From a feminism of ‘ressentiment’ to a feminism of the envious imagination.

If Ngai is keen to sensitize her feminist readers to the critical potential of envy, the work of Wendy Brown offers a very different take on the relationship between envy and contemporary feminism. Her influential States of Injury (1995), published in the same year as Honneth’s Struggle for Recognition, but in the context of contemporary American feminism, is profoundly critical of  “the feminism of ressentiment” she detects among her countrywomen. By a ressentiment-infused feminism she means one that stakes its political claim in a form of an injury and a ‘wounded attachment’ to an identity forged around victimhood and a sense of having been psychologically wronged. For Brown, a “victim” feminism grounded in such negative emotions of perceived injury is perilous because it inscribes and renders constitutive of its identity the very state of injury that it should (and on one level seems to) protest. Brown applies a Nietzschian concept of ressentiment to analyze the traps of identity politics for feminists who become reactively fixated on a narrative of female oppression, setting up the dominant (male) other as reviled party, while remaining profoundly attached to the very structure of domination that is reviled. For Brown this entails not only an unconscious complicity with the relations of oppression, but a disconnection from what is actually wanted and desired in the first place. She asks “What if we were to rehabilitate the memory of desire within identificatory processes, the moment in desire – either “to have” or “to be” – prior to its wounding […] which reopens a desire for futurity where Nietzsche saw it foreclosed by the logics of rancor and ressentiment” (Brown 1995, 75).

If Honneth offers a defense of the negative emotions as essential drivers of the struggle for recognition, Brown is averse to the way  “politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics” (Brown: 1995: 74).  This is a complex issue, and while I have sympathy for Brown’s impatience with victim feminism, I think it is essential to distinguish the critical potential, and open-endedness, of the identificatory processes very much alive in the envious imagination, from ressentiment’s closure of both future and imagination (see also Bell (2000) for an useful discussion of suffering beyond ressentiment). 

What distinguishes envy from ressentiment is that while the latter inverts or conducts a perverse ‘revaluation of values’ the former does not (necessarily) do so. The victim who reviles her oppressor, in the process presenting herself as a virtuous and morally superior being, is certainly not the same as one who directly acknowledges, either to herself or others, that she is envious, and that she wants. The ressentiment-fuelled denial of envy is, I think, potentially quite different from an open and unapologetic envy of that from which one is excluded. Envy of this ‘openly desiring’ sort differs, in my view, from Nietzschean ressentiment because it makes a direct identificatory claim (with the envied other) on behalf of desire. It is informed by a refusal to either invert one’s real values or to adapt one’s preferences, or to cease to want avidly. For this reason, what I describe here as the envious imagination may be proximate in some respects to what Brown advocates as the “desire to have or to be – prior to its wounding” but with one important caveat: namely that it inscribes, alongside the persistence of desire, a critical awareness that a wounding has nevertheless occurred - not for the purpose of cementing a permanent identity around that recognition, so much as a way of registering the obstruction those desires have endured. Wants and desire, which are integral to the envious imagination, are registered openly alongside their frustration, alongside the reality of their historical wounding, rather than dissolving into pure affirmation of (unhindered) wanting as if there were no obstruction to contend with, or as if positive wanting, in and of itself, were enough to remove all those historical and social obstructions to its fulfillment.  

The point of cultivating one’s envious imagination, then, would not be to derive or ground a feminist identity in a permanent sense of wrong or injury, but rather to use the powerful, if hostile, affective registering of envy as a starting point from which to come to know and diagnose what desires are denied. We do not need to assume that such envious desire is nothing but a compromised and colonized aping of the values of the dominant by the dominated, nor that desire is only pure or authentic if it proves free of any mimetic ‘leanings’ on those around us whom we deem to be desirable. After all, desire often is mimetically acquired. Insofar as a valued subject position is envied, I argue, the envious imagination works to hold open (despite frustration) this mimetic desire as a future possibility for the self, and is a persistence of the potential agency that, as Ngai rightly describes, lies suspended within it.

To illustrate how a feminist deployment of envious affect might look, and to demonstrate the distinction between a Nietzschean-inspired spirit of ressentiment (which Brown says feminism should steer well clear of), and a more radical envious imagination (which I think feminism needs to keep on its agenda), I turn now to revisit what is perhaps one of the most celebrated literary portrayals of classed and gendered envy – Carolyn Steedman’s marvelous Landscape for a Good Woman (1986). Steedman provides the reader with a poignant description of the envious disposition of her working-class mother whose life was spent under the deprivations of poverty, first as a child in the English working class suburb of Burnley in the 1920s and then under the frustrations and material hardships of single motherhood in South London in the 1950s. This (auto)biography can be read as a sensitive detailing of the accrual of envious affect as one of the ‘hidden injuries of class’ (Sennett and Cobb 1972). Such injuries express themselves not only in distributions of material and economic goods, but also in the distributions of affect across the socio-political body. Steedman suggests that the traditional and psychoanalytic categories of envy fall hopelessly short in accounting for the causal determinants of this negative emotion. In her analysis,

