Gene: The common words closest to the typical academic use of “affect” would be “feeling” or “emotion”.
It’s a common term in psychology. The APA defines it: > n. any experience of feeling or emotion, ranging from suffering to elation, > from the simplest to the most complex sensations of feeling, and from the > most normal to the most pathological emotional reactions. Often described in > terms of positive affect or negative affect, both mood and emotion are > considered affective states. Along with cognition and conation, affect is one > of the three traditionally identified components of the mind. For example, you may hear depressives described as having “flat affect”: "characterized by a lack of reaction to emotional stimuli, and can include a monotone voice or lack of expression in the face.” However, the typical use in academia is a bit more specific, if not in overt definition then in it having become jargon associated with certain theoretical/critical positions. These uses of “affect” are mostly tracable to 80’s 90’s Cultural Studies, especially to Larry Grossberg, and reflect ideas drawn from British Cultural Studies (Stuart Hall) way more than Deleuze and Guatteri (in part because so few perople can m,ake heads of tails of them). I’d say what the term represents in terms of intellectual history is an attempt to move away from strict Marxist political economy on one hand and Frankfurt School critical theory on the other – both of which were seen as not giving enough credit to the oppressed and too pessimistic. From at least the 1930’s on, a problem for left theory has been “Why don’t the masses rise against their domination? Why do they continue to act against their own material interest?” The only answer political economy could offer was some form of material force, which seems a stretch perhaps, but more importantly didn’t seem to point to a path forward, beyond expecting the masses to finally somehow magically wake up to the material realities of injustice and throw off the chains of capital. Of course, Adorno and Horkheimer (and, for that matter Debord and the other Situationists) had an answer to why the masses stayed passive, but their portrait of a Cultural Industry capaable of narcotizing the public into a sort of soft-fascistic passivity. These thinkers generally prescribed some kind of Avant Garde cultural practice as an antedote (yay Brecht!!), but perhaps some Frameworkers will understand why some people were skeptical Malcolm LeGrice films could bring about the revolution. ;-) The central principle of British Cultural Studies is that popular culture – quite apart from being merely the sort of pure domination machine diagnosed by Adorno – was rather “a site of struggle”, that it bent itself to the interests the ruling class, but also to the genuine interest of the people — the both were required to achieve the status of “popular”. So “the popular” was always contested terrain, open, then, somehow, to being used for or swung toward progressive ends. Which left the question of exactly how this struggle was waged, where you could find the expression of those genuine interests of “the people”. One major answer, in short, was “affect”. The political-economy frame is ultra-rationalist, it calculates benefit and detriment in pretty stark economic terms and rarely puts emotion/feeling into the equation at all. The Frankfurters, of course, distrusted emotion/feeling as too easily manipulated by fascism. So Cultural Studies is in many ways a more humanist turn (in the sense of marxist-humanist) in finding those somewhat fuzzy emotions that represent stakes, the feelings that this whatever MATTERS, are essential to the struggle. I don’t know if "gestures of affect and intervention” was used in taht context, but it sounds like it fits, anyway. All that being said, while it’s laudable to want to reach out for new conceptual tools, the jargon that tends to with them is usually best discarded in favor of expressing those ideas in terms that let you be you and connect to your audience. _______________________________________________ FrameWorks mailing list [email protected] https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
