YELLOW FEELING AT THE EDGE

ASIAN AMERICAN AFFECT IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE

This paper unfolds in the wake of anti-Asian violence. It comes after but it does not respond, at least not directly. I am striving to center Asian America and to theorize it not-in-relation to whiteness. This task is perhaps naive, perhaps impossible since Asian America has been tied to whiteness historically. My argument tilts away from the historical and moves into the realm of a speculative ontology. It is ontological because it tries to articulate the being of Asian America. It is speculative in the sense of contemplating what Asian America could be rather than what Asian America must be.

Whiteness tries to reduce the could-be to the must-be, so that Asian American potentiality can emerge only within its confines but never outside or against them. What whiteness relentlessly comes after is Asian America as a multitude of propensities to be unassimilable, that is, to be otherwise. Whiteness tries to destroy those propensities in order to grasp Asian America in its projected permanence. Anti-Asian violence is a necessary weapon of whiteness. Its principal target is not any individual or collective, but Asian America as a field of potentiality.

This paper dreams of Asian America as potentiality, as the potential to be otherwise, which can be only partly lived but never exhausted. The wager is that this speculative ontology has significant implications for Asian American affect and politics.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian violence has been fully expected but not any less shocking. As writer Han Ong says, anti-Asian violence has “become our weather.” Anti-Asian violence is neither an ironclad structure nor a chaos of disconnected instances. It is a mobile pattern. It follows particular tendencies but retains a capacity to swerve and surprise. The ubiquitous possibility of anti-Asian violence means that our lives are always in danger. If we say that we’re safe, we really mean that we have been spared.

This necropolitical condition is also an affective one. Dread, grief, and outrage are some of the affective tones of anti-Asian racism and the possibility of violence. Asian American studies of affect have typically focused on the sociopolitical conditions that produce certain emotions or psychic states. Anne Cheng, David Eng, and Shinhee Han have described melancholia as a feeling produced by exclusion but also as a constitutive aspect of Asian American subjectivity. Similarly, Jinah Kim has elaborated “postcolonial grief” as a transpacific structure of feeling that originates in imperial violence. What Cathy Park Hong calls “minor feelings” is produced when white people prefer innocence to accountability and consolidate a public sphere without any outlet for experiences of racism.

These tendencies focus on injury, whether as the source of feelings or the affective foundation of subjectivity. I want to explore different focal points through political theorist Wendy Brown’s article, “Wounded Attachments.” Brown was concerned with the use of injury as the foundation of politics. It would define identity through exclusion from white masculinist middle-class ideals. This unwittingly reinscribes the centrality of those ideals because its politics are reactive. These subjects are attached to their wounds.

To make subjects active, Brown called for a shift in politics from identity to desire, or from “I am” to “I want.” Central to my paper is Brown’s provocation: “What if we were to rehabilitate the memory of desire within identificatory processes, the moment in desire… prior to its wounding?” Brown did not elaborate what such a desire might be, whether it is possible, and how its memory might be rehabilitated. The necropolitical condition of Asian America could make us doubt that there is such a moment of desire prior to its wounding. The pervasiveness of whiteness and the ubiquitous possibility of anti-Asian violence makes Asian Americans wounded, potentially if not actually.

Rather than discounting Brown's provocation, we might stretch it in ways perhaps unintended. If there is desire prior to the wounding, prior to the violence that wounds, it is not in a temporal or sequential sense. It is prior in an ontological sense: as a condition under which and against which violence emerges. Asian American desire is not subsequent to and shaped by anti-Asian violence (although this kind of desire exists too). Rather, violence is subsequent to and thus shaped by Asian American desire. Anti-Asian violence is a reaction to Asian American desire as action. We are wounded because we desire, even if this desire never existed.

What is Asian American desire? Why is it targeted for elimination? How might it be described when it is always already consigned to nonexistence?

The desire to which anti-Asian violence responds is not a desire for anything. Desire-for too easily slides into lack, a sociopolitical category that reinforces existing norms as aspirational ideals. Desire-for is often constrained by whiteness, whether directly or indirectly. It also presumes that we are transparent to ourselves as though we fully know who we are, what we don’t have, and what we need.

