Structures of Feeling

Concepts for the

Study of Culture

Edited by
Doris Bachmann-Medick, Horst Carl,
Wolfgang Hallet and Ansgar Nünning

Editorial Board
Mieke Bal, Hartmut Böhme, Sebastian Conrad, Vita Fortunati, Isabel Gil,
Lawrence Grossberg, Richard Grusin, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,
Ursula Heise, Claus Leggewie, Helmut Lethen, Christina Lutter,
Andreas Reckwitz, Frederik Tygstrup and Barbie Zelizer

Volume 5
Structures of
Feeling

Affectivity and the Study of Culture

Edited by
Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup
ISBN 978-3-11-036951-9
e-ISBN [PDF] 978-3-11-036548-1
e-ISBN [EPUB] 978-3-11-039132-9
ISSN 2190-3433

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Table of Contents
Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup
Introduction 1

Raymond Williams
Structures of Feeling 20

1 Producing Affect

Richard Grusin
Mediashock 29

Eliza Steinbock
Parsing Affective Economies of Race, Sexuality, and Gender:
The Case of ‘Nasty Love’ 40

Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld
Affect Image, Touch Image 50

Mirko Milivojevic
Introducing Wounds: Challenging the ‘Crap Theory of Pain’ in
Nikola Lezaić’s Tilva Roš 58

Anja Bajda
Affect, Bio-politics and the Field of Contemporary Performing Arts 66

Heloïse Lauraire
Reflections on Fear as a Structure of Feeling in Specific Large Scale Installations
in Contemporary Art 74

2 Affective Pasts

Esther Peeren
Compelling Affects / Structured Feelings: Remembering 9/11 85
VI Table of Contents

Tine Damsholt
Staging Emotions: On Configurations of Emotional Selfhood, Gendered Bodies,
and Politics in Late Eighteenth Century 98

Martin Baake-Hansen
Nostalgia and Nostophobia: Emotional Memory in Joseph Roth and
Herta Müller 116

Christiane Struth
‘Affects as Stabilizers of Memory’?
The Literary Representation of Emotion, Affect, and Feeling in Self-Reflexive
Autobiographies 124

Stephanie Frink
“The Past Beats Inside Me Like a Second Heart”: The Narrative (Re)Construction
of Emotions in John Banville’s The Sea 132

3 Affective Thinking

Clare Hemmings
Affect and Feminist Methodology, Or What Does It Mean to be Moved? 147

Robert G. Ryder
The Curious Case of Affective Hospitality: Curiosity, Affect, and Pierre
Klossowski’s Laws of Hospitality 159

Ane Martine Lönneker

“What Can This Sorrow Be?”: Elegiac Affectivity in Virginia Woolf’s
Jacob’s Room 169

Elisabeth Skou Pedersen

“One Thing Melts into Another”: Unanimism, Affect, and Imagery in Virginia
Woolf’s The Waves 178

Marlon Miguel
Towards a New Thinking on Humanism in Fernand Deligny’s Network 187
 Table of Contents VII

4 Circulating Affect

Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage

Sympathetic Mobilization 199

Lise Dilling-Hansen
A Strategic Romance?
On the Affective Relation between Lady Gaga and Her Little Monsters 216

Nathalie W. Soelmark
Experiences of Assisted Reproduction in Video Blogs: On the Aesthetic-Affective
Dimension of Individual Fertility Projects on YouTube 226

Matti Kortesoja
Articulation of Well-being in Images of Beauty and Health 235

Lauren Greyson
How to meet the ‘Strange Stranger’: A Sketch for an Affective Biophilia 243

Yu Zhao
The Characteristics of Traditional Chinese Theories of Affect and their Impact on
Artistic Creation: A Study Based on Several Key Chinese Words 252

Index 265
Introduction

In his famous essay on the Bloomsbury group, Raymond Williams describes the
many different components that go into the formation of a ‘group’ to which its
members can adhere and feel attachment, from shared social background to
common political beliefs, from body language to generational experience, from
linguistic habits to idiosyncratic views on specific topics, and much more. All of
these different elements, ranging from serious matters of political urgency to the
trivial minutiae of everyday life, come together to create a “new style,” as
Williams puts it (Williams 1980, 154, his emphasis). In order to understand the
Bloomsbury group as a social and cultural phenomenon (indeed one of some
importance), Williams thus meticulously charts not only those matters that would
normally be inventoried when characterising the cultural impact of a cultural
group like this one: ideas, events, and their effects, but also, and more ambi-
tiously, all of the less tangible qualities that eventually make up the specific
social and intellectual atmosphere of the group.
This attentiveness to ‘style’ is a hallmark of Williams’ contribution to the
writing of cultural history. It implies a continuous search for supplementary clues
and traces that might lead us to understand the cultural and historical specificity
of what we study, the sense of lived lives underpinning the cultural record we can
access from the archives. This elusive stratum of reality, evanescent in its mani-
festations, but nonetheless important in the making of the historical facts we
contemplate, is sometimes described by Williams in terms of “structures of
feeling.” In spite of the importance of this idea in Williams’ work, it is barely
theorised, mainly appearing in a short entry in Marxism and Literature (1978). The
peculiar ‘something’ he is looking for is described here as “a particular quality of
social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular
qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or a period” (Williams 1978, 131).
Experience is the key term here, in its most mundane and straightforward sense;
what seems to interest Williams is the very basic idea, yet very complex pheno-
menon, of the lived presence. What does it feel like to be in a particular situation?
How do our propensities for doing this and not that emerge? What fuels our
enthusiasm or enhances our wellbeing? How do the little things pertaining to
feeling, bodily sensation, and atmosphere inflect, even ever so slightly, the ideas
we proclaim and interests we pursue? What we arrive at here is a participants’
perspective on culture; that is, not only what was said and done at a particular
place and at a particular time, but what it was like to be there.
2 Introduction

Williams thus suggests complementing the analysis of the social and material
infrastructure of reality with a third layer: that of affective infrastructure. In this,
his work seems to prefigure the conspicuous contemporary interest in affect
studies. For the last decade or so, the notion of affect has been circulating ever
more insistently in social and cultural studies, ranging from literature and archi-
tecture to sociology and geography, and seems set to become a dominant trend in
critical theory in the twenty-first century. Theories of emotion, atmosphere, and
feeling abound in the humanities and social sciences, and moreover, often in
ways that broadly correspond with Williams’ ambition to correlate material,
social, and affective structures.
In this book, we are concerned with the possible uses of affect studies and of
theories of affectivity in contemporary cultural studies. It appears logical to us to
begin with the ways in which Williams conceived of structures of feeling as an
effective component of social reality. From the vantage point of Williams’ study,
this volume develops an array of different investigations into the field of affect
studies, based on different historical and contemporary cases, from different
theoretical and methodological viewpoints, and with different disciplinary per-
spectives.

2 Structures of Feeling and the Study of Affects

When Williams published his historical and theoretical findings on the structures
of feeling, it remained, although widely acclaimed and acknowledged, peculiar to
his work. Considerable time has passed between then and the meeting of his
endeavours with the widespread contemporary thematisation and theorisation of
affect that we witness in contemporary social and cultural studies. There is no
doubt that other developments in the humanities and social sciences have facili-
tated this resurgence of, or belated encounter with, Williams’ work. Originally
advanced in a context of the theory of western Marxism, where more emphasis
was placed on economy and philosophy than on culture at large, the understand-
ing of Williams today is facilitated not only by a general cultural turn, but also by
other recent ‘turns’ towards the body, the historical production of space, the social
and cultural life-world, and the ‘thick’ anthropological description of historical
reality. These all seem to pave the way for a new and more nuanced approach to
historical description, elaborating, as does Williams, the notion of experience, in a
number of different ways. These approaches thus share a certain phenomenologi-
cal awareness of how experience is articulated in a close and complex interaction
between humans and their environments, how it is bodily mediated, how it plays
out in a particular spatial framework, and how it is inextricably invested in and
 Introduction 3

dependent on social relations between humans, and between humans and social
institutions. These approaches contribute in different ways to expand our under-
standing of culture, widening the analytical scope from masterworks and histor-
ical events to the multifarious fabric of everyday life, and moreover, to the ways in
which culture is continuously reproduced (and gradually developed in still new
dimensions) through the interaction between life forms and everyday practices on
the one hand, and institutions and power relations on the other.
If attentiveness to the layers of affect and feeling within the historical fabric
of culture is promoted by such developments in contemporary cultural studies, an
even more important background stems from the fact that affectivity seems to
have become an ever more important part of social life today. There is thus an
urgency to understand and theorise affects and affectivity, simply in order to
understand what is happening around us – and to us – in a world where politics,
economy, and culture are becoming increasingly affect-driven. The idea that
politics is often less about rational deliberation of the common good than about
feelings is of course no new insight. Whether spurred by enthusiasm or by fear,
politics seems to demand an affective investment, for those aspiring to lead
others, as well as for those being somehow persuaded to follow or support a
would-be leader. It does seem, however, that this affective dimension of politics
has come to play a still more dominant role in contemporary societies, mainly due
to the ways in which we handle and circulate information. On one hand, we have
the well-known mediatisation of politics, making political campaigning a huge
business for media professionals, who are able to turn political messages into
ingeniously fabricated affective stimuli. The like/dislike-factor in politics has
never enjoyed more importance than today, it seems, and investment in optimis-
ing this specific parameter has never been greater. Political sales talk is affective.
It probably always was, but never more systematically than today. Moreover,
political articulation is becoming increasingly affect-driven; that is, not only in
terms of what politicians say to their constituents, but also of the input they
receive in return from the public sphere. Political articulation is now less about
collective organisation and the setting of political agendas, and more about
answering questions. There are polls for everything. In this sense, political
articulation has never been more massive and powerful, since there is instant and
systematic feed-back on virtually every conceivable political question. But this
articulation is no longer part of a coherent and explicit political view. Rather
immediate reactions are sought to questions expressly devised in order to gauge
certain moods. Political participation becomes an endless series of ‘ayes’ and
‘nos’, sometimes broken down into to a scale of agreement from 1 to 10.
This idea of political participation as immediate reactions to specifically
designed questions is inherited, not from the political public sphere, but rather
4 Introduction

from the market place. And this is undoubtedly another reason why we have
become preoccupied with affect studies today: the affective aye or no is really the
model for customer behaviour in the market place, which in turn sets the agenda
in still more areas of our lives. Once the idea of rational consumer choice is
abandoned, we are pretty much left with an inscrutable set of propensities, of
which we know little, other than being able to observe the importance of affect
when it comes to weighing the propensity preference for object one against the
propensity for object two. Consumerism has affect as its main operator; it exer-
cises us in insignificant micro-decisions, drilling our readiness to prefer and reject
far beyond what is relevant to any needs we might have. Consumption is becom-
ing still more affect-driven, and so is production. ‘Toyotism’, as described by
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, distinguishes itself from Fordism in that it not
only exploits the labour force by having it perform pre-defined routines in a given
rhythm, but further, by tapping into its ability to coordinate collective work, to
imagine preferred designs, to emphatically share the destiny of the brand – in
short, mobilising cognitive and affective resources that Henry Ford could only
have dreamt of.
Affect, in other words, has become a major element in the organisation of the
way we live now. We don’t have ‘private’ views to be kept aside from our political
commitments, or ‘secret’ desires to be distinguished from our rational choices, or
indeed ‘personal’ qualities irrelevant to the labour we perform: what was once a
kind of supplement only relevant as something ‘subjective’ has now become an
equal part of our effective social presence and performance. Production, con-
sumption, participation: in every case we are addressed as (and retain relevance
by) being affective operators. This new situation of constant affective interpella-
tion and affective agency in turn underscores the urgency of understanding this
affective layer of reality, and indeed of taking up the research path suggested by
Raymond Williams.
In addition to pointing out the importance of the affective infrastructure of
our everyday life, Williams also adds a few directives on how to analyse its
manifestations. First of all, Williams intimates, we are generally not very good at
analysing cultural change. We recognise the facts of cultural life once they are
established and institutionalised, but we tend to miss those moments when new
patterns of experience emerge, when people start to think differently, when new
sensibilities arise, when habits swerve. We should learn to think about cultural
life as a present and unruly reality, and not only in the past tense, as that which
eventually became the case. When committing our attention to an evanescent
layer of styles, propensities, and becomings, rather than to the known and the
canonical, we should furthermore, and no less importantly, recognise the crucial
importance of these phenomena, and not discard them as the mere accidental
 Introduction 5

murmurings of the everyday. We should avoid, in other words, reproducing the

juxtaposition of the social and the individual, the essential and the accidental,
the objective and the subjective, and so on, that eventually systematically mar-
ginalises the living reality of culture. Two connected moves, then, are in order:
first, a shift in our attention from the stable and acknowledged towards the
immediate and emergent, and, second, the effort to treat the immediate and
emergent as serious social phenomena worthy of theorisation and indeed as
significant components of the social fabric. This twofold reorientation parallels
similar moves suggested by Henri Lefebvre, in encouraging the analysis of urban
life in terms of its rhythms rather than its forms, by Erika Fischer-Lichte as she
shifts attention from signs and signification to events and performativity, or by
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, who advocates a paradigm shift in the humanities from
the regime of meaning to the effects of presence. What these thinkers share with
Williams is attentiveness to the living immediacy of cultural agency and human
imagination, and a sense of the urgent need to chart this field, though it might
sometimes feel like putting a nail in a fountain jet.
The second important piece of guidance we can take from Williams is his
attempt to actually describe the principles of this charting. The challenge is a huge
one: how can one describe a feeling? Obviously, it is not a matter simply of naming
it, and pointing to it is also difficult, since it is hard to say where a feeling resides.
Williams proceeds in two steps. The first is dissociative, itemising the different
elements that seem to be somehow at stake when a specific feeling is being
expressed; “elements of impulse, restraints, and tone; specifically affective ele-
ments of consciousness and relationships” (Williams 1978, 132), and conse-
quently, then, an entire array of expressive micro-traits that somehow reveal a
state of emotional acuteness. These traits are not exactly signs referring back to an
emotional content, but rather expressive building blocks with the help of which a
feeling eventually surfaces. Hence the slightly technically inflected notion of
‘elements’: these are partly expressions, partly substances. The next step is
associative, aimed toward finding out how such differing elements come together
in the configuration of an affect. The crucial point here is to identify a specific
configuration of relevant elements, a configuration of traits that marks out the
profile of a feeling: “we are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set,
with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension” (Williams
1978, 132). The subtlety of this dissociative-plus-associative method is consider-
able, even if it seems unassuming. Notably, it locates affectivity, no longer accord-
ing to the coordinates we normally use, interior/exterior, subjective/objective and
so on, but as a distributive phenomenon, an assemblage of small parts of different
provenance, which make up, due to an internal system of relations, an unmistake-
able phenomenon, a feeling with a verifiable and identifiable structure.
6 Introduction

Without subscribing to one specific methodology for drafting the blueprints

of such structures, the contributions to this volume are all devoted to identifying
the extensive and socially distributed presence of affect. Raymond Williams and
the notion of structures of feeling might not be an explicit reference for all of
them, and nor indeed a methodological model, but all of the essays share the two
core directions marked out by Williams: the effort to look for the emergent and
fluid states of affective presence without subsuming them into more tangible
cultural expressions, and the attempt to gauge the relational configurations of the
affects that reverberate in our surroundings.

3 Affect Studies

Based on Raymond Williams’ short and dense text on the structures of feeling, we
can thus tentatively determine a ‘why?’ and a ‘how?’ of affect studies, which is to
say, the importance of the field and the methodological challenges it implies.
There remains, then, a ‘what?’ – perhaps the most difficult question: that of what
‘affect’ is in the first place. Not that there are no existing definitions of affect,
indeed, there are too many. Many scholars are engaged in affect studies, and all
define affect in slightly – and sometimes even dramatically – different ways.
Moreover, we need to realise that ‘affect’ is still perhaps more a word than a
concept; or rather: it might well be defined as a concept (and indeed in an
impressive number of different ways), but we very often base our sense of the
necessity and timeliness of affect studies on a more intuitive everyday semantics
of the word, which, to complicate things even further, seems to operate differently
in different languages. This is a field where there are already many neighbouring
notions, but once we dig into these, they fan out: feelings and emotions, moods
and drives, propensities and longings, dreams and visions, to mention a few. And
in addition to these still somehow abstract notions, a seemingly endless series of
their more tangible manifestations will claim their rights too: rage, love, hate,
lust, disgust, pride, shame, elation, and so on. It would be useful to possess a
history of concepts here, how all of these notions develop, overlap, change
domains, get conflated and differentiated, have their heydays and subsequent
periods of oblivion or neglect.
This abundance of understandings and definitions of course refers back to
the very matter at hand: singular social, political, and cultural instances of the
affective. And we should not blame current research for the fact that the pheno-
menon we study comes in a plethora of forms and instantiations. A certain family
resemblance between these forms does not obviate the fact that this is still a very
large family. Hence, the questions asked about affect within the various disci-
 Introduction 7

plines naturally differ significantly. For instance, within anthropology and the
history of emotions the most pressing concerns seem to be questions of the
culturally and historically constructedness of feelings. These questions are often,
in turn, fruitfully discussed in conjunction with issues of methodology, probing,
for instance, the role played by emotions in the ethnographic case study, as in
both Helena Wulff’s edited collection The Emotions: A Cultural Reader (2008), and
Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader (2009) edited by Jennifer Harding and
E. Deidre Pribram. In social and cultural geography, scholars such as Peter
Sloterdijk, Teresa Brennan, and Nigel Thrift have employed the spatial notions of
‘atmosphere’, ‘environment’, and ‘sphere’ in order to specify the ways in which
affective life is lived and governed. And within art and literary studies, one shared
concern is the investigation of the complex relations between different media,
genres, and styles, and the specific affects produced and reflected by them. A
further shared concern here is the importance of the notion ‘aesthetic experience’,
and the affective dimension of this experience in various historical periods.
Even in a field as patchy and open-ended as affect studies, we can identify, if
not a canon, then something like a consensual and persistent debate; namely the
debate over the subjective versus objective status of feelings and affects. Do the
various affective sensations I experience, consciously or otherwise, belong to me,
in the sense that they unfold somewhere in an inner realm, their privacy betrayed
only by my body’s way of representing them? Or is it rather the case that I pass
through various affective states, as suggested for instance by the experience of
entering a room with a specific affective atmosphere, and somehow catching the
mood that seems to emanate from the surroundings and the objects and relations
they embrace? This subjective-objective problematic has given rise to two distinct
vocabularies for addressing matters of feeling, namely that of ‘emotions’ and that
of ‘affects’. According to this distinction – now structuring much work within the
field of affect studies – affect constitutes a dimension of bodily experiences and
encounters, a dimension that remains, significantly, non-semantic and non-
representational. In contrast, emotions are considered as a somehow translated,
signified and subjectified version of the elusive, pre-discursive affective matter.
As a category for the kinds of feeling we take to be our own, emotion is often
described, then, as the consciously perceived and privately appropriated form of
matters of feeling.
This distinction between affect and emotion is central also to a current strand
of what we may term the ‘philosophy of emotion’. Within the philosophy of
emotion, two vectors have been particularly influential in contemporary affect
studies, as suggested by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth in their introduc-
tion to The Affect Theory Reader (2010). On the one hand, there is the argument
advanced by American psychologist Silvan Tomkins, that the system of affects is
8 Introduction

the primary motivational system in human beings, and something set apart from
the system of the drives, a theory of affect taken up and introduced to a wider
academic audience by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank in their influen-
tial Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (1995). And on the other hand,
there is Baruch Spinoza’s theory of affects in his Ethics (1677), notably taken up
by Gilles Deleuze in his Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, which in turn has inspired
much work in affect studies, including that of Brian Massumi. In this tradition,
affect is considered in terms of intensity and potential pertaining to bodily situa-
tions and interactions, and thus less directed at the qualities of some individual
interiority than at specific corporeal and social situations, and the affective
economy they embrace.
With this volume, we do not intend to engage in this debate in favour of some
specific philosophical definition of affect, as our aim is rather to explore the
significance of affect studies for the interdisciplinary study of culture. In this
context, it seems to us to be more pertinent to employ the notion of affectivity in
the more general sense invoked by Raymond Williams: as the delicate infrastruc-
ture regulating our propensities and modes of presence and participation in social
situations. This wider focus is one reason for our not being confined in this
introduction to the distinctly philosophical vocabularies of affect and emotion
respectively. Instead of proposing a comprehensive map of the many different
approaches to affect studies – there are simply too many competing and diverging
approaches in the field to make this a meaningful exercise for the moment – a
specific case of affectivity shall here serve as an occasion for us to highlight some
of the common interests of those involved in the field today.

4 A Case of Affect

In only ten days in March 2012, the Kony 2012 video, a 30-minute documentary
produced by the American charity Invisible Children, was shared all over Face-
book, mentioned several million times on Twitter, and received over 90 million
views on YouTube (making it one of the most ever viewed videos on YouTube).
The video was part of an effort to raise awareness about the case of Joseph Kony,
whose Lord’s Resistance Army has waged a decade-long insurgency in central
Africa with the help of abducted child-soldiers. Reportedly, the video produced
both mass feelings of injustice and a sense of empowerment about eradicating
this injustice, and astonished commentators were quick to agree that the issue
had become viral. Instantly endorsed by a host of celebrities, the campaign
generated in a week what looked like a global movement. This was early March.
In April, Invisible Children called upon its millions of supporters to ‘Cover the
 Introduction 9

Night’ by plastering every city around the world with posters, stickers, and murals
of Joseph Kony, in order to pressure governments to bring the guerrilla leader to
justice. But cities were left unplastered. Emotions were not translated smoothly
into action.
Inevitably, the Kony 2012 event sparked renewed scholarly interest in emotion
online, in social media, and in social movement, but the success and backlash of
the campaign is also of interest outside media studies departments. Large collec-
tives – online as well as offline communities – were affected by the image of evil
offered by the campaign, and by the promise of being able to participate in the
overcoming of this evil. In this sense, the campaign seemingly succeeded in
presenting the populations affected by the insurgency of the Lord’s Resistance
Army as profoundly grievable, to evoke Judith Butler’s helpful notion (Butler
2009). As Butler has suggested, responding affectively to images of the suffering
of distant others may very well carry critical and political significance: political
change requires a sense of responsibility, responsibility in turn being dependent
on responsiveness. Being responsive to the suffering of others requires that these
others appear grievable to us, grievability always being tacitly regulated by the
discursive and visual frames implied in the representation of suffering and by
cultural norms. In the case of Kony 2012, millions of people proved responsive to
the affect produced and circulated by the campaign. But where did the affect
generating this movement then go? Did it remain stored in our eyes, or does it still
linger in the affective infrastructure of the affected communities, changing our
capacities for responsiveness ever so slightly, the value of such change to be
assessed only later? Here, this affective media event will provide an opportunity
for an angled, case-based look at the field of affect studies, by way of a handful of
possible analytical entries.
Firstly, the Kony 2012 video produced rich instances of what we may term
affect critique, understood as the analytic endeavour to scrutinise the social and
political effects of specific public emotions considered too simplistic, too optimis-
tic, too pessimistic, or simply too measured to foster a given common good such
as accountability or justice. Much work is being undertaken within literary
studies, moral anthropology, and the history of emotions, on the effects of moral
social feelings such as sympathy, empathy, and compassion, this work in some
cases owing a debt to Nietzsche’s critique of ressentiment and of compassionate
feelings. In the case of Kony 2012, several commentators looked with skepticism
on the feeling-culture exposed by the campaign and its success. This skepticism
often addressed the possible depolitisicing consequences of a politics concerned
less with global structures of inequality and injustice than with cultivating
benevolent feelings towards less privileged populations. Nigerian-American
author Teju Cole thus tweeted stinging remarks about his perception that the
10 Introduction

fastest growth industry in the US is The White Savior Industrial Complex, a

complex in which “the banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimen-
tality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm”. In a
subsequent essay, Cole argued that the “White Saviour Complex” functions like a
valve for releasing the emotional pressures that tend to accumulate in an econom-
ic and political system built on pillage. Cole’s argument is related to Lauren
Berlant’s argument in her trilogy on American national sentimentality as well as
in her edited collection Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004).
Here Berlant diagnoses an age of sentimental politics, in which questions of social
inequity and antagonism are transposed from a register of power to a register of
sincere surplus feeling. In this age, a politics of true feeling structures public
discussions, policies, and fantasies, to an extent where feeling bad becomes
evidence of the injustices of collective life, while the triumph of justice is sig-
nified, conversely, by feeling good. Significantly however, in order to counter this
sentimental social contract, Berlant does not prescribe a return to something
called ‘thinking’ as the rational opposite of sentiment. As is generally the case for
current strands of affect theory, for Berlant feeling is already a kind of thinking.
To sustain a political optimism in the face of sentimentality, cynicism, and
boredom, Berlant instead advocates an analytically powerful and political rage.
Secondly, the emotional environments facilitated by Kony 2012 relied on the
circulation of signs and objects in what Sara Ahmed has termed affective econo-
mies. According to Ahmed’s theory of affectivity, emotions work as a form of
capital. Affectivity is that which is accumulated over time as an effect of the
circulation between objects and signs. In the case of Kony 2012, (com)passion
proved to be economic in several senses of the term. The Kony video circulated
between bodies, and accumulated great affective value, shaping the collective
body of the affected subjects in this process of distribution. Simultaneously, by
validating consumption through the simple invitation to ‘shop our products and
support the cause’, the campaign itself functioned much like a brand advertising
its mission with bracelets advertising slogans like “wear your heart on your
wrist”.1 In this sense, Cover the Night was also a call to contribute to the
accumulation of brand value by participating in a long history of the selling and
buying of images of suffering Africans, and in an ethically branded consumerism
surprisingly ignorant of relations between capitalist production and the reproduc-
tion of global inequality. This type of compassionate consumption involves not
only a significant rebranding of humanitarian aid, but also aids the brand itself

1 See the homepage of Invisible Children: http://store.invisiblechildren.com/collections/acces

sories.
 Introduction 11

by improving its ethical profile (see Ponte and Richey 2011). True to such new
forms of mobilisation, Kony 2012 was championed by a host of engaged celebrities
who once again proved the strange power of celebrities to organise public
response to humanitarian issues. “What is important to understand about gla-
morous celebrity,” writes Nigel Thrift, “is that it revolves around persons who are
also things” (Thrift 2007, 304). Celebrity culture also served as a template for
capturing the meaning of Joseph Kony, in so far as one aim of the campaign was
to “make Kony famous”, a mission served for instance by having Joseph Kony star
on campaign posters flanked by fellow evil celebrities Osama bin Laden and Adolf
Hitler. As with other signs and things, the affective value of evil celebrities
depends upon the ways in which these are circulated in the affective economy as
what Ahmed has called “figures of hate”.
Thirdly, the campaign established distinct affective spaces. People engaged in
its aim to make Joseph Kony famous were encouraged to buy action kits including
posters, stickers, T-shirts and so on, everything that might be needed to cover the
night in the emergency-red favoured by the campaign. ‘Covering the night’ thus
implied laying claim to a certain space as politicised public space, in which
people would come together to demand social justice, or at least one version of it.
Reconfiguring the surfaces of conventional architecture was conceived as a
means of establishing a territory of political feeling and thus constructing a
spatial version of the emotions engaged by the campaign, solidifying and ampli-
fying the affect in the process. But something in the transition from online
environment to the built environment thwarted the spreadability of affect, chan-
ging its direction and its force. The affective impulse of the campaign did not sit
well with the streets, it seemed, the public sphere of streets not coinciding in this
case with the public sphere of media. One way to understand this obstacle to the
affective communication of the campaign is to think of online environments as
protective environments, producing feelings of safety very different from the built
environment of urban public life. Constituting what Peter Sloterdijk has called
“spatialized immune systems,” online spaces apparently protect us from the
vulnerabilities of falling out of synch with others. In other words, they provide us
with affectively controllable environments in which coming together and sharing
rhythms of existence seems safe. Today, such coming together in intimate public
spheres is perhaps more smoothly facilitated by the “connected isolation” of
online environments than by the various analogue spaces of co-existence (Sloter-
dijk 2004).
Fourthly, the Kony 2012 campaign brings a certain affective aesthetic into play,
an aesthetic we may think of as an aesthetic of change. The agitprop style of the
main campaign posters was borrowed from the bright colours, geometric simpli-
city, and arresting human poses of the constructivists in the early Soviet Union,
12 Introduction

Alexander Rodchenko and the Sternberg brothers among them. The poster star-
ring Kony, bin Laden, and Hitler, in particular, brought the well-known ‘Hope’
poster for the 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign to mind, thus implying,
by way of association, an imagined enthusiastic chant of ‘yes, we can bring Joseph
Kony to justice’. If we were moved by the campaign and its aesthetic, we were
moved not least by the image of ourselves finally becoming agents of change.
This aesthetic of change is both warm and cold, or perhaps it is just that we have
warmed to this aesthetic, its coolness of style moving us, sometimes by channel-
ling and cultivating feelings of hope. In a sense, then, this aesthetic is itself about
the very capacity to feel, targeting, as it were, a shared mood of political hope-
lessness, indifference, and depression in order to transform this mood into
feelings of confident engagement. As suggested by Sianne Ngai, in contrast to
classical aesthetic categories like the sublime and the beautiful, the affective-
aesthetic categories prevailing in late capitalism “no longer seems definable by
the presence of a single exceptional feeling (say, ‘disinterested pleasure’)” (Ngai
2012, 23). Instead, today’s dominant aesthetic categories – Ngai singles out the
zany, the cute, and the interesting, as three such categories – are based on
complicated blends of ordinary, minor affects. And in a culture in which we are
aesthetically and affectively interpellated every minute of the day, Ngai suggests,
feelings of being moved are most often conjoined with feelings of being manipu-
lated. These insights into the qualities of aesthetic experience today may help us
understand when and why an aesthetic of change falls short of its aesthetic goals.
For all its charisma, this grand and self-confident aesthetic sits uncomfortably
with a situation of social conflict devoid of political struggle beyond liking and
disliking, perhaps amplifying the very political inertia it presents itself as an
aesthetic kind of answer to.
Finally, the Kony campaign most persistently prompts questions about the
relation between affective responsiveness and action. Critics of the campaign
were quick to dismiss its means of sharing, posting, and liking as mere ‘slackti-
vism’, denoting a lazy and low-impact version of ‘activism’. In the aftermath of
the campaign, Huffington Post’s Evan Bailyn argued, in contrast, that instead of
seeing social media as an easy way out, we ought to think of it as “a new tool for
improving the world through emotional and social awareness”.2 To some extent,
the infectiousness of the campaign confirmed that our ideas of what may consti-
tute political agency are thoroughly recast by social media, which are slowly
closing the gap between being moved and taking action. If Kony 2012 made it
evident that activism, engagement, and caring have come to signify something

2 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-bailyn/kony-2012-activism_b_1361791.html
 Introduction 13

ethically gratifying in and of themselves, the campaign also made evident that
during these times of networked intimacy, a collective desire and impulse to act
may in fact constitute a kind of action. Theorising this subtler kind of action in
terms of affectivity, media scholar Richard Grusin, who is among the contributors
to this volume, has coined the term ‘premediation’ in order to account for the
complexity of social processes of change:

Premediation deploys multiple modes of mediation and remediation in shaping the affectiv-
ity of the public, in preparing people for some field of possible future actions, in producing a
mood or structure of feeling that makes possible certain kinds of actions, thought, speech,
affectivities, feeling, or moods, mediations that might not have seemed possible before or
that might have fallen flat or died on the vine or not produced echoes and reverberations in
the public or media sphere. (1)

Seeing in Kony 2012 an event of premediation is to see it as an event whose

success consists less in its actual achievements than in its capacity to set up
affective paths to potential futures in which its own claims, and similar claims,
may be actualised. For better or for worse, perhaps this media event did in fact
work to gather, to focus, and to change the affective tone of public discourse, not
least that of the intimate public of social media, albeit in far less complex and
politically contesting ways than twenty-first century political and media events
such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement.

