Affect Studies

"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.

The HUMAINE database

by Christopher Edward Peters

Douglas-Cowie, E., Cox, C., Martin, J-C., Devillers, L., Cowie, R., Sneddon, I., McRorie, M., Pelachaud, C., Peters, C., Lowry, O., Batliner, A., and Hoenig, F. "The HUMAINE database". In P. Petta, C. Pelachaud and R. Cowie (Eds.), Emotion-Oriented Systems: The Humaine Handbook, pp. 243-284, Cognitive Technologies Series, Springer, January 2011
Bibtex available here: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/~cpeters/bibtex/bibtex.html#HandbookDatabase2011

The HUMAINE database is grounded in HUMAINE’s core emphasis on considering emotion in a broad sense – ‘pervasive... more The HUMAINE database is grounded in HUMAINE’s core emphasis on considering emotion in a broad sense – ‘pervasive emotion’ – and engaging with the way it colours action and interaction. The aim of the database is to provide a resource to which the community can go to see and hear the forms that emotion takes in everyday action and interaction, and to look at the tools that might be relevant to describing it. Earlier chapters in this handbook describe the techniques and models underpinning the collection and labeling of such data. This chapter focuses on conveying the range of forms that emotion takes in the database, the ways that they can be labeled, and the issues that the data raises. The HUMAINE Database
provides naturalistic clips which record that kind of material, in multiple modalities, and labelling techniques that are suited to describing it.

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.

Effects of emotion and identity on facial affect processing in schizophrenia

by Guy Tiberghien

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.

Geographies of Geborgenheit: beyond feelings of safety and the fear of crime

by Jan Simon Hutta

published in 'Environment and Planning D: Society and Space', 2009

This paper critically engages with the concepts of `feelings of safety' and `fear of crime' as they have been deployed... more This paper critically engages with the concepts of `feelings of safety' and `fear of crime' as they have been deployed in recent politics of community safety. While the first part of the paper discusses the staging of what is referred to as a dispositif of safety, which discursively frames subjective ^ spatial relations in powerful ways, the second part moves towards an understanding of lived experiences of spaces and places that unfold within, but also beyond, the dispositif of safety. For this purpose, the German concept of Geborgenheit is introduced. For a theoretical elaboration of this concept,Walter Benjamin's work around experience and temporality is referred to and articulated with Deleuzian theory. An analysis of Geborgenheit, it is argued, displaces hegemonic notions of `safety' by addressing the dynamics that enable subjects to open up to and nest within a place. The paper concludes with a discussion of vignettes from a qualitative study in Berlin in order to exemplify the constitution of geographies of Geborgenheit in the context of recent safety politics.

The Waitress -- on Affect, Method and (Re) Presentation

by Emma Dowling

Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies 12 (2): 109-117

This article engages the embodied experiences of the waitress with the question of how to (re)present these in their... more This article engages the embodied experiences of the waitress with the question of how to (re)present these in their affective dimensions. In service work, the body needs to be able to combine conflicting capacities; to lure, entice and satisfy on the one hand and to be resilient, fast and astute on the other. If an attention to affect allows a shift from the question of what a phenomenon means or represents, to that of what a phenomenon does, then the ways affect is analyzed and narrated are necessarily bound up with questions of method and (re)presentation. This piece performs the waitress in an analysis of her affective and embodied labor in the process of how she experiences and makes sense of it.

Nobody knows what an insurgent body can do Questions for affective resistance

by Stevphen Shukaitis

Despite the importance that autonomist feminism has played in the development of autonomist politics and struggles it... more Despite the importance that autonomist feminism has played in the development of autonomist politics and struggles it is commonly relegated to little more than a glorious footnotes of figures emerging out of operaisti thought (such as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno). Organizing around gender, affective labor, and issues of reproduction posed numerous important questions to forms of class struggle that focused exclusively on the figure of the waged industrial worker. Revolts of housewives, students, the unwaged, and farm workers led to a rethinking of notions of labor, the boundaries of workplace, and effective strategies for class struggles: they enacted a critical transformation in the social imaginary of labor organizing and struggle. By drawing on the history and of these struggles (such as the various Wages for Housework Campaigns and current organizing such as Precarias a la Deriva) and ideas of those involved (such as Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, Mariarosa Dallacosta, and Alisa Del Re) this paper will explore some lessons that can be learned from these a(e)ffective insurgency. Taking seriously the questions posed by these struggles are extremely important because as Alisa Del Re argues, attempting to refuse and reduce forms of imposed labor and exploitation without addressing the realms of social reproduction and housework amounts to building a notion of utopia upon the continued exploitation of female labor. Furthermore the often cramped positions that organizing forms of affective labor and social reproduction (housewives, sex workers, etc) occupies becomes all the more important as these processes are further integrated into the composition of contemporary capitalism. How does one refuse caring labor? Strategies for organizing around affective labor, what Precarias a la Deriva have called a “very careful strike,” are important to learn from to find ways “not a high productivity of domestic labor but a higher subversiveness in the struggle.” (Dallacosta/James)

