Reading group online
Posted on | October 4, 2006 |
For the past few months the reading group I wanted to set up has been running, gradually building a sense of momentum and confidence as we find out what we know and might like to learn from each other. I am really enjoying the opportunity to read and talk with people I don’t have the chance to meet with otherwise, and it feels useful to be able to share my own experience and thoughts about theory as someone who still feels a little cut-off from the traditions at work here at UQ.
The readings so far have been:
Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘A Thief in the Night: Stories of feminism in the 1970s at CCCS’
Beverly Skeggs, ‘Introduction’ Formations of Class and Gender
Paul Sweetman, ‘Twenty-First Century Dis-Ease? Habitual Reflexivity or the Reflexive Habitus’
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Understanding’
Angela McRobbie, ‘Bourdieu’s Weight of the World‘
Megan Boler, ‘The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze’
Melissa Gregg, ‘A Discourse of Empathy: Richard Hoggart, Ordinariness and the Persistence of “Them” and “Us”‘
Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’
Selections from M/C ‘Affect’
Next we’re reading more affect theory - the intro to my book, some Silvan Tomkins and maybe some Kristeva. We’re also swapping some work in progress from our newest member.
Along the way, we’ve decided it might be a good idea to try to keep the conversation going online in between meetings, particularly because it is so hard for busy people to get to campus on a regular basis. So this is the first of what will be an ongoing series of posts where we invite more people to join in our conversations.
For those of you who come along regularly, leave a comment below to say hi - and if you don’t come but want to take part, please jump in and introduce yourself too.
Two big questions from today to get us all going might be:
- What did Massumi mean when he wrote: ‘Affect holds a key to rethinking postmodern power after ideology’?
- What is the difference between affect and ‘the abject’?
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2 Responses to “Reading group online”
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October 6th, 2006 @ 11:47 am
By way of getting the discussion rolling… Hello.
I can’t really pretend to have a great grasp of affect at all. But to perhaps contextualise the second question, it arises because while I was reading the Massumi article, I kept thinking about Kristeva’s notion of the abject as a concept that derives from bodily processes, that doesn’t exist in a pure state but is theorised as something separate so that it can be discussed as something that comprises the social/Symbolic dimension of human existence.
October 17th, 2006 @ 11:33 am
I am interested in the bodily aesthetic of affect too I suppose from a different theoretical corner. Richard Shusterman’s theory of somaesthetics, mapping performativity and aesthetics within the body, really tickles my fancy.
Today I am reading through your chapter Mel. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have a better grasp of affect so that I can tap it more. I know it is a resource that will ground my spectatorship and art section of my thesis. Plus I am reading (well skimming) a book about religion and terror at the moment (Terror in the Name of God) and the way empathetic and sympathetic are used in this book, reflect my own use. Do you think that this might be because it is less humanities/social sciences approach and more centred around the author’s own position as a Harvard based law/government academic? I’m interested in how those terms are utilized in different fields.
see you tomorrow, x