5 Being Moved

The variety of different approaches to affects studies should not obfuscate the fact
that the various attempts to develop studies of affect share, across their differ-
ences, an intention to explore an empirical field that has hitherto not been put in
focus with sufficient clarity and emphasis. That is, they have a shared interest in
understanding how affectivity actually works as an important, albeit somehow
nebulous, component of social and cultural life. Or put differently: it might be
that affect as a concept is contested and tentatively defined with despairing
disparity in different research communities, but this does not prevent a more
general consensus on the importance, and indeed the necessity, of studying and
understanding the ways in which affectivity, in a number of different guises,
actually works.
When considering this more general notion of affectivity as an effective
component in virtually all aspects of human life and social interaction, it is not
too difficult to discern two major components. First, affectivity obviously has to
do with matters of the soul, as it were – the soul taken in a somehow wide and
14 Introduction

Platonic sense: as the locus of passions, of reason, and of the sensation of selfness
peculiar to humans (pathos, logos, thymus). Affectivity has to do with the attune-
ment of our being, the somehow intangible but nonetheless absolutely seminal
mode in which we find ourselves energised or discouraged, receptive or hostile,
inspired or put back by a given situation. Affectivity in this sense is what tinges or
colours the way in which we take part in the environments we find ourselves
placed into. This component seems broadly to cover the range of phenomena
Williams attempted to focus in on: not any specific affect, but the affective
qualities associated with any thought, action, or impression. Thinking in one
particular way rather than in another ‘feels right’, and likewise, the urge to do this
rather than that might not be transparent and reasonable, but rather follow a
hunch, a propensity – that is, it is imbued with affectivity. It would indeed be
difficult to account for this presence of affectivity in matters of human being and
doing if the affective were to be strictly delimited from perceiving, thinking, and
intentional agency. So if affectivity thus pertains, as most immediate accounts
would agree, to the inner life of human sensibility and sentiment, it does so in a
widely ramified and differentiated way, with bearings on how we see things, how
we think about them, how we interact with them. Despite the many and subtle
ways in which we can distinguish between perception, emotion, cognition and
imagination, the idea of affectivity still somehow seems to work in a transversal
dimension, covering all aspects of the Platonic ‘soul’ and percolating through the
entire stratum of human being and self-perception.
The second component of affectivity, to accompany this idea of a kind of
general imbrication of the human soul with attunements and propensities, is the
dynamism implied in the notion of affectivity, the processes and mechanics, as it
were, of affecting and being affected. Affectivity, in this sense, is when something
happens to us, and we react to it. We react according to the capacities we are able
to mobilise. That is, the same impulse will propagate and crystallise in quite
distinct manners, depending on who is being affected. Which practices of imagi-
nation are spurred by an impulse, which patterns and directions of agency? The
same impulse that puts one person into a state of creativity might put somebody
else into a state of inertia or depression. We are interested, therefore, in the ways
in which affectivity depends on the constitution of the subject being affected.
Different individuals will surely react in singular ways, conditioned by their
specific histories and capabilities. And of course, we could think of the ‘subject’
being affected on a number of different scales: as an individual, a family, a social
group, a nation, and so on. Affectivity in this second aspect is about what
happens to a given body, a given subject of imagination and agency, when it is
targeted by an impulse that comes from its surroundings, and then reacts to this.
It concerns what happens to us, and what we do about what happens to us. There
 Introduction 15

is incoming affect: that which strikes me. And there is outgoing affect: my
reaction, my being affected, according to Spinoza’s famous distinction between
affectio and affectus. But there is more to it: the mechanism of affectivity doesn’t
stop here. When somebody is affected, this somebody is likely to change agency
as well, producing new agency, affecting the environment in turn. When Othello
learns about Ophelia’s innocence, it affects him, and he is immersed in a deva-
stating mix of repentance, grief, and rage; and this in turn makes him react,
fatally. So there is Othello’s affliction, and there is the larger affective constella-
tion, mapped by the tragedy. Or when a group of hooligans, energised by a match,
eventually redirects this energy into bullying an immigrant community nearby,
they are somehow, albeit indistinctly, inspired by the ways the media presents
issues of immigration: again, we see not only how an impulse moves this larger
body, but how in turn it moves along, and how eventually a set of different affects
with quite distinct provenances merges, intensifies, and creates a specific affec-
tive climate. The mechanics of affectivity keep propagating, and keep developing
through ramifications and transformations.
Based on these two fundamental components of affectivity, as they appear at
an admittedly quite general level of abstraction, affect can be said to pertain to
the somehow global infrastructure of the human soul, and to the mechanics of
interaction between intelligent bodies – or put differently: to a mental ecology on
the one hand, and to a social ecology on the other. The notion of ecology here
might also underscore the fact that studies of affectivity will often refrain from
pinpointing very specific affects, or identifying some singular action or reaction,
but more often demonstrate how affectivity is at work in certain circumstances,
through certain relations, and in certain environments (see Guattari 2000). Affect,
to be sure, is not easily to localise, albeit perhaps less due to its elusive nature
than to the transversal logic of its instantiation, since it often crosses known
divides, such as those between reason and emotion, between body and soul, and
between subject and object. In this sense too, affectivity studies from the very
outset pose serious challenges to the ways in which research is organised into
disciplines, departments, and other handy boxes and compartments. Again, this
does not make studies of affectivity, or exercises of mapping structures of feeling,
something particularly esoteric; in spite of the difficulties of grasping affectivity
and the often strenuous theoretical vocabularies involved in providing a proper
articulation of its workings, affectivity is perhaps something that is actually fairly
straightforward. In this vein, you could say that the study affectivity is aimed
toward understanding the very well known phenomenon of being moved.
We are moved due to changes that occur in the mental and social ecologies
we take part in. This is a question of being mentally aroused, whether in the
general direction of enthusiasm or of disgust, of generating a propensity for
16 Introduction

something to do, or think, or otherwise mark out, and eventually of being

affected, precisely: being struck by something that makes you change your direc-
tion or composure ever so slightly. Affectivity studies examine the organisation of
these ecologies and the changes that occur within them. Studying affectivity is to
identify which bodies are being affected; individual bodies, collective bodies, and
composite bodies. It is to chart the relations these bodies have to their surround-
ings, how they are immersed in dependencies and interactions, and it is even-
tually to examine how these bodies change and develop within the affective
infrastructures in which they reside. It is to study the ways in which these bodies
are capable of receiving and processing the affective impulses impinging on
them, and how they eventually become different, for better or for worse, through
being affected.
The importance of studying affectivity finally also resides in this potential
insight: how the intelligent bodies we are, individually as well as through the
different social and technological assemblages in which we take part, are pro-
duced, how they subsist, how they develop over time. Being moved, after all, is
not solely about those moments of deviation where we are flooded by a sentiment,
where we follow a crowd and swerve from our direction, where we are taken by
compassion or enthusiasm. Although we might sometimes think about a state of
affect, the grip of a mood, as something we recover from in order to return to
normalcy, an important teaching of contemporary affect studies is that affectivity
is actually forming us, socialising our bodies, minds, and sentimental infrastruc-
tures according to the ecologies we take part in, becoming a part of our normality,
and making us feel at home in the locale of a structure of feeling. So rather than
juxtaposing the affect that derails us with the humdrum experience of habit, we
should also be attentive to the ways in which affective infrastructures are them-
selves becoming habitual; to the habits of our bodies, of our judgements, of our
attention. We are always exposed to environments that affect us, and we learn to
synchchronise with them. Affectivity, in this sense, is also a matter of drill, of
learning to inhabit a structure of feeling.3 Understanding affect, and particularly
understanding the many innovative, intensified, and highly ramified ways in
which contemporary networked, mediatised and interactive social and cultural
life affect us, might prove an invaluable tool in eventually gaining a better insight
into how subjectivity is produced nowadays – the structures of feeling we culti-
vate, the habits we form, in short, the deep underpinnings of ‘the way we live
now.’

3 This point has been very convincingly made by Nigel Thrift, see Thrift 2007. To the notion of
habit, see Ravaisson 2009.
 Introduction 17

Before venturing into the material of Structures of Feeling, a few words on the
structure of the volume itself. The book is divided into four sections, each section
focussing on the significance of the study of affectivity for already thriving fields
of cultural analysis such as media studies, memory studies, and cultural theory as
a whole. The first part, Producing Affect, brings together contributions that ex-
plore some of the ways in which new media work to produce and intensify
affectivity. Concentrating respectively on mass media, trans porn, Serbian cine-
ma, Slovenian performance art, installation art, and digital imagery, the chapters
in this section testify to the world-making dimension inherent in the processes of
mediating and premediating distinct affective environments and dispositions.
These essays thus contribute to the fields of both affect studies and media studies
in their shared concern with the mediality and aesthetics of affect, emotions,
moods, and atmospheres.
The cultural study of memory is a flourishing branch of contemporary huma-
nities and social sciences, ranging from art and literary studies to psychology,
anthropology, and sociology. The essays that make up the second part of this
volume, Affective Pasts, explore the significance of affect to the ways we remem-
ber, commemorate, and in other ways get hold of things in our recent or not so
recent past – or fail to do so. These essays engage the affective production of
presence in contexts such as 9/11, the emotional culture of the eighteenth century,
and literary auto-fiction. Focussing on the aesthetic, moral, and political outcomes
of displaying emotions in these diverse historical and cultural settings, this section
conveys the changing cultural status of emotions, and indicates the considerable
extent to which affectivity has come to provide a privileged vehicle for shuffling
between past and present – and thus for the production of historical knowledge.
In the third part, Affective Thinking, our contributors examine various con-
cepts, theories, and forms of thinking, not so much to show how the thinking in
question may inform the field of affect studies, but rather in order to draw attention
to the ways in which these modes of thinking are themselves already attuned to
matters of affect. The main interlocutors for these essays are literary and cultural
theory. This section attends to affective-performative, and thus post-representa-
tional, ways of thinking and writing, demonstrating that affectivity is already
regarded as a valuable source of knowledge in feminist thinking and writing, as
well as in the diverse bodies of work of Michel Foucault, Fernand Deligny, Virginia
Woolf, and Pierre Klossowski. This section thus provides fresh perspectives on the
literary and philosophical histories of the current ‘affective turn’.
New social relations and ways of being in a networked world are common
themes of the essays in the fourth and final part of the volume, Circulating Affect.
If the Kony 2012 campaign provides us with one example of contemporary socially
networked technologies of self and collective bodies, the chapters in this section
18 Introduction

present ample material for responding to questions like ‘what does well-being
entail, and what are its tools?’; ‘what kind of affective agency is produced by the
participatory practices of social media?’; and ‘what are our propensities for form-
ing relations with strangers, both human and non-human, and by means of which
affective discourses do we choose to do so?’ These essays, in other words, explore
the significance of affect for the social formation of new modes of belonging.

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University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American
Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life grievable? London: Verso 2009.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. New York and
London: Routledge, 2008.
Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds). The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2010.
Grusin, Richard. “Premediation and the Virtual Occupation of Wall Street.” Theory & Event 14,
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Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford:
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Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London and New York:
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Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 2012.
———. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Ponte, Stefano, and Lisa Ann Richey. Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Ravaisson, Félix. Of Habit. Bloomsbury Academic, 2009 (1838).
Sedgewick, Eve K., and Adam Frank. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1995.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Sphären. Eine Trilogie. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004.
Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. New York and London: Routle-
dge, 2007.
———. “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour”. The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Gregg,
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 Introduction 19

Tygstrup, Frederik. “Affective Spaces.” Panic and Mourning: The Cultural Work of Trauma. Eds.
Daniela Agosthino et al. De Gruyter, 2012.
Raymond Williams. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso, 1980.
Raymond Williams. “Structures of Feeling”. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
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Wulff, Helena. The Emotions: A Cultural Reader. Bloombury Academic, 2008.

Websites:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-bailyn/kony-2012-activism_b_1361791.html (22 May

2014)
Raymond Williams
Structures of Feeling1
In most description and analysis, culture and society are expressed in an habitual
past tense. The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is
this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products. What
is defensible as a procedure in conscious history, where on certain assumptions
many actions can be definitively taken as having ended, is habitually projected,
not only into the always moving substance of the past, but into contemporary life,
in which relationships, institutions and formations in which we are still actively
involved are converted, by this procedural mode, into formed wholes rather than
forming and formative processes. Analysis is then centred on relations between
these produced institutions, formations, and experiences, so that now, as in that
produced past, only the fixed explicit forms exist, and living presence is always,
by definition, receding.
When we begin to grasp the dominance of this procedure, to look into its
centre and if possible past its edges, we can understand, in new ways, that
separation of the social from the personal which is so powerful and directive a
cultural mode. If the social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed,
we have indeed to find other terms for the undeniable experience of the present:
not only the temporal present, the realization of this and this instant, but the
specificity of present being, the inalienably physical, within which we may
indeed discern and acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not al-
ways as fixed products, defining products. And then if the social is the fixed and
explicit – the known relationships, institutions, formations, positions – all that is
present and moving, all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and the
explicit and the known, is grasped and defined as the personal: this, here, now,
alive, active, ‘subjective’.
There is another related distinction. As thought is described, in the same
habitual past tense, it is indeed so different, in its explicit and finished forms,
from much or even anything that we can presently recognize as thinking, that we
set against it more active, more flexible, less singular terms – consciousness,
experience, feeling – and then watch even these drawn towards fixed, finite,
receding forms. The point is especially relevant to works of art, which really are,
in one sense, explicit and finished forms – actual objects in the visual arts,

1 From: Marxism and Literature by Williams (1977), pp.128–135. By permission of Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
 Structures of Feeling 21

objectified conventions and notations (semantic figures) in literature. But it is not

only that, to complete their inherent process, we have to make them present, in
specifically active ‘readings’. It is also that the making of art is never itself in the
past tense. It is always a formative process, within a specific present. At different
moments in history, and in significantly different ways, the reality and even the
primacy of such presences and such processes, such diverse and yet specific
actualities, have been powerfully asserted and reclaimed, as in practice of course
they are all the time lived. But they are then often asserted as forms themselves,
in contention with other known forms: the subjective as distinct from the objec-
tive; experience from belief; feeling from thought; the immediate from the gene-
ral; the personal from the social. The undeniable power of two great modern
ideological systems – the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘psychological’ – is, ironically,
systematically derived from these senses of instance and process, where experi-
ence, immediate feeling, and then subjectivity and personality are newly general-
ized and assembled. Against these ‘personal’ forms, the ideological systems of
fixed social generality, of categorical products, of absolute formations, are rela-
tively powerless, within their specific dimension. Of one dominant strain in Marx-
ism, with its habitual abuse of the ‘subjective’ and the ‘personal’, this is especially
true.
Yet it is the reduction of the social to fixed forms that remains the basic error.
Marx often said this, and some Marxists quote him, in fixed ways, before return-
ing to fixed forms. The mistake, as so often, is in taking terms of analysis as terms
of substance. Thus we speak of a world-view or of a prevailing ideology or of a
class outlook, often with adequate evidence, but in this regular slide towards a
past tense and a fixed form suppose, or even do not know that we have to
suppose, that these exist and are lived specifically and definitively, in singular
and developing forms. Perhaps the dead can be reduced to fixed forms, though
their surviving records are against it. But the living will not be reduced, at least in
the first person; living third persons may be different. All the known complexities,
the experienced tensions, shifts, and uncertainties, the intricate forms of uneven-
ness and confusion, are against the terms of the reduction and soon, by exten-
sion, against social analysis itself. Social forms are then often admitted for
generalities but debarred, contemptuously, from any possible relevance to this
immediate and actual significance of being. And from the abstractions formed in
their turn by this act of debarring – the ‘human imagination’, the ‘human psyche’,
the ‘unconscious’, with their ‘functions’ in art and in myth and in dream – new
and displaced forms of social analysis and categorization, overriding all specific
social conditions, are then more or less rapidly developed.
Social forms are evidently more recognizable when they are articulate and
explicit. We have seen this in the range from institutions to formations and
22 Raymond Williams

traditions. We can see it again in the range from dominant systems of belief and
education to influential systems of explanation and argument. All these have
effective presence. Many are formed and deliberate, and some are quite fixed. But
when they have all been identified they are not a whole inventory even of social
consciousness in its simplest sense. For they become social consciousness only
when they are lived, actively, in real relationships, and moreover in relationships
which are more than systematic exchanges between fixed units. Indeed just
because all consciousness is social, its processes occur not only between but
within the relationship and the related. And this practical consciousness is always
more than a handling of fixed forms and units. There is frequent tension between
the received interpretation and practical experience. Where this tension can be
made direct and explicit, or where some alternative interpretation is available, we
are still within a dimension of relatively fixed forms. But the tension is as often an
unease, a stress, a displacement, a latency: the moment of conscious comparison
not yet come, often not even coming. And comparison is by no means the only
process, though it is powerful and important. There are the experiences to which
the fixed forms do not speak at all, which indeed they do not recognize. There are
important mixed experiences, where the available meaning would convert part to
all, or all to part. And even where form and response can be found to agree,
without apparent difficulty, there can be qualifications, reservations, indications
elsewhere: what the agreement seemed to settle but still sounding elsewhere.
Practical consciousness is almost always different from official consciousness,
and this is not only a matter of relative freedom or control. For practical con-
sciousness is what is actually being lived, and not only what it is thought is being
lived. Yet the actual alternative to the received and produced fixed forms is not
silence: not the absence, the unconscious, which bourgeois culture has mythi-
cized. It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but
each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined
exchange. Its relations with the already articulate and defined are then exception-
ally complex.
This process can be directly observed in the history of a language. In spite of
substantial and at some levels decisive continuities in grammar and vocabulary,
no generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors. The difference
can be defined in terms of additions, deletions, and modifications, but these do
not exhaust it. What really changes is something quite general, over a wide range,
and the description that often fits the change best is the literary term ‘style’. It is a
general change, rather than a set of deliberate choices, yet choices can be
deduced from it, as well as effects. Similar kinds of change can be observed in
manners, dress, building, and other similar forms of social life. It is an open
question – that is to say, a set of specific historical questions – whether in any of
 Structures of Feeling 23

these changes this or that group has been dominant or influential, or whether
they are the result of much more general interaction. For what we are defining is a
particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from
other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period. The
relations between this quality and the other specifying historical marks of chan-
ging institutions, formations, and beliefs, and beyond these the changing social
and economic relations between and within classes, are again an open question:
that is to say, a set of specific historical questions. The methodological conse-
quence of such a definition, however, is that the specific qualitative changes are
not assumed to be epiphenomena of changed institutions, formations, and be-
liefs, or merely secondary evidence of changed social and economic relations
between and within classes. At the same time they are from the beginning taken
as social experience, rather than as ‘personal’ experience or as the merely super-
ficial or incidental ‘small change’ of society. They are social in two ways that
distinguish them from reduced senses of the social as the institutional and the
formal: first, in that they are changes of presence (while they are being lived this is
obvious; when they have been lived it is still their substantial characteristic);
second, in that although they are emergent or pre-emergent, they do not have to
await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pres-
sures and set effective limits on experience and on action.
Such changes can be defined as changes in structures of feeling. The term is
difficult, but ‘feeling’ is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal
concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology’. It is not only that we must go beyond
formally held and systematic beliefs, though of course we have always to include
them. It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively
lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs
are in practice variable (including historically variable), over a range from formal
assent with private dissent to the more nuanced interaction between selected and
interpreted beliefs and acted and justified experiences. An alternative definition
would be structures of experience: in one sense the better and wider word, but
with the difficulty that one of its senses has that past tense which is the most
important obstacle to recognition of the area of social experience which is being
defined. We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and
tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feel-
ing against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical con-
sciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then
defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations,
at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience
which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be
private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely
24 Raymond Williams

otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its
specific hierarchies. These are often more recognizable at a later stage, when they
have been (as often happens) formalized, classified, and in many cases built into
institutions and formations. By that time the case is different; a new structure of
feeling will usually already have begun to form, in the true social present.
Methodologically, then, a ‘structure of feeling’ is a cultural hypothesis,
actually derived from attempts to understand such elements and their connec-
tions in a generation or period, and needing always to be returned, interactively,
to such evidence. It is initially less simple than more formally structured hypoth-
eses of the social, but it is more adequate to the actual range of cultural evidence:
historically certainly, but even more (where it matters more) in our present
cultural process. The hypothesis has a special relevance to art and literature,
where the true social content is in a significant number of cases of this present
and affective kind, which cannot without loss be reduced to belief systems,
institutions, or explicit general relationships, though it may include all these as
lived and experienced, with or without tension, as it also evidently includes
elements of social and material (physical or natural) experience which may lie
beyond, or be uncovered or imperfectly covered by, the elsewhere recognizable
systematic elements. The unmistakable presence of certain elements in art which
are not covered by (though in one mode they may be reduced to) other formal
systems is the true source of the specializing categories of ‘the aesthetic’, ‘the
arts’, and ‘imaginative literature’. We need, on the one hand, to acknowledge
(and welcome) the specificity of these elements – specific feelings, specific
rhythms – and yet to find ways of recognizing their specific kinds of sociality,
thus preventing that extraction from social experience which is conceivable only
when social experience itself has been categorically (and at root historically)
reduced. We are then not only concerned with the restoration of social content in
its full sense, that of a generative immediacy. The idea of a structure of feeling can
be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions – semantic
figures – which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications
that such a new structure is forming. These relations will be discussed in more
detail in subsequent chapters, but as a matter of cultural theory this is a way of
defining forms and conventions in art and literature as inalienable elements of a
social material process: not by derivation from other social forms and pre-forms,
but as social formation of a specific kind which may in turn be seen as the
articulation (often the only fully available articulation) of structures of feeling
which as living processes are much more widely experienced.
For structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as
distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and
are more evidently and more immediately available. Not all art, by any means,
 Structures of Feeling 25

relates to a contemporary structure of feeling. The effective formations of most

actual art relate to already manifest social formations, dominant or residual, and
it is primarily to emergent formations (though often in the form of modification or
disturbance in older forms) that the structure of feeling, as solution, relates. Yet
this specific solution is never mere flux. It is a structured formation which,
because it is at the very edge of semantic availability, has many of the charac-
teristics of a pre-formation, until specific articulations – new semantic figures –
are discovered in material practice: often, as it happens, in relatively isolated
ways, which are only later seen to compose a significant (often in fact minority)
generation; this often, in turn, the generation that substantially connects to its
successors. It is thus a specific structure of particular linkages, particular em-
phases and suppressions, and, in what are often its most recognizable forms,
particular deep starting-points and conclusions. Early Victorian ideology, for
example, specified the exposure caused by poverty or by debt or by illegitimacy
as social failure or deviation; the contemporary structure of feeling, meanwhile,
in the new semantic figures of Dickens, of Emily Brontë, and others, specified
exposure and isolation as a general condition, and poverty, debt, or illegitimacy
as its connecting instances. An alternative ideology, relating such exposure to the
nature of the social order, was only later generally formed: offering explanations
but now at a reduced tension: the social explanation fully admitted, the intensity
of experienced fear and shame now dispersed and generalized.
The example reminds us, finally, of the complex relation of differentiated
structures of feeling to differentiated classes. This is historically very variable. In
England between 1660 and 1690, for example, two structures of feeling (among
the defeated Puritans and in the restored Court) can be readily distinguished,
though neither, in its literature and elsewhere, is reducible to the ideologies of
these groups or to their formal (in fact complex) class relations. At times the
emergence of a new structure of feeling is best related to the rise of a class
(England, 1700–1760); at other times to contradiction, fracture, or mutation with-
in a class (England, 1780–1830 or 1890–1930), when a formation appears to break
away from its class norms, though it retains its substantial affiliation, and the
tension is at once lived and articulated in radically new semantic figures. Any of
these examples requires detailed substantiation, but what is now in question,
theoretically, is the hypothesis of a mode of social formation, explicit and recog-
nizable in specific kinds of art, which is distinguishable from other social and
semantic formations by its articulation of presence.
1 Producing Affect
Richard Grusin
Mediashock
1 Introduction

Nearly a dozen years after 9/11, print, televisual, and networked media remain in
an acute state of shock or crisis. In many respects this “mediashock” follows from
the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – and more crucially
from the overwhelming aftershocks that have rumbled (and continue to rumble)
through the global economic and security apparatuses in the first decades of the
twenty-first century. But mediashock preexisted 9/11 and has been intensified,
transformed, and reinitiated many times in the twenty-first century.
Indeed US media thrive on crisis, shock, and disaster. At the first sign of
meteorological turmoil, social unrest, financial turbulence, or natural cataclysm,
print, televisual, and networked news media shift into crisis mode, generating on-
the-ground reports, live updates, multiple commentaries and breaking news. CNN
pioneered the 24–7 crisis mode in global cable news as far back as the 1980s, but
the media’s thirst for crisis, its obsession with remediating disaster and preme-
diating shock, has intensified in the twenty-first century, jump-started by the
events of 9/11 but escalating in the subsequent decade. With the exception of
regularly scheduled, periodic events like the Olympics or World Cup, political
elections, or award ceremonies, the most intensive media coverage invariably
occurs in response to aperiodic crises or disasters that operate according to their
own temporality – whether dramatic falls on the world’s financial markets;
hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, or tsunamis; geotechnical accidents like
mine explosions, oil leaks, floods, or nuclear meltdowns; violent terrorist acts like
suicide bombings, assassinations, or hijackings; or political upheavals like
strikes, demonstrations, occupations, or riots. Of course covering such unex-
pected events is what news is supposed to do and has always done. But what is
distinctive about the current mode of crisis mediation is that these mediashocks
are not only felt in the formal news media, but reverberate throughout informal
participatory media as well. Disasters like these not only set local, national, and
international news organizations into immediate action but are felt even more
quickly in the world of social media, as twitterstreams, Facebook feeds, YouTube,
Tumblrs, Reddit posts, instagrams, email, blogs, and instant messages multiply
exponentially in the aftermath of such events.
This essay sets out the concept of “mediashock” as a way to make sense of the
mood or atmosphere of shock or crisis that US media in the twenty-first century
work simultaneously to create and to contain. Building on my recent work on
30 Richard Grusin

premediation, “mediashock” participates in the critique of representationalism

that has been intensifying in cultural, political, and media theory over the past
couple of decades. I take as my point of departure the ways that print, televisual,
and networked media circulate and remediate shock – particularly how they
produce, intensify, and modulate the affectivity of shock, both individually and
collectively, among humans and nonhumans alike. Although “mediashock”
names a specific condition of the twenty-first century, the concept also has its
historical antecedents. The intensification of media saturation, the unprecedented
distribution of mobile technical media devices, and an everyday mediasphere that
is more complex, multiple, and contradictory than in previous centuries – all of
these participate in the generation of mediashock in the early twenty-first century.
Nonetheless, the concept of “mediashock” itself has a genealogy that goes back at
least to the beginning of the twentieth century, and its effects can be identified in
the print and telegraphic media responses to such earlier historical disasters as
the 1755 Lisbon earthquake or the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
In a fuller version of this piece I outline some of the ways that mediashock
has been conceptualized in the twentieth century in the US and in Europe. The
longer version also takes up the remediation of the Japanese earthquake and
tsunami in March 2011 as an exemplary case of the connection between the
mediation of disasters or crises and the affectivity of shock that these remedia-
tions produce, modulate, amplify, and shape. Here I focus more generally on the
temporal and technical formats through which media engage with the public in
the twenty-first century, the logics and temporalities of social networking, mobile
devices, email, and web browsing. I delineate four different senses of the concept
of mediashock: 1) the preoccupation of news media with crisis and disaster, how
media remediate and premediate these narratives of shock; 2) the way in which
media physically shock the human system as bio-organism, how media materially
alter the human bodily sensorium; 3) the power of media to shock established
social patterns, public norms, or collective affective formations in anticipation of
and response to changing material and medial conditions; and 4) the way in
which, like earthquakes or other natural disasters, mediashock produces geophy-
sical, geopolitical, and geoaffective impacts upon the global assemblage of hu-
mans and nonhumans, the social, technical, and natural actants that constitute
the world in the twenty-first century. Taken together, these four senses of media-
shock emphasize the affectivity of media themselves as well as their relation to
the affectivity of natural/technical disasters or crises. They also insist upon the
ontological status of such geotechnical media events – which are produced
neither by nature, society, or technology but emerge as complex assemblages
with their own forms of agency. These new kinds of events, objects, or actants in
the world are related to but not finally reducible to the explosion of new informa-
 Mediashock 31

tion and media technologies in the past few decades, including mobile technical
devices, socially networked programs or formats, and the translation of see-
mingly innumerable media interactions into ‘big data’ for the purposes of com-
merce, security, and finance.

2 Premediation

In my recent book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (2010), I trace out
a shift in the temporality of mediation at the start of the twenty-first century, from
a focus on the present and recent past, which predominated in the latter decades
of the twentieth century, to an increasing focus on the future, which has come to
predominate at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Taking up formats and
practices of mediation circulating through the United States in the period after
September 11, 2001, I trace the emergence, or more accurately the intensification,
of a logic of “premediation” in post-9/11 US media. Although premediation
predates the event of 9/11, it became plainly evident in the run-up to the Iraq War
in 2002 and 2003. Premediation is a counterpart to the concept of remediation
that Jay Bolter and I developed in the late 1990s to make sense of the contra-
dictory logics and practices of mediation circulating at the end of the previous
millennium (see Grusin and Bolter 1999). Premediation does not displace reme-
diation but deploys it in different aesthetic, sociotechnical, or political forma-
tions. The double logic of remediation still obtains today, but its conflicting media
logics are formally different.
Unlike remediation, which seeks a kind of perceptual or affective immediacy,
premediation works to produce an affectivity of anticipation by remediating
future events or occurrences which may or may not ever happen. The media
regime of premediation marks not the 1990s desire for a virtual reality but an
engagement with the reality of the virtual, what Deleuze and Guattari might
understand as “potentiality.” While premediation often takes the form (as it did
in the run-up to the Iraq War) of the proliferation of specific possibilities, or
particular scenarios, the generation of these possible scenarios premediates the
potentialities or virtualities out of which future actions, decisions, or events might
(or might not) emerge. The aim of these premediations is not necessarily (or in
many cases not at all) to get the future right, but to mobilize or modulate in the
present individual and collective affective orientations towards the future.
Although premediation has much in common with game-planning, scenario-
building, or prediction, each of which imagines the future as something like a
determinable state that can be controlled or forecast or planned, the distinction
between the possible and the virtual distinguishes premediation from these more
32 Richard Grusin

goal-oriented or instrumental modes of imagining the future. To define premedia-

tion as the remediation of virtuality or potentiality is to insist that there are always
multiple competing and incomplete futures – multiple actualities which could
emerge from any potential present, but which emerge not by the negation or
addition of particular variables or factors but by differentiation and divergence
from other potential but never actualized futures. Where game-planning, scenar-
io-building, and prediction define the real in terms of which imagined futures
eventually come to pass, premediation maintains that these virtualities are al-
ready real insofar as they produce or mobilize real affective states (and real
actions) in the present. To think of the future as virtual, and therefore as real, is to
insist on the efficacy, or force, of the multiplicity of premediations in and of
themselves – no matter which futures might actually result.
Put differently, premediation describes the temporal and affective formation
of today’s socially networked society. Where remediation spoke to the more
individualized networked model of immediacy and hypermediacy that informed
the cyberculture enthusiasm of the 80s and 90s, premediation speaks to the
anticipatory temporality of the twenty-first century. Today people are always
already moving through social networks that are premediated into the future.
Networked media are used to mobilize individuals and groups to come together
and disperse in heterogeneous temporal and spatial media events – whether
online via Facebook or Twitter or in increasingly networked geographical space
through the linking of mobile technologies with GPS and other spatial technolo-
gies. In the 80s and 90s the temporal focus of new media was largely on the
possibilities of digital immediacy, which concepts like Virilio’s “real time” articu-
lated as a “monochronic, perpetual now” (see Virilio 1997). In the twenty-first
century the affective and temporal focus of socially networked media is increas-
ingly on futurity or anticipation, on what is to come, where to go, when to meet.
Although technical media formations differ throughout history and across socie-
ties and culture, the predominant temporal logic of mediation in any historical
formation can never be totalizing. There are always competing and overlapping
temporalities and media formats. People in the twenty-first century are still
interested in immediacy, or the now, just as in the last decades of the twentieth
century new digital media technologies brought into play new imaginings of the
future, new interest in alternative, future-oriented temporalities.
These heterogeneous affective and temporal formations emerge from predo-
minant technical and medial formations, through something like what Gilbert
Simondon understands as individuation. Thus the obsessive digitization of all
prior media forms in the late twentieth century fostered an orientation towards
renewing the past which resulted in the nearly universal claims of the “newness”
of digital media. Perhaps paradoxically the late twentieth century claim for new-
 Mediashock 33

ness was less about the future than about the present and the past – if some media
formation is ‘new’ that means it is marked as different from the media formations
that preceded it. Such a claim, however, makes no strong assertion about futurity.
New media are new now – to think about the future is only to think about a time
when these new media will no longer be new. In the twenty-first century the
temporality of premediation is also connected to the predominant forms of techni-
cal mediation, which at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century
are mobile, socially networked media and the big data whose mining and capitali-
zation they enable. These media are not primarily concerned either with the now
or with the new – or insofar as they are, they are concerned with them chiefly as
they will be replaced or succeeded by the next now or the next new status update,
tweet, or text. The affective temporality of premediation is the temporality of
anticipation, in which mobile, socially networked media work together to pro-
duce, satisfy, and maintain individual and collective affective states of anticipa-
tion towards a potential, virtual, and thereby already real futurity.

3 Geoaffective Mediation

In addition to modulating public affect or mood, print, televisual, and networked

media also function to regulate the temporality of national, state, or diasporic
communities, marking and archiving the regular periodic functioning of cultural,
social, economic, and political institutions. I offer the concept of “mediashock” as
an attempt to make sense of how media operate during aperiodic events of
disaster or crisis that unfold according to their own periodicity rather than at
regularly scheduled times. If (as I argue in Premediation) media function as agents
of governmentality in the twenty-first century, then it is important to understand
how their mediality operates not only during business as usual but more crucially
during moments of disaster or crisis. Or perhaps put differently, we need to
account for how mass, networked, and distributed media attempt to govern
disasters or crises by regulating such aperiodic events through strategies of
remediation and premediation.
One way we might think to do so is through Niklas Luhmann’s understanding
of the functioning of media as an autopoietic system. In his 2000 book, The Reality
of Mass Media, Luhmann contends that the media make up a self-regulating
system which generates irritation through its interaction with the environment
and then stabilizes itself through mechanisms of autopoietic feedback. Luh-
mann’s central example of the reality of mass media is the news. New events or
stimuli in the media’s environment irritate the mediatic system; the news media
then use the binary code information/not-information to sort these events into
34 Richard Grusin

news or not-news according to premediated formats and programs, thereby resta-

bilizing itself. The concept of mediashock allows us to think about the autopoiesis
of our media system on a much larger scale as an affective geotechnical system of
mood regulation. Because Luhmann thinks about mass media almost exclusively
in terms of its content, not its relations with the media public, he does not consider
how the media system regulates individual and collective affectivity. What he
characterizes as the reality of media in its operations, I would talk about in terms
of its affective role in shaping collective mood, what Raymond Williams calls
structures of feeling or what Heidegger refers to as stimmung. Mediashock shapes
or enables particular individual and collective affective formations, which keep
people attached to social media, television, or the internet through intensifying
the affective bond with their technical media devices. The simultaneous remedia-
tion and premediation of shock or disaster makes the media public feel anxious
and reassures them – keeps them anticipating future events so that they continue
to return to their social media networks and devices, to television or online news
sources, and are reassured to find their networks still operating.
To unpack how this process might work in terms of a more complex global
environment of affective technologies, I consider in the longer version of this
essay how the 2011 Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown had a
physical impact on the reality of our mediatic system. Not only did the Sendai
earthquake produce numerous aftershocks in the earth’s crust, generate several
tsunamis across the Pacific Ocean, and cause serious damage to the Fukushima
Daichii nuclear plant, but it also worked, I would suggest, to generate geoaffec-
tive shocks in the mediatic system, shocks whose reality was registered in all
kinds of different media effects – on Twitter, Facebook, email, texts, blogs, radio,
TV, print, and so forth. In claiming that the Sendai quake generated mediatic as
well as seismic aftershocks, I am not simply being metaphorical but arguing that
such media aftershocks were generated by the quake and its aftermath in just the
same way that tsunamis, floods, and seismic aftershocks were. If this is so, then
the aftershocks generated by the Senadai quake could be registered in the
mediatic infrastructure in just the same way that they were registered by the
Japanese communication, transportation, and energy infrastructures. One way to
understand how the Sendai earthquake could generate media aftershocks for
example, would be to think in terms of Bruno Latour’s description of the metrolo-
gical chain of inscription and translation that operated in the circulation of
reference from the Brazilian rain forest to the pages of a scientific journal or
science studies monograph.1 Seismic waves generated by the earthquake are

1 Latour follows a scientific experiment in the Brazilian rainforest (see Latour 1999).
 Mediashock 35

measured by the technical media apparatus of the seismometer, made up of

“electronic sensors, amplifiers, and recording devices,” which are themselves
connected to computers that translate these seismic measurements into inscrip-
tions which can be read by scientists, compared with other seismographs, and
transformed into data that can be transmitted through networked communication
infrastructure to academic, governmental, and media institutions. Such hyperme-
diated aftershocks are then translated into news reports in print, televisual, and
networked media, connected back through a chain of “immutable mobiles” to the
shaking of the earth produced by the subduction of the Pacific Plate.
In sketching out this sequence of transmission, I do not mean to suggest that
mediashocks are simply passive responses to the quake and its aftermath. It is
important to account for the agency of news media in remediating and premediat-
ing these disasters or the agency of the individuals who tweeted, texted, emailed,
Flickrd, or updated their Facebook status, as well as the agency of the news
reports, tweets, texts, emails, photos, or status updates themselves. Our mediatic
system is a complex assemblage of state, corporate, and informal media; of
technical infrastructure, finance capital, and affective labor; of bodies screens,
and devices. Following Jane Bennet’s work on the agency of assemblages, I
understand mediatic agency, like all human and nonhuman agency, as distribu-
ted and complex, interwoven among humans and nonhumans, organic and
technical actants and networks. In linking media aftershocks with those in the
geosphere or in the Japanese and global post-industrial infrastructure, I am trying
to bring into focus both the ways in which the media system itself is physically
impacted by such crises and how media function as active translators and
mediators of these physical shocks – how they work to transform, modulate, and
remediate the shock of geophysical disaster into new media formations which
themselves work to modulate individual and collective affectivities of people and
things across a widely networked and hypermediated world.

