Comments on: An introduction to affect

by: Emily

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:10:01 +0000

I like intros that position the book in its academic field and also in broader terms - ie what does this book offer to the world at this time. And I don’t think this is too grand a claim. Its an assertion of the materiality of ideas, how theory and how we live come together. And I think it can be local and particular too - and unresolved. Who knows what this collection will mean/do, but things have been generated in the process of putting it together, and we could learn a lot from hearing about these. I reckon the intro you propose would be great because of this.

by: Mel

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 03:22:08 +0000

When I’m reading an introduction, it’s because I don’t have a lot of time, and so I’m looking for something that situates the collection in a field or in a cultural ‘moment’, and then goes on to discuss the essays thematically (not necessarily in the order in which they appear). I use the introduction to help me identify which essays will be most useful to me.

Hope this helps you in your task…

by: melgregg

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 02:47:29 +0000

The Ben Anderson quote is from this essay (link requires subscription). Massumi’s is from Parables of the Virtual, from memory, but I’ll need to check as I took it from Thrift’s own quotation of it in his hard to track down ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect’ in Geografiska Annaler, Series B, 86, 57-78 (that’s the source of his own passage above, and the essay is well worth finding).

This wasn’t an oversight - I don’t usually put references in blog posts to spare the non-nerds, as well as to dissuade the plagiarist tendencies of Kiley’s students

by: kiley

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:37:33 +0000

I like the Massumi too. And the Ben Anderson one will be useful in my work I think. References mel?

I’ve wondered about the purpose of the introduction as well. I love an introduction that touches on all the articles/chapters without too much of a precis but more setting the tone for the collection. One of the most annoying things about an introduction that interprets the proceeding articles is that undergrad students often cite these rather than the article proper. Drives me crazy!

by: glen

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:35:45 +0000

hey, where is the brian massumi quote from?

For your collection of affect quotes:

Feeling implies an evaluation of matter and is resistances, a direction (sens, also “meaning”) to form and its developments, an economy of force and its displacements, an entire gravity. But the regime of the war machine is on the contrary that of affects, which relate only to the moving body in itself, to speeds and compositions of speed among elements. Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack, whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools. There is a relation between the affect and the weapon, as witnessed not only in mythology but also in the chason de geste [epic poem; ’songs of heroic deeds’], and the chivalric novel or novel of courtly love. Weapons are affects and affects weapons.
—- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_, p 400.