Feeling through the Four of Cups

Whiteness, Affect, Excess, Retreat, & Grottoes

Dear Reader,

It’s been a while, but I had to take some time to feel. I needed retreat and recovery and to keep from falling apart, and I know you do too.

Retreat is about self-preservation, self-respect. In this damned world it is a daily effort to keep one’s self-regard from being all-consumed by capitalist cannibalism.

A cornerstone of my safe-keeping is teaching. The other Sunday I taught my class on the Cancer cards and decans. My classes are for those cognizant of their identity as different, in-process. We join as mothers, sisters, femmes and friends primarily. We fall off the mainstream maps of official citizen-subject normativity. While much of the time I am sitting alone, exiled, displaced and barred before obstacle after obstacle toward some sort of mainstream paradigm of communicative coherence, my arms and my heart are open when I teach.

And especially when I teach, I excessively express myself. I am tangential, passionate, ritualistic and I encourage my students to curse, cry, and celebrate as much as they can permit themselves. I encourage my students to work against the affective register of whiteness, especially as I have white students.

See acting white, that is performing a particular affect, to access the normative white-world is not something I strive for, let alone could achieve if I did. Yet my failure comes with cost, that of material precarity. I struggle with garnering visibility for my work while self-preserving. I teach independently because my trajectory as an educator within the white institution was curtailed by my queer brown trans-femininity.

My classes are intimate, but dedicated. And in my Cancer class we came to understand the Four of Cups as a card cautioning against the white affect, which is rather a rejection of affect or lack thereof.

“This performance (of whiteness) primarily transpires on an affective register. Acting white has everything to do with the specific performance of a particular affect, which grounds the performing subject in a normative white lifeworld. Latinas and Latinos, and other people of color, are unable to achieve this affective performativity on a regular basis.”¹

The affect of Latinas is off-white. It fails in feeling white, unable to adhere to the cultural mandates that paint the world white. If there is official declarations insisting on English-only initiatives, then there too is an unofficial national affect.

When Brown Black and Red people participate in democracy, or perform their citizenship they are insisting on an ethnic affect within a contested national sphere struggling over the very terms of citizenship.

The Four of Cups, the third decan of Cancer, the overflowing cup of the latest new moon, proves a useful tool to chart the utility and efficacy of various modes of affective struggle.

In the Smith-Waite iconography, the Four of Cups figure is alone, sitting off-center, arms crossed, eyes closed, apparently rejecting a fourth cup offered them. As Austin Coppock notes, this decan deals with privilege, while the image shows our complexes around receiving and the nature of abundance. Yet we see in this image a rejection of emotion that the cups represent. It is read as emotional excess and in its rejection the Four of Cups becomes a card of whiteness. This fourth feeling cup is literally over the top.

Moving through the world as brown trans-femme it’s easy to see the national affect primarily associated with white middle-class subjectivity as disapproving of an ethnic affect. Given mainstream media representations of ethnic difference serve to reduce, simplify and flatten, it is vital to engage dense, nuanced emotional expressions of Brown, Black, Red life. Ethnic, racialized expression is exoticized by White mainstream media because by all accounts, whiteness is bland. I mean who really wants wonder-bread really?

“Whiteness is cultural logic that can be understood as an affective code that positions itself as the law,” Muñoz observes, noting that if you can’t inhabit or at least act white, white law blocks access to freedom.

If you know the tarot, then you know that the Five of Cups that follows the Four is one of emotional impoverishment. So it’s not that we are too much, it’s that whiteness is just never enough. White affect is so minimalist, so sparse, so underdeveloped, it’ll starve you of any emotional satiation. So from the Four to Five of Cups we can clearly position whiteness as lack, especially important in this historical moment. It is not normative and it is not neutral, despite its claims or delusional fantasies as such.