Affect (Cultural Theory)

Affect and Feeling: Special Issue

by john cromby

Co-author: L.Blackman.

Introduction to a special issue of the International Journal of Critical Psychology on 'Affect and Feeling'.

Cinema of the Not-Yet: The Utopian Promise of Film as Heterotopia

by Adrian Ivakhiv

Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 5.2 (2011)

Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s writings on utopia, Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, and the ‘affective turn’ in... more Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s writings on utopia, Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, and the ‘affective turn’ in social theory, I argue that cinema is by its nature heterotopic: it creates worlds that are other than the ‘real world’ but that relate to that world in multiple and contradictory ways. The landscapes and people portrayed in film are affectively charged in ways that alter viewers’ relationship to the real objects denoted or signified by them. But it is the larger context of social and cultural movements that mobilizes or fails to mobilize this affective charge to draw out its critical utopian potentials. I examine four films from the 1970s—Deliverance, The Wicker Man, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, and Stalker—as examples of richly heterotopic films that elicited utopian as well as dystopian affects in their audiences, and I discuss some ways in which American environmentalists, British Pagans, Europe’s ‘generation of ’68’, and Soviet citizens worked with these affects to imagine change in their respective societies.

Creating subjectivities

by john cromby

Book Review. Laviolette, P., Extreme Landscapes of Leisure: Not a Hap-Hazardous Sport. London: Ashgate, 2010

by Jonathan Westaway

Book Review
Journal of Tourism History, 2012, 4, (1), 118-120.
DOI:10.1080/1755182X.2012.671498

"Seeing Immanent Difference: Lorna Simpson and the Face's Affect"

by Laurie Rodrigues

Published in _Rhizomes_, Issue 23 (April 2012).
Special Issue on Deleuze and Photography. Guest Editor, Michael Kramp.

"Seeing Immanent Difference: Lorna Simpson and the Face's Affect"

by Laurie Rodrigues

Published in _Rhizomes_, Issue 23 (April 2012).
Special Issue on Deleuze and Photography. Guest Editor, Michael Kramp.

Pedagogy and performativity: Rendering laboratory lives in the documentary" Naturally obsessed: the making of a scientist".

by Natasha Myers

Digital memories, analogues of affect

by Robert Payne

Who Speaks? Torture and the Ethics of Voice

by Michael Richardson

published in TEXT Vol. 16 No. 1, 2012

This paper performs, in three movements, an exploration of the ethics not of torture itself but of writing it... more This paper performs, in three movements, an exploration of the ethics not of torture itself but of writing it creatively. First movement: of the right to write. This first movement considers ethical questions of authorship in the fictional narration of the trauma of torture. It employs Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopower and testimony to position the act of writing creatively about torture in relation to torture’s political project and the subjection of the body to sovereign power, along with a reading of torture as affective encounter, to suggest the necessity of writing literary testimony to it. Second movement: of writing the torturer’s voice. The second movement draws on Deleuzian affect theory to articulate a relational conception of this trauma that suggests, however distasteful, the need for the torturer’s voice to be heard beyond the torture chamber. Third movement: of being affected by unjust ethics. This third movement draws on concepts of affective contagion to gestures back towards the experience of being affected by writing unjust ethics. With their twists and turns, their connections and discontinuities, these movements navigate – necessarily incompletely – the messy complexities of the ethical space of voice in the writing torture.

Writing Torture’s Remnants: Sovereign Power, Affect and the War on Terror

by Michael Richardson

Published in 'Torture Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice', 2011, edited by Catherine Barrette, Bridget Haylock and Danielle Mortimer.

This eBook is available for free download.

American use of torture in the war on terror, what is routinely sanitised as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ has... more American use of torture in the war on terror, what is routinely sanitised as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ has not received significant literary attention. Writing about torture and its traumatic affects is made difficult by torture’s assault on subjectivity, language and narrative. In its obsession with not piercing the flesh, American torture renders bodies in their entirety – social and political, flesh and blood – utterly subject to sovereign power and makes precarious the very possibility of a speaking subject. Narratives are ruptured and produced; after, the event remains without closure, unable to become memory. This chapter takes an inter-disciplinary approach to understanding the torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere, grounding its analysis in examples from literature, documentary cinema, memoir and confidential correspondence with an anonymous American military intelligence officer, and exploring the problem of writing the traumatic remnants of that torture. Agamben’s work on sovereignty and biopower is used to show how bodies become wholly penetrated by American power, while affect theory, following both Tomkins and Deleuze, provides the conceptual apparatus for an expanded understanding of bodies, and for exploring relations between tortured and torturing bodies. The author’s own fictional work- in-progress on detention and torture during the war on terror frames both the challenges and possibilities in the practice of writing the consequences of torture. The work of Felman and Laub on testimony, and that of Agamben on what he calls ‘neither the dead nor the survivors’ but ‘what remains between,’ provide the basis for an ethic of writing built on the traces of trauma, the remnants of torture that are ever-present in bodies, yet to become memory.

