An introduction to affect
Posted on | November 9, 2007 |
With one project finally off my whiteboard for good, it’s getting to crunch time for The Affect Reader, as Greg and I try to get a full draft to Duke in time for peak commissioning season in the US. My most recent experience of academic presses in the States was frustrating, and as an Australian I’m hardly alone in that, but I’m a little more confident that the material and the publisher are the best fit this time. The perils of the academic blogger: archiving hopes about book contracts…
Having just written an introduction to the ‘Wireless’ journal issue, I’m hypercurious at the moment about the genre of the introduction - what its function is, how much people care about them, what my responsibility is in writing one. The other day I was telling Gerard how reluctant I was to follow the usual formula and introduce the articles in our issue in order, with the obligatory few sentences of summary. I don’t think I ever read those summary sentences in introductions; in fact, I know full well that I’m only ever interested in the motivations for the project, the editors’ hopes for it and the people they want to thank for making it happen. This might be because I arrogantly assume I’ll be able to work out for myself whether or not I want to read the contents of a book or journal, or maybe it’s because I don’t want someone else’s interpretation of an article to confuse me. But when I write an introduction, I am always trying to make it a stand-alone work that manages to convey the overall inspiration that the collection has been raised to instantiate, as well as making a contribution of its own to the the stated theme. I guess this is part of my ongoing struggle with academic convention and rules of speech: I feel like if I’m merely filling in the gaps copying a formula, then I’m not doing anything interesting.
So Greg and I have been writing an introduction back and forth for months now, and slowly it’s being punctuated and inflected by the ideas at work in the chapters that have been submitted. But so far I can’t work out how invested I am in affect theory per se to offer the kind of ‘grand overview’ that ‘an introduction’ to an affect reader would occasion. Having read a number of others’ attempts to generate a theory of affect by now, I’m even more disinclined to follow that path and instead offer something that encapsulates the contrasting encounters Greg and I have each had separately with affect theory. In doing that, we figure that it solves two problems: the ostensible fashionability, and hence lack of longevity, affect theory looks destined to suffer - which we hope to challenge by showing two contrasting temporalities and legacies of activity around it; and secondly, the heights of abstraction that philosophical arguments can lead to - which goes against quite forthright exercises on both our parts in the past to maintain a balance between theory and everyday life. I wonder though, whether this option means are we letting people down in our role as editors, or whether we will be able to successfully enact something we jointly feel about the rights and wrongs of current versions of cultural theory’s production?
Whichever is the case, I’m sure the reviewers of the draft manuscript will let us know. And in the meantime, I thought it might be nice to share a couple of passages about affect from earlier essays of some of our contributors. I think they help to indicate why we feel it’s important to have a book that finally brings them in dialogue. I’ll add more in time, and if you have quotes you’ve found useful in navigating this area, please do so too.
Affect is a different kind of intelligence about the world, but it is intelligence none-the-less, and previous attempts which have either relegated affect to the irrational or raised it up to the level of the sublime are both equally wrong-headed.
[...]
There is more to the world than is routinely acknowledged in too many writings on politics and this excess is not just incidental. It points in the direction of fugitive work in the social sciences and humanities which can read the little, the messy and the jerry-rigged as a part of politics and not just incidental to it. It points as well in the direction of work that wants to give up the ancient settlement between knowledge and passions (and nature and culture, and people and things, and truth and force) in favour of considering what ties things together as an explicit politics.
- Nigel ThriftThe escape of affect cannot but be perceived, alongside the perceptions that are its capture. This side-perception may be punctual, localised in an event… When it is punctual, it is usually described in negative terms, as a form of shock (the sudden interruption of functions of connection). But it is also continuous, like a background perception that accompanies every event, however quotidian. When the continuity of affective escape is put into words, it tends to take on positive connotations. For it is nothing less than the perception of one’s own vitality, one sense of aliveness, of changeability (often described as ‘freedom’). One’s ‘sense of aliveness’ is a continuous nonconscious self-perception (unconscious self-reflection or self-referentiality). It is the perception of this self-perception, its naming and making conscious, that allows affect to be effectively analysed — as long as a vocabulary can be found for that which is imperceptible but whose escape from perception cannot but be perceived, as long as one is alive.
- Brian Massumi… a politics of affect begins from the assumption that life is an intersecting multiplicity of harmonious and disharmonious relations. Thinking the political affectively must therefore involve building a protest against the affectivities of suffering into a set of techniques that also aim to cultivate “good encounters” and anticipate “something better”. How, though, can we engage with the vectors of diminishment that form the still not, the ground that haunts an imperative to hope, without reproducing the lifeless rhetoric of doom that marks too much critical engagement with the world? One response is to learn from the affective fluctuations of everyday life and foster certain types of hope and hopefulness because of, rather than despite, the tragedy and injustice of suffering each emerges from.
- Ben Anderson
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5 Responses to “An introduction to affect”
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November 9th, 2007 @ 8:35 pm
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.
November 9th, 2007 @ 9:37 pm
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!
November 10th, 2007 @ 12:47 pm
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
November 12th, 2007 @ 1:22 pm
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…
November 13th, 2007 @ 10:10 am
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.