4 Mediashock doctrine

So if I am correct, why should the premediation of disaster in contemporary media

take the form of mediashock, both preparing people to cope with future disasters
and acting to create and maintain a media public? Are media in the twenty-first
century unique in seeking simultaneously to maintain low levels of fear (particu-
larly in non-crisis modes) even while generating more intense levels of fear in
regard to catastrophic events? Haven’t earlier media formats – letters, newspa-
pers, telegraph, photography, film – also circulated and mobilized both news and
collective affect in response to catastrophic natural, social, and technical events?
36 Richard Grusin

Of course they have. In identifying mediashock as a condition of media in the

twenty-first century, I do not mean to suggest that it is an unprecedented develop-
ment. Like cultural traits in archaeology, media formations need to be historicized
in terms of seriation, with different media practices and logics coexisting and
overlapping one another. But while it is important to acknowledge the historical
antecedents of mediashock it is also important to recognize what is distinctive or
singular about mediashock in today’s intensively hypermediated environment. As
I have argued elsewhere, the emergence of premediation as the dominant media
formation of the twenty-first century is inextricably related to the proliferation of
mobile, socially networked media and the regime of securitization and control
that this sociotechnical media apparatus fosters and enables. The media tempor-
ality that marked the terrorist attacks of 9/11 – intensive remediation of the initial
disaster followed by the premediation of multiple affective and geopolitical
futures – has been echoed or repeated in the mediashock generated by the Sendai
earthquake (like almost any global media disaster in the twenty-first century).
Because of the speed and connectivity of today’s socially networked media envir-
onment, mediashock operates more powerfully and quickly than it could have in
an era of print, or even of telegraph, television, or radio. Furthermore, because of
the anticipatory temporality of the current media environment, premediation is
oriented more towards mobilizing the affectivity of the media public towards the
future than was possible in more historically oriented media technologies. Print or
photography operated most powerfully by recording past events, while media like
television focused most effectively on the immediacy of live, real-time coverage.
But there may be an additional reason why premediation takes the form of
mediashock in print, televisual, and global media, having to do with the fact that
in the twenty-first century we find ourselves subject to global assemblages that
move, change, and grow according to logics, forces, or trajectories that far exceed
the control or mastery of humans or nation-states. Throughout history such large
global forces have been primarily natural – storms, earthquakes, floods, torna-
does and hurricanes, drought, avalanches – events known in the legalese of
insurance contracts in the US as “acts of God.” But today such catastrophic events
are increasingly generated by human and technical agency; as Neil Smith wrote
in response to Hurricane Katrina, in the twenty-first century “There’s no such
thing as a natural disaster.”2 Events like global climate change, financial col-
lapses, nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, famine – events fostered by the complex
sociotechnical assemblage of twenty-first-century finance capitalism – these, too,
take the force of “acts of God” in that they (and their consequences) are not

2 http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/
 Mediashock 37

controllable or stoppable by individual or collective human agency, but can only

be modulated, adapted to, or endured. There is in all of these events a sense that
we can do little more than watch, navigate, or negotiate large, complex forces
already in action. Such disasters like dramatic climate change, rising ocean
levels, the smoldering core of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, or the drastic
cycles of drought and floods that move throughout the globe, cannot directly be
stopped or controlled but at best only guided, influenced, decreased, or dimin-
ished. State, corporate, and informal media can only premediate at best the
course of these events, trying to prepare individuals, governments, institutions,
corporations, and NGOs for the multiplicity of ways in which these crises might
develop and in which we might ride them out. Scientists and policy makers alike
must rely upon premediated models of future ecological conditions to try to
counteract the force of ongoing disastrous ecosystemic change in the present.
In light of such aperiodic complex disasters, remediation seems less useful
than premediation. Where remediation operates to refashion a current or past
event in a new form, premediation operates to proliferate potential futures in
order to deal not with what is happening now or what has happened in the past
but with what might or will happen in the future. Thus rather than trying to
control or stop these disastrous events directly, news media, governments, cor-
porations, and NGOs must focus on riding the wave of the future, anticipating
how events might develop and how they might best be responded to. The thermo-
nuclear reactions that were generated in the Japanese fuel rods are a perfect
example of this kind of event-driven temporality – they cannot directly be
stopped by human or technical agency, but operate according to their own time-
scale, one which has more to do with the half-life of uranium than with the
periodicity of the mediatic system. These reactions could be (and were) mini-
mized, modulated, or redirected not by acting upon them directly as if they were
inert, passive nonhuman physical processes, but rather by accepting the fact that
their agency, trajectory, and development were operating according to their own
laws, their own temporality, their own scale. Rather than trying to remediate
these twenty-first century disasters, the best course of action is to try to minimize
the damage and consequences of events with their own time-frame, which oper-
ate according to temporalities distinct from and indifferent to the pace and scale
of human time. In light of the mediashock generated by contemporary disasters,
which produce news at unpredictable moments and in unpredictable forms,
media today can only premediate eventualities and potentialities, changing its
premediations on the fly as events and circumstances occur that rule out some
possible futures and create, open up, or enable others.
In discussing the workings of mediashock in our print, televisual, and
networked news media, it can sometimes be difficult to avoid creating the sense
38 Richard Grusin

that mediation is somehow separate from, or secondary to, the events themselves.
I want to reiterate that I do not consider this to be the case, that mediation is not
external to these crises, catastrophes, or disasters but immanent to them. There is
no possibility of crisis or catastrophe without its mediation as such – these
conceptual and ontological entities are not prior to or independent of mediation
but are in fact constituted as forms or categories of mediation. This is not to deny
the ontological status of earthquakes, tsunamis, oil spills, or nuclear meltdowns
but rather the reverse: to insist that such events are themselves acts of mediation.
To use Karen Barad’s powerful conceptual framework, media make agential cuts
in the real, through the “intraaction” of technical apparatuses which weave the
ontological fabric of the world, including the complex assemblage of state,
corporate, and informal media (see Barad). Borrowing from Barad’s “agential
realism,” I want to argue for a form of “mediational realism” in which mediation
functions ontologically, not – as it mainly has in the history of western thought –
epistemologically.
In the geopolitical global assemblages of the twenty-first century, cata-
strophic events are not only remediated and premediated by print, televisual, and
socially networked media, but they are constructed or fabricated by the media in
another more radical way. The very same multinational conglomerates which
own media outlets or networks invariably also manufacture or produce the
products or goods or provide the services that cause or are caught up in the events
that are covered by the media, that make up the disasters or crisis situations that
produce the phenomenon of mediashock. It is therefore more than a telling
coincidence that General Electric, which was until very recently the parent com-
pany of NBC, designed and helped to manufacture the very nuclear reactors
whose cooling system failed at Fukushima, as well as those at 23 nuclear power
plants in the US. Thus when NBC News reported on the affective and radiological
fallout from the reactor core meltdown at Fukushima Daichii, its mediation of the
event was not in any ontological sense distinct from the event itself, as General
Electric is simultaneously involved both in the disaster and in the mediashock
that it generated. Indeed, given the scope of General Electric, the world’s largest
corporation, there is almost no major disaster in the world today that does not
have connections to the products or services of GE or its subsidiaries. Even more
broadly the same could be said and will continue increasingly to be able to be
said about Google and other multinational information and media conglomer-
ates.
In her book The Shock Doctrine (2007), Naomi Klein has persuasively argued
that the spread and dominion of multinational capital operates according to a
“shock doctrine” of “disaster capitalism,” which fosters and takes advantage of
technical, geopolitical, and natural disasters to take control of markets and
 Mediashock 39

governments across the world. Insofar as Klein’s analysis of the shock doctrine
seems accurate, then it is not too far a stretch to suggest that what I have been
describing today is something like a ‘mediashock doctrine’ of disaster capitalism,
a form of ‘disaster mediation’ that functions in the twenty-first century to ensure
the spread and distribution of the heterogeneous assemblage of state, corporate,
and informal media across the globe and indeed beyond. And if we follow Eric
Cazdyn and others in saying that “crisis is not what happens when capitalism
goes wrong, but when it goes right,” then mediashock can be seen not as that
which breaks with or interrupts the mediatic system, but rather as the condition
or indication of its functioning (Cazdyn 2012, 2). That is, mediashock is not what
happens when premediation goes wrong, but when it goes right.

References

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter
and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010.
Cazdyn, Eric. The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Durham, North
Carilina: Duke University Press, 2012.
Grusin, Richard. Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11. New York: Palgrave, 2010.
——— and Jay David Bolter. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
1999.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan
Books/Henry Holt, 2007.
Latour, Bruno. “Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest.” Pandora’s Hope:
Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1999.
Luhmann, Niklas. The Reality of the Mass Media. New York: Polity Press, 2000.
Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. New York: Verso, 1997.

Websites

http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/ (22 May 2014)

Eliza Steinbock
Parsing Affective Economies of Race,
Sexuality, and Gender: The Case of ‘Nasty
Love’

In this chapter, I wish to show how transgender studies and affect studies
might mutually approach the subject as a matter of process. I outline an
affirmative constructivist ontology of ‘becoming more’ to oppose the current
trend in queer theory towards deconstruction and negation. Scholars in trans-
gender and affect studies often share the methodology of departing from the
middle, starting with describing the affective relation that generates a subject.
For example, in “Happy Objects” Sara Ahmed writes that affect “is what sticks,
or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and
objects” (Ahmed 2010, 29). Ahmed suggests elsewhere that “emotions play a
crucial role in the ‘surfacing’ of individual and collective bodies” namely
through the circulation patterns they carve out between bodies and signs
(Ahmed 2004, 117). Wherever affect streams, it produces an exchange economy.
Focusing on the creation of boundaries, Ahmed also grants a creative and
redistributive quality to affective economies – “emotions do things” (Ahmed
2004, 119). I argue that in a case of trans pornography the charged affective
economy of relations between ‘nasty’ race, sexuality, and gender work to
refunction damaging stereotypes; and to proliferate new aggregates of ideas,
values, and objects stuck together by ‘nasty love.’

My starting point is the film Trans Entities: The Nasty Love of Papí and Wil (2007)
with its evocative term entity for the subjectivities of the docu-porn and the
descriptor of nasty for the kind of love generated by these sexual subjects.1 In
modifying the concept of love, nasty evokes contentious, layered, stereotypes
associated with Papí and Wil. They are both trans, kinky, polyamorous, people of
color (POC), and hence, embody quadruple cultural stereotypes for excessive,

1 I also write about this film in the article “On the Affective Force of ‘Nasty Love’” that deals in more
detail with the film’s processual ontology through the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.
Parsing Affective Economies of Race, Sexuality, and Gender: The Case of ‘Nasty Love’ 41

hypersexual, and thereby, nasty, ways of being.2 Their embrace of being (and
doing) nasty, however, critically exposes the whiteness and gender normativity
that saturates the dominant affective tradition of sexuality, including pornogra-
phy. Moreover, the film’s cogent vision of nasty love captures an affective inten-
sity that seems formative of alternative sexual subjectivities, trans entities.
In these ways and more Trans Entities suggests that mimetic modes of racial,
sexual, and gender identification are inadequate, namely for neglecting the
affective force and expanse of erotic relations. To take these relations into
account, I firstly examine the impact of nasty love in terms of the genre of the
film, a melding of pornography and documentary conventions. In studying the
pornumentory genre, I explore how it re-models sexual stereotypes of black and
brown bodies, to which the affect of nasty seems to stick and porn typically
reinforces. I then secondly consider how sexuality for trans subjectivities incorpo-
rates a desire for transitioning, for “becoming more,” as Eva Hayward describes it
in “Spider City Sex” (2010). My argument in short is that with the assertion of
nastiness, and refutation of feeling normatively masculine and white, the film
offers a processual subjectivity in the affective form of feeling excessive layered in
brown, kinky, and trans experiences. In other words, a sexual relation can
generate a feeling of more, and thereby a becoming more.
Featuring real-life lovers, Trans Entities runs only fifty-five minutes, but has
impressed American reviewers as well as wowed international audiences.3 It con-
sists of four parts interview-driven discussions on sex and gender expression, three
parts steamy, intimate, creative sex. Like the films of Tony Comstock in the Real
People, Real Life, Real Sex series in which the motto is “Love. Uncensored,” the
inclusion of documentary-styled footage on the personal lives of the performers
trespasses an expected barrier in watching anonymous porn. Unlike earlier queer

2 I follow the film’s language in employing trans (and not trans* or transgender) as an umbrella
term for gender variance, genderfuck, and transitioning genders, including transsexual-identified
people. Kinky refers to those sexual proclivities, desires, and practices that are not “straight” but
experienced with a “kink.” It is a shorthand community term that also refers to the recently coined
term BDSM. According to Weiss (2011), BDSM and SM refers to “a diverse community that includes
aficionados of bondage, [D]omination/submission, pain or sensation play, power exchange,
leathersex, role-playing and fetishes” (vii). Formally, it is an acronym for bondage/discipline,
Dominance/submission, and sadomasochism. Polyamory is a term for “many loves” and widely
used to refer to practices and theories of non-monogamy or non-exclusive partnering.
3 Reviewers include Tristan Taormino (2008) and Audacia Ray (2008). During the fifth Nether-
lands Transgender Film Festival (2009), I selected this film for our “Sex Positive” program and
facilitated the post-screening discussion with director Morty Diamond and Judy Minx, a trans
partner and French porn star. It was a sold out screening (90+) and evaluated very highly.
42 Eliza Steinbock

Fig. 1: Morty Diamond: Still from interview

and trans sexual representation, this video is forthright about the taboo topics of
African American and Puerto Rican trans identities as well as kinky desires.
The popularity of the video may also be due to the range of sexual scenes. It
begins in the bedroom with an erotic game of Mercy, involving face and chest
slapping, and later penetration sex with strap-ons. The next scene of Race Play
includes a third partner, Chris, who is white, deaf and a submissive, and who
joins Papí in being dominated by Wil. And finally, Papí and Wil role-play gang-
sters in an Interrogation scene, the footage of which also shows the couple
negotiating beforehand and taking care of each other afterward.
During the interviews, viewers are introduced to Papí and Wil’s individual and
collective thoughts on gender transitioning, polyamory, race politics, role-play,
and spirituality. The first line of the film comes from Wil, who fully clothed and
sitting comfortably with his partner Papí states, “I identify as a trans entity. I feel
very much in touch with both my male and female side. I wish there was something
very much in between. … I just, you know, found a word for it.” He attests to having
“always” been perceived as masculine due to his developed musculature and also
feeling so, though not exclusively. Wil’s identification with becoming an entity
suggests a situational identity in process and certainly in transition. Papí also self-
names as a trans entity, though came to do so later, after identifying as femme, gen-
derqueer, and on the masculine spectrum. For Papí especially, becoming a trans en-
tity means radical “shifting” back and forth and “playing with” gender expression.
The film’s composition arranges the sexual scenes adjacent to personal inter-
views with slow dissolves, voice over, and musical bridges, which help the viewer
Parsing Affective Economies of Race, Sexuality, and Gender: The Case of ‘Nasty Love’ 43

to switch from one format to another as smoothly as possible. The viewer is thusly
encouraged to see the continuities between how Papí and Wil experience their
sexuality and reflect on it. The subtitle – “The Nasty Love of” – unabashedly points
to the film’s preoccupation with ‘nasty’ elements placed into relation with a love
connection. Besides a catchy title, it suggests that the affective force of the nasty
aspects of trans sexuality – transness, brownness, kink and polyamory – enhances
their loving practice of becoming trans entities.
The film shows a realistic depiction of sexual acts, including oral, genital,
and anal intercourse, as well as less conventional kinky activities like spanking,
bondage, and breath control. The inclusion of a range of more standard love-
making to nasty sexual activities, however, is not the most unusual aspect of how
this pornumentary presents sexuality. Tristan Taormino’s 2008 review of “The
New Wave of Trans Porn” singles out a unique counter-logic in its pornographic
principle. Whereas much mainstream pornography seems to reify the gendered
norms of sexual behavior (see Williams, Hard Core), the deeper the viewer goes
with the protagonists into these sexually explicit scenes, for Taormino, “their
genders become malleable and less significant than their connection to one
another” (n/p). By foregrounding the intensity of their relation, the mutability of
gender is not trivialized, but becomes contiguous to it.
The trans-sexing of their shared transitions seems to be accomplished in part
by their trans sex, by their so-called nasty love. The possible conflict between
nastiness and love seems resolved by the affective intensity – their connection –
during the event of sex: the sex may be nasty, but it is so in a loving way. Through
interviews, the sex is known to be consensual. The use of safer sex methods is
highlighted with shots of reaching for condoms, gloves, lube. And each scene is
embedded in a communicative and honest relationship. The viewer comes to
associate their love with consent, communication, and care. Hence, the nasty love
juxtaposition that takes place within the event of physical sex intensifies their
sexual, psychic and physical connection. The shifting of intensities between
nastiness and lovingness, visualized in parallel through the seamless editing of
interviews and sexual scenes, seems to work in Trans Entities as a looping that
feeds back into the circuit of desires. The commingling and enhanced resonances
of racial, gendered, polyamorous, and BDSM desires produce a specific charge,
which I will examine in terms of their overlapping affective economies.

The mapping of nasty components onto declarations of love, such as Papí empha-
tically saying, “I love the fuck out of you,” not only supports the flexibility of their
44 Eliza Steinbock

gender, but also the ways in which they perform racial difference. While the term
nasty pops up in the film as a synonym for ‘sexy’ with positive connotations, it
also is attached to their practices of on-camera racial role-play. In the culturally-
informed environment of pornography, film scholar Linda Williams points out in
her “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border” (2004) that “the hypersexualization of the
black body (male and female) in some ways parallels the ‘hysterization’ of the
white woman’s body: both are represented as excessively saturated with sexual-
ity” (Williams 2004, 272). In U.S. race politics nasty became synonymous with
obscene black heterosexuality in the wake of 2LiveCrew’s controversial 1989
album As Nasty as They Wanna Be (see Crenshaw). The taboos of black power and
hyper-masculine sexuality is explicitly invoked in the three-way scene, the sec-
ond sexual interlude in the film (Figure 2).
It stages an inverted relation of power demarked by skin color, in which “Sir
Wil” dominates “nothing” (Chris) with the help of “Pet” (Papí).4 Though the Old
South and Plantation culture is not an explicit element of the scene, the use of
collars and disciplining instruments that reinforce the Dominant-submissive
dynamic recall shackles and whips used during slavery. Props and power distrib-
uted according to racial difference stimulates an erotic charge.
In her discussion of interracial lust in films, Williams is careful to note that
the intensity of the taboo relates to knowing it, to being aware of the stereotyping,
which is quite different from believing it (Williams 2004, 275). The tension of the
forbidden, as explored in this three-way role-play organized by caste of color,
comes from converting that which Wil says is his “animalistic” desire into a
controlled (and clothed) Master who tortures by giving orgasms. Together with
his (naked) lovers, he develops through iteration what Williams calls a “refunc-
tioned stereotype” (285) of black and white sexuality in order to bring them all
pleasure. Clearly Trans Entities does not deny interracial lust, or that “pornogra-
phy acts as a racialized economy of desire” (Miller-Young 266). However, I offer
that it mobilizes it “in historically new ways that are more erotic than phobic”
(Williams 2004, 285) by harnessing awareness of the affect charge patterned on
racial differences. In paying attention to racial difference – evidenced by affirm-
ing to each other that “I love your juicy lips,” discussing openly that Papí and Wil
rejected white lovers before to avoid exotificiation, and only playing with a deaf
person because s/he has a separate culture than being white – Trans Entities
works against the contemporary goal of “color blindness” operant in U.S. culture
(Williams 2004, 285).

4 For popular coverage of race play, see Daisy Hernandez, “Playing with Race” (Posted online
Dec. 13, 2004), at <http://colorlines.com/archives/2004/12/playing_with_race.html>
Parsing Affective Economies of Race, Sexuality, and Gender: The Case of ‘Nasty Love’ 45

Fig. 2: Morty Diamond: Still from threeway

The affective charge of “nasty” can also be seen in terms of a racialized class,
which suffuses the third scene between a backstabbing “criminal business part-
ner” and “crime boss,” who gets even through interrogation techniques that
involve knives and rough sex.
The racial stereotype of Black people as a criminal underclass challenges
what Mireille Miller-Young discusses in “Putting Hypersexuality to Work” (2010)
as the “politics of respectability” in which Black women and men seek to gain
racial respect by forming heteronormative, domestic, and bourgeois family rela-
tions (Miller-Young 2010, 222–223). In addition to acting out non-normative sex-
ualities of queer, contractual, public sexuality (see Miller-Young 2010, 223), then,
this scene adds a nasty class component to the racial profile of their roles.

Throughout Trans Entities Papí and Wil together with Chris explore the terrain of
Ahmed’s “affect alien” with regard to race, sexuality, gender and class. Ahmed
argues in “Happy Objects” that an affect alien does not (by refusal or accident)
reproduce the line of what a community has determined is a “happy object,” such
as the nuclear family (Ahmed 2010, 30). Paying attention to feeling alienated from
happiness means realizing that the affective atmosphere is always already
angled, “[w]hat we may feel depends on the angle of our arrival” in so far as “it is
always felt from a specific point,” an embodied point of view (37). By bridging the
46 Eliza Steinbock

personal with the sexual, blurring into a public intimacy, Trans Entities invites
viewers to feel with them from a specific, contiguous angle. From the vantage
point of Trans Entities, nastiness brings love. The film elicits viewers to become
neighboring affect aliens, who, like them, are out of line with the dominant
affective community and thus alienated in the sense of being unable to feel
pleasure from normative happy objects. Though love, like happiness, might be
one of the most normatively moral affects, their means to seek it takes them far
from the orientation towards bourgeois family relations and further into ‘bad’ and
morally suspect practices (genderfuck, BDSM, non-monogamy).
Yet the world of alienated feelings is heavily populated, so suggests José
Esteban Muñoz in “Feeling Brown” (2000). He analyzes the world-making of a
theatre play that presents a reality structured by the affective overload of Latina/
o latinidad, drug use, trans embodiments, and queer sex. Like this play, Trans
Entities eschews the cultural logic of heteronormative White respectability for
the pleasures of its own affective performances of excess. As Muñoz stresses, the
failure of Latinos/as (or other POC) to perform a moral affective citizenship is in
relation to the “hegemonic protocols of North American affective comportment”
from which they feel alienated (Muñoz 2000, 70). However, from the point of
view of the Latina/o, “the affective performance of normative whiteness is
minimalist to the point of emotional impoverishment” (70); it appears under-
developed, if not a lack, in relation to latinidad fullness. Given the angle of the
U.S. racial atmosphere, Muñoz argues that seizing the stereotype of excess
shows the myriad ways in which the presence of POC affective excess puts a
great deal of pressure on the affective baseline of whiteness. Hence, redirecting
the stereotype vents fumes from a toxic characterization, creates an erotic
charge, and resists feeling properly. In the same way, the experience of excesses
in Trans Entities runs along numerous community lines and against multiple
cultural mandates. The publicity of these unhappy effects of interracial lust,
whether in a play or a film, is ultimately affirmative. According to Ahmed,
following the affect alien “gives us an alternative set of imaginings of what
might count as a good or better life” (Ahmed 2010, 50). The film’s presentation
of affect aliens thereby sets different historically situated terms for what loving
looks like; their nasty love circulates and sticks together new configurations of
objects, values, and ideas.

Beyond re-drawing stereotypes, the film’s affective register of excess draws gen-
der and sexuality into a new theoretical position. Susan Stryker says transgender
Parsing Affective Economies of Race, Sexuality, and Gender: The Case of ‘Nasty Love’ 47

studies assumes the “mutability and specificity of human lives and loves” (Stry-
ker 2004, 215) by starting from the notion of transition. The film attends to the
gender mutability, or malleability (Taormino), and its specific rendering in sexu-
ally and racially marked trans entities. In this way it examines what falls outside,
or moves beyond the static frameworks of gender or racial identity. I propose that
the film seeks to account for what Brian Massumi has described as the movements
between the “grid system of identity” (Massumi 2002, 1–4). The singular “relation
of movement and rest” conveyed by sensation and affect, claims Massumi, “is
another way of saying transition” (15). Such relations of movement form the basis
of gender transitions, which are usually only thought of in terms of the take-off
and landing points of the crossing, as in [male] becoming [woman].
Starting in the middle with the bracketed experience of becoming, Eva
Hayward asks whether it might be that “a transsexual woman becomes a woman
for reasons other than simply being read as woman?” (Hayward 2010, 234). She
answers by giving aesthetic and affective reasons: “a transsexual lives out the
responsive potential of the flesh; through sensuous reaches, intensification of
corporeal boundaries and energetic states, the body becomes simply more” (235).
Whereas transsexuality is typically limited to transgressions of binary gender/sex
categories, Hayward suggests the trans-becomings speak to making use of one’s
flesh as a resource for experiencing the profuse potential of bodily change (227).
The more of trans-becomings might be achieved through hormone replacement
therapy or hair removal, but Hayward’s notion of “transpositions” (237) contends
that limiting trans-becomings to certain ways of trans-sexing would form exclu-
sions and circumscribe the spatial and temporal forces with which a transsexual
(or any subject) enacts a morphing of embodiment. The very particular, situated
act of changing something into another form ‘oriented’ by forces (or Ahmed’s
“angles”) cannot be predicted in advance, nor categorically defined: “Transposes
can as well be perversions or deviations, misdirections that discompose order and
arrangement” (Hayward 2010, 238). From the perspective of trans-becomings as
more, sexuality theory might swerve from queer theory’s stress on deconstructing
the hierarchal relationship of object-subject, sex-gender, hetero- and homo-sexu-
ality to constructing trans sexualities’ felt sense of more. This is to stress the
excess and fullness of subjectivity experienced as affect.
Papí’s closing affirmation of what they feel is the strength of their relationship
is explained as Wil’s capacity to understand the openness of the future: “who I
am as a sexual being, intellectual being … [who] can just flow with me.” Similarly,
Wil affirms that with Papí he loves the way that they “grow together,” suggesting
an intrinsic relationship between the flowing and growing into a constantly
evolving future of actualizing trans entities. The event of becoming hurtles
towards the dimension of Gilles Deleuze’s virtual, or, what Alfred North White-
48 Eliza Steinbock

head terms potential in contrast to the actual of the entity. The virtual in either
case, according to Shaviro’s study of the two philosophers, is like “a field of
energies that have not yet been expended, or a reservoir of potentialities”; it
names the unknown, that which cannot be predicted, or determined in advance,
but serves as a condition for generating the actual (Shaviro 2009, 34).
Shaviro investigates this “impelling force” (34) that forges new relations
among bodies more generally, but specifically in aesthetic encounters. For Hay-
ward, transitioning genders perform this impelling force. The virtual tapped into
with a trans-sexing transposition accesses the body’s potential for growth. She
pronounces in “More Lessons from a Starfish” that “the [surgical] cut is not so
much an opening of the body, but a generative effort to pull the body back through
itself in order to feel mending, to feel the growth of new margins” (Hayward 2008,
72). More than a concrete action, the surgical cut accesses the virtual realm of the
body’s on-going materialization, the matrix of sensations and emergence.5
Though Hayward theorizes “the cut” as one possibility for transpositions, Trans
Entities weights the affective force of sex – nasty love – with a similar capacity for
accessing the virtual, and for generating transpositionings. Hence, I offer that the
cut into the future can be rendered through aesthetic as well as sexual techni-
ques, which mend and grow an emergent subject.
To conclude, Trans Entities insists time and again on aligning with the angle of
love, which could seem sentimental or naïve. However, the expression, practice,
and embodiment of ‘nasty love’ previcarates from the romantic, white-washed,
heteronormative, vanilla connotations that most often plays in the mainstream
media. Their love connection forms a feedback loop into experiences of becoming
more and growing as trans entities. It suggests a perverting, differentiating affective
force closer to that described by Lauren Berlant: “I often talk about love as one of
the few places where people actually admit they want to become different. […]. It’s
change without guarantees, without knowing what the other side of it is, because
it’s entering into relationality” (Berlant 2012, 8). The potential grasped by “entering
into relationality,” such as this chapter attempts, is one that opens up the expanse
of new risky relations to ideas, values, and objects. One might even find a kind of
methodological love in the interdisciplinary encounter between affect and trans-
gender studies as they stick together bodies and signs anew.

5 For an expanded argument on the therapeutic, generative quality of the surgical cut see Eliza
Steinbock, “The Violence of the Cut: Transgender Homeopathy and Cinematic Aesthetics” in
Violence and Agency: Queer and Feminist Perspectives. Eds. Gender Initiativkolleg Wien (Frankfurt
and London: Campus Publications, 2012), 154–171.
Parsing Affective Economies of Race, Sexuality, and Gender: The Case of ‘Nasty Love’ 49

References

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———. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 29–51.
Berlant, Lauren. “On the Risk of a New Relationality.” Interview with Lauren Berlant and Michael
Hardt by Heather Davis and Paige Sarlin. Review in Cultural Theory 2.3 (2012): 6–27.
Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew.” Boston
Review 1.6 (1991): 6–33.
Hayward, Eva. “More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixal Flesh and Transspeciated Selves.”
Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.3–4 (2008): 64–85.
———. “Spider City Sex.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20.3 (2010): 225–251.
Hernandez, Daisy. “Playing with Race” (Posted online Dec. 13, 2004), at http://colorlines.com/
archives/2004/12/playing_with_race.html (22 May 2014)
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2002.
Miller-Young, Mireille. “Hip-Hop Honeys and Da Hustlaz: Black Sexualities in the New Hip-Hop
Pornography.” Meridians 8.1 (2008): 261–292.
———. “Putting Hypersexuality to Work: Black Women and Illicit Eroticism in Pornography.”
Sexualities 13.2 (2010): 219–235.
Muñoz, José Estaban. “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s ‘The Sweetest
Hangover (And Other STDs)’.” Theatre Journal 52.1 (2000): 67–79.
Ray, Audacia. “Review of Trans Entities.” Live Girl: Sex, Media and Culture Reviews. (Posted
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love-of-papi-and-wil/ (22 May 2014)
Shaviro, Steven. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge: MIT, 2009.
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Stryker, Susan. “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
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Taormino, Tristan. “The New Wave of Trans Cinema: The latest transporn breaks down both
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Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld
Affect Image, Touch Image

Fig. 1: Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld 2010, Time: Aalborg | Space: 2033, 3-channel video
installation

On a sunny day in 2011, the ordinary event of browsing over the News Feed on my
Facebook account hit me in a visceral way. Some friends were circulating You-
Tube videos from the early stages of the Syrian uprising. These videos were
captured on cellular phones, and compressed and uploaded via poor Internet
connections and satellite phones, resulting in pixilated images so deteriorated
from their original size and spectrum that their content was hard to decipher. Out
of the moving pixels, the contours of a faceless entity in green emerge. A shot is
heard. The camera tilts. The image dissolves into a moving mass of grey pixels.
My encounter with this footage called me to question what footage, if any,
can one assemble after such events? Even though they have been captured on
countless cellular phones, video cameras, and satellite phones, will the images of
catastrophe, accelerating to the speed of new media compressions and codecs,
deprive us of access to what actually was? Additionally, what new forms might
we assemble out of the pixelated debris?1
This essay seeks to explore these questions through a discussion of the affect
of the digital image. Is the digital image void of texture? How can it touch us, and
how can we touch it? My motivation is not only to understand how we are affected
by digital images, but also to understand their affordances: How did it get that
way? And what do they allow us to with them?
Over the last decade or so the question of whether the digital image has
lost its indexicality and its ability to touch us has been much debated. Some
argue that with digital image processing, the image has lost its direct trace to a

1 The article was written in 2012. By the time we move into print, images from the war in Syria
have changed. Not only has their content grown more violent, but the resolution has also
increased – they no longer have the undecidable character which was present in the pixelated
images from the early stages of the uprising.
 Affect Image, Touch Image 51

concrete ‘that which was’: while the analogue camera captured the luminances
that touched the object in front of the lens and transmitted those same lumi-
nances directly to the future beholder of the image, the digital image has lost
this element of direct ‘touch’, because the digital camera stores data onto the
memory card “as a calculation that decomposes the elements of the spectrum
while waiting for the treatments that will end in the imprinting of something
else, of something other than the photonic ectoplasm of a this was” (Derrida
and Stiegler 202, 153). Others seem to insist that electrons do remember, and as
such the data stored on the memory card still carries an indexical relation to
the object captured and transmitted to the receiver (Marks 2002,161–175).
Lebanese performance artist Rabih Mroué has worked extensively on videos of
the early stages of the Syrian uprising in his performance and exhibition The
Pixilated Revolution (Mroué 2012). In this work, Mroué seems to hint that the images
smuggled out of Syria still point to some sort of indexical relationship. The activist
captures the sniper on his cellular phone. The sniper then shoots the activist, and
this is the exact same field of vision that we, the consumers of Facebook and
Internet, receive on the other side of the screen. He even takes a step further, and
suggests a prosthetic relationship between the eye of the activist and the cellular
phone – as though the cellular phone were a prosthesis of the activist’s own eye,
burning the image of the perpetrator onto the memory card before he is injured.
What we receive, then, on the other side of the screen, is a direct imprint, which we
again share, circulate or ‘like’ using the prosthetic ‘retinal screen’ of our tablet,
smart phone or laptop. And this exchange makes us, according to Mroué, in some
ways complicit.
But neither of these explanations seems to account for the visceral affect
with which I was hit, so many miles away from the unfolding events in Syria. I
suggest that there exists a possibility of affect and ‘touch’ of digital images
somewhere in between, neither completely denouncing the texture and affect of
the digital image, nor insisting on the indexical relationship between the digital
image and the spectator. To do so, I will draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
notion of texxture/texture, and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the affection image.

