Professor Michael Schnegg (Hamburg University)
Affective Closures: When Sharing Becomes Shameful
Sharing has long been a valued practice in Namibian communities. Being dependent in terms of economic goods, labor, and food was seen as the usual contribution to shared affectivity in the group. In recent years, however, wealth differences increased and independence has become a salient norm. Consequently, people feel increasingly ashamed when they must demand food from others. To explore this change and the entanglement of affective and economic processes, I draw on Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of ‘the look.’ In this view, shame as an atmosphere that forms when economic dependencies become visible. This perspective is established in critical phenomenology and makes exclusion intelligible. But it does not explain the blurring of class boundaries and under what circumstances shame fades away. To address this, I point to a bias in the extensive literature that builds on Sartre: gazes can be empowering for the gazed-at, too. Acknowledging the duality of what gazes do allows me to show how communities slowly move towards an affective closure. In this process shame increasingly reinforces the emerging class boundaries, whereas these boundaries are not yet fixed, and empowering gazes have the capacity to dissolve them situationally.