A different notion of desire comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom Wendy Brown draws. For Nietzsche, desire is linked to action, or what we might call creativity. Viewed as creative force, desire augments, connects, builds, becomes. It is the propensity to become otherwise without determining in advance what that is and without being limited by whatever comes. This is desire without want, and it might even be desire against what we want. In short, this is not desire for an otherwise. It is desire that directly enacts the otherwise.

Our starting point is not with anti-Asian racism but what is prior to it. It’s not that Asian America once existed—that it had a stable form or a common foundation or a cozy unity which was then messed up by racism, and now needs to be restored. This is not nostalgia for a pure origin, an ideal state of Asian America. The Asian American prior is not an “is,” for it did not exist, wasn’t allowed to exist, and, perhaps most importantly, did not want to exist, when existence under whiteness takes the form of a solid, individuated, completable thing—a thing that can be known, categorized, disciplined, regulated, violated, consumed, discarded, and worst of all, salvaged. It is a longing for Asian America as nonexistent: a fuzzy, shapeshifting aggregate, a force superabundant and incalculable, and hence antithetical to the demands of whiteness for homogeneity, for boundaries, for order.

Anti-Asian violence is not only the breaking of bodies. It is primarily the brutal imposition of form onto shapeshifting substance. Its telos is the extermination of the otherwise. In this historical juncture, the otherwise has been made exquisitely sensible in whatever Asian Americans do, whether they are sitting on a bus, going for a walk, or heading home for the night. Asian Americans are impossibilities crashing into the real and hence must be returned to the realm of nonexistence. As philosopher Boram Jeong has observed, “How readily yellow bodies can be expelled from the world organized around whiteness shows that their presence in it has always been contingent upon their invisibility, the supposed absence.”

But maybe some of us long to not exist. I don’t mean a wish not to live, but that many of us feel like we can live only by withdrawing from existence within the terms of whiteness—terms that are too narrow, too exhausting, too damaging, and, maybe worst of all, too boring. Existence is an insult to the largeness of Asian America, a largeness that never existed but may yet have a future because it always persisted in potential.

What does this speculative ontology of Asian America do?

First, it expands politics by conceptualizing resistance differently. Resistance is typically understood as a response to power, as that which is subsequent to and conditioned by it. We have been turning this relationship around and asking, what if the conditions of the historical present were not power but resistance? As Michel Foucault says, “Resistance comes first, and resistance remains superior to the forces of the process; power relations are obliged to change with the resistance.” I am theorizing the primacy of Asian American resistance: that Asian American resistance is ontologically prior to anti-Asian racism, what whiteness relentlessly and violently fights off in order to maintain its hold. Asian American resistance is not bound to oppositional paradigms and reactive stances. It is not responsive but creative.

A good example of this kind of resistance is abolitionism. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.” Resistance as creative force is animated by and changes desire. As Jack Halberstam writes alongside Moten and Harney, “We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after ‘the break’ will be different from what we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in the break.”

Second, this orientation expands Asian American affect theory. Rather than focusing on the affects produced by whiteness and anti-Asian violence, it asks, what are the affects to which whiteness and anti-Asian violence responds? This path involves deeper attunement to what Asian America could have been and could be, how we are already resisting or serving as a vessel for a resistance that precedes us. As alluring as Halberstam’s description of desire and the breaks is, it remains unsatisfying because it cuts up time into before, during, and after. This linear, sequential temporality is ruptured by the ontological priority of resistance. The breaks are always happening, and we are only ever in them, no before, no after.

So a qualifier is needed: resistance is not “already there”—meaning, it does not exist. It is not actual but potential. To sense it, we need sensorial practices that are detached from whiteness. Whiteness is not only an ideology or set of norms. It is a partition of the sensible that obliterates the capacity to sense otherwise. It has us looking for a world without whiteness on a distant horizon rather than in the pockets of the ordinary. Our task is not creating resistance from scratch. It lies in activating resistance by crafting our senses to feel what Asian America could have been and could be. It lies in dwelling in the breaks, to be nothing but the breaks, to be nothing but broken. It lies in remembering that which did not happen.

We while we strive to escape whiteness, to escape anti-Asian violence both actual and potential, we might find the way out not after the hold of whiteness but prior to it. This impossible path takes us away from what we want because we are guided by desire. It leads us to Asian America as incalculable plenitude, to unassimilability without origin or end, to a history of events that did not happen, to becoming worthy of our brokenness, and to yellow feeling at the edge.