1 Texture | Texxture

[T]o perceive texture is always, immediately and de facto to be immersed in a field of active
narrative hypothesizing, testing, and reunderstanding how physical properties act and are
acted upon over time. To perceive texture is never only to ask or know What is it like? Nor
even just How does it impinge on me? Textual perception always explores two other
questions as well: How did it get that way? And what could I do with it? These are the kind
52 Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld

of intrinsically interactive properties that James J. Gibson called ‘affordances’. (Sedgwick

2012, 13 [quoting Renu Bora])

Sedgwick’s notion of texture as ‘affordances’ seems crucial for the discussion of

the affect of the digital image and what it allows us to do with the image. The sole
brush of my fingertips precipitates this double inquiry into how the texture of the
material touches me, and what can I do with it.2 But how am I to understand these
affordances, when what I am brushing over are digital pixels on the crystalline
surface of a tablet or smartphone, void of texture?
According to Sedgwick there is no such thing as textural lack. Instead, she
differentiates between texture and texxture. Texxture is “dense with offered in-
formation about how substantively, historically, materially, it came into being”
(15); she uses as an example the hand moulded brick that ‘still bears the scars and
uneven sheen of its making’. Texture with only one ‘x’ defiantly or even invisibly
blocks or refuses to convey the information of its making: “there is texture,
usually glossy if not positively tacky, that insists instead on the polarity between
substance and surface, texture that signifies the willed erasure of its history” (15).
Following this distinction between texxture and texture, one might conclude
that analogue film (like the hand-moulded bricks) is ‘texxture’, since film carries
the history of its making within it. This information is lost in the digital image,
which according to Bernard Stiegler is “discrete” not only because it is composed
of separate entities, but also because it hides its own making (Derrida and Stiegler).
Thus, the digital image is not devoid of texture, but is devoid of texxture. According
to this line of thought, one may argue that if the digital image shows its texture, it is
only in the sense that its history and making is always already hidden and subject
to manipulation: it is nothing but stored zeroes and ones, resulting in the imprint-
ing of something else, of something other than the ‘this was.’ As such the digital
image cannot stand as a testament to the atrocities we are witnessing.
I will argue here that the YouTube videos circulated at the beginning of the
Syrian uprising do indeed possess texxture. Hito Steyerl introduces the concept of
the ‘poor image’ as “the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of
audiovisual production (which) testify to the violent dislocation, transferals, and
displacement of images – their acceleration and circulation within the vicious
cycles of audiovisual capitalism” (Steyerl 2013, 1). Following from her argument
that it is the production facilities, which produce the poor image, I argue that the

2 Here I borrow Sedgwick’s notion of the ‘the weaver’s handshake’ which she describes as the
“gesture [brushing-three-fingers over a garment] of the way a fabric person will skip the inter-
personal formalities when you’re introduced and move directly to a tactile interrogation of what
you’re wearing.” (Sedgwick and Goldberg 2012, 71)
 Affect Image, Touch Image 53

pixilated images emerging from Syria actually are this very violence or fear, and
that this is so on account of these images’ texxture. Texxture has a double mean-
ing here, because it both points back to the image’s pixilation, which is a direct
result of the violent mechanisms that produced it (the war), and additionally, the
image’s very texture is composed of discrete entities, which annihilates any
indexicality, and casts us into uncertainty or fear. This fear is intrinsically related
to Deleuze’s notion of affection image, which I shall move on to discuss.

2 Deleuze’s Texture

According to Deleuze, “the affection image is the close up and the close up is the
face” (Deleuze 2009, 89). The affection image is among Deleuze’s three image
concepts of the movement image. Affection images are able to move us through a
set of micro-movements internally in the frame.
Using the close-up of Marlene Dietrich’s face in Josef von Sternberg’s The
Scarlet Empress, Deleuze unfolds how the affection image moves from intensifica-
tion to reflection, and then to lyrical abstraction, as a result of the treatment of
light and texture:

the face of the young woman is caught between the white of a voile curtain and the white of
the pillow and the sheets where she is resting, until we see the astonishing image, which
seems to come from video, where the face is now only a geometric incrustation of the voile. The
white space itself is in turn circumscribed, redoubled by a veil or a net which is super-
imposed, and gives it a volume, or rather what one calls in oceanography (but also in
painting) a shallow depth. Sternberg has a great practical knowledge of linens, tulles,
muslins and laces: he draws from them all the resources of a white on white within which
the face reflects the light. (Deleuze 2009, 96, my emphasis)

What I would like to foreground here is the way light is employed to create
reflective surfaces, and then how the texture of various materials is inserted to
create depth – a shallow depth.
What is essential is the way in which the image is composed through super-
imposing layers of semi-transparent texture onto a white, reflective surface:
Sternberg’s analogue image thus possesses both texture and texxture. As we have
already seen, an analogue image is texxture by default, since its very surface
points back to its history and the process of its making. But in the case of lyrical
abstraction this surface is a reflective surface of white light, which the close-up of
the face is inserted onto, which might cast us into uncertainty whether we are
talking about texture or texxture here. But the confusion is exacerbated when
layers of voile, net etc., are added onto it. This both points back to how the image
54 Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld

was made through a process of manual manipulation of superimpositions, but at

the same time it hides the image’s making, something which might have been
difficult to detect by the general filmgoer at the time of its making.
Deleuze seems to propose that Sternberg’s ‘great practical knowledge’ of the
materials and their affordances construct a ‘shallow depth’: the image moves
from its two-dimensional surface and becomes almost 3D, as though we always
had 3D without realising it.3 In this sense, the texture of the analogue image might
not differ so radically from the texture of the digital image as we first assumed.
Rather, one might see the digital as an extension of the analogue. Even though
the digital image might have lost its original referent, it still carries a mimetic
character. Today all those layers of linen, tulle, muslin, and lace are standard
surface texture plugins in 3D animation programs that combine to make the
digital 3D animated image capable of surpassing ‘reality’ itself.4
But there is something rather odd at stake when Deleuze mentions that the
image “seems to come from video, where the face is now only a geometric
incrustation of the voile” (96). What is it about video that makes the face look like
a geometric incrustation of the voile? I have hardly any concept of what video at
Deleuze’s time of writing in 1984 looked liked, but I can only assume that it was
pixilated, ‘bougé’, slightly soft – out of focus, cut up into squares because of the
bad quality of the magnetic tape. Suddenly, the textural qualities of the analogue
affection image appear to be always already analogico-digital. But the properties
pertinent to both the analogue affection image and the analogico-digital video
image seem similar to the digital YouTube videos of Syrian protesters capturing
their own deaths on camera. The sniper who shoots the beholder of the camera is
pixilated, cut-up into squares, blurring his identity. This happens not on account
of the director’s sensitivity to textures (net and voile), but due to the mechanical
production facilities of cellular phones, which render the process of making
transparent. The result is a digital image so abstracted from its original content
that it is difficult to hold it accountable. Yet it is able to produce a visceral affect
in me precisely because its object (the perpetrator) is reduced to a somewhat
faceless, blurry entity. The pixilated image shows its texxture – the violent
mechanisms that produced it (the war) – but because of the discretisation of the
perpetrator’s face, it also hides its own making.
I will now move on to discuss how the touch of the digital image is propelled
by a micro-movement similar to the micro-movement in the affection image,

3 Here I am rephrasing Deleuze’s reading of Henri Bergson ‘as though we had always had cinema
without realizing it’ (Deleuze 2009, 2)
4 For an excellent survey of texture in 3D see Harun Farocki’s video installation Parallel.
 Affect Image, Touch Image 55

which takes place internally in the digital, pixilated image. To do so I will return
to Deleuze’s notion of the affection image.

3 Discrete Entity

The close-up does not tear away its object from a set of which it would form part
(…), but on the contrary it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is
to say that it raises it to the state of Entity. (Deleuze 2009, 98)
The close-up, according to Deleuze, rips itself from the whole of which it
would form part, and is raised into a state of entity. This deterritorialisation of the
close-up is interesting to analyse in relation to ‘discretisation’ of the digital image.
As we have already seen the digital image is discrete since it is in itself composed
of separate entities (Derrida and Stiegler 2002). One might then argue that each
pixel internally in the frame becomes similar to the analogue close up, in that
each pixel is ripped away from its spatio-temporal coordinates and raised into a
state of entity. The digital image is thus not fundamentally different from its
analogue other, but a continuum of the very same properties – as though we had
always had digital images without realising it.
The digital image, like the analogue close-up, is devoid of psychology and
disrupts lineage of interconnected signs. But maybe the difference between the
analogue and digital image can be inserted in the following:
a) The digital image disrupts continuity and the ‘umbilical cord’, which in
the analogue image was constituted by the luminances that touched the object
in front of the camera. Those luminaces were then directly emitted to me,
creating a linear, irreversible ancestry propelled by ‘touch’ (Derrida and Stiegler
2002, 152), and
b) The digital image in its totality is liberated from any spatio-temporal
coordinates, but it is also composed of a multiplicity of separate entities, which
again are deterritorialised from the ‘whole’.

4 [k]not a conclusion

I have attempted to show that the affection image – the close up – moves, through
texxture and texture, from being a partial object to becoming an entity. In Sedg-
wick, the subject engages in an affective and accretive encounter with a partial
object. This engagement does not restore the subject back to a preexisting whole,
but somehow transforms the subject-object relationship into a separate entity
with its own powers and phantasmatic qualities. This relationship forms a new art
56 Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld

of existence, which is not already readable within the current frames of normativ-
ity. I would argue that this transformative process is only possible through a
textural and affective encounter with the object. But what kind of texture are we
talking about here – is it texxture, or texture?
As we have seen, if the texture of the object is able to touch the subject, it
should be texxture. But there is something quite interesting at stake when Sedg-
wick mentions that texture is ‘the willed erasure of its history’. In my view the
subject assembles or confers a plentitude onto objects which are rich in texxture,
only to erase their history, meaning, or value in a positively tacky, over-the-top
treatment of the object. Ripped of their spatial-temporal coordinates, fragments
are assembled into new meaning (Sedgwick 2003, 143).
Returning to Marlene Dietricht’s face encrusted in veils, tulle, and muslin, I
argue that a similar transformative effect might be possible in the affection image.
The close up of the face is ripped of its totality and does not point back to a
preexisting whole. Through the textural composition of the face and the micro-
movements in the face, it is lifted into an entity. Ripped of its spatial-temporal
coordinates, the close up of the face annihilates individuation and constitutes a
fear, because it is no longer readable within the normative frames of what
constitutes a face: as “individuating”, “ socializing”, “relational” or “communi-
cating” (Deleuze 2009, 101). Even though this undecidability might be a fearsome
thing to experience, it might also open up a new potentiality. While this process
in the affection image takes place through texxture (it is film), and texture (the
face is inserted onto a white reflective screen, superimposed and added tulles,
linens and muslins) then the difference between the texture with one ‘x’ and two
‘xx’ seems to converge. The affection image in itself performs a transition from
texxture to texture: while it posseses all the qualities of analogue film, it becomes
a willed erasure of the past that created it, and that is when the image seems to
come from video.
So what would it look like if I pair these two theoretical strands in relation to
the affect sparked in me by the YouTube video? The pixilated images emerging
from the Syrian uprising are composed of pixels. The micro movement internally
in the pixilated images moves the face from its status as a partial object referring
back to a whole to a blurry, deterritorialised entity ripped of its spatio-temporal
coordinates. And this movement in the pixels composing the face annihilates
individuation.
This process takes place through texture – a texture that is both points back
to the violent mechanisms that produced it while at the same time erasing any
linkage to this past. It was these micro-movements between the pixels that made
me shudder when I firstly encountered the faceless face of the perpetrator shoot-
ing the beholder of the camera on my Facebook News Feed – not necessarily
 Affect Image, Touch Image 57

because there was some sort of indexical linkage between me and the electrons
that touched the perpetrator shooting the beholder of the camera, but because the
mechanical production facilities, had deterritorialised it from the whole. The
result was an image, which was no longer recognisable within our current frames
of what constitutes an image, or what constitutes a face. In this case the faceless
face of the perpetrator was a fearsome thing to experience, but such images might
also produce different affects.
The digital image has not completely left us as free floating entities –
discretised, atomised – without any relational bond to past, present and future,
but rather displaces the ontology of the image from a ‘that which was’ to what we
could maybe call a “newfound struggle over what is and what can be” (Galloway
2012). The digital image does not grant us any certitude about a past we can no
longer know, but points towards new forms of subjectivity and temporality yet to
emerge.

References

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-image. London: Athlone, 2009.

Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Cambridge
UK; Malden MA: Polity Press; Blackwell Publishers, 2002.
Farocki, Harun. Parallel. The World is Not Fair – The Great World’s Fair. Berlin: Hebbel Am Ufer
and Raumlaborerberlin, 2012.
Galloway, Alexander. “Black Box, Black Bloc. Communization and Its Discontents:” Contestation,
Critique and Contemporary Struggles, 2012. 238–249.
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002.
Mroué, Rabih. The Pixelated Revolution. Kassel: dOCUMENTA (13), 2012.
Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Jonathan Goldberg. The Weather in Proust. Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2012.
Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image”. E-flux Journal 10.11/2009 Web. 16 Feb. 2014.
Mirko Milivojevic
Introducing Wounds: Challenging the ‘Crap
Theory of Pain’ in Nikola Lezaić’s Tilva Roš

This chapter investigates how acts of self-harm and images of wounded human
bodies, attached to the images of the wider social and political environment,
could affect the larger social or political body, primarily as represented in Nikola
Lezaić’s movie Tilva Roš (2010). This investigation not only negotiates new under-
standings of the body/bodies – both psychical and social or political – but the
political reality and potentials re-created through affirmative action and affects as
well. This could provide a contribution to a critical conversation that draws
certain connections in recent Serbian cinema regarding the intertwinement of
violence, politics, body (mis)use, and medial representation. Some of the most
frequently discussed movies in this context are Spasojević’s Srpski Film (2010),
Miloš’s Klip (2012), Djordjević’s Made in Serbia (2005) and Zivot I Smrt Porno
Bande (2009).
For the purpose of this investigation, I would like to use the well-known
Spinozan-Deleuzian declaration as my starting point: “For we do not even know
what a body can do” (Deleuze 1988, 17). As I put my focus on the human body as
such, this should also to be understood and perceived literally as would be
practiced by the couple or group of teenagers in small town in eastern Serbia,
spending most of their time shooting ‘Jackass’-style videos.
Tilva Roš (2010) takes place during the summer after high school, focusing on
two best friends, Toda and Stefan, in Bor, Serbia. All they are really interested in
during this transition period from their childhood to their maturity is devising and
acting out various pranks and stunts with their Skateboard team Kolos, and
filming the acts they perform. The movie was initially inspired by a Jackass–
inspired video made by two actors, Crap: Pain is Empty, which was uploaded onto
Youtube and similar internet platforms, and which consisted of a series of stunts
and pranks. By the usage of the idea and also some of those original shootings in
Tilva Roš – four parts of their original video material are integrated and used in
the movie – the director deliberately places the entire act within the wider social
or political context and negotiates its political significance as well. Bor, a provin-
cial town in east Serbia, or Tilva Roš (meaning the “Red Hill” in Wallachian, the
language of the dominant national minority there) functions as a perfect location
for the movie, placing the popular, sub-cultural concept of ‘Jackass’, and the
 Introducing Wounds 59

entire narrative, into an imminent political frame. It gives a different meaning and
significance to our entire perception of the represented images, and in this way
the town itself and all of the movie’s chosen locations become an integral part of
its visual representation. Political and industrial crisis is underlined in the movie,
by showing one of the biggest copper mines in Southeast Europe, which not only
impacts on and has pivotal significance for the protagonists and their activities,
but also makes the town a paradigmatic example of Serbian society during the so
called post-war and post-communist transition period.
A brief explanation should be given here of the term ‘Jackass’. It derives from
the US reality series of the same name, originally shown on MTV from 2000–2002,
featuring a group of characters performing various dangerous but also ridiculous
self-injuring stunts. Initially the entire concept emerged out of skateboard culture
(primarily ‘Big Brother Magazine’) and was intentionally humorous. The stunts
and acts performed were originally filmed with cheap video cameras, single-
handedly, though later features and episodes, and finally movies as well, entered
some of the major TV and cinema productions.1 Other significant elements of the
‘Jackass’ phenomenon – now a genre, since it has evolved into a global video
trend – are stupidity and comedy. It is essential to note that Jackass is based as
much on making the audience laugh as it is on inflicting injury on one’s friends.
To a certain extent, one could consider adding the Jackass films to the ‘body
genre’ as outlined by Linda Williams. The ‘body genre’, Williams suggests,
basically comprises several film (sub)genres such as horror films, pornographic
films and melodramas. According to Williams, main characteristics and notions
of this (sub)genre can be defined by the body as spectacle, and by visual narra-
tives that include bodily sensation (Williams 1991).

One of the key features I would like to highlight regarding affectivity in Tilva Roš
is the so called ‘crap theory of pain’, a self-proclaimed theory practiced and
challenged at the same time by the protagonists of the movie. What does this
actually refer to? First of all, I would suggest it is not a theory, but rather a non
theory. It actually signifies a set of self-harming, self-destructive acts, a collection
of stunts, which gradually presents the simple concept of questioning the limits
of the human body, and challenging the resistance and response to physical pain.
All of this is explicitly suggested in the movie by the protagonists themselves,

1 See: http://www.jackassmovie.com/#/home
60 Mirko Milivojevic

while they experiment with several methods and ways of hurting one another.
This is explicitly addressed in the third part of the original shootings used and
integrated into a feature movie, where two of the principal protagonists are using
a ruler, a rod, and finally a belt, hitting each other’s backs, and consequently
recording their acts and reactions to this pain with a video camera. This is further
emphasized in the movie by constant injuries to human flesh, such as drilling the
face with a needle, grinding the knee, hitting each other with fists or various
objects (balls, bats, etc.), jumping from a gigantic crane, or surfing on the top of
automobiles in motion.
A challenge to the theory/non-theory of ‘crap’ must operate through an inter-
play of frames that shifts from the subjective, personal, local surroundings of the
principal protagonists and their skate group on the one hand, towards the larger
public, political landscape of contemporary Serbia on the other. In this way, these
private amateur videos and acts of ‘crap’ enter the political domain, and the
actual protagonists themselves become rather depersonalised. Here ‘crap’ sig-
nifies and primarily involves games played by the protagonists, rather than their
challenging and experimenting. In this context it means exclusively experiment-
ing with someone’s body and challenging the body limits, but it certainly recalls
the awaiting the result of the entire act – recalling the other aspect of the Jackass
in general. In other words, such acts certainly involve curiosity and expectation,
rather than anticipation, of what the body is capable of doing and resisting, and
finally, about whether it can accomplish the initial goal in the experimenting
process.
Another integral element of such experimentation is failure, which fulfills
and justifies the entire concept of expectation and curiosity. Namely, it is only the
incorporation of failure as another genuine possibility that enables this specific
challenge on the edge of success. Only in such a sense, as the two main characters
(and their entire skate-crew Kolos) are found in an ‘affects/affectivity web’ (see
Deleuze), does it all become ‘crap’. Therefore, all of the fixed elements to come:
maturity, obligations, social arrangements – literally all that’s ahead of the
awaiting the result, or more precisely ahead of the curiosity and expectation that
becomes crap, i.e. nonsense or bullshit this time. In the world of Kolos, in the
world of Tilva Roš, and of ‘Crap – theory of pain’, all things are left open to further
challenge and rest in the expectation of the final result. Therefore, maturity is
‘crap’, emotions are ‘crap’, politics is ‘crap’, conventions are ‘crap’, fakeness is
‘crap’, pain is ‘crap’, but the body is real, and body is all that’s left.
 Introducing Wounds 61

If a key question of my investigation in this chapter could be: what does the image
of a young (human) wounded body tell us?, this could also be reframed as: how
do we actually react to these images, and how do they affect us? Since the body
remains the great unknown that can be investigated and experimented with, it is
characterised exclusively by its “the capacity for affecting and being affected”
(Massumi 2012, 15). In other words, to quote Steven Shaviro, who explores a
similar issue in relation to David Cronenberg’s movies, the human body is here
understood as “the site of the most violent alterations and most intense affects”
(Shaviro 1993). In this sense, it is the human body, taken here as the bottom line,
the ground level, and also the only remaining (biological) resource left. This raw
material is re-actualized and re-approached now by being contextually related
with the post-war, ‘transition period’ of today’s Serbia. In the contemporary era of
social networking dominance, omnipresent media, and a plethora of images and
pressure to (self)present, in order to make a (human) body visible it must be
destroyed, depersonalised, subversive, wounded, or over-activated. In a society
where verbal communication, appreciation, and understanding among social
bodies and the protagonists is absolutely denied and defeated, communicating
exclusively through the exchange of the filmed/recorded images of (wounded)
human bodies seems to be the only possible way of communicating.
Moreover, there is no dialogue between the protagonists throughout the entire
movie; words are repeated and fragmented, turned into a single non-signifying
syllable. Parents, authorities, and children experience constant verbal misunder-
standing, which leads to irony, and the subversion of family life or any social
structure. At the same time, it is exactly such wounds or rupture points of the
human body that provide us with a direct link to the wider, i.e. outer, where
diverse perceptions of the social or political are not only possible, but also
intensified. In the plethora of images that the political environment creates,
horrifying images of injured human bodies create interruptions within the totality.
That is to say, precisely these rupture point and wounds become symptoms
(Gržinić 2005, 102). Furthermore, in such a simulated environment, the wound can
be perceived as the initial point of development of various alternative aesthetic
and conceptual strategies. In one of the last scenes in the movie, at a simulated job
interview, when asked to present his CV and his qualifications, and finally to
convince the board of his capabilities, one of the principal characters in the movie,
Toda, simply takes off his clothes and presents his naked wounded body.
Turning again to the previous notion of the ‘affectivity web’, or ‘web of
affects’, one of the greatest values of the visual representation in Lezaić’s Tilva
Roš is simply not showing us explicitly what really causes the activities under-
62 Mirko Milivojevic

taken, i.e., these numerous self-destructive stunts. We are left only with hints and
suggestions, instead of explicit defined and developed causality. Moreover, those
modes of (auto)violence remain self-justified, depicted as a sort of menacing
extended present, neither doubted nor challenged further, as we are focussing
simply on human body i.e on. its capabilities to communicate, and thus to cause
emotional effects and actually ultimately to affect the greater political body. On
the other hand, while the film explores and investigates the limits of physical pain
and the limits of bodily endurance and sustainability, this necessarily includes
and reminds us of vulnerability as another element we are also witnessing. In this
sense, the political or social are never far away. Such spectacles make a clear
claim upon us, since they affect spectators and turn them into witnesses, as well
as affecting the actors.
Referring back to Deleuze and Spinoza, and the idea that “you do not know
before-hand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given
arrangement, a given combination” (Deleuze 1988, 125), the footage of the Crap:
Pain is Empty video and the numerous stunts shown in Tilva Roš actually transmit
what those teenagers practice. Precisely in the “not knowing before-hand” men-
tioned by Deleuze, building on Spinoza, there is a condition of total reliance on
experimentation as such, and thus also on the expectation of, and uncertainty
regarding, the final result. These Jackass-like videos, constant experimenting acts
of what now clearly is a non-theory of pain put the impetus not only on the actors,
but rather on the spectators, who share the same position in “not knowing”.
Finally, this sets up a situation for a Spinozan ethics as described above; namely,
a political or social environment in which no one actually knows what kinds of
good or bad things politics, politicians, ideology, or any political body or act as
such is capable of. Again, it is exactly through curiosity and expectation as
essential that we are led to a different political awareness and perception,
namely, to a specific affective shift. Is the body capable of enduring the pain, or
succeeding and accomplishing the goal – or is it rather ridiculous and a failure, in
a sense, a ‘Jackass’ after all? In the case of Tilva Roš, regarding the interplay
within such a web of affects, it is more appealing to observe how the protagonists
in the movie manage to affect the greater political body, instead of being affected
by pre-given and dominant political/social conditions.

The frequent attempts of breaking political gravity, the status quo or balance
between the good and bad, initially by challenging gravity – as the skate team
Kolos in the movie frequently does – leads to my final question of the examina-
 Introducing Wounds 63

tion. How is the structure or the system on a wider scale affected by such
activities, primarily by the relation and the encounter between the minor-skating
community and the ‘crap’ stationary and impotent political body as stressed
frequently in the movie? In this sense, it is not only that numerous skateboard
moves and stunts already question gravity, this notion is also stressed when they
are faced to the urban and industrial environment and compared to the position
of other human bodies. Only in the presence and dominance of the big inhuman
machinery which defines the local urban environment and represents the left-
overs of the great industrial complex, whose deserted venues are now appro-
priated by the skaters, we see them wandering and turning it all into a platform
used for their own ends. The other element suggested here is the presence of
workers’ protests, which remain in the background throughout the entire movie.
As we see the impotent attempt of workers’ protests, teenage skaters also join the
crowd in one of the later scenes, but (naturally) not exactly following the protests
and their route, but rather ending up demolishing the local grocery store.
Emphasizing that nothing is fake or simulated in their acts and ideas – but all
is part of an infinite experimentation – should not however displace the charac-
ters in Tilva Roš from their initial punk (or punk rock) aesthetics. Their activities
should not be understood as some kind of exoticism, but rather as exploring the
possible, and establishing ways to approach and deal with politics and the
immediate environment. This could even be considered as the only possible and
appropriate way of negotiating the state, and the sterility of politics in general,
and of thinking about society. Such elements recall the issues and presence of
pain and emptiness, the roles of the body, and remind us of the violence attached
to politics, social frustration, and curiosity, which are already being invested in
the dominant social and environmental consciousness. It is exactly through such
activities that these human bodies actually do operate as an integral part of the
greater social body – they refuse any kind of victimisation, and appeals to
sympathy or mercy. On the contrary, they exchange their capabilities and affec-
tive energy to the highest degree when confronting the represented rather impo-
tent political body of maturity and social order.
Brian Massumi reminds us that Spinoza’s conception of the body under the
“relations of movement and rest” further suggests the notion of transition (Massu-
mi 2002, 15). Being opposed to stagnant and sterile politics or efforts of the
workers’ protest only underlines the dystopian image of the wider social realm on
the one hand, and maturity on the other, the political impetus of the various acts
now renegotiates the entire political structure and its stability. As Massumi
continues, “each transition is accompanied by a variation in capacity: a change
in which powers to affect and be affected are addressable by a next event and how
readily addressable they are – or to what degree they present as futurities.” (ibid.)
64 Mirko Milivojevic

Furthermore, as Rosi Braidotti puts it, by living and acting to the “nth degree”
(Braidotti 2006, 139), it is precisely possible to indicate the impossibility of the
homogenisation of the entire social body. One should also think of such interac-
tion of both bodies or on both levels in the movie – human and political – in its
function of creating the platform for affectivity or affirmative action desirable and
potentially established. Lastly, experimenting with body/bodies and affectivity is
always, necessarily, relational – i.e. present in the encounter with other bodies. If
we follow the suggestion made by Braidotti in her essay “The Ethics of Becoming-
Imperceptible” (2006), this would be to “take pain into account as a major
incentive”, in order to “rethink the knowing subject in terms of affectivity, inter-
relationality, territories, eco-philosophy, locations and forces” (Baridotti 2006,
133). Thus such experimentation implies the channelling of energy and forces,
and the pre-calculated, constant questioning of the sustainability that aims at
endurance of the body itself. This ‘channelling’ might further enable affirmative
activity and further effects on the wider, outer social/political body. As it primar-
ily “evolves affectivity and joy,” the body then seeks fulfillment, and “a joyful
affirmation of (Spinoza-Deleuzean) potentia” as “the affirmative aspect of power”
par excellence (134). Once the human body is located within the affective web of
the political and social, it works out the process of transforming negative into
positive passions, in other words, this leads to the desire to become (ibid.).
Returning then to Tilva Roš, and investigating further the capacities of the
human body to affect or to experiment with the landscape – in this particular
case, with its industrial surroundings i.e. the wasteland or leftovers of what was
once the most representative industrial site in the country and entire region – and
taking into account the landscape as a body itself, we open up the possibility for a
new becoming, or in other words, a new assemblage. If we are to think of the
Deleuzian-Guattarian notion of the “Horse/Man/Bow and arrow” as an assem-
blage of nomads (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and in Tilva Roš, I would
suggest thinking of ‘crap’ as itself an assemblage, namely, a Concrete/4Wheels/
Board/Teenage body/Wound type of an assemblage (or, to a certain extent,
Concrete/Car-in/motion/Roof/Teenage-body). Finally, following the initiation of
the becoming-skateboard body, this might suggest the becoming-Tilva Roš – or
the becoming-Red Hill. For the landscape to also be considered as a body, this
necessarily implies and includes thinking about the red element that keeps
circulating within and initially enables the moving and pushing forward of the
body itself. In case of Tilva Roš and ‘crap’, in the case of Serbia today, this red
element is blood.
 Introducing Wounds 65

References

Braidotti, Rosi. “The Ethics of Becoming-Imperceptible.” Deleuze and Philosophy. Ed. Constantin
Boundas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. 133–159.
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. 1968. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City
Light Books, 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980.
Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Grzinić, Marina. Avangarda i Politika: Istočnoevropska paradigma i rat na Balkanu. Trans. Stevan
Vuković. Beograd: Beogradski krug, 2005.
Massumi, Brian Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2002.
Shaviro, Steven. “Bodies of Fear: The Films of David Cronenberg.” The Politics of Everyday Fear.
Ed. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 113–136.
Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 4. (1991):
2–13.

Websites:

http://tilvarosh.tumblr.com/ (22 May 2014)

http://kiselodete.com/feature-films (22 May 2014)
http://www.jackassmovie.com/#/home (22 May 2014)
Anja Bajda
Affect, Bio-politics and the Field of
Contemporary Performing Arts

Affect, with all of the implications of the term, influences analytical and inter-
pretative work on the performing arts, at least from the second half of the
twentieth century onwards. Leading performance theoreticians have now begun
to speak of the “performative turn” (Fischer-Lichte 2004), or post-dramatic thea-
tre (Lehmann 2006), and about the deconstruction of representation (Pavis 2013).
Their argument is that the field of contemporary performing arts requires a variety
of approaches towards the visibility and recognition of meaning and cannot be
analysed solely by the analytic tools, provided by traditional semiotic, for text-
centred, traditional dramatic theatre.1
Within recent performing arts production, the emancipatory potential and the
transformational impact of the arts function as an implicit or explicit objective
(Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” is an example). This emancipatory potential is
virtually present in the performance, and I return to the theme of virtuality by ex-
plaining the notion of actual virtuality at the close of this essay. As is the case with
the performance Mandićmachine, which is an example of hybridization of the thea-
trical and performative framework, the virtual presence of emancipatory potential2
invites us (spectators) to experience the performance, to employ our senses, and to
become more spect-actors than spectators, limited to the apparatus of vision.
In this essay, I outline the primary aspects of the relation between the
contemporary performing arts and the notion of affect, something I would argue
is particularly interesting when exploring the bio-political character of contem-
porary arts production. The performance through which I will provide this analy-
sis is Mandićstroj [Mandićmachine],3 produced by the Slovenian performance art

1 Phenomenological approaches are (according to Patrice Pavis) prevalent in performance analy-

sis. Not coincidentally the analysis of performance through phenomenological concepts is con-
nected to the notion of affect (contemporary performing arts producitons are often experiential).
2 Jacques Rancière explains emancipation as the rupture in the order of things, as subjectifica-
tion. According to the French philosopher the idea of emancipation is historically connected to the
idea of equality. In order to fully understand emancipatory potential, we have to presuppose
equality at the beginning of any political project and not assume it as the goal of emancipation.
3 I will use the English translation of the title of the performance. Mandićmachine implies the
hybrid of the actor (Marko Mandić) and the machine (in this case, for the production of dramatic
characters, represented on stage).
 Affect, Bio-politics and the Field of Contemporary Performing Arts 67

group Via Negativa.4 In this piece, one of the principal actors of the Slovenian
national theatre in Ljubljana, Marko Mandić, presented thirty-seven theatrical
roles developed during his career as theatre actor within different stageproduc-
tions. With costumes and other scenic elements, he recreated dramatic characters
and reenacted excerpts from these theatrical roles.5 The spectators were active
participants in the performance, since they were occasionally invited to help the
actor to recreate the situations and atmosphere. The performance consisted in
displaying the roles of an actor, and of their reenactment, while the transitions
between these roles were performative (created in real space-time settings). With
the act of transformation of the backstage into the main stage, consequently
forging a link between private and public and between ‘art and life, I would
suggest that Mandić created a platform of the common:6

It is not the occurrence of anything ‘real’ as such but its self-reflexive use that characterizes
the aesthetic of postdramatic theatre. This self-referentiality allows us to contemplate the
value, the inner necessity and the significance of the extra-aesthetic in the aesthetic and
thus the displacement of the concept of the latter. The aesthetic cannot be understood
through a determination of content (beauty, truth, sentiments, anthropomorphizing mirror-
ing, etc.) but solely – as the theatre of the real shows – by ‘treading the borderline’, by
permanently switching, not between form and content, but between ‘real’ contiguity (con-
nection with reality) and ‘staged’ construct. It is in this sense that postdramatic theatre
means: theatre of the real. It is concerned with developing a perception that undergoes – at
its own risk – the ‘come and go’ between the perception of structure and of the sensorial
real. (Lehmann 2006, 103)

1 Considering Theatrical Performance as Bio-political Practice

The performance I have described above provoked among the spectators an urge
to (re)act (creatively), despite the fact that (a) it did not deal with any explicit

4 The term via negativa refers to the method of theatrical exploration established by Polish
theatre practitioner and theoretician Jerzy Grotowski. It literally means ‘not a collection of skills
but an eradication of blocks’. ‘Via Negativa is an international performing arts project. Our work is
focused in the relationship between the performer and the audience in real space and time.’
http://vntheatre.com/en/about-via-negativa/the-project/ (15 November2012).
5 The list of roles can be found at: http://vntheatre.com/en/projects/via-nova-series/mandicma-
chine/about/ (15 November 2012).
6 The adjective ‘common’ implies an ‘internally contrasting multitude of singularities’. (Gielen
and Lavaert 2009, 166) ‘The common, of course, is not a realm of sameness or indifference. It is
the scene of encounter of social and political differences, at times characterised by agreement and
at others antagonism, at times composing political bodies and at others decomposing them.’
(Gielen and De Bruyne 2009, 46).
68 Anja Bajda

social/political content, and did not directly refer to actual political context, b) it
did not produce any particular statement, either regarding subversive artistic
formations or regarding theatrical convention, but played in between the two and
(c) was not composed into a homogenous unity; rather, it was the composition of
omnipresent, equally important heterogenous elements. The political aspect of
the performance must then be located elsewhere than in an explicitly political
content, approach, or form.7
In the contemporary performing arts, the end product (theatrical perfor-
mance) is often replaced with open, participatory work, exhibiting work in
progress, and raising questions rather than answering them. Besides the partici-
pation of the spectators, postdramatic theatre consists in different working meth-
ods, based on research rather than on imitation (though results vary, from an
exposed physicality of performance elements to the various physical and perfor-
mative settings in which the artwork is presented and observed). The political and
social character of postdramatic performances is frequently inscribed into the
works by producing a different politics of aesthetics, that is, by proposing alter-
native regimes of perception:

While mimesis in Aristotle’s sense produces the pleasure of recognition and thus virtually
always achieves a result, here the sense data always refer to answers that are sensed as
possible but not (yet) graspable; what one sees and hears remains in a state of potentiality,
its appropriation postponed. It is in this sense that we are talking about a theatre of
perceptibility. Postdramatic theatre emphasizes what is incomplete and incompletable
about it, so much so that it realizes its own ‘phenomenology of perception’ marked by an
overcoming of the principles of mimesis and fiction. (Lehmann 2006, 99)

Following the logic of an event, theatrical performance produces forms of life,

and is thus bio-political (and consequently able to produce forms of resistance).8
Creative skills (the creation of theatrical roles, theatrical conventions in which
these are represented, machinistic production), which could be understood as
profitable within the field of creative industries, are, in the performance of
Mandićmachine, paralleled with artistic ‘autonomous creation’ (the act of selec-
tion of the excerpts of theatrical roles and the absence of the final, profitable
result of an event). The only distinction between art and creative industries is,
according to Lehmann, in the “aesthetics of responsibility” (Lehmann 2006, 184).

7 ‘Its (theatrical, op.a.) political engagement does not consist in the topics, but in the forms of
perception’, (Lehmann 2006, 184).
8 Difficulties with differentiation of the fields of economic production and politics appear,
according to Gielen and De Bruyne, because ‘both (are) oriented towards the production of the
common, that is, the creation of social relations and forms of life’ (Gielen and De Bruyne2009, 51).
 Affect, Bio-politics and the Field of Contemporary Performing Arts 69

In contrast to resignation about the “loss of an original self”, due to the endless
simulacrum process and consequential cynicism, regarding theatricality, the
performance Mandićmachine offers the proposal of “inherent creativity,” which is
directly connected to the critical evaluation of creativity as the indistinctive
quality within the neoliberal political ideology and so called creative industries.

2 Materiality of Affect and its Historicity Within the Performing

Arts

The notions of ‘meaning-ness’ and ‘thing-ness’ within an artwork are theoretically

explored in detail in the work of Karen Barad.9 The ontology of agential realism,
which is in some aspects close to the ontology-ethics of the new materialisms, can
be outlined in her proposal for the understanding of ‘thing-ness’ and ‘meaning-
ness’ primarily through diffraction, that is, through relata whose existence does
not presuppose any prior substance. The relata does not have any inherent
characteristics, while the substance does not exist prior to any relata, which
constitute material phenomena and discursive practices. Although affect is hardly
conceived as materiality, I think that agential realism provides a way to compre-
hend its relation to materiality.
We can follow affect’s history in the performing arts and theatricality back to
carnivalesque festivity, where it played a crucial role in the “spontaneous self-
organization of the masses” (Bristol 1989, 37). One of the later turning points in
the timeline of affect in the field of the performing arts was the ‘performative turn’
of the 1960s, when the role of transgression and subversion was inverted.10 By
stepping over the line of transgression to subversion, in postmodernism, the
power of affect, as the transversal force of social resistance, became (as Sontag
and Bishop11 explain in detail, especially regarding participation) privatised,

9 “Posthumanist Performativity.” Although Barad develops an approach towards the relation of

the social and scientific, the elaboration of concepts is in some aspects useful also for the
performance studies. Agential realism and new materialisms explore the intra-relations between
sociality, science, humanities and theory.
10 In the Renaissance period carnival could not change the given social order, on the contrary;
after the period of public festivities, when the boundaries decency were transgressed, the existing
social and political order re-appeared. Through this perspective carnival helped to maintain the
existing social order. In the sixties the frontal “artistic” attack on the conventions as the means to
maintaining social order, took place.
11 Barok 2009.
70 Anja Bajda

commodified.12 Within the contemporary performing arts, the theory of affect can
be useful as a tool for the explanation of works which are hardly graspable with
the old instruments of performance analysis, especially when dealing with parti-
cipatory oriented theatrical events, sensory theatre, etc. When considering sub-
version, resistance, and transgression in contemporary performing arts pro-
duction as phenomena that do not make an artwork valuable per se, the
emancipatory potential of performing arts productions is thatthey form an impli-
cit critique, which doesn’t necessarily underline social/political issues or the
oppression/repression dynamism of. Both Susan Sontag and Claire Bishop claim
that the roles of transgression and participation in relation to participation in the
arts was, once both had been integrated into the consumer society, symbolically
discharged. This is perhaps reason enough why the relation between emancipa-
tion, transformation (i.e., sociality, politics) and the contemporary performing
arts should be complexified. A good example of such complexification of the
relata between social equality, emancipation, education, philosophy and art is
theoretically provided by Jacques Rancière (Rancière 2009).
In the creative correspondence between performing arts (theory) and agential
realism, as well as the idea of emancipatory potential in the arts, the theory of
affect is, I propose, of high relevance. It provides the tools for understanding and
grasping the arbitrariness of intensity, of un-graspable affect and affective attune-
ment, participatory and interventionists ascpects of the contemporary performing
arts production. The latter certainly does not signal its distance from actual
political/social issues, but considers its position as one ‘outside within.’ The idea
of subversive affirmation appeared in Yugoslavian non-institutional theatre in the
1980s, when it was used, to distribute new critical approaches toward the repres-
sive totalitarian regime (the form of this critique had to be reinvented by reprodu-
cing the dominant regimes of representation).

12 Claire Bishop speaks about commodification of the ideas of authenticity and creativity.
Creative industries had privatised the affective power of transgression, creative expression etc.
The exploitation of creativity, transgression, the image of spontaneity and resistance for strategic
economic purposes in marketing can, as is the case in the performance Mandićmachine, become
the platform for questioning its limits within the performative and theatrical framework. The
performance on one side exposes the idea of omnipresent theatricality of everyday life, while on
the other side unfolds the excess of theatrical proficiency as its by-product, which constitues the
potential for radical criticism. The role of affect thus returns to its (carnivalesque) origins, altough
now hybridised with the newer forms of artistic expression and critique; instead of being under-
stood as profitable element within the economic production, it is concieved as the constitutive
element of social emancipation. The new forms of sociality, which the breaks with the theatrical
conventions produce, are critically approaching the simple and often totalitarian neoliberal logic
of mass consumption.
 Affect, Bio-politics and the Field of Contemporary Performing Arts 71

The spaces of affective community and participation are politically signifi-

cant, as they display a strong connection with historical public manifestations of
disobedience and resistance towards social and political authorities. Theatre
theoretician Hans Thies Lehmann explains post-dramatic theatre (in relation to
pre-histories of dramatic theatre) as a form in which the dramatic action is
replaced with ceremony, with which dramatic action was once, in ritual, united:

What is meant by ceremony as a moment of postdramatic theatre is thus the whole spectrum
of movements and processes that have no referent but are presented with heightened
precision; events of peculiarly formalized communality; musical-rhythmic or visual-archi-
tectonic constructs of development; para-ritual forms, as well as the (often deeply black)
ceremony of the body and of presence; the emphatically or monumentally accentuated
ostentation of the presentation. (Lehmann 2006, 69)

Post-dramatic theatre persists in the para-ritual position, occupied with ‘affective

attunement’ (between the collective of performers and spectators), and with
intensity and resonances as ‘main post-dramatic characters-objects’.

3 Actual Virtuality

Hans Thies Lehmann’s statement about postdramatic theatre as the theatre of

perception (the theatre of the real, and the aesthetics of responsibility, risk, and
undecidability) can be compared to Brian Massumi’s thematisation of ‘affect’ as
intensity between virtual idea and the concrete actualisation (or, according to
Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič, to the ‘actual virtuality’). In “Affect and
Revolution” Zupančič provides an insight into this idea of actual virtuality
through the revolutionary role of enthusiasm as affect in history. In reference to
Kant’s essay “Conflict of the Faculties” (“Der Streit der Facultäten”) she empha-
sises that the event itself (in the case of performing arts production the perfor-
mance) is not already a realisation of the possibility, but is primarily something
that creates a specific, hitherto outrageous, possibility that changes the given
configuration of reality (Zupančič 2005, 64).
The event thus legitimates the possibility as an actual possibility. Actual
virtuality makes a possibility operative in a symbolic space, but not yet integrated
and fully realised within it. Virtuality as the form of reality holds the real in itself.
As such, the Badiouan ‘passion for the real’ happens to be an appeal for realisa-
tion of the real within the virtual, and not, as Zupančič warns, the demand to
realise every given possibility (the simulated ‘must’, which is produced within
late capitalism): “The event can be perceived as the appeal for the transformation
of actual virtuality into actual actuality” (64).
72 Anja Bajda

When the event appears, virtuality becomes actual; actual virtuality is not
actuality itself, but nor is it the opposite. Zupančič’s thesis is that the difference
between the real and the supplement is actually the doubling of the supplement.
The consequence of this process is that the latter becomes the site of the inscrip-
tion of the real. Massumi’s conceptualisation of virtuality is in some ways compar-
able to this idea:
Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is virtual.
The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of
incipiencies and the tendencies, is a realm of potential […] The virtual is a lived
paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where
what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt – albeit reduced and contained.

4 Conclusion

The thematisation of affect within the contemporary performing arts offers several
possibilities for the interpretation of politics (for both the aesthetics of politics,
and the politics of aesthetics) and the social impact of the arts (that is, for the
transformative power of performance). In this essay, I have tried to articulate
(through the analysis of a particular performance) postdramatic theatre as a
platform of actual virtuality, and consequently as a platform of (political and
aesthetic) potential. It is affect, in tandem with the performing arts and theatrical
events, which constitutes this platform for change and transformation: “Actual
virtuality isn’t every possibility, it is the virtuality, which, as virtuality, consists of
some type of the real […] It is virtuality as the emerging form of reality” (Zupančič
2005, 65). As such, discussion of the political or social impact of the contemporary
performing arts (and in many ways, of other artforms as well) appears theoreti-
cally unstable. The real appears to be a constitutive element of an illusion, and
enthusiasm (as an affect) is an inherent element (on the side of the spectators) of
a revolutionary act.

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Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo, 2001.
Zupančič, Alenka. “Afekt in revolucija” [“Affect and revolution”]. Filozofski vestnik, XXVI. 3
(2005): 59–75.

Websites

http://vntheatre.com/en/about-via-negativa/the-project/ (15 November2012)

http://vntheatre.com/en/projects/via-nova-series/mandicmachine/about/ (15 November 2012)
Heloïse Lauraire
Reflections on Fear as a Structure of Feeling
in Large Scale Installations in Contemporary
Art

In the field of contemporary art, affects are the subject of much critical discussion,
since the realm of the affective is important for thinking about both the relation
between the audience and artworks, and the relation between the members of the
audience themselves. In an essay titled “Emotion’s Revenge” (2008), the French
curator Catherine Grenier suggests that the early twenty-first century has been
particularly marked by artistic propositions involving narration and aesthesia.
She also suggests that this shift in sensibility is linked to the emergence of
psychologic and affective aspects as a reaction to a conceptual supremacy, with
the 2000s representing a kind of paroxysm of this artistic tendency, or at least an
important development. She explains that unlike artists of the 1980s to the 1990s,
who used quotations or references in their works to introduce perspectives on
reality, the current generation of artists incorporate an unmediated world of the
senses into their art. Grenier specifies that:

the most various aesthetic channels enable this integration : the documentary film, realistic
painting and realistic sculpture, the staging of illusionist models, the proliferation of
performance, video narrative, creating sound or physical environments, the objective photo-
graphy. (Grenier 2008, 24)1

Here it seems that our subject is a matter of distance but at the same time it can
also appear also as a matter of absence of distance. I would like to focus on one
aspect of this kind of aesthetics: physical environments. One of the affects these
kinds of aesthetics generate is fear among the members of the audience. In
L’expérience émotionnelle de l’espace, an essay first published in 1967, the
French philosopher and psychoanalyst Pierre Kaufmann describes the emer-
gence of fear through the perception of space and architecture. On his analysis,
fear is a matter of space perception. Space perception includes the object of
perception, the nature and the cause of this object, and the identity of the one

1 [Cette intégration passe par les voies esthétiques les plus diverses: le film documentaire, la
peinture et la sculpture véristes, la mise en scène de mannequins illusionnistes, la prolifération
de la performance, la vidéo narrative, la création d’environnements sonores ou physiques, la
photographie objective.]
 Reflections on Fear as a Structure of Feeling 75

who perceives this object. In order to describe this process, Kaufmann uses the
example of a Chekhov short story called “Panic Fears.” In Chekhov’s 1886 text,
the narrator remembers a series of frights he had in the past. He tells the story of
surprising phenomena, and a growing fear he was confronted by. Once, at
sunset, he saw an incomprehensible brightness in a church tower. Another time
during a night walk, he was surprised by a lonely wagon which came past him
without locomotive, and finally, he met an unknown and wandering dog, a St
Bernard. Each time, the object of his fright could be considered as ordinary, but
the intensity of luminosity, or of his loneliness, or the element of the unknown,
creates special contexts for these appearances. According to Kaufmann’s analy-
sis of Chekhov’s story, fear first appears with the idea of loneliness through
incomprehension and disorientation (the suspect activity at the top of a church
at night), then through the discovery of a face to face (the self-driving wagon),
and finally through the awareness of the narrator own solitude (the figure of the
wandering dog). While Kaufmann speaks of “a liquefaction of the object’s space
framework” (30)2 to describe the apparition of fear, Brian Massumi talks about a
“feeling-in-action […] in a durationless moment of suspense in the time slip of
threat” (Massumi 2005, 36). In reference to the body of the subject, he sum-
marises: “it will have been a shock to the system, whose immediacy disconnects
the body from the ongoing flow of its activities while already poising it for a
restart.”
My aim in this essay is to introduce the reader to artworks offering similar
experiences to those described above, artworks requiring their audiences to enter
‘walk through’ installations, experiments in the liquefaction of time, space, and
threat. I do not have space to describe all the details of the ways certain artistic
environments produce this atmosphere, and this structure of feeling, but I will
instead highlight some significant examples.

In 2004, Gregor Schneider presented a piece he called Family Schneider in Lon-

don. In this specific environment, the viewer faces feelings of déjà vu and strange-
ness. For his project, the artist invested two houses of Walden Street, located side
by side. The architectures are clearly modest and identical in all aspects. Numbers
14 and 16 Walden Street have identical fronts, identical terraces, identical doors.

2 [Une liquéfaction du cadre spatial de la perception de l’objet]

76 Heloïse Lauraire

Fig. 1: Die Familie Schneider

Their interior decor is the same. Inside, we find the same number of rooms, the
same narrow hallways and yellowed walls.
To enter one of these houses, we had to make an appointment to get the keys
from the Artangel office, the London-based arts organisation which produced the
project. A twenty-minute visit per person was allotted for each house, and only
two spectators could enter per visit. Once the visitor left one house, he or she
could not return. We might imagine that the visit would be the ‘same’ in the
second house, but the strangeness of this repetition perfectly prevented this
feeling. The thick and heavy carpet in bedrooms and on the stairs in the hallway
absorbed the sound of footsteps. The visitor was alone with the beating of her
heart, the sound of her breathing and the muffled sounds of the house (flowing
water, refrigerator noise, footfall, voices on the first floor, doors that open and
close). In the twin houses were installed twin families: adults and children. They
seemed to live as though in the mirror of the other house, wearing the same
clothes, making the same gestures, moving the same way, using the same routes.
Some visitors tried to intercept actors, who were indeed sets of twins. But the
actors did not speak to them, they ignored their presence. At the same time, the
visitor both felt doubt, and ignored it. The same confusing scenes were repeated
each time a new visitor entered the house. The visitor could move freely, open
closets, doors. However, a malaise hung over the scene: the occupants did not
seem to see the new visitor, or to notice his/her actions. Progressively, the visitor
lapsed into a kind of invisibility. The sense of unease or embarrassment was
augmented by disturbing attitudes and strange scenes. On the second floor, the
visitor could hear children’s voices from the floor below, who had discovered in a
 Reflections on Fear as a Structure of Feeling 77

Fig. 2: Die Familie Schneider

room a body with a plastic bag on its head. First, visitors would think that
Schneider had used a doll to create this scene, but they would then realise that
what they had first considered as a fake body was actually breathing. The idea of
a crime, of something related to morbidity, came to mind. This idea of walking
through something that was inappropriate or unsavoury became definitive once
the visitor found the entrance to the cellar and noticed the mattress on the floor. ‘I
do not have room here to explore the reasons for these violent and unsettling
scenes in depth. However we can link these kinds of pictures to those published
by tabloid press or those daily presented by the television news. What becomes
apparent here is a kind of criticism of the media and people’s taste for this kind of
story.
To return to our topic, the structures of feeling and the appearance of fear, we
can notice that the strangeness of this situation is also based on a contradiction:
the visitor did not break into either house since he has the keys. He was
authorised to enter, and he chose to enter. It was initially in the visitor own
reality, the one of a simple visitor, a member of the audience. But at the first
meeting with the occupants, the visitor slips into a different status: he or she
simultaneously became a voyeur, an invisible character, and a powerless witness.
The experience of the Family Schneider makes of the visitor a ghost, whose sense
of reality is derived from his or her own feelings.
The movements of visitors to 16 Walden Street were invariably marked by
their impressions of déjà vu of 14 Walden Street. With this project, Schneider leads
the viewer in impaired memory, bypasses it. The experiment proposed by Schnei-
der is complete only if visitors explore both twin houses, one after the other. The
78 Heloïse Lauraire

past thus becomes the present, and the present becomes the past. The staging of
déjà vu (also known as paramnesia) can be linked to what is called ecmésie, that
is to say, the emergence of old memories relived as a present experience. The
instability of memory, and the perception of the present and the past, involves a
new relation with the future, a relation of threat.
On this question of indeterminacy, we can consider the phenomenon de-
scribed by Massumi. He writes:

A threat is only a threat if it retains an indeterminacy. If it has a form, it is not a substantial

form, but a time form: a futurity. The threat as such is nothing yet – just a looming. It is a
form of futurity yet has the capacity to fill the present without presenting itself. Its future
looming casts a present shadow, and that shadow is fear. Threat is the future cause of a
change in the present. A future cause is not actually a cause; it is a virtual cause, or
quasicause. Threat is a futurity with a virtual power to affect the present quasicausally.
(Massumi 2005, 35)

I would suggest that threat as an imminent future which has not yet arrived is also
perceptible in The Coral Reef, Mike Nelson’s large scale installation. First shown
in 2001 at Matt’s Gallery in London, The Coral Reef is now a part of the Tate Britain
Collection, which presented it in 2009. Described by critics and the audience as a
claustrophobic construction, The Coral Reef was a labyrinthine set of corridors.
Only ten people were allowed to enter the site-specific installation at any given
time. As we observed the elements of the room’s set, words such as conspiracy,
terror, and abandonment came to mind.
In an interview, Mike Nelson explains:

The Coral Reef kind of referred to an idea of an ocean surface, like referring to the idea of
an ideology, like a prevalent ideology, an economic one of capitalism, under which a sort
of coral reef, a complex of fragile structure, different sort of belief systems, existed. So in a
sense, each different room was indicative of a different sort of belief system. So as you walk
through, the first room you come to is the faked kind of reception of an art gallery, and the
second one you come to is an Islamic minicab office where you come to the back office,
and you come back to later on within the works, which is a replica of itself, and then on to
a room of Americana, a room of heroin, a room with dope, a room with bike mechanics,
like worshipping the automobile, the car, the motorbike, and one room that is just a void,
or empty like the unseen, the unknown, the other, sort of like the room of horror,
ultimately.

He continues:

It seemed like a very disempowered belief structure, in a position which somehow couldn’t
be heard. […] You know, you sit down in your armchair and you could be sailing the seas,
fighting the First World War, sort of… you could be doing anything, ultimately, if you had
 Reflections on Fear as a Structure of Feeling 79

agreed to go with that fiction within the first few pages. And the idea is that you are invited
to become lost in this lost world of lost people.3

Firstly, the installation offered to isolate the visitor and gave him the possibility of
loosing himself in a labyrinth. While he was trying to forge a spatial orientation,
the visitor had to walk through a series of quotations. The deserted intercon-
nected rooms suggested a narrative through the accumulations of references, but
as Catherine Grenier remarks, these were “unmediated.” The lack of indication of
directions disturbed the visitor, and the abundance of objects artefacts contribu-
ted to making him feel more and more disquieted.

In the introduction to his essay Le spectateur émancipé (2008), Jacques Rancière

reminds us that the identity of a spectator traditionally derived from the gap that
exist between himself and artwork (as a distinct object from himself), and from
the fact that he is an observer, not acting in the work. But here it seems that the
architecture of the installation and its contents allowed the visitor to feel himself
as a singular part of the work of art as well as of the community of spectators.
Often, people who had the opportunity to explore these spaces felt the need to
narrate their experiences or to publish photographs on the Internet. They also
tried to make maps of their journey through the installation.
These practices can be understood as necessary recollections of the experi-
ence in support of a later narration. Massumi explains that after such experiences,
one needs to think the feeling-in-action experience as a collection of perceptions:

What just happened is placed under retrospective review and mapped as an objective environ-
ment. The location of the threat is sought by following the line of flight in reverse. The cause of
the fright is scanned for among the objects in the environment. (Massumi 2005, 38)

We also find this kind of accumulation of perceptions and this strong effect of the
uncanny in Christoph Büchel’s Simply Botiful giant installation. In 2006, in
London, the Swiss artist chose to occupy a former industrial building reconverted
into an exhibition space by the gallery Hauser & Wirth in a warehouse district in
the East End of London. The exhibition entrance was marked with a ‘Hotel’ sign

3 Complete interview available on the Tate website. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/

video/mike-nelson-coral-reef
80 Heloïse Lauraire

and in the entrance one could read: ‘Families welcome / Last food orders for
children 5pm / assistance dogs only.’
In the lobby, a guard asked visitors to sign a release and warned them about
the risks of the visit. Then he pointed out the steps that would lead them toward
the installation. As indicated on the outside wall, visitors found themselves in the
hallway on the first floor of a hotel. The doors to the rooms were ajar, but access
was partially obstructed by mattresses, books, mugs, ashtrays, leftover food
(sandwiches, pizzas, etc.). In each room served by the corridor, the visitor dis-
covered the world of an absent occupant, and clues relating to his or her person-
ality, tastes, or profession. Little by little, the rooms appeared to be more specific,
not as expected in a hotel. The visitor progressively fell into another world, or
level of the world. The more the visitor progressed in her or his exploration, the
more doors looked like holes in the wall, secret crossings, or underground
passages. As the visitor progressed, space became overloaded with furniture,
newspapers, and bags, which piled up, preventing him from going further.
As in Mike Nelson’s Coral Reef, a strong sense of abandonment and desola-
tion reigned in every room. Visitors got lost. Meeting one of them was like meeting
a ghost; the hotel remained mysteriously deserted. Finally the visitor discovered a
door marked ‘private’. This door opened into a new, completely unexpected
space. In a huge warehouse, hundreds of refrigerators, containers, cameras, and
electronic components were stored. This was a repair shop. Some signs indicated
the recent presence of occupants: music playing, a television switched on, hang-
ing clothes, appliance buttons flashing in the laundry, etc.
Behind mounds of mechanical parts and appliances to walls, visitors also
found other passages to secret dilapidated old rooms. One of these was a large
archaeological excavation site with a mammoth. At the back of the warehouse,
one last door led the visitor out of the physical space of the gallery. The building
had been crossed. The visitor entered a refrigerator resale store, the window of
which overlooked the street. One visitor wrote on his blog after his visit:

Stood again outside the gallery looking at the freezers in the shop window, nothing seemed
to look the same anymore. I felt dirty but my clothes and hands were clean, I felt sick looking
at the shop now realising its hidden horrors inside. On my way home, I found myself looking
down all the back rooms of shops I went into, I was checking back streets for dodgy hotels
just looking for tell tale signs.4

4 Extract from the article “Christoph Büchel. Simply Botiful” published on April 23, 2008 on the
blog The Attic, http://steff-theattic.blogspot.fr/2008/04/christoph-bchel-simply-botiful.html.
 Reflections on Fear as a Structure of Feeling 81

Large scale installations, deserted mazes and meanders, and hyper-realistic

artefact environments invite a visitor’s feelings of claustrophobia, panic and/or
paranoia. Immersion is the word usually used to describe the experience of the
visitor, but here it seems that ‘submersion’ would be more appropriate.
Claire Bishop defines installation art as art that “presupposes an embodied
viewer whose senses of touch, smell and sound are as heightened as their sense of
vision” (10). This relation to environment is close to what we experience in daily
life: walking through rooms and architectures, meeting objects on our way, analys-
ing space situations. This proximity to our daily life may be the reason that another
feeling, curiosity, can be considered as a driving force in the visitor’s behaviour.
These domestic décors can be understood through the notion of hospitality, but
also through the notion of hostility, with these at work together in the material
aspect of these environments, attraction and repulsion being two sides of the same
coin. The visitor thus has to face uncertainty about his or her own state of mind.
We know that documentary pictures in magazines and newspapers are one of
the main sources of inspiration for Christoph Büchel, for example. Even if the
realities these artists depict in their works are not ours, we do have a common
knowledge of these distant realities, which also cements the audience community
of these specific art works. Even if we only know about these realities through the
media, and even if we are asked to enter such installations alone or separately,
visitors share the common experience of uncanny, perhaps even fear or threat.
These kinds of artworks could thus be seen as mechanisms, organisations that
produce feelings, and as material conversions of structures of feeling.

Acknowledgement: The author thanks Mr Gregor Schneider for the permission to

use pictures from Die Familie Schneider

References

Bishop, Claire. Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate, 2005.

Grenier, Catherine. La revanche des émotions, Essai sur l’art contemporain. Paris: coll. Fiction et
Cie, Seuil, 2008
Kaufmann, Pierre. L’expérience émotionnelle de l’espace. Paris: coll. Problèmes et controverses,
Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1967.
Massumi, Brian. “Fear (The Spectrum Said)”. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. Special issue
‘Against Preemptive War’, 113.1 (2005), 35–38.
Rancière, Jacques. Le spectateur émancipé. Paris: La fabrique éditions, 2008.
82 Heloïse Lauraire

Websites:

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/mike-nelson-coral-reef (12 November 2012)

http://steff-theattic.blogspot.fr/2008/04/christoph-bchel-simply-botiful.html (12 November
2012).
2 Affective Pasts
Esther Peeren
Compelling Affects / Structured Feelings:
Remembering 9/11

In New York, near Ground Zero, stands the Tribute WTC Visitor Center, which
aims to commemorate the victims and convey accounts of 9/11 and the earlier
World Trade Center attack in 1993 through “person to person history.” The
promise “We will never forget” is prominently displayed on a wall in the
exhibition, where you can listen to personal testimonies, see a time-line of the
attacks, and view a model of the planned buildings and memorial for the WTC
site. A large section of the Visitor Center is devoted to a gift shop selling, as
the brochure puts it, “Tribute items” that “allow visitors to take home and
remember the Tribute experience.” Aside from the remarkable displacement
from commemorating the attacks to remembering one’s visit to the Visitor
Center – privileging the act of remembering and the one who remembers over
what or whom it is that is supposed to never be forgotten – it is significant
that the shop explicitly ties memory, and, by implication, mourning, to materi-
al consumption. In this essay I will explore the expressive function of this
consumption, which appears designed to put the memory and mourning of
9/11 on display and certify the presence of what I call compelling affects.
Remembrance and mourning become tasks that have to be seen to be under-
taken in a particular, materialized manner. The form of this materialization,
moreover, is not exclusively imposed by political and social institutions, but
takes direction from the experience of those regarded as having been most
closely and deeply impacted by the attacks. I will argue that this way of
configuring memory and mourning constitutes a new “structure of feeling,” in
Raymond Williams’s terms, in which feeling or affect itself becomes a structur-
ing element.
I am by no means the first to notice the intimate link between memory,
mourning, and consumption, which extends quite far back. Philippe Ariès
notes, for example, how, in the western world, “the trappings of death occupied
such a large place in the sensibility of the nineteenth century that they became
one of the most valuable and profitable objects of consumption” (Ariès 2008,
597–598). This, however, mainly concerned the commoditization of the care for
and ritual disposal of the dead body. Unlike the present sensibility (a term to
which I will return later), it did not involve the selling, until years after the fact,
of a variety of objects, many of which not traditionally associated with com-
memoration or mourning, designed to pre-empt forgetting and perpetuate pub-
86 Esther Peeren

lic grief.1 Marita Sturken’s Tourists of History (2007) presents a detailed explora-
tion of “the consumerism of trauma, fear, and security and the closely woven
relationship of loss to tourism and kitsch” that characterized the American
response to the Oklahoma City bombing and, more pervasively, 9/11 (Sturken
2007, 4). She explains this consumerism as an expression of a “comfort culture”
accompanied by a “politics of affect” that works to depoliticize; by peddling
objects that provide reassurance and enable Americans to constitute themselves
as victims, a dominantly emotional register is allowed to saturate the public
realm while complex political and ethical questions surrounding the events of
9/11 and the American response to it are elided (Sturken 2007, 5). In her article
“Putting Mourning to Work: Making Sense of 9/11,” Karen J. Engle, too, presents
9/11 souvenirs as means of sustenance that allow people to identify with the
event and its dominant patriotic narrative in a narcissistic manner as the objects
are melancholically appropriated “through a kind of ingestion” (Engle 2007, 72).
Yet these souvenirs can also be seen in a different way, as serving to externalize
memory and mourning, since the purchased trinkets signify something not only to
the ones who purchase them, but also say something about these purchasers to
others. As Sturken notes in passing, 9/11 souvenirs are “a means of expressing
sorrow at the lives lost [at Ground Zero]” (Sturken 2007, 10, emphasis added). Such
expression tends to be taken as presuming a pre-existing emotional condition, yet
may also be conceptualized as a performative process that brings into being and
certifies, in the eyes of others, that which it enunciates. What I am interested in
here is the way expression, as performativity, invokes an audience. In displaying,
in material form, the act of sorrowful commemoration, the Tribute items sold in the
Visitor Center enable others to verify that you remember and grieve, while allowing
the practice of memory and mourning to be quantified: presumably, the more (or
the more expensive) souvenirs you acquire, the more expansive and lasting your
remembering is thought to be. Not buying – and consequently not having any
Tribute items on show in your home – is equated to forgetting.

1 While this essay uses the way the events of 9/11 are remembered and mourned as a case study, I
do not want to imply that the present-day sensibility is confined to or started with these events. In
fact, the death of Princess Diana in 1997 is often taken as inaugurating this sensibility and is
certainly what brought it to global attention, highlighting in particular the way objects of all kinds
had become signs of grief. Although the display of these objects and the outpourings of emotions
garnered criticism, including invocations of mass hysteria, they may also be seen as signaling the
beginning of a more accepting attitude towards public grief and the use of objects in its expres-
sion. See Sandra M. Gilbert’s Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve for an account
of the way Diana was mourned through “ritual offerings” consisting of anything from flowers and
stuffed animals to bottles of wine and food (Gilbert 2006, 275–279).
 Compelling Affects / Structured Feelings: Remembering 9/11 87

While Sturken focuses on the status of 9/11 souvenirs as “cultural objects

of ‘inauthentic’ cultural status” or “kitsch memory objects” (Sturken 2008, 75,
76),2 I would argue that what is significant is not so much the kind of objects
obtained – in fact, the Visitor Center’s range is not confined to kitsch, but
comprises academic books and highbrow films – as the fact that the purchasing,
owning, and, crucially, displaying of any object(s) related to the memorializa-
tion of 9/11 has become almost a duty, a requirement in order to (be seen to)
remember. Objects no longer aid memory but instantiate it; they are, it is
suggested, what makes memory and mourning possible. Thus, a card distribu-
ted at the Visitor Center advertising the opportunity to sponsor a cobblestone on
the National 9/11 Memorial Plaza implores: “Help pave the way to remembrance
and hope” – as if there would be no remembrance (or hope) without a visible,
material sign of it.3 Although the cobblestones, “out of respect for the victims,”
will not carry the names of their sponsors, these names will be “listed along
with the locations of their cobblestones at Memorial Plaza kiosks.” The cobble-
stones, then, are thought to both produce remembrance and endorse specific
people’s participation in it. This differentiates them from more traditional “ritua-
lized objects” that function as “touchstones, material artifacts that can provide
some kind of corporeal presence to mediate the absence of a loved one”
(Sturken 2004, 312–313). Rather than standing in for the deceased, the cobble-
stones, like the Tribute items, guarantee and show off the act of remembering,
of mourning.

