[-empyre-] Week 4 - Affect

[micha cárdenas]

Much critical theory and art today can be said to be concerned with
affect, as demonstrated by the essays in The Affective Turn, a book
edited by Patricia Clough, one of this week’s guests.  Brian Massumi
states that “the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between
content and effect” in Parables for the Virtual, which was introduced
to me by one of our guests this week, Jordan Crandall. Much of
Jordan’s work considers and explores affect. Perhaps a wonderful
example of the kind of detail that evokes affect in Crandall’s work,
like the quality of light or the positioning of a gaze, can be seen in
his film “hotel”, which can be found here:

https://vimeo.com/7091631

Another guest this week, Lauren Berlant, describes the affective
landscape of precarity in her recent book, Cruel Optimism. She cites
Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadapoulos to describe the affects of
vulnerability, hyperactivity, post-sexuality, fluid intimacies,
restlessness and unsettledness as comprising a large part of
contemporary experience under neoliberal capitalism, “in order to
engage a broader range of physical and aesthetic genres that mediate
pressures of the present moment on the subject’s sensorium”.  In my
own work on Ke$ha Feminism and femme disturbance, forthcoming in the
June 2012 issue of Journal of Popular Music Studies, I claim that
femme is an affect, different than an emotion, something that is in
process, performative and challenges rigid definitions.  Affect also
has it’s critics, like Ruth Ley who says “if you don’t understand try
to feel. According to Massumi it works”.
[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/659353?uid=3739560&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21100855946111]

This week, we will consider what role affect plays in queer theory and
art today? How can it be used, if it exists outside of content as
Massumi claims? How has it been deployed by contemporary artists? And
how can we understand affect in relation to emerging forms of
resistance to neoliberalism?

This week's guests are:

Lauren Berlant (US) is George M. Pullman Professor of English at the
University of Chicago. Her national sentimentality trilogy — The
Anatomy of National Fantasy (University of Chicago Press, 1991,
Chicago), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Duke
University Press, 1997, Durham), and The Female Complaint (Duke
University Press, 2008, Durham) — has now morphed into a quartet, with
Cruel Optimism (2011) addressing precarious publics and the aesthetics
of affective adjustment in the contemporary U.S. and Europe. A
co-editor of Critical Inquiry, she is also editor of Intimacy
(University of Chicago Press, 2000, Chicago); Our Monica, Ourselves:
The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New York University
Press, 2001, New York); Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an
Emotion (Routledge, 2004, New York); and On the Case (Critical
Inquiry, 2007). She blogs at Supervalent Thought and is also a
founding member of the art/activist group Feel Tank Chicago.

Jordan Crandall (US) (http://jordancrandall.com) is a media artist,
theorist, and performer.  He is a Professor of Visual Arts at
University of California, San Diego.  He is the 2011 winner of the
Vilém Flusser Theory Award for outstanding theory and research-based
digital arts practice, given by the Transmediale in Berlin in
collaboration with the Vilém Flusser Archive of the University of
Arts, Berlin.  He is a collaborator  at Eyebeam art and technology
center in New York and the founding editor of the journal VERSION
(http://version.org). His current project UNMANNED is a work of
“philosophical theater”: a blend of performance art, political
allegory, philosophical speculation, and intimate reverie that
explores the ontologies of distributed systems and the changing nature
of masculinity in the face of automated technologies of war.

Patricia Clough (US) is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at
Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York. She is the co- editor with Craig Willse of Beyond Biopolitics:
Essays on the Governance of Life and Death and editor of The Affective
Turn: Theorizing the Social, both published by Duke University Press.
Her books include Autoaffection (2000), Feminist Thought (1995) and
The End(s) of Ethnography (1992, revised 1998).



-- 
micha cárdenas
PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
Provost Fellow, University of Southern California

New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research

MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities,
http://amzn.to/x8iJcY

blog: http://transreal.org