"Affect": a theory seminar with Anke Bangma & Pedro Gomez Egana
"Affect" is often used as synonymous with feeling or emotion. But it is both more bodily, and more abstract. In its most basic sense, affect refers to the ability of the body to affect and be affected by other bodies. We may see it as the density of neural firing, which registers in our body as the tensing or relaxing of muscles, the speeding up or slowing down of heartbeat and respiration, etc – all bodily responses which occur automatically and involuntarily, as an ongoing part of our living interaction with the world. One could say that affect, then, is the body’s way of responding to a given situation and preparing for potential action. We sense these increasing or diminishing intensities as excitement, joy, distress, disgust, fear, anger, etc. The bodily nature of these sensations resonates in such expressions such as "I was uplifted", "it weighed me down", or "I was moved".
Jill Bennett and Sarah Ahmed emphasize that affect is a moment of "contact". Brian Massumi understands affect as the human ability to "attune to" or "resonate with" what it encounters. What all of these authors share, is the insistence that affect is not simply personal: it is not something that comes from within, but something from without, that flows through us, and that we transmit in turn.
Our bodily predisposition for continuous responsiveness to our surroundings, suggests that our encounters with people and things already have an effect on us before we come to recognize this effect as a distinct feeling, or can look back to analyze and reflect. (“Fear”, William James famously said, “strikes the body and compels it into action before it registers consciously. When it registers, it is as a realisation growing from the bodily action already under way: we don’t run because we feel afraid, we feel afraid because we run.”)
Recognizing these characteristics of affect has a range of implications. For example: if our encounters with people and things apparently propel us into states of fear or excitement prior to our consciousness of what is happening, this suggests that our ability to exert our free will or critical faculty is not as powerful, or as important, as it has been made out to be. Even if we may retrospectively observe our response, and reflect on it as if from the outside, a sensation has already passed through our bodies, and affected us as a lived reality that we could not refuse.
This seminar will explore some of the implications of our ability to affect and be affected. We will look at the affective impact contemporary media and politics have on us, and how they work to spread undirected sensations rather than concrete views. But we will also consider how artworks may affectively touch us and allow us to engage with other experiences than our own.
1. Title: 'Identifying with' or 'feeling for', or how to relate to the
experience of others
Core reading: Jill Bennett, section from "Empathic Vision" (2005) and
Christian Metz, "Identification, Mirror" (1981)
Two meetings, Monday Nov 1 and Wed Nov 3.
2. Title: Being 'impressed', or how we are shaped by histories of contact
Core reading: Sara Ahmed, section from "The Politics of Emotion" (2004).
29 November
3. Working title: 'Anytime now', or how the media modulate the body's
readiness for action: a seminar in collaboration with Pedro Gomez Egana
Core reading: Brian Massumi, "Fear, the spectrum said" (2005), and
Mary Ann Doane, "Information, Crisis, Catastrophe" (1990).
Two meetings, 2 and 3 December
Workform:
Reading and discussion
Prequalifications:
Texts must be read in advance of the seminar meetings.
The course starts 01/11/2010 / Week 44, and ends 03/12/2010 / Week 48
Location: Details of precise time and place will be emailed to seminar participants
Provider: MA kunst
Target group: MA Kunst
Target year of study: Master 1
Master 2
Capacity: 12
Academic staff: