Feeling Accountable: Affect and Embodied Ethics in Times of Crisis

Abstract

Calls for strengthening the U.S.’s federal ethics systems have proliferated in the popular media, among good governance watchdog groups, and beyond. Framed as an ongoing crisis, the situation has prompted democracy reformers to advocate for more stringent accountability mechanisms, oversight, regulations, and laws. Drawing from new directions in scholarship, this article uses approaches from affect theory to reconsider assumptions about reason, language, and the rule of law within government ethics reform. In so doing, I suggest that perspectives from affect theory expose overlooked areas within current accountability mechanisms and subsequent failures of enforcement, arguing that recent theoretical interventions help us rethink good governance practices by calling into question the ratio-centric, agential framing of government accountability. By mobilizing new theories of crisis and emotion, this article considers how administrative bodies—made up of corporeal bodies—might feel accountable. Building on the work of scholars who link the roles of habits and environments to embodied actions, this article proposes that examining the affective composition of an ethics crisis has wider implications for theorizing moments of institutional reckoning.