ABSTRACT
George W. Bush’s administration understood well the political uses of the generation and management of affect.1 Indeed, one could tell the story of the Bush administration as a series of more or less successful efforts to provoke and press into service the unwieldy affective intensities mobilized by 9/11.2 In this essay, I will propose that the administration’s establishment of the interrogation camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the official executive embrace of indefinite detention and torture that the camp has come to represent, were such efforts. I will suggest, further, that the objects of this effort at affect-making and management were not only those who have been imprisoned and tortured at Guantánamo, but ordinary American citizens as well. Finally, through a reading of two televisual representations of Guantánamo, I will consider the ways mass-and popular-cultural representation has tried to work throughand help its audience work through-the political emotions engendered by the camp’s existence.