Being Affected: Spinoza and the psychology of emotion

by Steve Brown

Brown, S.D. & Stenner, P. (2001) ‘Being affected: Spinoza and the psychology of emotion’ International Journal of Group Tensions Vol 30, 1. 81-105

This paper describes the relevance of Spinoza’s Ethics for con- temporary thought on the psychology of emotion.... more This paper describes the relevance of Spinoza’s Ethics for con- temporary thought on the psychology of emotion. Spinoza’s account of the pas- sions completely inverts the Cartesian primacy given to mind. For Spinoza the critical task is to formulate an ethics of knowing, which begins with an understanding that body and mind are two attributes of the same substance. Increasing the capacity of the body to both be affected and affect others is the means by which the knowing subject progresses. The article sketches out the key concepts involved in this system and shows how they sensitize us to a post-cognitive understanding of emotion in Proust’s Swann’s Way.

Doing and Feeling Research in Public: Queer Organizing for Public Education and Justice

by Therese Quinn

Erica R. Meiners & Therese M. Quinn (2010): Doing and feeling research in public: queer organizing for public education and justice, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23:2, 147-164.

Grounded in activism – fighting the implementation of Department of Defense-run schools in a public schools system;... more Grounded in activism – fighting the implementation of Department of Defense-run schools in a public schools system; organizing to fight the largest national teacher education accreditation agency’s removal of sexual orientation and social justice from its accreditation standards; and protesting a state’s decision to hold a public meeting for teacher educators at a private Christian college that ‘condemns’ homosexuality – this article highlights how education is being re-formed through appeals to ‘private choice’ and at the same time select public issues are devalued by being called private and outside the bounds of normative ‘professional’ attention. This reframing, a hallmark of contemporary neoliberalism, has specific ramifications for queers, as analysis of these cases indicate. Using collaborative participatory research that attends to emotions, the authors argue that feelings are political and problematizing, and useful – they can trigger tactics. With the goal of offering examples of tactics tried, the paper archives evidence – original texts including pledges, letters, flyers, and emails – of queer organizing in education.

Affect Theory Reader - intro (Seigworth/Gregg)

by Greg Seigworth

From Affection to Soul

by Greg Seigworth

Houses in motion

by Greg Seigworth

Fashioning A Stave, or, Singing Life

by Greg Seigworth

Current positive and negative affective states modulate attention: An attentional blink study

by Nicolas Vermeulen

The motor of being: a response to Steve Pile's 'emotions and affect in recent human geography'

by Leila Dawney

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2011

Here, I argue two points related specifically to what Pile refers to as ‘affectual geographies’: firstly, to defend... more Here, I argue two points related specifically to what Pile refers to as ‘affectual geographies’: firstly, to defend ‘what is important about this work’, and secondly to consider the slippage between affect and emotion, its genealogy and potential pitfalls, and what this means in terms of the ‘space in-between’ the affective and the subjective registers. Finally, I suggest an alternative, materialist
approach towards the interplay between these registers, to Pile’s suggestion of a ‘transplanting’ of psychoanalytic concepts.

Lloyd, Henry Martyn & Marguerite La Caze, “Editor’s Introduction: Philosophy and the ‘Affective Turn,’” Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, Vol. 13, (2011): 1-13.

by Henry Martyn Lloyd

Co-authored with Marguerite La Caze.
http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/

Psychological Damage or Resistance? Re-Evaluating the Clark Doll Tests through the Lens of Performance Studies

by Robin Bernstein

This talk derives from my book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York University Press, 2011)

In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted their famous "doll test" in... more In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted their famous "doll test" in which they asked African American children whether they preferred black or white dolls. Most children identified white dolls as "nice" and black dolls as "bad"-proof, the Clarks argued, that segregation damaged black children psychologically. These findings figured pivotally in Brown v. Board of Education. Bernstein defamiliarizes the "doll test" by locating it not in the history of Civil Rights but instead in the history of representational play involving racialized dolls. Bernstein argues that a black child's rejection of a black doll might indeed reveal internalized racism; but it could also constitute a rejection of violently racist practices of play that had, for a century, been coordinated through black dolls. Thus Bernstein offers a new understanding of the Clarks' child-subjects not as passive internalizers of racism instead as agents who resisted inherited traditions of performance.