Misplaced Concern

Consider the Get Well card. Sending a card like this to someone convalescing from an injury or, more likely in our pandemic present, a disease, on the face of it does very little for the afflicted party. It’s just a gesture. One that says “Hey, I’m here, I’m thinking of you.” The card’s value, writes Chris Ingraham in Gestures of Concern, “lies less in being effective than in being expressive” (2). Taken together, however, far from being either explicitly political or entirely trite, “noninstrumental expressive acts” like sending Get Well cards serve to “enact a spirit of sociality that builds an affective commonwealth” (2). Ingraham, a professor of communication at the University of Utah, argues that as scholars and citizens we need to pay more attention to forms of relations, communication, and rhetoric that go beyond the explicit, verbal, and instrumental, to those that subtly and often imperceptibly shape the affective worlds we inhabit. While scholars of cultural politics have long been concerned with finding the political in the personal and quotidian, Ingraham asks us to think of those everyday actions that prefigure or skirt the political, but that nonetheless help shape the affective commonwealth we inhabit and where our politics are formed. Ingraham’s project is neither prescriptive nor normative; he does not call for anyone to engage in any specific gestures of concern, nor does he suggest that individual actions will in and of themselves contribute to lasting political or even affective changes. Rather, his is a call for attunement to everyday rhetoric and action. This is a welcome invitation. In almost everything we do, we both start from and help create affects and dispositions “that orient us to one another and to B o o k R e v i e w