For Freud, mourning is “a reaction to the loss of a beloved object” (Freud 2005,
205). What is commemorated in the Tribute WTC Visitor Center is the com-

2 Sturken suggests that the nature of these objects as kitsch may lead those who use them to
mourn being perceived as “engaging in bad taste,” yet proceeds to show that kitsch can be
assessed in various ways. Far from only being a sign of a lack of sophistication, it has become part
of American comfort culture; because it embodies a “prepackaged sentiment,” it does not require
complex interpretations and, in addition, it conveys the soothing “message that this sentiment is
shared and that it is adequate” (Sturken 2007, 20–23). My point is that, besides a reevaluation of
kitsch, the commemoration of 9/11 represents a shift in the relation between memory and mourn-
ing and consumption as this consumption becomes conspicuous.
3 The card lists a range of options, moving from the periphery to the center of memorial space:
“For a donation of $100, you can sponsor a cobblestone that will line the Memorial Plaza. A $500
donation will sponsor a cobblestone for the Memorial Glade, a beautiful and distinguished place
for gatherings and ceremonies. A $1000 donation will sponsor a Memorial paver.”
88 Esther Peeren

pounded loss of the victims, of the landmark World Trade Center, whose pre-
attack image and shape are echoed in many of the objects for sale, and, more
symbolically, of a sense of American invulnerability.4 However, rather than
serving the “reality-testing” that should reveal “that the beloved object no longer
exists” or appearing as a projection of the lost object’s persistence in the psyche
even after the work of mourning has been completed, the Tribute items, in their
very name, invoke the idea of an obligatory and above all ostentatious economic
exchange (Freud 2005, 204). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “tribute”
originally referred to “a tax or impost paid by one prince or state to another in
acknowledgement of submission or as the price of peace, security, and protec-
tion.” While a tribute may be offered as a token of affection or esteem (which is
presumably the sense the Visitor Center brochure seeks to invoke), it is commonly
associated with duty and necessity, with something that has to be done and has
to be shown to be done. A tribute is per definition public rather than private.
While Freud, in “Mourning and Melancholia,” rues the fact that there is as yet no
way of “providing an economical characterization of pain,” here the painful
emotion of grief is straightforwardly economized (Freud 2005, 204). Grief, which,
in relation to 9/11 has moral qualities assigned to it, is bought rather than bought
off; the souvenirs do not so much assuage or make up for a pre-existing pain as
attest to the arising of the “proper” feelings it is one’s duty to express, both in
public and in one’s home.
According to Sturken, it is kitsch that “dictates particular kinds of sentimental
responses and emotional registers,” producing not only an exclusion of the
political but also a circumscription within the realm of affect (Sturken 2007, 21). I
would argue that this ability to dictate or compel is not restricted to kitsch, but
characterizes the memory and mourning of 9/11 (and perhaps even the current
sensibility of memory and mourning in general), in its requirement of ostentatious
materialization, as a whole. Against the notion that mourning should be discrete,
which Ariès considers the corollary of the twentieth-century denial of death,5 it is

4 In Precarious Life, Judith Butler asserts that 9/11 marked “the loss of the prerogative, only and
always, to be the one who transgresses the sovereign boundaries of other states, but never to be in
the position of having one’s own boundaries transgressed” (Butler 2006, 39).
5 Ariès notes how, under this view, “mourning is an extension of modesty” and “the obstinate
bereaved is mercilessly excluded as if he were insane” (Ariès 2008,572). Jean Baudrillard, in 1976,
similarly writes that “death, like mourning, has become obscene and awkward, and it is good
taste to hide it, since it can offend the well-being of others” (Baudrillard 2006, 182). It could, of
course, be argued that the display of mourning through objects is still a form of hiding, albeit in
plain sight, as what is exhibited may not be raw grief but rather the acceptable shape of mourning.
Even so, the requirement that mourning take shape, in public and for an extended period,
represents a notable change.
 Compelling Affects / Structured Feelings: Remembering 9/11 89

now supposed to be shown in the form of public displays of emotion that

converge on public displays of objects, such as the makeshift shrines, by now
completely formalized in their show of spontaneity, that inevitably pop up after
celebrity deaths or deaths deemed particularly tragic. Non-expressive, non-mate-
rialized reactions to the experienced loss are increasingly conceived of as anom-
alous or even reprehensible, as is demonstrated, for instance, by the accusations
of coldness leveled against the Royal Family in the wake of Princess Diana’s death
(portrayed in Stephen Frears’s 2006 film The Queen) and the case of the British
missing girl Madeleine McCann, where a perceived lack of emotionality on the
part of her parents – and particularly her mother – caused tabloid media outrage
and turned them into suspects (see Yabroff 2007).
In this context, the Tribute items sold at the Visitor Center point to what I want
to call the spectacularization of mourning, intimating that it is no longer something
that predominantly goes on inside individuals or in the private sphere of the family
– with traditional mourning dress signifying precisely a state of separation from
everyday society – but something to be performed for others to enable its verifica-
tion and evaluation. The “spectacle” in spectacularization, then, refers specifically
to the element of ostentation; to the way memory and mourning are compelled,
through its materialization, to attract recognition as attention and approval. Spec-
tacularized mourning, materialized in mementos, operates in a mode of simulation
in Baudrillard’s sense, leaving us unable to tell what came first: the sense of grief or
the objects designed to display, and thereby confirm, this affect.6 Where Sara
Ahmed, in “Happy Objects,” argues that objects accumulate affective value, which
is “sticky,” as they circulate among people, the Tribute items sold in the Visitor
Center come invested with a fixed, normative affective mix of sadness, fear,
anguish, indignation, and righteousness that functions somewhat like a Teflon
layer, making it difficult for anything else to stick to them (Ahmed 2010, 29). These
items, moreover, are not things I can evaluate as good or bad, but things that
evaluate me (and my decision to buy or not to buy or to display or not to display
them) in moral terms, in relation to the imperative to “never forget.”
Andreas Huyssen has famously referred to our contemporary “culture of
memory,” where “total recall seems to be the goal” and commemoration proceeds

6 The fact that the affect is produced through and as simulation does not make it any less actual.
As Baudrillard explains in Simulacra and Simulation, “simulating is not pretending: ‘Whoever
fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an
illness produces in himself some of the symptoms (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulat-
ing, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked,
whereas simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the
‘imaginary’” (Baudrillard 2006, 3).
90 Esther Peeren

through obsessive monumentalization, musealization and commodification

(Huyssen 2000, 25). In the case of 9/11, the commodification impulse is reinforced
by the fact that what is being remembered was itself a site of commerce, of trade,
a status that has also heavily impacted decisions on the future of Ground Zero,
now, at least in part, considered “sacred ground” (Sturken 2007, 314). According
to Huyssen, the “turn towards memory,” which began in the 1980s, is accompa-
nied by an intense fear of forgetting that can only be counteracted by what he
calls “survival strategies of public and private memorialization” (Huyssen 2000,
28). But what if the fear of forgetting turns into a prohibition, or survival strategies
into rigid obligations – as when displaying the American flag after 9/11 ceased to
represent a choice and became an expectation?7 I want to suggest that the on-
going spectacularized remembrance of 9/11 shows how memory and mourning
can become compelling: enforced, constraining, but also rousing strong interest
and fascination. Here, the affective intersects with the normative, constituting a
visceral interpellation particularly difficult to refuse or subvert.
In the case of 9/11, which unfolded on a personal level but also on the levels of
the city, the nation, and the globe, the aspect of compulsion is mediated by degrees
of distance to the event. Those furthest away have considerably more freedom with
regard to whether and how to remember and mourn than those closer to it.
However, the ones considered closest, with direct experience of the attacks or
having suffered personal loss, are given more lee-way, on the grounds of their
ability to claim an “authentic” response, than those at middle-distance. What is
particularly noticeable, and characteristic of the current sensibility, is the way the
traditional separation between private and public memory and mourning has
become blurred. The public realm – or better, “the public” – now appears to impose
a demand on those personally bereaved to participate in displays of grief. After
Princess Diana’s death, for instance, Queen Elizabeth II was compelled to not only
organize a state funeral (going against official policy), but also to attend it and
partake of the people’s mood of affective ostentation. Similarly, it has become

7 For E. Ann Kaplan, the flags indicated at once a problematic “newly engaged patriotism” and a
“way to indicate empathy for those who had lost relatives and friends, and a shared trauma about
the shock to the United States” (Kaplan 2005, 9). Whereas Kaplan seems to assume that the flags
were flown and displayed voluntarily, the so-called tie-pin scandal that erupted in 2007 when
Barack Obama appeared without the flag on his lapels (see Durrani) and the way some Arab-
Americans displayed American flags after 9/11 to “provide protection against harassment and
discrimination” (see Zeleny 2009) show a considerable degree of social compulsion was involved.
A similar obligation to show that one is remembering in the “right,” societally endorsed, manner
has become noticeable in the UK in relation to the wearing of poppies for Remembrance Day (see
White 2000).
 Compelling Affects / Structured Feelings: Remembering 9/11 91

almost unacceptable for relatives of victims of global events like 9/11 or murders
receiving media attention to refuse to put their mourning on show or at least
provide photographs or videos of the deceased to help satisfy the drive for specta-
cularization. At the same time, private grief has come to inhabit public mourning,
as the families of the dead tend to be seen as entitled to a special say in how the
memory of the fatal event should be materialized in the public sphere. This became
manifest in the close involvement of 9/11 victims’ relatives in the lengthy debates
about the building plans for Ground Zero and in recent discussions about the
planned displays for the National September 11 Memorial Museum.8

What does all this mean in terms of the wider realm of affect theory at stake in this
volume? My uptake of Ariès’ term “sensibility” to denote the specific way in which
memory and mourning, as affective acts, are configured in the wake of 9/11 has
been deliberate, prompted by its resonance with Jacques Rancière’s “distribution
of the sensible,” indicating the way what is considered sensible (perceptible and
intelligible) within a particular society, in all dimensions of experience, including
that of affect, relies on a particular pre-ordering that renders everything that falls
outside its parameters irrelevant, illegitimate or imperceptible. Such pre-ordering
is a necessary condition; no recourse is offered to the “real,” “authentic” or non-
distributed, only to re-distribution.9 “Sensibility,” when read through Rancière,
affirms how affect – which it invokes in its reference to the capacity to feel, to be
affected – cannot be placed outside of socially established and enforced divisions

8 The involvement of family members in the discussions about Ground Zero is detailed in Paul
Goldberger’s Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York (2005). Signifi-
cantly, his remark that “a great many of the family members, understandably enough, believed
that they had a justifiable right, or even an obligation, to have a major say in the future of the site”
invokes entitlement as well as compulsion (Goldberger 200546). Goldberger also points to
tensions between different relatives’ organizations, as families of rescue workers and families of
office workers did not share the same interests and, when it came to the listing of victims’ names
on the memorial, disagreed about how the names should be arranged and whether some should
be more visible than others (through the addition of shields and emblems for rescue workers). The
spectacularization of memory and mourning, it seems, is liable, precisely because of its emphasis
on materialization, to produce a hierarchization of both the dead and the ones who mourn them.
9 Thus, when Ariès argues that the pre-eighteenth-century sensibility with regard to death and
mourning “might, because of its extreme age and stability, be compared to a state of nature,”
weight should be given to the fact that he presents this as a supposition that yields, moreover, no
more than a comparison with the natural (Ariès 2008, 581).
92 Esther Peeren

but has to be seen as entangled in them. This point, of course, is also made by
Williams, invoking the same linguistic stem, in his definition of “structure of
feeling” as “a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically
distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or an
epoch” (Williams 1978, 131, emphasis added). However, whereas Williams rejects
the often employed separation between the social as consisting of fixed forms and
the personal as “this, here, now, alive, active, ‘subjective’” as misconstruing the
way culture and society work, his account nevertheless maintains a rigid distinc-
tion between practical consciousness and official consciousness, with the first seen
as direct (as-yet-unformalized) experience (128). Furthermore, the phrase “struc-
tures of feeling” is explained as feelings that are (in the process of being) structured;
the possibility of feeling – as “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and
tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships” (132) –
actually being that which structures or formalizes stays unacknowledged.
In the remainder of this essay, I want to suggest that the entanglement of
official and practical consciousness in the spectacularization of the memory and
mourning of 9/11, and in particular the way valuated appeals to feeling as
precisely distinct from crystallized worldviews and ideologies help shape this
spectacularization, destabilizes some influential assumptions about affect.
The commemoration of 9/11 appears to exemplify the tendency Williams
perceives, and condemns, towards the “immediate and regular conversion of
experience into finished products” (128). Thus, the fact that talk of a fixed,
materialized site of recollection began almost immediately after the event leads
Sturken to speak of “the rush to memorialization” (Sturken 2004, 321). However,
the emphasis on a quick move to “formed wholes” was not accompanied by the
usual relegation of everything unformed to the disparaged realm of the personal
and subjective (Williams 128). In fact, the drive for fixity was channeled through
the personal as the feelings and wishes of those who lost loved ones or were
directly involved in the events became central in cementing its form. Williams’s
association of “the undeniable experience of the present” with “all that is present
and moving” (128) is diluted as “moving” comes to signify “emotionally affecting”
more than “in motion.” In this case, therefore, the “basic error” of reducing “the
social to fixed forms” cannot so exclusively or so easily be assigned to a “proce-
dural mode” founded on the exclusion of “the specificity of present being, the
inalienably physical” (Williams 1978, 128–129).
A 2012 New York Times article by Patricia Cohen recounts the controversies
surrounding the planned displays for the National September 11 Memorial Mu-
seum. These controversies center on whether images of the perpetrators should
be included in the exhibits (with memory and mourning now so tightly linked to
materialization, any conspicuous presence of their portraits or belongings would
 Compelling Affects / Structured Feelings: Remembering 9/11 93

imply that they, too, are being commemorated10); whether it is appropriate for the
museum to contain remains of unidentified victims and, if so, who should be able
to see and have access to these remains11; to what extent victims’ families should
have a say in these matters; and how the museum (which names itself as also a
memorial) can achieve the contradictory task of attending both to the fixation of
the event in the past and its affective negotiation in the present. These controver-
sies appear to invoke the type of tension Williams argues frequently exists
between “received interpretation” and “practical experience,” a division that may
not be equivalent to that wrongly installed between the social and the personal,
yet is nevertheless taken to correlate with fixity versus emergence or becoming.
Although it is true that the events of 9/11 have not yet solidified into a stable
formation (not least because of the persistence of conspiracy theories), the way its
repercussions are lived can be seen as departing from Williams’s binaries by having
received interpretation depend on practical experience, which manifests a ten-
dency towards “fixed, finite, receding forms” conceivably stronger – more compel-
ling – than that found in the institutions normally associated with the relegation of
the present to the past. Thus, the director of the 9/11 museum, Alice Greenwald,
cannot avoid consulting and appeasing those whose claim to practical experience
– to living the event with more actuality, a greater affective immersion, than others
– yields a high degree of formalization and entrenched, enforcing ideas of “proper”
mourning and remembering. While no consensus exists among all victims’ rela-
tives, the influence of the most active members of this group, which is substantial,
tends less towards keeping the event’s meaning in process in a living present than
towards fixing it in an eternal, tragic and threatening present like the man falling
from one of the towers in the infamous photograph taken by Richard Drew. While
the event is thus no longer made to recede into the past, it is still frozen into a
definite form. Instead of practical experience being “taken to be private, idiosyn-
cratic, and even isolating,” it becomes a measure for the social, guiding the public
handling of the event’s commemoration, while at the same time inuring itself from
criticism on the ground of its status as standing apart from conscious, formulated
belief (Williams 1978, 132). In this way, the opposition between the processes of
practical experience and the forms of received interpretation – between the reduc-
tion that can happen to third persons but not first persons, and between majority

10 In the end, this effect was countered by shrinking the photographs to 2 by 1½ inches to reduce
their ability to attract attention, attaching FBI evidence stickers to them to clearly place them in a
different category from photographs of victims, and exhibiting them on a slanted board in an
alcove so they can only be seen from above and thus looked down upon (see Cohen 2012).
11 See also Hartocollis 2011.
94 Esther Peeren

and minority generations – upon which Williams’s discussion of structures of

feeling relies are destabilized.
Despite emphasizing the structured nature of the feeling he is referring to and
pointing to their social aspect and specific hierarchies, Williams nevertheless
suggests that “what is actually being lived, and not only what it is thought is
being lived,” escapes codification because it is situated “at the very edge of
semantic availability” (131, 134). However, the Bakhtinian reading he invites
through his comparison of structures of feeling to linguistic styles, which Bakhtin
calls speech genres, would stress that all human experience and practice, includ-
ing that of minority generations, is subject, a priori, to social conditioning and
generic strictures, making absolute distinctions in degree of fixity between
“meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” and “formal or systema-
tic beliefs” questionable (Williams 1978, 132).12 As Bourdieu’s theory of habitus
has also shown, the fact that certain values and feelings remain unarticulated and
implicit does not make them any less stable or determinate. In some cases, norms
that escape consciousness may act more powerfully to fix social behavior than
official ones, precisely because their enactment is perceived as unmediated
experience that escapes semantic denotation and cognition.13
My skepticism about some of the more celebratory forms of affect theory
derives from this point. Undoubtedly, there is much that bypasses knowledge and
it is certainly useful to think about the “intensities” and “resonances” passing
between bodies, and between bodies and other elements of the world, or about
“the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances them-
selves” – especially in terms of how they may produce “capacities to act and be
acted upon” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 1). Yet such “vital forces” cannot be
thought of as in essence more flexible than established worldviews, ideologies or
class outlooks, let alone as autonomous energies that bypass all mediation,
discursivity or signification (1). If they did, how could they ever be apprehended
or mobilized in a meaningful way? The association of affect, as “infinitely con-
nectable, impersonal, and contagious belongings to this world” (2), with emanci-

12 In “The Problem of Speech Genres,” Bakhtin writes: “In essence, language, or functional,
styles are nothing other than generic styles for certain spheres of human activity and communica-
tion. Each sphere has and applies its own genres that correspond to its own specific conditions”
(Bakhtin 1986, 64). Speech genres, which may be extended to genres of feeling, differ in degree of
fixity, but this difference is not related to the distinction between actual and mediated experience
Williams appears to maintain.
13 According to Bourdieu, “agents conceal, even from themselves, the true nature of their
practical mastery as learned ignorance (docta ignorantia), that is, a mode of practical knowledge
that does not contain knowledge of its own principles” (Bourdieu 1999, 102).
 Compelling Affects / Structured Feelings: Remembering 9/11 95

patory potential is especially troubling in the context of postindustrial capitalism

and neoliberalism, which, as Patricia Clough points out, take notions of “open-
ness, emergence, and creativity” as their object, extracting value from them and
rendering indeterminacy as precarity rather than freedom (Clough 2010, 224). Ben
Anderson, furthermore, cautions that while affect is “not simply available to be
smoothly shaped, normalized, and instrumentalized at will,” the “conjunction of
affects and power” needs to be taken into account (Anderson 2010,182, 183). He
notes that in the present moment, as I have also argued here with regard to the
memory and mourning of 9/11, a particular form of this conjunction is prevalent
in which the “excess of affect is […] not so much regulated as induced, not so
much prohibited as solicited” (168).
I have suggested that the post-9/11 sensibility of memory and mourning is
characterized by a transformation of practical consciousness itself, which,
although insistent on keeping the event present in the first person, as evident in
the emphasis on “person to person history,” simultaneously seeks to reify it into a
coherent, controlled account. This is why the unidentified, unassigned, and
necessarily impure remains are so troublesome, and why the most controversial
architectural designs for Ground Zero incorporated a lasting sense of fragmenta-
tion. As Sturken notes, “the design proposal that failed most spectacularly on the
sensitivity scale was Peter Eisenman’s proposal for an office building complex
that was designed to look as if it was in a state of perpetual collapse” Sturken
2004, 320). While she considers this design “strangely inappropriate” and thus
insensitive, I would see it as insensible. It does not make sense within the reigning
distribution of the sensible, yet is by no means inherently unfeeling or incapable
of expressing grief. Within the controlled account or finished product that is being
proposed, which is grounded in practical consciousness (the experience of vic-
tims’ families or Lower Manhattan residents being invoked at every turn as
providing an infallible moral compass), affect operates as a compelling force that
itself performs a structuring, as, for example, in the constitution and maintenance
of the threat-environment Brian Massumi describes in “The Future Birth of the
Affective Fact” or, more concretely, in the controversy surrounding the plans for
the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” which was neither a mosque nor located at
Ground Zero.14 Ultimately, then, the spectacularization and commodification of
memory and mourning do not constitute a departure from practical experience, a
corruption of what would be truly personal and directly lived, but remain rooted

14 See http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/park51/index.ht
ml. Although relatives of 9/11 victims were found on both sides of the debate about what was
officially called “Park51” and would house a Muslim community center, what matters here is the
way their opinions were seen as particularly difficult to ignore.
96 Esther Peeren

in practical experience reconstituted as received interpretation, putting in ques-

tion the binary opposition maintained by Williams and any consideration of affect
as escaping or exceeding discourse.15 In a way, it could be argued that affect has
itself become a discourse. The Tribute WTC Visitor Center, with which I began this
essay, embodies this discursivity, or, in Williams’s terms, the officialization of
practical consciousness, in having been established by the September 11th Fa-
milies’ Association, presented not as a dynamic, living community of mourners,
but codified and institutionalized as a “501(C)3 non-profit corporation.”16

References

Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory
J. Seigworth. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. 29–51.
Anderson, Ben. “Modulating the Excess of Affect: Morale in a State of ‘Total War’.” The Affect
Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2010. 161–185.
Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death
Over the Last One Thousand Years. London: Vintage, 2008.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” M. M. Bakhtin: Speech Genres & Other
Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1986. 60–102.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Press, 2006.
———. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: SAGE, 2006.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London/New York: Verso,
2006.
Cohen, Patricia. “At Museum on 9/11: Talking Through an Identity Crisis.” New York Times. Web.
2 June 2012.
Clough, Patricia T. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies.” The Affect
Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2010. 206–225.
Durrani, A. “Arab Americans and Muslims Are Victims Too.” Media Monitors Network. Web.
25 September 2001.
Engle, Karen J. “Putting Mourning to Work: Making Sense of 9/11.” Theory Culture Society 24.1
(2007): 61–88.

15 Seigworth and Gregg are particularly hostile to discourse, implying that, unlike affect, it is not
able to “touch,” “move” or “mobilize” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 24). This argument, and the
related one that sees discourse ignoring the bodily dimension of being, relies on an equation
between discourse and language that is refuted by, among others, the work of Michel Foucault
and Judith Butler.
16 See http://www.tributewtc.org.
 Compelling Affects / Structured Feelings: Remembering 9/11 97

Frears, Stephen. The Queen. Pathé Pictures and Granada Productions, 2006. DVD.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. Trans.
Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin Books, 2005. 201–218.
Gilbert, Sandra M. Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. New York and London:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
Goldberger, Paul. Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York. New York:
Random House, 2005.
Hartocollis, Anemona. “For 9/11 Museum, Dispute over Victims’ Remains.” New York Times. Web.
1 April 2011.
Huyssen, Andreas. “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia.” Public Culture 12.1 (2000): 21–38.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Massumi, Brian. “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat.” The
Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2010. 52–70.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York:
Continuum, 2004.
Seigworth, Gregory J, and Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader.
Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2010. 1–25.
Sturken, Marita. “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero.” American Ethnologist
31.3 (2004): 311–325.
___. “Memory, Consumerism and Media: Reflections on the Emergence of the Field.” Memory
Studies 1.1 (2008): 73–78.
___. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.
White, Michael. “Remembrance Day: No One Should Be Given a White Feather For Not Wearing a
Poppy.” Guardian Politics Blog. Web. 5 November 2000.
Williams, Raymond. “Structures of Feeling.” Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1978. 128–135.
Yabroff, Jennie. “Mothers To Blame: Hysteria around Mums Suspected of Murder Can Warp
Judgment and Logic.” Newsweek. Web. 28 September 2007.
Zeleny, Jeff. “Obama’s Lapels.” The Caucus: The Politics and Government Blog of The Times. Web.
22 May 2014.

Websites:

http://www.tributewtc.org (22 May 2014)

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/park51/index.html
(22 May 2014)
Tine Damsholt
Staging Emotions: On Configurations of
Emotional Selfhood, Gendered Bodies, and
Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century

Studies of affect are currently setting the agenda in many fields of cultural
investigation. The aim of this type of study is to understand and scrutinise human
emotions as individual and collective phenomena. In line with the trend of
labelling all sorts of new approaches as ‘turns’, there has even been some talk of
an ‘affective turn’ within the humanities. These new ways of investigating inten-
sities and affects, as the capacities to act and be acted upon, often focus on “in-
between-ness” and “beside-ness” (see Gregg and Seigworth 2002). Notably, the
affective nature of bodies, in particular the “intrinsic connection between move-
ment and sensation”, is discussed by Brian Massumi. Parallel to the ‘affective
turn’, there have also been an increasing number of studies on the history of
emotions and the historicity of emotions in recent years (see Frevert 2011). From
the perspective of the latter, the current interest in affects also has a history and a
genealogy.
This chapter may be considered a contribution to a genealogy of affect
studies, since it investigates one of the historical scenes where emotions surfaced
as an object of scientific and aesthetic practices. In the late eighteenth century,
emotions also entered into public awareness and agency, and became a pivotal
dimension of family life and performances of the civic self. In late eighteenth-
century Europe, emotions became entangled in new configurations with morality,
selfhood, gendered bodies, movement in nature, and political culture. In this
essay, the material-discursive doings of emotions and emotional selfhood in Den-
mark are discussed as local examples of staging and performing a more general
‘European emotional culture’. The focus is on the emergence of a new emotional
and civic self in a number of semi-public arenas in Copenhagen – as well as on a
specific mixture of feelings, politics and patriotic sentiments.

1 An Emotional Public Space and Civic Self

A number of historians have described the French Revolution as a laboratory for a

series of changes in political culture in the Western world (see, for instance, Hunt
1984; Landes 1998; Outram 1989). It was part of a transformation of political
 Staging Emotions 99

theory, and a movement towards the idea of the contract that is still at the core of
most prevailing political philosophies, and which regards the people as the true
sovereign body. On this view, only power that is exercised in accordance with the
will of the people is considered legitimate. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Du
contrat social (1762), defined the general will as determined by the interests of the
common good. In this sense, a people comes into existence through its aspiration
towards the common good, with the individual subordinating his own interests
out of concern for the collective as the nation or the fatherland.
Thus, contract theory implied a specific perception of the state and of the
citizen. The citizen’s ethical imperative consisted of putting aside his (or her) own
interests in favour of the general will, for the sake of the common good. This
ultimately meant the willingness to give one’s life for the fatherland. The concepts
of patriotism and of love of the fatherland became pivotal in Danish public
discourse – as well as in other Northern-European countries. Both the individual
as a citizen and the union of citizens as the people became the two crucial entities,
according to the logic of this discourse, whose individual and collective subjectiv-
ity was essential for political Utopia.
In this way, the French revolution engendered a new political culture, which
aimed to legitimise the new form of state, both through rhetoric and visual
symbolism, and through physical expressions in the new and sensitive public
space (Hunt 1984; Outram 1989). The attributes and the reverence formerly
associated with the person and body of the king now had to be transferred to and
reinterpreted within a new context. Part of the bourgeois revolution was that ‘the
gaze of society’, which had previously been directed at the person of the king and
the aristocratic culture of the court – which ‘existed to be seen’ – was instead
turned towards people’s interiors. Furthermore, this virtuous inner self had to be
staged in public space as a form of theatre (Outram 1989, 42, 80).
As historian Joan Landes has pointed out, the paradox of popular representa-
tion must be taken into consideration:

[…] when the sovereign is faceless and in the majority, when the ability to speak on behalf of
the people or to represent it is always in danger and subject to objection. For the same
reasons, the democratic body politic requires a stage and must be constantly performed
(Landes 1999, 163, my translation).

With the end of absolutism in France, or, in the case of the Danish-Norwegian
unitary state, with a new interpretation of absolutism, the focus shifted from the
king’s body to the people as the embodiment of the state and sovereignty, and
thereby to the population as those who should give their bodies to the body
politic. Public space became the stage upon which the utopian subjectivity of the
loyal citizens was to be embodied and performed.
100 Tine Damsholt

The celebration and staging of princely power in public space was already an
integral part of absolutism. However, the French Revolution created a new
cultural phenomenon in the form of didactic state festivals, which instead staged
abstract values such as reason, the ‘supreme being’, equality among citizens, and
shared duty to the fatherland. A new revolutionary religion was created, ‘a cult of
federation’, which was more or less in opposition to the existing church, but
simultaneously borrowed from its established iconography (Schama 1989, 414,
768). As the same ceremonies were held all over the country, the nation was
symbolically and emotionally bound together. To quote Benedict Anderson, an
“imagined community” was created (see Anderson 1983).
Emotional outbursts played a major role in these political rituals; contempor-
ary sources record that, in the early days of the revolution, no event failed to end
in collective “patriotic tears and embraces”. Paradoxically, this “general sensibil-
ity” was associated with the new political system, in which the individual was at
the centre (Vincent-Buffault 1999, 243). Yet when emotions were publicly staged,
although the individual was at the centre, the individual’s place within the
collective was simultaneously stressed, as the individual acquired meaning via
his or her position as part of the whole.
One prerequisite for understanding this change in the political culture is the
new configuration of emotions in the European culture of sensibility during the
latter part of the eighteenth century. Here, the emphasis was on feelings as the
seat of a person’s proper moral responsibility for society. The historian Simon
Schama has shown how a ‘cult of sensibility’ combined with a fascination with
classical citizens’ republics was an integral part of these new configurations. In
particular, the educated class of nobles, civil servants, and intellectuals culti-
vated these ideas. Unlike rococo court culture, with its concentration on external
formalities (manners and style), the focus was now on people’s ‘interior’ or inner
lives (emotions, virtue, and morality). Nature was preferred over culture, sponta-
neity over calculation, innocence over experience, the soul over the intellect, and
so on. Feeling strongly for something became a sign of a noble character; having
un cœur sensible was seen as a prerequisite for morality (Schama 1989, 149).
Thus, the more recent perception of reason and emotion as opposing cate-
gories is problematic when attempting to understand the eighteenth century and
its concept of emotion, since feelings and a sense of duty or morality were not
then perceived as separate entities. The idea of the heart as the topography for
morality also informed the contemporary pietist version of Christianity. With its
emphasis on a personal and emotional relationship to God, pietism also encour-
aged individual reading and the development of a heartfelt emotional language.
As mentioned earlier, patriotism was regarded as the ideal of political self-
hood. Patriotism was a feeling that could, in principle, be shared by all citizens. It
 Staging Emotions 101

was primarily based on a sense of duty and responsibility, which was supposed to
elevate the individual above specific interests and experiences. What is interest-
ing here is that an emotion – such as love of the fatherland – became a central
virtue within the complex of political ideas. In the context of theories of emotion-
ality, feelings were regarded as something that would foster the ideal sense of
responsibility and subjectivity in the population.
Thus, a causal relationship between emotion and virtue was established in
late eighteenth-century discourses. This is illustrated by J. J. Rousseau’s Consi-
derations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur ca réformation projecté (1772).
Here, he reflects on the necessity of inscribing the constitution in the hearts of the
citizens. In Rousseau’s philosophy, the heart is one of the central locations in the
inner moral topography of the civic self:

There will never be a good and solid constitution unless the law reigns over the hearts of the
citizens; as long as the power of legislation is insufficient to accomplish this, laws will
always be evaded. But how can hearts be reached? (…) How then is it possible to move the
hearts of men, and to make them love the fatherland and its laws? Dare I say it? Through
children’s games; through institutions, which seem idle and frivolous to superficial men,
but which form cherished habits and invincible attachments. (Rousseau 1991, 165)

The key, Rousseau emphasises, is “the art of ennobling souls” (165). Civic sub-
jectivity must become an inward urge rather than an external demand. And
festivals and rituals are – Rousseau draws inspiration here from antique Greece –
perceived as technologies by which the heart is reached, and the emotional self is
transformed towards this utopian and civic subjectivity. This causal relationship
between emotion and civic virtue is the philosophical backbone of the cult of
sensibility.
The core concept here was sensibility, defined as “the capacity for extremely
refined emotion and quickness to display compassion for suffering” (Todd 1986, 7),
which was supposed to be expressed in spontaneous acts such as weeping, faint-
ing, or falling to one’s knees. Being emotional was not the same as living in the grip
of passions, or giving oneself to amusements and sexual excess. Reason had to be
enlisted to assist the soul, so that passions were transformed into ‘emotions’ under
the control of reason (see Mai 1994). The correct balance had to be found between
sense and sensibility, to quote the title of Jane Austen’s famous novel.
A sense of compassion was regarded as the fundamental element in a
person’s moral improvement. Art, which was the central medium of the cult of
sensibility, often depicted people in need and emotional torment. Novels and
paintings especially, but also plays and poetry, were expected to arouse compas-
sion and simultaneously to be morally instructive. Novels often depicted arche-
types such as ‘virtue in distress’, who was either rescued into the safe haven of
102 Tine Damsholt

marriage, possibly after the improvement of the man through the encounter with
such a woman’s unassailable virtue, or else was released from her troubles by
death. Another archetype, ‘the man of feeling’, was, because of his sensitivity,
either seized by the wretchedness of the world while trying, with varying degrees
of success, to do good, or else died (perhaps by his own hand) of unhappy love.
Richardson’s Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded (1740), Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle
Héloïse (1761), and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) are classics in
this genre.
Stories of the hardships of heroes and heroines, and especially the detailed
description of the emotional expressions they provoked, served as instructions for
how to behave and express one’s feelings (Todd 1986). In this staging of emotion,
tears were essential, and were therefore described in detailed terminology: from
sniffs to floods of tears (Vincent-Buffault 1999, 16–18). In novels, the sharing of
tears was often the culmination, the peak event, after which moral improvement
through sensibility was bound to occur.
With the textualisation of these emotions – i.e. detailed descriptions of how
feelings were perceived and expressed – literature took on the function of emo-
tional guidance and moral instruction. The epistolary genre, with its natural
intimacy, was preferred in these emotional novels. The letter form concealed the
distinction between fiction and reality, and made it appear natural that the
account of events should be accompanied by descriptions of the feelings they
provoked. Moreover, as Foucault has argued, letter writing is one of what he calls
“the technologies of the self”: writing is a way of showing oneself, of revealing
one’s soul, which is laid bare to the gaze of other people and therefore to one’s
own gaze. In this objectification of the soul, letter writing and self-scrutiny were
two sides of the same coin (Foucault 1995).
Thus, the emotional novels of the time contained narratives about the emo-
tional self, which was staged as a subject for intertwined emotion and morality.
Reading and self-knowledge became in this way connected and emotionalised.
This was particularly the case in Rousseau’s writings, especially his confessions.
Feelings, life, and reflections became inseparable from reading and writing
(Darnton 1984). Reading and writing became central elements in the material-
discursive practices that shaped the new emotional self.
Recently, historian Lynn Hunt has argued that the notions of bodily integrity
and empathetic selfhood that surfaced in the latter part of eighteenth century are
intimately related to the emergence of the ‘self -evidence’ of human rights in the
same period. Furthermore, she argues that epistolary novels, as the most evi-
dently new cultural form aimed at inciting emotion and compassion, must be
seen as a pivotal component in the changing of minds, and thus the re-organisa-
tion of social and political life. New kinds of reading created new individual
 Staging Emotions 103

experiences and feelings, and the new emotional selfhood became transformative
for political culture (Hunt 1984).

