel, see, and act otherwise.

5. A NOTE ON MINOR FEELINGS

Because whiteness strives to erase the otherwise, it generates what Cathy Park Hong calls “minor feelings,” or “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.”

But maybe minor feelings aren’t so negative. An absence of minor feelings could indicate assent to white norms as though they were universal truth. Minor feelings reflect distance from whiteness, difference from it. Their origin is not whiteness but a stubborn will to persist otherwise and perhaps a yearning for other worlds. If so, then minor feelings are a key expression of Asian American joy. To focus on joy is to shift Asian American studies from minor feelings to minoritarian affect.

6. A NOTE ON AFFECT AND EMOTION

Massumi’s distinction between joy and happiness follows a broader distinction between affect and emotion. Emotion is “a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal… It is intensity owned and recognized.” Affect, or intensity, is “a nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation, as disconnected from meaningful sequencing, from narration, as it is from vital function.”

In other words, emotion is experienced while affect is a complication to experience. Emotion is recognizable while affect is not. Emotion can be narrated, while affect interrupts narration. We can have endless, cliched stories about happiness but only ever have notes on joy.

Whiteness reduces affect to emotion. I follow José Muñoz, who observes that because “whiteness claims affective normativity and neutrality,” it racializes subjects as emotionally excessive or deficient. I would add that whiteness does this by capturing affect in a harmony of emotion, description, and subjectivity. Those affects then appear self-identical, legible, and proper. Whiteness is a strange realm, wherein happiness looks and feels like happiness, sadness looks and feels like sadness, and affect looks and feels like emotion.

That is why I hesitate to use affect and emotion interchangeably, for doing so can afford primacy to whiteness and anchor Asian America to it. Asian American politics might distinguish between affect and emotion—not to free Asian American joy from whiteness but to emphasize that Asian American joy is always already free because it does not exist. This politics takes Asian America to be primary and finds whiteness to be reactionary.

7. A NOTE ON EMOTIONLESSNESS

Since whiteness makes Asian Americans seem to be emotionally lacking, Asian Americans could respond by showing that they are, in fact, emotional. Asian American politics might instead challenge the sociopolitical terms of facticity by defying white expectations of emotional performance. Refusing to embody or mimic white happiness, this politics rejects what Summer Kim Lee has explored as an imperative to be relatable and accommodating.

This politics could replicate stereotypes of Asian Americans as inscrutable, but it is supported by Asian American feminist retoolings of inscrutability by Vivian Huang, Xine Yao, and Mila Zuo. For example, we might be guided by Zuo’s contention that “the inscrutable is not devoid of meaning but rather pregnant with plenitude.” As I describe it, inscrutability thwarts white reductions of affect to emotion. Fidelity to intensive bodily shifts makes Asian Americans inscrutable to others and to themselves. In this politics, Asian Americans are emotion-less but affect abundant, unhappy but joy-full.

8. A NOTE ON AFFIRMATION

For Spinoza, joy is the feeling of an increase in the capacity to affect and to be affected while sadness is a feeling of decrease. But joy and sadness are qualitatively different. Joy makes us want to connect with the source of empowerment, which we embrace as though it were part of us; it is a body rising to meet an object, as Kondo puts it. Sadness makes us repulse what drags us down. In short, joy and sadness are somatic modes of affirmation and negation.

When Asian American politics is informed by joy, it becomes affirmative. It is not principally concerned with opposing the powers that be. It stages and joins encounters that enhance the capacities of Asian America to be otherwise to whiteness, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism.

0. A NOTE ON RETURN

At the outset of this talk, I said I don’t have my shit together, and hopefully it is clearer why. Asian American joy denotes shifts in bodily capacities beyond expectation, comfort, and control. It reflects a disorganizing encounter. When in touch with joy, one is undone.

Asian American joy has as many forms as the encounters that spark it. It is open-ended and dynamic at heart. This makes Asian American joy unknowable. Although—or because—Asian American joy is unknowable, it can be thought. Thinking is the afterparty of an encounter that solicits affirmation. It is an effort to preserve joy—that is, to preserve its dynamism by carrying it to another form. Asian American joy is the eternal return of movement beyond whiteness. It enables Asian America to only ever be otherwise, not only to whiteness but also to itself.

I suspect that this means Asian American studies cannot take joy as an object to be known. Instead, joy Asian American studies to be speculative and experimental. The question is not how to critique Asian American joy, but how to think it by letting it find expression in a work. Not quite Asian American studies of joy, but with it and from it.

1. A NOTE FROM ASIAN AMERICAN JOY

I am only ever we, only ever different from myself, a difference that disallows the self or at least possessive forms of it. You, Asian America, do not need to wait to realize us for you are us. We are already here and now as disturbances to the here and now, and as much else besides. We invite you to feel and amplify our powers—to see that you are nothing but collective encounters, that you pulse with potentiality, that you persist only by becoming otherwise, and that we make a mess of you every step of the way, and that’s how we get you to love you too.