'"Should I feel a moment with you?": Queering Dickensian Feeling'

by Ben Winyard

L'avventura della percezione tra rappresentazione e affetto

by Enrica Picarelli

Questo saggio esplora il rapporto tra soggettivazione e comunicazione, adoperando un paradigma teoretico stratificato... more Questo saggio esplora il rapporto tra soggettivazione e comunicazione, adoperando un paradigma teoretico stratificato che adotta analisi di stampo tanto rappresentativo che affettivo. Assumendo la soggettivazione nel senso attribuito a questo concetto da Foucault, come un processo storico collegato una configurazione epistemologica e spaziotemporale ben definita, il saggio sostiene che la comunicazione audiovisuale operi come un dispositivo di posizionamento sociale e di mobilitazione percettiva. Inoltre, esso avanza la proposta teorica di analizzare le dinamiche di interazione e socializzazione, che sempre più spesso vengono generate dai cosiddetti nuovi media, in relazione alla New Economy al fine di evidenziare in che modo la produzione sociale sia sfruttata come valore di mercato.

The Hollins Community Project: New Media, Narrative, and Affective History

by Alli Crandell

Happy Accidents - Facebook and the Autonomy of Affect

by Tero Karppi

Forthcoming

The Performative Body: Symbolic Interactionism, Dramaturgy, Affect, and the Sociology of the Body

by Phillip Vannini

Co-authored with Dennis Waskul, forthcoming in the Handbook of Dramaturgy, edited by Charles Edgley (Ashgate, 2013)

The ordinary trauma of gender

by Lee Airton

DRAFT ONLY

Presence Bleed: Performing Professionalism Online

by Melissa Gregg

Submitted to Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill and Stephanie Taylor (eds) Theorizing Cultural Work: Labour, Continuity and Change in the Creative Industries, Routledge, forthcoming.

Draft only: feedback welcome.

This paper draws on empirical evidence and theories of affect to make sense of the online landscape for information... more This paper draws on empirical evidence and theories of affect to make sense of the online landscape for information labour. My aim is to unpack notions of workplace subjectivity and agency premised on ‘separate spheres’ and ‘clock time’ – questioning their usefulness in biomediated work worlds (Adkins 2009, Clough 2010). While the evidence used is based on a small study of professionals in Brisbane, Australia, the discussion bears relevance for workers in a range of industries, due to the so-called ‘ubiquity’ of mobile computing (Dourish and Bell 2011). If modernist notions of labour hinged on a set number of hours for work, often conducted at a set physical location, the fact that labour now escapes spatial and temporal measure poses obvious problems for defining work limits.

Eva Hesse’s Late Sculptures: Elusive Expression and Unconscious Affect

by Susan Best

published in Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the feminine avant-garde (London: I B Tauris, 2011)

This is the first section of a chapter on Eva Hesse. I argue that recent interpretations of her work that utilise the... more This is the first section of a chapter on Eva Hesse. I argue that recent interpretations of her work that utilise the idea of the part object are incorrect.

Seducing Bodies

by Valerio Simoni

Race moves: following global manifestations of new racisms in intimate space

by Aparna Mishra Tarc

Race, Ethnicity and Education

This article makes tentative links between abstract global forces and the affective and material reworking of race in... more This article makes tentative links between abstract global forces and the affective and material reworking of race in intimate spaces of culture and community. Using postcolonial and psychoanalytic resources the article follows enduring manifestations of race as racism surfaces and is mobilized through global shifts of people, ideas and capital. The article argues that as national borders become destabilized under globalization, existing significations of race and racism give way to reattach to migrating, vulnerable and displaced bodies. The article argues that teachers and educators in multicultural nations can begin to follow and intervene in race moves by collectively thinking through narrative histories of migration that structure national belonging and non-belonging and our relationships to each other at home and in the world.

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