2 Gendering Emotions

The aesthetic cultivation of the emotional self and of bodily outbursts of emotion
such as crying must be seen in the light of the contemporary worship of ‘the
natural’, including theories of gesture as mankind’s first (‘natural’) language.
Spoken language and stiff codes for social intercourse were regarded as alienat-
ing and, at worst, as incapable of representing ‘real’ emotions. Pantomimes,
tableaux vivante, and ‘attitudes’ (stylised outbursts of emotion) became popular
forms of art, which conscientiously staged ‘the natural’. Basic human feelings
such as fear, despair, and admiration were portrayed in attitudes (often with clear
references to classic art), most often by female artists in the field (see Klitgaard
Povlsen 1998). In this way, a new language of emotions was developed; one that
could be read by those with a classical education.
This focus on emotions, affects, and attitudes was not just an aesthetic phe-
nomenon, but was also based on a philosophical discussion of sensory experiences
as constitutive of the self. Therefore, it was accompanied by scientific investiga-
tions of the nervous system as the seat of the emotions (Barker-Benfield 1992). The
natural and medical sciences became pivotal in an increasing gendering of emo-
tions, which was related to the gradual contrasting of the sexes during the course of
the eighteenth century (Laqueur 1990; Schiebinger 1991). In this way, women
acquired a special meaning as by nature ‘morally superior’ to men, since the
capacity for emotionality was linked to bodily constitution and the nervous system.
This created a new emotional topography of gender, as German historian Ute
Frevert argues, which involved a specific reading of the female body and its
capacity for emotions. Since the female body was destined to give birth, women’s
limbs were more delicate than men’s, their nerves highly irritable, and their
emotions feeble and unstable. Due to their frail and delicate nerves, women were
thought to be less capable of enduring strong and deep emotions (Frevert 2011,
105). On this interpretation, biological differences rendered women more super-
ficial, unsteady, and irrational than men, and unable to master their passions as
men could.
Rousseau, in his educational treatise Emile, ou de l’Education (Émile, or on
education) (1762) and his depiction of Sophie, the ideal female companion for
Emile, argued that a woman had no place in society: she existed only to please,
and to be useful to her husband. She depended on her man more than he
depended on her, thus her conduct had to speak to his sentiments and appeal to
104 Tine Damsholt

his judgements. A girl was to be taught to master her temper and bow to the will
first of her father, and later her husband.
Eventually, the gendering of emotions developed into a more general critique
of male patriots’ practicing too much sensibility. Excess of feeling seemed to
threaten men’s masculinity, and tenderness or ‘wimpishness’ was viewed as
incompatible with holding public office. Therefore men increasingly distanced
themselves from sensibility (Frevert 2011, 109). Emotions gradually became an
exclusively female attribute – a gendering of affects that would later be problema-
tised and revived again in new configurations.
In late eighteenth-century readings of gender, the gendered and emotiona-
lised body became a social destiny for women; their constitution and capacity for
inner feeling led them to obey their husband and tenderly care for their children
by nursing them themselves. The finer female constitution, as well as their greater
emotionality and moral superiority, would secure the home (which gradually
became the preferred scene for the emotions) as the foundation of morality.
However, this same emotionality also made women irrational, and the gendered
body was therefore used as an argument for the exclusion of women from the
political arena (Outram 1989; Landes 1998).
Recently the idea that the ‘depoliticised republican mother’ was privileged by
Rousseau and the French revolutionaries has been challenged. In spite of the fact
that women were not granted political rights and were excluded from the public
sphere, Annie K. Smart argues that a model of active and participating citoyennes
was generated in late eighteenth-century France, in the writings of Rousseau
among others. In Emile, a ‘civic mother’ is constructed; a good mother who knows
how to think (Smart 2011,16). Smart also argues for the emergence of a new notion
of home as a site of civic practice and experience. The home was a private space,
but this did not mean it was solely a space for private subjectivity. Instead the
home needs to be reconsidered as part of a larger public sphere, since the civic
virtues originated in the intimate sphere (17). The home became the important
stage for the female citizens’ enactments of emotions and good citizenship –
raising children to become good patriots – and thus a precondition for a wider
public sphere. Hence, in this gendered emotional topography, the public and the
private spheres became entangled on account of the pivotal status of emotions.

3 Doing and Staging Emotions

The aesthetic and political interest in emotions, whether positive or critical, and the
scientisation of the emotions – the objectification and division of the nervous
system, physiognomy, and gesture – may be seen as material-discursive practices
 Staging Emotions 105

that constitute emotions as an object by means of investigation and classification,

but also as gendered everyday practices. One might say that the objectification of
feelings in science and art, as well as the detailed description of how emotions were
felt and expressed, co-constituted the ability of individuals to recognise such emo-
tions in themselves and to perform them in a way that was recognisable to others.
The textualisation of emotions was heavily intertwined with the experiences of fee-
ling, bodily movements, and practices for expressing emotions. As such, emotions
are what I have called material-discursive practices.1 From this perspective, emo-
tions are not only textual constructs but are also always performed or enacted in
specific historical and cultural versions. Being performed and enacted means that
they are more than ‘just’ discursive. They are material, bodily, embodied practices,
but they are also always discursively shaped by previous articulations and textuali-
sations, and by cultural categories. As such, emotions are matters of doing.2
In the late eighteenth century, the home was not the only important arena for
choreographing and staging emotions and the new compassionate civic selfhood.
The entanglement of discourses and bodily-material practices can be illustrated
with a new configuration of emotional self-practice; the staged interaction be-
tween self and ‘nature’ in the form of romantic gardens. An important element in
this new interest in the self was the aesthetic theories of the sublime, of soul-
shaking experiences as a central aspect of self-knowledge. The sublime was
manifested in the encounter with unfathomably large phenomena within the
senses and in nature. The transcendent meeting with ‘terrible beauty’ meant that
the individual had to relate to new sides of his/her character, and thereby get to
know and eventually improve him/herself.3 Powerful sensuous experiences be-
came a crucial medium for analysing the self and for exploring and naming
hitherto unsuspected essential forces. Thus, they became one of the technologies
of the emotional self (Foucault 1988). The movement that was expected to occur
within the self as a result of the encounter with nature was closely connected to
the movement of the individual within the landscape. Bodily perceptions and
practice were therefore a prerequisite for emotional ‘movement’.
The sublime was gradually institutionalised in set elements such as waterfalls
and mountain peaks, but also in more domesticated versions, such as in the
English garden style. This ‘state-of-soul garden’ was staged to awaken and

1 My theoretical inspiration comes from a performative approach developed within gender

studies by scholars such as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad.
2 Recently Monique Scheer has proposed a similar perspective of practice for the study of
emotions, however from a different theoretical angle (see Sheer 2012).
3 There is great variation in the theories of the sublime, with regards to the question of whether
the sublime was to be found in nature or in the self (see, for instance, Mortensen 1993).
106 Tine Damsholt

nourish certain sentiments. By inspiring all sorts of emotions, from gaiety to the
sweetest melancholy, these gardens were supposed to lead to empathy and
beneficence (Taylor 1989, 298, 300). Thus, garden strolls became a technology of
the self; a way to improve oneself morally via the emotions aroused by the garden.
Strolling (or rambling) in a landscape became a way to combine body and soul, to
come closer to both inner and outer nature, and thereby to the emotional self. The
aestheticisation of nature and moral philosophy were united with new forms of
physical movement. In Orvar Löfgren’s words, the different ways of experiencing
the landscape combined metaphysics and microphysics.4
The experience of nature and landscape presupposed new forms of move-
ment. Rambling in nature meant a new way of moving; instead of the stiff, well-
controlled promenade, which involved tensing the muscles for each individual
movement, the movements of rambling were softer, freer,5 and more ‘natural’.
This opened up to individual routes and emotional moods. In C.C.L. Hirschfeld’s
Theorie der Gartenkunst (1779–1785) movement in all of its manifestations became
fundamental to the experience and creation of the garden’s meaning. Thus, this
book could enhance the affective power of the reader’s movements through a
natural landscape (Parshall 2007, 36, 52). Walking was textualised as an “art of
taking walks”, and the goal of this new technology was the ethical betterment of
the walker (49). Motion and emotion became intrinsically entangled in these new
material-discursive garden practises.
The Danish C. W. Eckersberg’s Portræt af Johannes Søbøtkers fire børn i
Hummeltofte (The four children of Johannes Søbøtker in a garden) from 1806
illustrates some of the diverse and gendered forms of experiencing gardens and
thus embodying nature.
Dressed in colourful and ‘play-enabling’ clothes, the two boys are actively
investigating nature in the form of wild strawberries and a butterfly, and seem to
forget themselves as they are absorbed in their activities. In his educational
treatise Émile (1762), Rousseau articulated his ideal of bringing up boys in close
contact with nature, as nature would guarantee that the instinct of self-preserva-
tion would enable them to develop the necessary interior regulation of the self,
and thereby the civic and emotional values of a good patriot. Unlimited experi-
ences in nature would enhance astuteness. Nature should be sensed; touched,
smelled, and tasted (here in the form of wild strawberries), in order that boys
could develop natural bodily selfhood and masculinity.

4 Orvar Löfgren has emphasised this link between motion and emotion in many of his analyses of
tourism.
5 This development can also be observed in dance and military tactics (see Kayser Nielsen 1993).
 Staging Emotions 107

Fig. 1: C. W. Eckersberg’s Portræt af Johannes Søbøtkers fire børn i Hummeltofte 1806. Øregaard
Museum.

The two girls in the painting are sitting on the grass and, as such, they are also in
close contact with nature. However, they are dressed in delicate white according
to the contemporary fashion, and this emphasises their more fragile nature. They
are also depicted with flat shoes meant for garden strolls on grass (see Damsholt
2010). However, in the picture, while tenderly caring for their younger brother,
108 Tine Damsholt

they sit gracefully in a statuesque manner, as though ‘fixed’ in a tableau vivant.

The painting creates a striking contrast between dynamic male movement and a
graceful female ‘still life’.
In contrast to the boys, the girls also seem aware that they are being
observed; they consciously look directly at the beholder. As art historian Michael
Fried has argued, whenever a self-consciousness of viewing exists, absorption is
compromised and theatricality results (see Fried 1980). And although the boys are
depicted as engulfed in nature, the painting offers a theatrical form of presence,
where absorption is also staged in a kind of theatre. Thus, the children’s bodies –
though seemingly unrestrained, spontaneous, and reflective of close contact with
nature – illustrate the cultural specificity in the staging and choreographing of
experience, sensibility, and gender in the material-discursive practices of emo-
tional selfhood.

4 Staging Patriotic Emotions

Tableaux vivantes were also a genre in the new political culture and emotiona-
lised public space, more or less inspired by the French renewal of political
culture. One of the new French revolutionary rituals was the Fête de la Fédération
in 1790, on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, which inspired ‘local’
political performances in several European countries (see also Colley 1992). For
the Fête de la Fédération, the Champ de Mars was transformed into a huge
amphitheatre with an ‘altar to the fatherland’ at the centre. Thousands of national
guards swore their loyalty to the fatherland at this altar, with its inscription
proclaiming that all mortals were equal, and that virtue, not birth, was decisive
(Schama 1989).
Such staging of political loyalty also played a role in the Danish-Norwegian
unitary state. Patriotic celebrations were held in private homes, in public spaces,
and in semi-public spheres such as the officers’ corps, where they excelled in
celebrating the birthdays of the king and the crown prince (Damsholt 2000). For
the most part, the figures to whom the celebrations were dedicated were absent.
In lieu of the monarchy, civil servants staged and hailed the abstract values of
equality, duty to, and love of the fatherland.
Furthermore, on such occasions, the staging of emotions was gendered. In
the French rituals, young women dressed in white appeared in tableaux as
representations of the ideas of liberty and reason. At Danish festivities, the female
sex gave their bodies to a similar classically-inspired patriotic iconography. These
celebrations, to which the military were admitted free of charge, often included
allegorical tableaux: for example, an obelisk of fake marble could be erected,
 Staging Emotions 109

with the inscription “for the favourites of virtue and benefactors of the people: the
king and the crown prince.” Three officer’s daughters, dressed in white, with
myrtle wreaths on their heads and laurel wreaths on their shoulders, surrounded
this monument’ and recited an adulatory text in chorus.6
At other celebrations, all the participants rose and shook hands, passionately
swearing friendship and fidelity to each other. Forming a circle and holding
hands in order to perform equality and fraternity was a favourite component of
French revolutionary festivals, where emotional civic selfhood was supposed to
be enacted.
These celebrations may be seen as an example of ‘a necessary political
theatre’, a performance of the utopian patriotic body politic, in which all estates
and citizens were potential and necessary actors. The crucial thing here was the
embodiment of the patriotic rhetoric, enacted by more or less anonymous partici-
pants, many of whom were public employees (both military and civil) and their
families. These rituals utilised many elements and symbols from the political
culture of revolutionary France. The repetition of the same activities and the reuse
of symbols such as liberty trees and female representations of the republic were
important elements in the construction of a sense of community (Hunt 1984). The
speeches and choreography of tactile experiences and physical presence created
a ritual in which the unity and equality of the population were performed and
symbolically enacted, creating an imagined patriotic community.
Thus the Danish celebrations described here may be seen as a component of
European patriotic culture, but also as rituals through which patriotic emotions
could be experienced. By virtue of these bodily, choreographed rituals, the people
involved were emotionally moved.
In 1801, patriotic rhetoric about dying for the fatherland became a reality in
the sea battle of Copenhagen.7 As such, the battle also became an emotional
event; those who fell in the Battle of Copenhagen embodied the abstract patriotic
rhetoric about dying for the fatherland as a civic duty, and their funerals were
staged in a way that emphasised this exemplary emotional value. According to a
contemporary report, the citizens of the capital were eager to honour those who
died ‘the glorious death for their fellow citizens’ (Abrahamson).
In this report, the funeral ceremony was extolled as the perfect emotional
patriotic ritual. It brought together citizens of both sexes and all classes, includ-
ing many of those who had fought in the battle, as they followed the remains of
the fallen brothers on foot from the seamen’s hospital to the cemetery outside the

6 As described in Det danske Krigsbibliothek 1794 vol. 1, p.132

7 467 died on the Danish side alone.
110 Tine Damsholt

ramparts of Copenhagen. Here, they formed a circle around the graves, along with
students from the Crown Prince’s Lifeguard, and sang Abrahamson’s newly
composed Være Fred med Eder Alle [Peace Be with You One and All], which
honoured the fallen who had been steadfast in battle against superior forces. The
emotional text underlined the fraternity between citizens, between the fallen and
the survivors. After the song, the coffins were lowered side by side, underlining
the unity of Danish citizens of all classes; it was a new phenomenon for officers
and privates to be buried together. Girls dressed in white also featured in this
patriotic ritual:

[…] and then a considerable number of white-clad daughters of the middle classes*) went
forward and scattered flowers in the graves, on the bodies of the courageous fallen.
*)
On such occasions the common people cannot, and those of high birth or rank will not,
feel or show emotion. (Abrahamson)

The message is clear: emotions had to be displayed! As Frevert argues, the display
of affect and emotions followed sophisticated rules, which varied firstly according
to social rank and estate and secondly according to gender (Frevert 2011, 100).
Aristocracy was regarded as ‘over-cultured’, and peasants as being in a state of
nature ruled by instincts. As Rousseau outlined, man had to ennoble feelings in
order to proceed to the ‘civil state’ and become an emotionally balanced citizen.
Thus, despite the rhetoric of fraternity among people of all classes, it is
obvious that the ceremony belonged to the bourgeoisie and the class of officials
who were already familiar with the patriotic ideas. And, just as importantly, it
belonged within the cult of sensibility, in which feelings were textualised and a
bodily language was developed as a ‘grammar of emotions’. For Abrahamson and
like-minded people to be able to recognise an act as an expression of emotion, it
had to follow set rules of iconography, gesture, and patterns of movement. Within
this framework, the reactions of the peasantry or the nobility could not be
classified as emotions. Nevertheless, Abrahamson had high expectations regard-
ing the effect of the ceremony. He claimed that people went home with ‘their
hearts full of fraternal gratitude’ and that they left with a resolve to follow the
‘most honourable example’ of the fallen when the fatherland and the defenceless
once again needed to be defended. Thus, the chief effect of the ceremony was to
arouse feelings that could in turn morally improve those involved, thereby in-
creasing the number of patriotic and civic selves.
Fully in accordance with the rationale of the cult of sensibility, it was believed
that the fallen and the feelings expressed for them could have an improving effect
on the survivors. On the same day, a collection was started for a monument to
‘fallen defenders of the fatherland’, and 276 citizens from all over Denmark took
part, ranging from the top nobility via officials, merchants, and clergymen, to
 Staging Emotions 111

ordinary craftsmen in small provincial towns. A poem was also published and
sold to raise contributions. Both the collection and the monument were intended
to preserve the feelings aroused throughout the kingdom (Lahde 1810).
The battle as an emotional event was also celebrated outside the capital, and
several plays on the subject were written and performed in provincial towns.
Oehlenschläger’s The Second of April 1801: A Dramatic Situation interweaves an
emotional love story with the battle, and thus civic virtue. Burghers, students,
and rural soldiers spontaneously praise Danish heroism and the defence of the
fatherland, and class divisions are dissolved when this motley gathering of
people utters the final words in chorus: “Here we stand smiling hand in hand,
united through virtue and civic spirit” (Oehlenschläger 1802, 43).
Citizens of the provinces were also able to take part in commemorations or
‘patriotic tableaux’ arranged by royal actor H. C. Knudsen in churches and town
halls all over the country to mark the battle. He spent his summer holidays
travelling around the country to ‘National Feasts’ to collect money for the
wounded, and the widows and children of the fallen. He sang and recited patriotic
poems in front of an ‘altar to the fatherland’ in a flower-adorned hall, while local
officials and military men appeared in uniform, and women in white were
recruited to form a decorative background and symbolise the nation, and the
patriotic virtues (Nyrop-Christensen 1970, 274). On the altar was an urn, symbolis-
ing the heroic patriots who had given their lives in the defence of Denmark on 2
April. The urn was a well-known iconographic element in English gardens, where
the sight of urns and tombs was expected to provoke the desired tears and
sympathy. Knudsen’s altar to the fatherland was a symbol combining religious
elements and well-known allegories in neo-classical style, replete with meaning
and expectations of emotional reactions. The ritual, besides Knudsen’s singing
and declaration, consisted of young girls dressed in virgin white placing a wreath
around the urn, a clergyman making a speech about the significance of patrio-
tism, community singing, and the collection of money for survivors or invalids
(who sometimes took part in the ceremonies) – a suitable offering from ‘the
patriotic and emotional congregation’.
In this staging of shared patriotic emotions, the repetition of the same rituals
all over the kingdom was a crucial part of the symbolic construction of the
participants as united by feeling across barriers of time, place, and social and
cultural differences (Klein 1995). Although only a limited proportion of the popu-
lation took part, these rituals may be regarded as an attempt to create an
‘imagined patriotic and emotional community’, in which the individuals merged
together in the general patriotic will, becoming a homogeneous group of good
patriotic citizens. The rituals initiated the individuals into the emotional patriotic
collective, and can be regarded as one of the technologies of a civic self.
112 Tine Damsholt

As part of the eighteenth-century philosophy of the education of the self, these

emotional rituals, the staging of sensory experiences and the physical direction of
the masses may be seen as detailed ways to organise sensory impression and thus
mobilise body and language in a way that went beyond words (Nilsson 1996, 112).
All of the senses were set in motion in one and the same experience, which may be
regarded as a technique of intensification – the condensation and demarcation of
the symbolic space in which individuals were initiated into the patriotic fellow-
ship. We do not know how such rituals affected the ordinary participants, but
judging by their popularity, we must assume that they ‘worked’ (Nyrop-Christen-
sen 1970, 274). However, it is important to bear in mind that even if they moved the
people involved, it is not certain they did so in the intended manner.
Although the rituals may have aroused other feelings than the desired ones,
there is no doubt that people at that time believed that if an event was to change
the individual self, then one had to be emotionally shaken, in accordance with
the theory of the sublime. These ceremonies, with their sensuous staging, were
considered to be well suited to this end. The idea of ceremonies as affective means
for the formation of the desired civic selfhood is expressed in exemplary fashion
in Laurits Engelstoft’s book of 1802, Om den Indflydelse Opdragelsen, især den
offentlige, kan have paa at indplante Kiærlighed til Fædrelandet. Et Statspædago-
gisk Forsøg [On the Influence that Education, Especially Public, Can Have for
Instilling Patriotism: An Essay in State Pedagogy]. Here, the author makes use of
the classical technologies of the formation of selfhood: tuition in history, narra-
tives about exemplary conduct, and physical training.
What was new, however, was Engelstoft’s exhortation to “promote patriotism
with sensuous means.” Engelstoft emphasised the necessity of influencing the
heart, which he claimed could be done through the senses. Ceremonies, national
festivals, and national plays had to be created, so that one could stage “instants”
which “shook a young person” and would not be forgotten. Therefore, he pro-
posed the institutionalisation of a youth festival, which could fill the heart with
the noblest sentiments: to this end, it had to have “a stamp of importance” and “a
solemn pledge must be made and certain symbolic actions performed, intended
to move and elevate the heart” (Engelstoft 1802, 57).
Here, we recognise the core rationale in the causal relationship between
emotion and civic virtue, which was established by Rousseau, among others. We
also encounter once again the central elements in the French didactic festivals
and the Danish patriotic rituals. With their soul-shaking properties, the solemn
ceremonies may be understood as not only staging the patriotic speeches, but
also as material-discursive practices enacting the cherished emotions and thereby
utopian civic selfhood. Thus, the ceremonies were also regarded by contempor-
aries as what Foucault would later call ‘technologies of the self’.
 Staging Emotions 113

5 Conclusion

The way in which patriotic ceremonies addressed emotions in order to improve

the people was fully in keeping with the patriotic culture of sensibility. The core
rationale was the causal relationship between emotion and civic virtue estab-
lished by Rousseau, among others. Thus technologies by which the heart could be
reached and emotions enhanced became the backbone in material-discursive
practices that shaped a new emotional self in the desired transformation and
trajectory towards a utopian civic selfhood.
Emotional practices took many forms: from reading epistolary novels or garden
strolls and tableaux vivants, to singing and holding hands in public or political and
emotional events. I have emphasised the intrinsic connections between movement
and sensation, and between physical and emotional movement, which Massumi
also discusses in terms of the affective nature of bodies. Another focal point in this
chapter has been the gendering of emotional practices. Although the home became
the most important stage for female citizens’ enactments of emotions and good
citizenship in the new gendered emotional topography, the public and the private
spheres also became entangled as a result of the pivotal status of emotions.
When emotions emerged into public awareness and agency in the late eight-
eenth-century bodies, citizens, gender, and politics were configured in new forms
of emotional practice. The patriotic discourse, the gendered body, new genres of
literature, the aesthetic staging of nature, the cult of emotion, and the political
culture of revolution were essential elements for these new configurations, in
which culturally specific staging and choreographing of practices of emotional
selfhood were shaped. From this perspective, this essay is a contribution that
underlines the historicity of emotions – and thereby also the genealogy of the
current interest in affects.
Emotions, then, are not universal feelings or affects, but are shaped in
historically, culturally, socially, and geographically specific configurations. How-
ever, they are not only social constructions or discourses. They are staged,
practiced, enacted, categorised, gendered and experienced; they are lived – in
body and mind. And, as such, they are material as well as discursive.

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der modtog det den 2den April 1802. Copenhagen, 1802.
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Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of National-
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Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility. Sex and Society in Eighteenth-century Britain.
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Damsholt, Tine. Fædrelandskærlighed og borgerdyd. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press,
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———. “Børnene i haven. Dragt, krop, barndomsopfattelse og iscenesættelse omkring år 1800”.
Tiden, kunsten & og den vestindiske forbindelse. Copenhagen: Øregaard Museum, 2010.
Darnton, Robert. “Readers Respond to Rousseau. The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity.” The
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Foucault. Eds. Luther H. Martin, et al. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
———. “At skrive sig selv” Foucaults masker. Eds. Nils Brygger, et al. Århus: Modtryk, 1995.
Frevert, Ute. Emotions in History – Lost and Found. Budapest: Central European University Press,
2011.
Gregg, Melissa and Seigworth, Gregory. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader.
Eds. Melissa Gregg, and Gregory Seigworth. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984.
———. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York, London: Norton & co., 2007.
Kayser Nielsen, Niels. Krop og oplysning. Om kropskultur i Danmark 1780–1900. Odense: Odense
University Press, 1993.
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holm: Carlssons, 1995.
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1795–1816.” Nordisk salonkultur. Et studie i nordiske skønånder og salonmiljøer
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Lahde, G. L. Gravmindet over De i Kampen d. 2 April 1801 faldne Fædrelands-Forsvarere. Forteg-
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Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University
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Martin Baake-Hansen
Nostalgia and Nostophobia: Emotional
Memory in Joseph Roth and Herta Müller

1 Introduction

On 17 April 1932, Joseph Roth published a preface to his novel The Radetzky
March (1932) in Frankfurter Zeitung. In this preface, he writes of the “gruesome
will of history” that has destroyed his former fatherland, the Habsburg Empire. “I
loved this fatherland”, he writes, “I loved the virtues and merits of this fatherland,
and today, when it is dead and gone, I even love its flaws and weaknesses”.1
Roth’s affection for this lost Empire increased in response to the growing political
nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s. Eventually, Roth came to regard the Habs-
burg Empire as a manifestation of supranationality, a concept he associated with
cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity, with tolerance and fraternity under
the reign of the holy Austrian Emperor. The Radetzky March is a tribute to this lost
Empire, or rather, to a remembered and idealised Empire that emerges in Roth’s
writings as the only possible home for the eternal wanderers who are his protago-
nists. I would suggest that this home, this utopian counter-image to the age in
which Roth lived and, is evoked by way of nostalgia in his novels and stories.
The picture is different, to say the least, in the work of Herta Müller. In her
early prose work – notably Nadirs (1982) – home is characterised not by the
presence of gentle noblemen, pure-hearted peasants, and sweeping landscapes
as in Roth, but by former SS-soldiers, violence, corruption, dirt, mud, flies, and
fungus. Müller’s depictions of her protagonists rely heavily on her own biography
(and thus is autofiction, as she calls it), and just as Müller left her native Romania
and went into exile in West Germany, so does Irene, the protagonist of her 1989
novel Traveling on One Leg. As a typical Müller-protagonist, Irene does all she can
to avoid nostalgia or homesickness, or Heimweh, which is the term employed in
Müller’s work. This is an intrusive and unwanted emotion, which Müller’s char-
acters nonetheless find considerable difficulty in overcoming. What emerges in
this battle against nostalgic memory and its idealisation of the past is what I will

1 “Ich habe es geliebt, dieses Vaterland. Ich habe die Tugenden und die Vorzüge dieses Vater-
lands geliebt, und ich liebe heute, da es verstorben und verloren ist, auch noch seine Fehler und
seine Schwäche” (Roth 1989, 874, my translation).
 Nostalgia and Nostophobia: Emotional Memory in Joseph Roth and Herta Müller 117

call in this essay nostophobia, the fear of returning to a home that is remembered
with negative emotions.
Home matters in both Roth and Müller, and depictions of home in their work
are shaped by the emotions of nostalgia and nostophobia. Being emotions, but
also specific modes of memory, which is to say, ways of interpreting the past,
these concepts pave the way for the combination of cultural memory studies and
affect theory that form the basis of this chapter.

2 Nostalgia Revisited

Before we return to Roth and Müller, it would be helpful to briefly consider the
history of the concept of nostalgia, a term coined by Johannes Hofer in his 1688
Dissertatio medica de nostalgia. Hofer combined the Greek words nostos, meaning
‘return home’ and algia, meaning ‘longing’ or ‘pain’. To Hofer, nostalgia was a
medical condition with a simple cure: return to one’s homeland. Conceived as a
malady that displayed the nostalgic person’s patriotism, it was originally seen as
an honorable albeit pathological feeling. Over time, however, the meaning of the
word changed, and in the twentieth century, nostalgia was mostly criticised as
reactionary, sentimental, a betrayal of history, and even “a social disease”, as
Susan Stewart has it in her study On Longing (xi).
Most critics agree that modern nostalgia is primarily concerned with time.
Stuart Tannock calls it a “periodizing” emotion:

Nostalgia works, in other words, as a periodizing emotion: that was then, and this is now. In
the rhetoric of nostalgia, one invariably finds three key ideas: first, that of a prelapsarian
world (the Golden Age, the childhood Home, the Country); second, that of a ‘lapse’ (a cut, a
Catastrophe, a separation or sundering, the Fall); and third, that of the present, postlapsar-
ian world (a world felt in some way to be lacking, deficient or oppressive). (Tannock
1995,456)

In such situations of rupture, nostalgia has the potential to provide comfort and
refuge from violent changes. Thus, according to Elisabeth Bronfen, nostalgia
creates “protective fictions” (Bronfen 1998, 259).
Andreas Huyssen characterises modernity as a whole by its link to the idea of
progress, and accordingly explains the critique of nostalgia by way of its tempor-
ality: “Nostalgia counteracts, even undermines linear notions of progress,
whether they are framed dialectically as philosophy of history or sociologically
and economically as modernization” (Huyssen 2006, 7). Since the 1980s, how-
ever, we have moved from being preoccupied with grand futures to searching for
and digging into the past: according to Huyssen, we have turned our attention
118 Martin Baake-Hansen

from “present futures” to “present pasts” (Huyssen 2003, 3). This has made the
concept of nostalgia newly relevant, and there have been several interesting
attempts to reconceptualise it within the field of cultural memory studies.
One example is Svetlana Boym’s 2001 book The Future of Nostalgia. Boym
distinguishes between restorative and reflective nostalgia, and argues that the
latter has a potential to generate critical thinking: “It [reflective nostalgia] reveals
that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective
memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection”
(Boym 2001, 49–50). According to Boym, “Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in
total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers
on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and
another time” (41). Restorative nostalgia aims toward an actual homecoming,
while reflective nostalgia is concerned with the “irrevocability of the past” (49).
Instead of discarding nostalgia as a disease, we could instead regard it as what
Raymond Williams has called “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977,128), as an
affective discourse that is born out of loss and has certain kinds of critical and
ethical potentials.
While the focus on temporality is important, it ought not to overshadow
nostalgia’s original connection to space. Space and time are inseparable in the
images of home in Roth and Müller. It is for this reason that I propose to work with
concepts of nostalgia and of nostophobia here, which connect neither to space or
time alone, but to both. Nostalgia and nostophobia both produce time-places,
chronotopes, in their specific ways of remembering home.
In his seminal work Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (1979),
Fred Davis argues that nostalgia remembers nothing but good things (Davis 1979,
16), while Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer argue that it does not necessarily
exclude traumatic memory. In their view, nostalgia might very well be a longing
for a place that is “Home in a way, but […] also hostile territory” (Hirsch and Spitzer
2003, 81). This complexity is also highlighted in studies from the field of social
psychology. In a series of empirical studies, Tim Wildschut and others find three
perspectives on what they call the “Affective Signature of Nostalgia” (Wildschut et
al. 975). The dominant perspective associates nostalgia with positive affects, while
others highlight negative affects, and some have bittersweet emotions.
This is to say that the emotion of nostalgia is not and never has been a simple
one. One can reverse Sianne Ngai’s argument in Ugly Feelings (2005), where she
writes on the distinction between affect and emotion: “My assumption is that
affects are less formed and structured than emotions, but not lacking form or
structure altogether” (Ngai 2005, 27). In other words, nostalgia might be more
formed and structured than affects per se, yet it is not entirely without a some-
what diffuse affect-like quality.
 Nostalgia and Nostophobia: Emotional Memory in Joseph Roth and Herta Müller 119

I argue that what emerges from reading Roth and Müller in order to ‘test’ this
‘new’ concept of nostalgia is a confirmation of the critical potentials of reflective
nostalgia, and the usefulness of introducing nostophobia into the discussion of
exile and homecoming. Nostophobia can be regarded as a ‘structure of feeling’,
and as a mode of memory that is closely connected to but also very different from
nostalgia. Both memory discourses return home, but what they find there, or
rather, how they interpret what they find, makes all the difference between them.

3 Home, Sweet/Disgusting Home

In The Radetzky March, Roth articulates counter-images to the actual age in which
he lived and wrote. But however positive Roth’s description of the Habsburg
Empire might be, he is by no means blind to the downsides of Habsburg discipline
and bureaucracy, of which he writes highly ironically. Roth’s most famous novel
thus illustrates Boym’s claim that nostalgia can in fact be nuanced, reflective, and
critical. Furthermore, in Boym’s words, this kind of nostalgic desire can have an
“important impact on improving social and political conditions in the present as
ideals” (Boym 2001, 355). In Roth’s work, this ideal is most aptly expressed in his
story “The Bust of the Emperor” (1935), in which Count Morstin depicts the lost
Habsburg Empire as a house of tolerance, a materialisation of the supranational
idea of home: “My old homeland, the monarchy, was a big house with many
doors and many rooms for all kinds of people”.2 What makes for the bittersweet
tone of Roth’s work is above all the fact that while he (as well as both narrator and
implicit author) seems to sympathise with his nostalgic characters, his work
nonetheless shows the immense discrepancy between their worldview and rea-
lity. In the late 1930s Roth conspired to restore the Habsburg Empire, but his own
literary work demonstrates that such an endeavour is utterly naïve.
The nostalgically remembered home in Roth is the very reverse of the home
depicted in Müller’s Nadirs. There is no longing for her Banat Swabian home,
which – hostile, cold, and dark as it is described to be – generates only negative
emotions, such as disgust and repulsion. And yet Müller’s work is all about
nostos. It continually returns to the lost homeland, but it does not create utopian
images, rather, it creates a dystopian chronotope. Nostalgia and nostophobia
share a strong connection to the lost home: they are, one might say, two sides of
the same coin that is inevitably being pulled back to the home of the past.

2 “Meine alte Heimat, die Monarchie, allein war ein grosses Haus mit vielen Türen und vielen
Zimmern, für viele Arten von Menschen” (Roth 2008, 310, my translation).
120 Martin Baake-Hansen

In an essay, Müller mentions that she has always written about the past. In
the 1980s, she lived in the city of Timişoara and wrote about her childhood
village 30 kilometers away: “The spatial distance was small, but the difference of
level was large. Dealing with the theme of the Swabian village I was in my past
and in the present of my parents”.3 The following passage from the chapter “The
Swabian Bath” is but one example of how this home of the past is depicted in
Nadirs:

Mother climbs into the bathtub. The water is still hot. The soap is foaming. Mother is rubbing
little gray rolls off her neck. Mother’s rolls are floating on the surface of the water. The tub
has a yellow ring. Mother climbs out of the bathtub. The water is still hot, Mother calls to
Father. Father gets into the bathtub. The water is warm. The soap is foaming. Father is
rubbing little gray rolls off his chest. Father’s rolls are floating with Mother’s rolls on the
surface of the water. The tub has a brown ring. (Müller 2003, 6)

This continues with Grandma and Grandpa until the water is black, and the scene
ends as follows: “The Swabian family, freshly bathed, is sitting in front of the TV.
The Swabian family, freshly bathed, is waiting for the Saturday night movie” (7).
If nostalgia transforms flaws and weaknesses into virtues and merits, any remem-
bered situation can be beautified. We cannot get direct access to Müller’s child-
hood home, but we can read her (autofictional) artistic interpretation of it. The
above quotation is an example of the way nostophobia, as opposed to nostalgia,
works as a mode of memory in literature: instead of erasing the bad or unwanted
parts of the past, it highlights them.
In Müller’s own words, the village in which she grew up was the first dictator-
ship that she came to know, and to her, it is just as deplorable as the regime of
Nicolae Ceauşescu that would later force her into exile in West Germany. In her
essays, Müller describes the village and her childhood home as xenophobic,
arrogant, and hostile, and this point of view is reflected throughout her fictional
and essayistic work.