Within Western religious and political thought, envy has long been called a sin, the improper covetousness of that to which one has no right. When Wilhelm Reich considered the formation of class-consciousness in children […] he dismissed envy as a usable motivational force, despite knowing that poverty, which naturally gave rise to envy is ‘never absolute, but always relative to those who have more’. Envy is thus seen as an enclosed and self-referencing system of feeling, incapable of becoming dynamic or a force from which change might spring.  Feelings of exile and exclusion, of material and political envy, are a feature of many lives […]. To deal with the felt injuries of a social system through the experience of women and girls suggests that beneath the voices of class-consciousness may perhaps lie another language, that might be heard to express the feelings of those outside the gate, the propertyless and the dispossessed. To enter the arena of subjectivity does not mean abandoning the political; indeed to explore my mother’s organization of feeling around a perception of vast personal and material inequality […] is probably the place to start (Steedman: 1986: 111-114).

The filial duty which Steedman as a writing daughter performs here is not only a witnessing or memorializing of the injustices of her mother’s life, but also a kind of critical ‘reverie’ upon that envious affect around which her mother had organized (or been induced to organize) her existence. While it may be true, as Laura Berlant observes, that “the mother cannot feel the ambivalence that drives her toward her satisfaction via the object” (Berlant: 2008: 238), there is no doubt about Steedman’s reflective awareness of that ambivalence as key to her textual transformation of envy from female to feminist emotion. Even in its rawer, unmetabolized form as part of the mother’s affective “landscape of the good woman”, her envy provides her with a prodigious source of resistance to the ideologies of virtuous femininity. I disagree with Berlant’s conclusion that “fantasy is where the mother really lives – she is a sentimentalist in the traditional sense, and she believes in the intelligence that brings her to longing’s objects” (Berlant 2008: 239), insofar as the stubborn persistence of her envy works to disrupt and dislodge the hold of the sentimental. A thoroughly sentimental and sentimentalized “good woman” would not be able to register such envious fury at the perception of how her fantasy (of the good life) has failed to be realized. Steedman’s feminist containment of the emotion of female envy is at once a textual work of mourning (for the life unrealized, for the agency suspended) as well as a ‘holding’ of the feelings of the dead mother in the living and compassionate socio-analysis of the daughter. This posthumous recording of the affective life of the (now lost and, in once sense, irreparable) mother, gives us an insight into the possible cultural reparation that a feminism attuned to envy might be able to perform.

As a final illustration of the equivocal nature of the work involved in ‘containing’ envious affect by the ‘values of feminism’, and how complex is the task of discerning its subjectively and objectively ascribed perceptions of inequality, we might turn to a recent depiction of contemporary female envy in a novel by British author Rachel Cusk. In the figure of Juliet, who appears in the first chapter of Cusk’s Arlington Park (2006), we find a masterful study of envious discontent. The moral ambiguity of what is “mere envy” at not getting what one wants from life, and what is a justified fury at structural sexual inequalities, produces the equivocal and ugly feelings that both Juliet and the reader must wrestle with. If we try to discern whether Juliet’s vitriolic (if largely suppressed) aggression towards the world around her  - neighbours, husband, children - has any “justice” in it, or whether it is, as “mere envy”, symptomatic of Juliet’s personal vice, lack or failing, the impossibility of quite managing to read it one way or the other is probably the most accurate approximation to the truth. The wavering between these two assessments provides the clue to the quandary that the perception of inequality attributable to the subjective register and that attributable to the objective conditions of gender injustice cannot be disentangled. It is not (quite) that Juliet is the innocent victim of a system of gender inequalities that constrains her, nor is it (quite) the case that she is a vicious woman who cannot accept being outshone by others (including her husband) even though it was her earlier self who once was singled out for recognition as rather ‘special’ in her promise and talents. Rather, the souring of the soul that accompanies her envy is real enough. Yet far from being proof that her protest at living a lesser and constrained existence is a reflection of her own (subjective) lack, it is equally clear that her sense of lack is just as much the product of the objective conditions of a painfully unfulfilled life. The difficulty of discerning one from the other – subjective from objective – is where the equivocal nature of her envy lies. The uneasy blurring of the distinction between registering an injustice and a “merely” envious spoiling are captured here in Juliet’s early morning musings on the neighbours she has dined with the night before:

She thought of their house, into whose kitchen alone the whole of the Randall’s shoddy establishment in Guthrie Road would comfortably have fitted. What had they done to deserve such a house? What was the justice in that? The lord of the manor had spoken harshly from     amidst his spoils, from his unjust throne, to Juliet his guest. […] It was as if he’d employed her as a guest and was giving her a caution. That was how a man like that made you feel: as if your right to exist derived from his authority. He looked at her, a woman of thirty-six with a job and a house and a husband and two children of her own, and he decided whether or not she should be allowed to exist (Cusk: 2006: 10-11).

Just as striking as Juliet’s envy in this scene is its accompaniment by her compulsive listing of “goods” - a job, a houses, a husband and two children - arraigned almost in self-defense against being ‘reduced’ to the status of an inferior by the interaction with her overbearing neighbour.

Juliet’s goods may function here as what Sara Ahmed, in her recent study The promise of happiness (2010) has called ‘happy objects’. These describe aspects, situations or things whose prospective attainment performs the ideological work of entraining their (would be) bearers into an alignment with certain patterns of being and wanting. While ‘close up’ the pursuit of the happy object may be performed with all the intensity of a greyhound flying behind the stuffed bunny on a racetrack, a wider critical panning of the lens over the  ‘happiness track’ shows us just how pre-ordained and predictable is the curvature of the path along which such desires are entrained.  

Ahmed’s work offers a critique not only of the new science of happiness, with all its tautologies and assumptions about human desire, but also of the subtle workings of power that adhere in the setting up of the track, so to speak, in accord with pre-given social norms. The traditional ‘happy objects’ of femininity are all too well known: the carefully monitored and cultivated image of (hetero-) sexual attractiveness; the making of the ‘good’ marriage (Ahmed quotes the happiness literature, endorsing this as a good statistical guarantor of happiness); and the achievement of motherhood. To this we might add the more recent (but already surprisingly worn) briefcase as ‘happy object’ of efficient performance in the workplace.

That these ‘happy objects’ are also the affective containers of irreconcilable structural conflicts is conveyed too by that other clichéd image of how contemporary woman positions herself in relation to them – namely that she juggles, as befits the perpetual instability of their possession. Female anxiety abounds in relation to negotiating the tensions between and within such happy objects - that one’s ownership may be only provisional, up in the air, at any moment the ‘bundle’ may be dropped. At the same time successfully juggled happy objects become a scene for the display of a new meta “happy object” that goes under the rubric of “having it all”, and towards which there is much female ambivalence, unsurprisingly given that this meta-‘happy object’ emerges for women as what is simultaneously most desirable and most impossible to attain. In her novel Cusk shows us a striking vignette of a woman’s initial seduction and then increasingly unhappy relation to the ‘happy objects’ towards which she has oriented herself and her desires. Envious discontent emerges as the key emotional timbre of a life of “suspended agency” (Ngai 2006) resulting as the consequence of this sequence of internalization and then rude disenchantment with the ‘happy objects’ that, once attained, threaten to swallow whole the female subjectivity which has too unreflectively swallowed them:

One day she had met Benedict and it had risen up before her startled eyes, a great vista of challenges like a mountain range: things she didn’t have, things she’d never even thought of! Really they were only the dreary lineaments of her mother’s life, a husband, a house, children – but to Juliet they seemed mysterious, full of foreign, ineluctable glamour. […] For a while she prized the idea of a house and a husband and children, as though these things were uncommon, as though they represented some new refinement of human experience. Then she got them, and the feeling of lead started to build up in her veins, a little more each day. The time she realized that if she didn’t go and buy food herself there would be none in the house; the time Benedict returned to work a week after Barnaby’s birth and she realised she would be looking after him alone; the countless times a domestic task had fallen to her, so that she became experienced and preferred to do it because it was easier than asking Benedict – it was all surprising to her, outrageous almost. With her sense of justice she expected that at some point the outrage would be detected and addressed but of course it was not. She made the mistake of complaining to her mother. Oh, the joy, the harsh, vitriolic joy in her mother’s face! She could almost hear her mother thinking, That’s showed you. That’s told you what’s what (Cusk: 2006: 37-8).

In the complicated intergenerational disillusionment depicted here, we find a mother’s Schadenfreude as the daughter comes to know from the inside the injustice the mother has known before her. Their shared plight is not experienced as solidarity or mutual compassion, but rather demonstrates the deep ambivalence of the work of envious emotion that can manifest as a bitter joy in the fact that the other younger woman will not escape the suffering that the older one has known. The realization that her daughter has, in once sense, had to join her in her fierce perception of (objective) injustice does not mitigate against the Schadenfreude felt towards the daughter who had imagined that she was special enough (as talented individual) to escape from the sexual inequalities that impact upon them both. 

If it is true that envy is an ugly feeling that reflects and arises from conditions of suspended agency (leaving its subject stuck half way between activity and passivity), so too it may reflect and arise from these moments of “suspended solidarity”, half way between a joining together in a recognition of being “in the same boat” and an impulse towards dis-identification and repudiation as each party catches in the other a mirroring of her own painful limitation and perception of inferiority. It is a moment of “suspended solidarity” in so far as the potential (for a feminist and intergenerational) solidarity is undone and derailed in the instant of its possible crystalisation, suspended even as it forms.

By giving space to analyzing the affects of those who come to dwell outside or in profoundly ambivalent relations to our culture’s dominant ‘happy objects’, Ahmed also enables a bold celebration of alternative genealogies and ways of being, reconstituted and preserved in what she calls the “unhappy archives” of feminism. Celebrating “unhappy archives” is not a celebration of unhappiness per se, but nor does it accept the stigmatization of subjectivities that either decide to exit, or are excluded from, the domain of the ‘happy object’. These negative emotions and affects, beautifully illustrated in Ahmed’s examples of the melancholic migrant, the feminist killjoy and the unhappy queer, are sites that collect the essential traces of those affective counter-histories: the emotional experiences of those excluded from mainstream culture and its promises. It is important to note here, however, that Ahmed herself chooses to exclude the emotion of envy from her archives. She speaks of envy only in a footnote devoted to a discussion that celebrates the refusal to be envious displayed by the character of Polly in Mike Leigh’s film Happy Go Lucky (Ahmed: 2010: 282). While I think we owe an enormous amount to Sara Ahmed’s groundbreaking excavations of affect in the “unhappy archives” of feminism, I disagree with her relegation of envy to a place outside them. In my view envy offers too vital a site at which to excavate the affective components of being dispossessed (not only of happy objects, but also by the logic of the happy object itself, as we can see in the case of Juliet) to leave it off the record.

Ahmed’s observation that “envy is a disposition that is attuned to the competitive logics of capitalism” (Ahmed: 2010: p. 281) - and hardly to be celebrated for that - is only part of envy’s complicated story for women in late modernity. As discussed above, envy is also a disposition attuned to the perception of social inequality, whose equivocal status derives from the way it hovers between a perception of that inequality as caused by a subjective lack or inferiority attributable to the individual, and one that ascribes that perception to an objective structural injustice.  This is why, even as we might want to reject the categorical distinction made by Rawls between envy and resentment, it is just as vital to draw a distinction between an envious imagination that subtends a feminist politics, and that variety of ressentiment which takes feminism hostage to an identity politics of ‘wounded attachments’ (Brown 1995). Envy, I have argued here, is not ressentiment. Nor is it subject to easy incorporation by the ‘business of sentimentality’ (Berlant 2008). In my view it stands in a more open relation to female desire, without either denying or making a fetish of the historical wounds that such active wanting and female agency can sustain in the face of structural inequality. Where feminism draws upon the envious imagination in this sense, it can testify to these painful states of suspension of female agency and solidarity. It might also be noted, in conclusion, that what stands as affective witness to such states is also evidence that what is painfully suspended is also not (yet) lost. It is evidence of what may yet be released. This suffices, I believe, to earn envy an honoured place in our “unhappy archives”.

References

Ahmed, Sara et al., (eds.) 2000. Transformations: Thinking through feminism.  London: Routledge.

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
-------. 2010. The promise of happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
 
Bell, Vikki. 2000. “Owned suffering: Thinking the feminist political imagination with Simone de Beauvoir and Richard Wright” in Ahmed et al. 2000. Pp. 61-76.

Berlant, Laura. 2000. “The subject of true feelings: pain, privacy and politics”. In: Ahmed et al. 2000.
-------. 2008. The female complaint: The unfinished business of sentimentality. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton: Princeton Univfersity Press.

Cohen, G.A. 2009. Rescuing justice and equality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Cusk, Rachel. 2006. Arlington Park. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

De Beauvoir, Simone. [1949] 1997. The second sex. London: Vintage.

Freud, Sigmund. [1905] 1980. Case histories I: ‘Dora’ and ‘Little Hans’. Trans. Alix and James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Honneth, Axel. 1995. The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. Trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Jaggar, Alison. 1989. “Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology” Inquiry 32(2): 151-176.

McNay, Lois. 2000. Gender and agency: Reconfiguring the subject in feminist and social theory. Malden, Mass.: Polity Press.

Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press.

Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Probyn, Elspeth. 2005. Blush: Faces of Shame. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Rawls, John. 1971. A theory of justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky. 2003. Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Schoeck, Helmut, 1969. Envy: A theory of social behaviour. Trans. Michael Glenny and Betty Ross. London: Secker & Warburg.

Sennett, Richard. and Cobb, Jonathan. 1972. The hidden injuries of class. New York: Vintage Books.

Steedman, Carolyn. 1986. Landscape for a Good Woman. London: Virago.

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