4 The Aesthetics of Emotional Memory

The emotional connection to the chronotope of home in the works of Roth and
Müller is expressed, among other ways, in what Sianne Ngai would call the ‘tone’

3 “Die räumliche Distanz war zwar klein, aber das Gefälle gross. Mit dem Thema des schwä-
bischen Dorfes war ich in meiner Vergangenheit und in der Gegenwart meiner Eltern” (Müller
2003, 123, my translation).
 Nostalgia and Nostophobia: Emotional Memory in Joseph Roth and Herta Müller 121

of the books. Ngai is interested in how emotions are articulated in literature, in

how we identify the formal aspects that call for the terms ‘nostalgic’ or ‘nostopho-
bic’ when dealing with literary works such as Roth’s and Müller’s. In relation to
the complexity of these concepts, we could perhaps extend the acoustic meta-
phor, and speak instead of ‘chords’. One might say that loss strikes the keynote of
nostalgia, a note which is then supplied with different thirds and fourths, creating
different chords, such as the ambivalent bitter-sweetness that would be the chord
of (Roth’s type of) reflective nostalgia. Likewise, nostophobia sounds sometimes
sombre and sometimes humorous in Müller. Determining the ‘tone’ or the ‘chord’
of a novel is tricky but important, not only because one should always take
aesthetics into consideration, but also because Ngai makes a strong case that “the
ideology of a literary text may be […] revealed more in its tone […] than in any of
its other formal features” (Ngai 2005, 48). This is to say that tone and ideology,
aesthetics and ethics, might somehow link up.
Readers often get an immediate sense of the tone (or chord) of a novel, but as
Ngai explains, it is difficult to locate it in any isolated formal feature (45). In the
writings of Roth, the bittersweet chord of reflective nostalgia seems to revolve
around the phrase ‘Back then’ or Damals. It recurs several times in The Radetzky
March in instances when characters or the narrator juxtapose past and present.
Thus the phrase reads as both a bitter cry of protest (directed at the present) and a
sweet sigh of joy (directed at the past).
In Müller, one gets a sense of what I would call a nostophobic tone (or chord),
such as in the way the narrator dwells on the disgusting details of the bathtub
scene. While nostalgia would tend towards overlooking the dead rolls of skin,
they take centre stage in Müller’s nostophobic literary production of a disgusting
home. The tone of her fiction is dominated by negative emotions, and it is a
powerful affective corollary to the more direct critique of Romanian totalitarian-
ism she puts forward in her essays. Thus nostophobic memory proves to be a
strong reaction to a problematic past, which like nostalgia, has interesting aes-
thetic, ethical, and political aspects.
Müller’s poetics is one of detail and affect. Not only does she focus on little
details, such as the dead rolls of skin, but also on larger ‘details’ that were
‘forgotten’ in the official history of communist Romania: the Romanian Germans
who joined the SS during the Second World War, and the deportation of Roma-
nian Germans to Gulag camps in 1945, to name but two examples. By highlighting
such details, Müller aims to create what she calls a ‘poetic shock’. According to
Müller, literature paints a truthful picture of reality by fictionalising it (Müller
2003, 87–88), and ‘fictionalising’ in Müller is among other things producing an
aesthetics of nostophobia. In this way, her works just might give us a sense of
how it felt to grow up in a Swabian village in Ceauşescu’s Romania.
122 Martin Baake-Hansen

Memory is never absolute. While focusing on certain aspects of the past, it

necessarily leaves out others. As we have seen, nostalgia cleans up the past, while
nostophobia displays its dirt. What surfaces in novels concerned with exile and
homecoming is the fact that the empty space separating us from the past can lead
to different affective responses, two of which are nostalgia and nostophobia. One
of these desires and is attracted to the lost home, while the other is repulsed and
disgusted by it. Thus these emotions are opposite extremes in the spectrum of
possible affective answers to the question posed by home, for example, in the
work of Roth and Müller respectively.
Emotional tone is expressed in the aesthetics of a given literary work, and
influences the way the reader intellectually receives and affectively is influenced
by that work. Reading Roth may very well result in the reader feeling a little
nostalgic himself or herself, whereas when reading Müller one might feel sad,
angry, disgusted – hence these emotions are, as it were, affective potentials in the
texts. In this way, literature serves as a ‘space’ for the reader’s affective experi-
ence.
It is no secret that media in general affect and shape the way we understand
the world. Literature, too, plays an important role in our understanding of history
and memory, because it can create lasting images and emotions in the reader.
Literary works like The Radetzky March and Nadirs are symbolic forms that open
windows onto the past in specific ways. The works of Roth and Müller are two
examples of artistic interpretations of the past, and they offer certain affective
possibilities that can only be realised in the reader’s interpreting the text and
listening to its tone. Consequently, the literary works of Roth and Müller not only
relate to a fixed context, the past, but shape this very context as well. Or rather:
they shape the way we understand this context, the way we think about the past.
I would suggest that this is how literature works as cultural memory. In the words
of French historian Pierre Nora, a literary work might qualify as a kind of local
lieu de mémoire (Nora 1992), a site of memory, in which the collective memory of
the people, who experienced the events that form the socio-historical context of
the work, is crystallised. As we have seen, such sites are never neutral or un-
political.

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Stewart, Susan. On longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collec-
tion. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Tannock, Stuart. “Nostalgia critique”. Cultural Studies 9.3 (1995): 453–464.
Wildschut, Tim, Constantine Sedikides, Jamie Arndt, and Clay Routledge. “Nostalgia: Content,
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Christiane Struth
‘Affects as Stabilizers of Memory’?
The Literary Representation of Emotion, Affect, and Feeling in
Self-Reflexive Autobiographies

1 Introduction

What role do affects play in the process of transforming experiences into mem-
ories? This question has fascinated scientists from a range of different fields. It
has, for example, been researched extensively by cognitive psychologists, neurol-
ogists, and neuropsychologists. Affects have the power to shape our perceptions
and thus contribute at a very basic level to the formation of autobiographical
memories. The “real-world phenomenon known as weapon focusing” (Schacter
1996, 210) that Daniel Schacter describes in his study of the workings of memory,
Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, is a case in point. During
an event that is intensely emotionally arousing, as, for example, when being
threatened by a gun during a robbery, the arising affect, ‘fear’, causes a narrowing
of attention so that the person threatened with the gun tends to focus his or her
attention on the gun and therefore loses sight of the scene’s peripheral details. As
this admittedly extreme example demonstrates, the affect known as ‘fear’ deter-
mines what is best remembered afterwards. Thus, affects can determine the
contents of memory by determining what is selected from a host of more or less
relevant information in a certain situation. More generally, emotions, of which
affects form part, have a cognitive function in assigning relevance to certain
information or events. They can guide our attention through bodily signals as
reactions to certain external or internal states. In other words, emotional arousal
can direct perceptions and influence what goes into the formation of our personal
memories. Can it also serve to ‘stabilise’ them? Aleida Assmann poses this ques-
tion with regard to the perseverance of traumatic, emotionally challenging experi-
ences and their symbolic representation in autobiographical texts. In her seminal
article “Three Affects as Stabilizers of Memory: Affect – Symbol – Trauma”, she
claims:

Affect works as a magnifier of perception, retaining vivid scenes and acute images in the
shape of disconnected fragments. Without affect, there are no memories; it highlights a few
moments of our experience and retains them against the background of our continuous
forgetting. (Assman 2003, 29)
 ‘Affects as Stabilizers of Memory’? 125

Assmann’s assertion offers an explanation of why certain events enter autobio-

graphical narratives, whereas other insignificant events are left out. What is even
more interesting, considering the first hypothesis that “[a]ffect works as a magni-
fier of perception”, is the question of whether it is pertinent to speak of affects as
‘stabilisers’ of memory when affects seemingly entail some kind of perceptual
distortion. Can affects really be said to stabilise memories of past events, or do
they rather produce idiosyncratic versions of past events generated by the indivi-
dual’s emotional disposition or the intensity of emotional arousal experienced
during the event? Do affects, in ‘colouring’ experiences for example, emotionally
distort the memory of the original event, and do they perhaps even have the
power to create and sustain counterfactual memories?
The second obvious claim contained in the statement, that “[w]ithout affect,
there are no memories”, needs to be put into perspective. Of course, we know from
everyday experience that one can acquire knowledge of the world that forms part
of a memory subsystem called ‘semantic memory’ through a rational operation
known as ‘learning’, which usually requires neither emotion nor affect to take
place. Yet even operations like learning facts by heart can be enhanced if the facts
are combined with affective images. This mnemotic device has been known and
used since antiquity. In contrast, where ‘episodic memory’, i.e., personal mem-
ories that are time and place specific, is concerned, it is plain to see why emotions
should play a decisive role in storing long-term memories, for they single out
experiences that are relevant for: (1) the individual’s sense of self, which high-
lights the psycho-social function of emotions, (2) his/her social relations, which
emphasises the socio-cultural function of emotions, and (3) the individual’s
survival, which underlines the evolutionary function of emotions. This article
seeks to analyse the representation of emotion, affect, and feeling, and their
concomitant effects on memory formation and retention in autobiographical texts
that self-reflexively comment on processes of memory formation and autobiogra-
phical recall. The cognitive psychological and literary approach chosen by Ass-
mann will be supplemented by contributions from neuropsychology, which has
developed a model of memory as a networked storage system that can elucidate
the questions posed by Assmann and others on the basis of empirical facts.

2 Emotion, Affect, and Feeling

To answer the questions outlined above, it is necessary to define and differentiate

the key terms ‘emotion’, ‘affect’, and ‘feeling’. Currently, a great variety of defini-
tions of these terms is in circulation, not only between different disciplines but
also within them. Dan Shanahan provides an overview of the diverse definitions
126 Christiane Struth

currently used in psychology (see Shanahan 2007, 29f.). Since the concepts of
‘affect’, ‘emotion’, and ‘feeling’ seem to be inextricably linked with each other,
Shanahan refers to all three as the ‘AEF complex’ (29), which is an abbreviation of
‘affect/emotion/feeling complex’ (29). For the purpose of this article, I use the
term ‘affect’ as referring to an emotion that ‘affects’ a change in an object, triggers
an action or simply shapes human perceptions and experiences of events in
certain ways. As opposed to feelings, affects exclude the degree of intentionality
that characterises an action motivated by feelings.
Affects are more spontaneous than feelings since they are based on unme-
diated emotions, whereas feelings, in the context of this paper, are thought to
correspond with complex psychological states.1 The spontaneous or ‘uncon-
trolled’ nature of affects becomes plain in their capacity as ‘stabilisers of mem-
ory’, since the process of stabilising memories does not include human volition
but is guided, first and foremost, by the force of preverbal and therefore uncon-
scious emotions that send impulses to the human brain to then consciously pay
attention to particular events. Perhaps the conceptual differences between ‘af-
fect’, ‘emotion’, and ‘feeling’ are best demonstrated with the help of an example.
To this end, it is helpful to analyse the general conception of ‘fear’.
The notion of ‘fear’ can be described as a composite that is based on the
conceptions of: (1) fear as an emotion, (2) fear as an affect, and/or (3) fear as a
complex feeling. Fear as an emotion entails bodily reaction like increased heart
palpitation or sweating in the presence of some concrete or unspecified danger. It
is similar to what the German term angst refers to; namely some vague kind of fear
that is mainly conveyed through the senses but not consciously understood by
the person affected with angst. It is a latent feeling, so to speak. The notion of fear
as an affect would imply a reaction or an action that is not meditated but rather
induced spontaneously by certain affective emotions. Affective reactions in re-
sponse to a situation inducing fear include among others running away, freezing,
or fighting. These reactions correspond with the evolutionarily programmed set of
reactions that animals display in dangerous situations. Finally, fear can also be a
feeling, that is, a complex psychological state that is to a certain degree available
for conscious introspection and interpretation.
While emotions are often considered to be preverbal bodily states, feelings
involve a degree of consciousness that differs qualitatively from these preverbal
and therefore preconscious bodily states of ‘pure emotion’. Feelings are (meta-)
representations of emotional states, or “emotional feelings” (LeDoux 1988, 17) as

1 E.g., the legal system punishes crimes less severely if committed under the influence of
affective emotions.
 ‘Affects as Stabilizers of Memory’? 127

LeDoux calls them in explaining how feelings are generated as the result of higher
mental operations that evaluate and interpret clusters of sensual data: “when one
of these evolutionary old systems (like the system that produces defensive beha-
viours in the presence of danger) goes about its business in a conscious brain,
emotional feelings (like being afraid) are the result.” (ibidem) Thus, certain
clusters of emotions are identified by the conscious brain as pertaining to or
entailing a certain feeling (cf. LeDoux 1988,16). Feelings – like that of being afraid
– can be questioned and actively dealt with by the individual: What am I afraid
of? Is the feeling of fear I am experiencing at the moment appropriate under the
present circumstances, or am I overreacting? What measures can I take to con-
front or expel my fear? In contrast, the purely emotional state can be disorienting
for the individual, for example, when the inner or external source of fear is not
quite clear. An emotion that is not transformed into a ‘conscious feeling’ (a term
that is preferable to ‘emotional feeling’) makes the individual more prone to act
on an impulse or not to act at all, since states of disorientation, where the self
does not know how to interpret its feelings due to conflicting bodily signals, do
not generate clear calls to action.

3 Feelings and the Cartesian Divide

Feelings conceived of as both corporeal and conscious phenomena play an

important role in (re-) negotiating the Cartesian divide (cf. Damasio 1994). Here is
an excerpt from Maureen Howard’s self-reflexive autobiography Facts of Life,
which makes an important point about feelings as both mental and bodily
phenomena.2 In the excerpt the author comments on the limits of historical
objectivity that can be achieved in autobiography, and on her subjective view of
past events. However, what is more important in the context of this essay is the
wonder the female narrator expresses at the extent to which feelings can come to
dominate our lives:

Here, as a witness to the past, I am totally biased: I recall that their intentions seemed evil in
showing me their woman. They had me every morning, pawed my mind. We were into the
Cartesian question: How can it be that states of mind, feelings, expectations influence the
physical movement of our lives and can further control, let us say, our appreciation of music
and the plastic arts? (Howard 1978, 162)

2 Self-reflexive autobiographies like Maureen Howard’s Facts of Life, Stephen Fry’s Moab Is My
Washpot and Robert Kroetsch’s A Likely Story: The Writing Life engage with the conventions of
traditional autobiography by foregrounding and commenting on them.
128 Christiane Struth

It is significant that in her self-reflexive autobiography, Howard states with

regard to her memory of past encounters with two men whom she used to know
quite intimately that she is surprised by the high degree to which matters of body
and mind are interlinked, and she refutes, on the basis of her own experiences,
the Cartesian conviction that proposes a split between mind and body, reason
and emotions. She discussed these and other questions with the two men
remembered above, because, like her, they were of a philosophical bent and, at
the same time, longed for real-world experiences to bear out or refute their
philosophical convictions. It is significant that Howard, in this passage, refers to
feelings as ‘states of mind’, differentiating them from emotions that pertain to
the realm of the body. In enumerating ‘feelings’ alongside other ‘states of mind’
like ‘expectations’ she clearly demarcates feelings from the body and, for that
matter, the heart, traditionally thought to be the seat of the soul and/or of human
feelings.
Howard intuits that what we commonly refer to as ‘feelings’ have a strong
cognitive dimension which for Howard virtually renders feelings a matter of mind
and consciousness. However, since feelings are generated by bodily reactions or
corporeal states, it should not come as a surprise that feelings in their capacity as
conscious (meta-) representations of emotional states can influence “the physical
movement of our lives”, as Howard calls it, as well as the individual’s relation to
the fine arts which addresses itself to both mind and body, reason and emotion.
In other words, as mental (meta-) representations of emotional states, feelings
occupy a central position at the divide between mind and body, and make the old
Cartesian split between reason and emotion obsolete. This recognition highlights
the cognitive function of emotions.

4 Emotion and Pseudo-Memory

Memory, especially autobiographical memory, is another key concept that needs

to be defined within the scope of this essay. Since the cognitive psychologist Ulric
Neisser refuted what he called the ‘Reappearance Hypothesis’ (Neisser 1967, 281)
i.e., the hypothesis that memory produces faithful copies’ (281) of the past,
memory has been reconceptualised in a variety of ways (cf. also Schacter 1996,
40). Assmann states:

Memories, we have learned, are not preserved as encoded information but are constantly
reconstructed. In opposition to the static model of storage and retention, we are presented
with a dynamic model of continuous reconstruction and elastic adaptability to the demands
of an ever changing present. (Assmann 2003, 15)
 ‘Affects as Stabilizers of Memory’? 129

Neuroscientists have established a model of memory on the basis of the brain’s

physiology that conceptualises memory as a neural network consisting of many
subsystems that interact in (re)constructing memories. Strong, emotional mem-
ories seem to be more resilient against forgetting, since they are better networked
in the brain: the information is stored in multiple neural pathways and the neural
patterns thus generated are not only strengthened, but also reconfigured, during
reactivation, wherefore the memory that is retained as a memory trace (but not as
a complete memory unit) can be reconstructed more easily (cf. Markowitsch and
Daum 2001, 226f.). This applies especially to episodic memories that are often
equated with autobiographical memory: what kinds of episodes do people re-
count in their autobiographies? The answer is episodes that are best remembered
and that bear some kind of relevance to the writers’ personal lives and to their
senses of self. This relevance is often defined in emotional terms, or terms of
affectivity, meaning the intensity with which the emotional experience once
affected – and still continues to affect – the autobiographical subject. This can go
so far as to conjure up the same bodily symptoms in the act of retelling (and
reliving) past events, as Stephen Fry remarks of writing the scene of a shameful
boyhood memory in his self-reflexive autobiography Moab is My Washpot: “The
boiling flood that rose to my face then is rising again now. It is of that heat and
fever that can only be caused by injustice – rank, wicked, obscene, unpardonable
injustice.” (Fry 2004, 94) Memories can trigger emotional states, as in Fry’s
example, and can be triggered, vice versa, by certain emotional states that
contain the right cues.3 It is typical of self-reflexive autobiographies that the
autobiographical subject explicitly describes the moment of recall and its accom-
panying emotions, the ‘here and now’ of the discourse, the actual process of
writing down his or her life, while reflecting on the interrelations between how
something is remembered and what specifics triggered the memory in the first
place. In this respect, they differ from traditional autobiographical texts that focus
on the contents of the represented lives and not so much on the truthfulness and
underlying laws of memory as self-reflexive autobiographical texts do.
Autobiographical memory is not only composed of ‘episodic memory’ but
also of ‘semantic memory’ that helps us to put personal experiences into perspec-
tive and to interpret episodes of our lives in accordance with the historically and
culturally specific concepts that each of us acquires in the course of our lives. The
following example taken from Robert Kroetsch’s self-reflexive autobiography A
Likely Story: The Writing Life nicely shows how these two subsystems cooperate in

3 On the interdependence of mood and memory recall see Schacter 1996, 207.
130 Christiane Struth

the reconstruction of a supposedly authentic boyhood memory that turns out to

be the elaborated memory of a cautionary tale told to children in rural Canada:

We were visiting people who lived in a house near the Whitemud River. It was in that house
I first heard about the cow in the quicksand.
For much of a lifetime now, two narrative possibilities […] have quarreled in my mind.
Part of me is persuaded that I actually saw the cow in the quicksand. That part of me is still
horrified at the sight of the cow, its head and the thin line of its backbone showing in the
quicksand, the terrified cow snorting, frothing at the mouth, the helpless men trying to get a
lariat onto the cow’s head without themselves getting stuck […]. There is another part of me
that suggests that I and the other kids were told the story to keep us from playing along the
riverbanks and down in the drying quicksand and risking our lives. (Kroetsch 1995, 78–79)

What this example nicely shows is how deeply engrained this ‘narrative experi-
ence’ is, probably due to the intense emotion of fear that the tale elicited in the
autobiographer’s younger self for the cow’s, but also for the men’s, lives. The
memory of the tale is still alive in the adult, since the younger self, as the adult
recalls, was ‘horrified’ when he visualised the scene. It is pertinent to assume that
the gist memory of the tale was stabilised by the intense emotion of fear by which
the narrator’s younger self was seized or rather, ‘affected’ while listening to the
tale. Thus, the cautionary tale has achieved its aim of instilling fear of riverbanks
in the young child – in which case fear must be conceptualised as a more or less
conscious ‘feeling’ with a corresponding call to action i.e., ‘stay away from
riverbanks!’ Furthermore, the rich circumstantial detail and the vividness of recall
seem to suggest that the author is reporting an authentic memory, of which even
the mature narrator remains partially convinced. Aside from the gist memory, the
additional information provided by episodic memory (which is always time and
place specific) helps the mature narrator to debunk the seemingly authentic
childhood memory as a pseudo-memory: in retrospect, it seems plausible to
assume that, as a child, he elaborated on the story of the cow in the quicksand
which he had first ‘heard’ about in the house near the Whitemud River. In
comparing the gist of the pseudo-memory with the additional information pro-
vided by episodic memory and putting it into perspective through the frame of
knowledge that he has since acquired about the existence and function of cau-
tionary tales, the mature narrator is able to form a more correct autobiographical
memory.
However, although the narrator indicates that the memory is probably a
pseudo-memory, he remains partially convinced of its truthfulness, and is loath
to debunk it as a mere childhood myth. Assmann argues with regard to emotion-
ally charged memories: “Affect-memories bear the stamp of authenticity which is
why they are cherished by individuals as inalienable private property.” (Assmann
 ‘Affects as Stabilizers of Memory’? 131

2003, 29) Considering that the author grew up in rural Canada, the memory can
be said to stabilise his personal identity construction, which is informed by a
specific regional identity of which the generic memory forms part. Therefore, he is
reluctant to discard the memory, although his judgment urges him to disown it, at
least partially.
In summary, what this example nicely shows is firstly, how affects can
stabilise even pseudo-memories, and secondly, how the interplay of different
memory systems (in this case episodic and semantic memory, together with the
gist memory of the pseudo-event) can be employed to de- and re-construct
autobiographical memories, because these memories are available only as mem-
ory traces that are supported through different, interrelated networks that are
actively (re)constructed in the creative process of ‘re-membering’. The example
also corroborates the “‘apodictic quality’ of affective memories”, (Assmann 2003,
19) which cannot be changed at will in order to conform to an objectified
representation of the personal past. Such affective memories resist “discursive
reinterpretation” (19) owing to their centrality in the construction of personal
identity.

References

Assmann, Aleida. “Three Stabilizers of Memory: Affect – Symbol – Trauma.” Sites of Memory in
American Literatures and Cultures. Ed. Udo J. Hebel. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. 15–30.
Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam,
1994.
Fry, Stephen. Moab Is My Washpot. 1997. London: Arrow Books, 2004.
Howard, Maureen. Facts of Life. 1975. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
Kroetsch, Robert. A Likely Story: The Writing Life. Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer CP, 1995.
LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. 1996.
New York: Touchstone, 1998.
Markowitsch, Hans J. and Irene Daum. “Neuropsychologische Erklärungsansätze für kognitive
Phänomene.” Neurowissenschaften und Philosophie: Eine Einführung. Eds. Michael Pauen
and Gerhard Roth. München: Fink, 2001. 210–237.
Neisser, Ulric. Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967.
Schacter, Daniel. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: Basic
Books, 1996.
Shanahan, Dan. Language, Feeling, and the Brain: The Evocative Vector. New Brunswick, London:
Transaction Publishers, 2007.
Stephanie Frink
“The Past Beats Inside Me Like a Second
Heart”: The Narrative (Re)Construction of
Emotions in John Banville’s The Sea1

1 Introduction

Emotions are as ubiquitous in narrative fiction as they are in everyday life. Stories
have the potential to thematise feelings through characters and events, to express
narrators’ reflections on their own or others’ emotions, and to comment on
affective processes on a meta-level; moreover, they may also to trigger a broad
range of emotional responses in their readers. By employing different narrative
and aesthetic techniques, novels and other works of fiction do not only take up
but also problematise and transform notions of affectivity. They therefore provide
a rich but hitherto relatively unexplored source of knowledge about the nature
and manifestations of emotions that may usefully complement scientific research
(cf. Hogan 2011b, esp. ch. 1). Although recent developments in the social or
affective neurosciences have, not least thanks to the discovery of ‘mirror neu-
rons’, considerably advanced our understanding of the ‘emotional brain’, there
are still many aspects of the human emotion system that cannot be explained by
laboratory methods but that can be – and have, in fact, for centuries already been
– recorded through narrative. After all, “narrative fiction is, in essence, the
presentation of fictional mental functioning” (Palmer 2004, 5). Due to the appar-
ent transparency of fictional minds, literary narratives often grant direct access to
“the unspoken thoughts, feelings, perceptions of a person” (Cohn 1978, 7–8),
processes that tend to remain opaque in real-life interactions. While empirical
experiments offer an external view on emotions, novels manage to further com-
municate their experiential dimension, i.e., the subjective experience of “what it’s
like” (Herman 2009, 73) to feel something, and thus to “presen[t] us with detailed
interpretive contexts for comprehending the mechanical explanations articulated
by the scientists” (Hogan 2011b, 18).
This chapter, then, is based on the assumption, as articulated by Patrick Colm
Hogan in several seminal publications (see, e.g., Hogan 2011a; Hogan 2011b), that

1 I would like to thank my doctoral supervisor, Vera Nünning, for making valuable comments on
the first draft of this article, and Jennifer Smith for her careful proofreading.
 The Past Beats Inside Me Like a Second Heart” 133

emotions and stories are interconnected and, consequently, that the studies of
affect and narrative are, in fact, inseparable too. The interrelation between stories
and emotions is an important and rapidly growing area of research within the
broader field of cognitive narratology, one that has received increased attention
in recent years. Whereas numerous studies have assessed the social, cognitive,
and affective – especially empathic – impact of novel-reading, Hogan has pur-
sued a different line of enquiry, concentrating on the narratological treatment of
emotion or, more precisely, on the question of how story structures are organised
by emotions. Claiming that “the distinctive aspects of narrative are to a great
extent the product of emotion systems” (Hogan 2011a, 1–2), Hogan introduced
‘affective narratology’ as a promising new approach, which, with its specific focus
on the emotional aspects of stories, complements existing cognitive research on
the mind-narrative nexus while also drawing on recent scientific findings for
inspiration. This essay simultaneously builds on and extends Hogan’s account by
studying narrative as an affective medium in its own right (see also Frink 2013).
Drawing on the concepts and analytical tools provided by narratology and narra-
tive theory as well as on concepts from psychology, I will first of all highlight the
role emotions play in narrative self-construction. In a second step, I will provide a
reading of John Banville’s prizewinning novel The Sea (2005), which exemplifies
the myriad ways in which works of fiction (re)construct feeling processes. Instead
of focussing on the story level and on specific plot patterns, as Hogan does, I
place special emphasis on the level of discourse, i.e., on the narrative mediation.
In particular, I will look at how basic narratological categories such as focalisa-
tion or time and space contribute to the staging of emotionality, and how emo-
tions, in turn, affect the process and style of narration as such. Banville’s fictional
(meta)autobiography,2 I propose, lends itself particularly well to an inquiry in
terms of affectivity, because it fruitfully demonstrates how a recent loss and
distant trauma challenge the narrator’s self-expression.

2 ‘Emotion-Making’ through Narrative

As a constitutive part of identity, emotions take centre stage not only in our daily
actions and interactions, but also in the narratives we tell about ourselves.
Because affects charge situations with personal significance, our most important

2 In fact, the term ‘meta-autobiography’ seems to be a more appropriate genre description in this
context, for The Sea, in many instances, self-reflexively foregrounds and critically reflects upon
the enterprise of ‘life writing’ as well as on the problems involved in it.
134 Stephanie Frink

and detailed autobiographical memories, on the basis of which we construct our

life stories, tend to be emotional ones (see Assmann 2003, 15–30). Hence, one
could well argue that affective stories are at the heart of narrative world- and self-
making (cf. Herman 2009). Typically, narrators – in fiction as in real life – focus
on momentous events and turning points in their lives, with the retelling being an
attempt to come to terms with unresolved feelings or emotional unease. Banville’s
narrator, for instance, tells us about the two losses that have breached his
emotional biography and shattered his self-conception.
Therefore, narrative itself could even be conceptualised as the most suitable
tool for processing feelings (see Nünning 2012). As psychologist Tilmann Haber-
mas and his colleagues claim, “[n]arrative is an essential part of the human
emotion process” (Habermas 2006, 752). Since emotions are not naturally mean-
ingful, we often only grasp them when verbalising or narrating them: “the mean-
ing of an emotion is fully understood when organized within a sequential narra-
tive framework that identifies what is felt, about whom, and in relation to what
need or issue” (Greenberg and Angus 2004, 333). Stories thus provide frames for
making sense of our own emotions and allow us to access the qualia of others’
experiences, or to empathically share these. From a constructivist and narratolo-
gical perspective, then, the emotional relevance of events is neither pre-given nor
inherent to the situation, but rather unfolds through narration. To put it in the
words of Theodore Sarbin, “instances of emotional life” are “best understood as
narrative construction and reconstruction” (Sarbin 2001, 217–18). In autobiogra-
phical narration, feelings are typically negotiated in a dialogue between the
‘present self’ telling the story and his/her former self, or rather selves. The main
task of the ‘remembering I’ is to establish a meaningful connection between the
past and his/her current situation, i.e., to bridge the temporal and cognitive-
emotional gap separating his/her different selves, and to establish a coherent
narrative (cf. Neumann 2005, 162).
Moreover, narrativisation – due to its world- and meaning-making qualities –
significantly influences the process of emotion regulation and has the power to
reduce the impact of negative feelings, since “narrating an emotional event is a
central mechanism for interpreting and coping with an experience and the emo-
tions it elicited” (Habermas et al. 2009, 760).3 The broader assumption that the
narrative shaping of feelings is a precondition for well-being, and for self-organi-
sation more generally, is also supported by psychological studies indicating that

3 Due to the fact that psychologists have increasingly come to acknowledge that the process of
narration contributes to effective therapeutic outcome, several productive forms of emotion-
focused therapy have recently emerged that make use of narrative (cf. Greenberg and Angus
2004).
 The Past Beats Inside Me Like a Second Heart” 135

mental health correlates with a higher degree of narrativity and narrative structur-
ing (cf. Habermas and Berger 2011). However, while incorporating affective ex-
periences into one’s life story is doubtlessly crucial for the formation of identity, it
is by no means an unproblematic undertaking: overwhelming, traumatic events
in particular often cannot be organised into a meaningful narrative order, but
distort prototypical emotion paradigms and thus threaten the continuity of the
life story (cf. Birke 2008, 46).
Contemporary fiction, which is full of ‘broken stories’ in which self-narrators
deal with fragmentation or trauma, presents a promising medium for investiga-
ting the difficulties in narrativising intense feelings. Narrators’ or characters’
personal crises, as Dorothee Birke (cf. Birke 2008, 43–54) convincingly argues,
are often accompanied by a crisis of form, a disruption of narrative, and a
decrease in narrativity. After all, “the difficulty of coping with emotional events”
is commonly “reflected in the difficulty of actually narrating them” (Habermas
and Berger 2011, 207). In order to find a way of voicing their emotional turmoil,
the narrators of novels often subvert traditional patterns of representation, ex-
periment with innovative modes of narration, and question the suitability of
narrative as a compensatory mechanism (cf. Onega 2009, 199–200). The Sea is a
case in point, centring on an autodiegetic narrator who tries to deal with several
disturbing incidents by writing a “journal of the plague year” (Banville 2005, 23).
Instead of portraying a coherent narrative, the novel defies expectations about
structure and time, as well as about causality, and foregrounds the process of
remembering and self-making. In doing so, it explores narrative’s great potential
for negotiating overwhelming feelings; even grief itself is staged as a narrative
process (cf. Weston 2010). Conveying Max Morden’s “experientiality” (cf. Fluder-
nik 2004) – hence emotionality –, Banville not only invites the reader to imagina-
tively simulate and reflect on the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings, but also
offers valuable, otherwise unavailable insights into the dynamic interaction
between narrative, identity, memory, and emotion.4

4 ‘Fictions of memory’ is a genre that is necessarily also about emotions: our feelings do not just
have an impact on the content of our memories, colouring what we remember; the act of
remembrance itself, i.e., how we remember and, consequently, how we retrospectively frame
autobiographical memories through narrative, too, is influenced by current emotions or needs.
Whether or not self-narrators identify with or distance themselves from their past selves is,
therefore, often a matter of emotion.
136 Stephanie Frink

3 Narrativising Emotions in The Sea

The Sea is a typical tale about memory: cast in the form of fictive diary entries, it
is the monologue of Max Morden, “a person of scant talent and scanter ambition,
[…] uncertain and astray and in need of consolation and the brief respite of drink-
induced oblivion” (Banville 2005, 200). After the death of his wife from cancer,
this middle-aged art historian seeks “escape from the intolerable present in the
only tense possible, the past” (99). He returns to the seaside town of Ballyless,
where he spent a memorable holiday 50 years ago, “to live amidst the rubble of
the past” (4). Submerged in a flood of affective memories, he not only has to cope
with the recent loss of Anna but also to confront the sudden death – or most likely
suicide – of his childhood love Chloe Grace. As the story unfolds, Morden
reconsiders the relationships and experiences of various stages of his life, and
faces the gloomy reality of the seemingly senseless present. Since memories do
not offer support or create meaning, he increasingly seeks consolation in alcohol,
which almost kills him. His drinking, paired with the burdens of emotional
pressure and doubts concerning his own impressions, as well as several intratex-
tual discrepancies and inconsistencies make him an unreliable narrator.
While emotions certainly figure prominently on the story level, it is especially
the narrative discourse, i.e., the organisation and shaping of the material, that
yields illuminating insights into Morden’s affective profile. Rather than featuring
a narrator who merely comments on feelings, The Sea imitates emotions in action,
thus creating the impression of authentically experienced feelings. Constantly
complaining about “how imprecise language is, how inadequate to its occasions”
(Banville 2005, 66), Morden does not use concrete emotion words to describe or
directly label his feelings, but implicitly sets up affective dynamics by using
certain structural and stylistic devices such as elliptical syntax, poetic tone, or
detailed descriptions. Given that emotional events seem to be visually anchored
in his memory, as “tableau[x]” (221), the art historian retrieves them mostly in the
form of sensory or affective images, and mimics feeling processes with the help of
a number of strategies that reproduce the phenomenological atmosphere of past
moments (see Peters 2008, 47–51). The use of different stylistic means constitutes
a key emotion resource in the novel, as it allows Morden not only to mark events
as emotionally salient, but also to construct himself as affective experiencer of
them, and to re-live previous feelings in the present, thus establishing a performa-
tive link between his different selves (cf. Herman 2009, 96–97). At the same time,
however, this rhetoric of metaphors and of indirections reveals the inexpressibil-
ity of feelings, and how the narrator avoids confronting these.
The representation of time and space also plays a pivotal role in the narrative
staging of Morden’s crisis (cf. Birke 2008, 66–71, 87–88). Different times carry
 The Past Beats Inside Me Like a Second Heart” 137

strong emotional connotations, as the suggestive imagery and the use of oppos-
ing semantic fields demonstrate.5 Feelings are (re)constructed through the differ-
ent ways in which the temporal categories of order, duration, and frequency are
employed. Since Morden is “more interested in remembering life, than in living
it” (Friberg 2007, 251), The Sea does not employ a plot in the conventional sense
but consists mostly of analepses, and is pervaded by a mnestic quality through-
out. Memory is staged as a subjective phenomenon rather than as conscious,
controllable recollection, and Morden’s inner turmoil goes hand in hand with a
collapse of sequentiality. Rejecting chronological order, the novel operates with
at least three temporal strands that coexist and merge. The narrative discourse is,
accordingly, characterised by abrupt shifts between different time levels and
seemingly unorganised spasms of memory. The fact that Morden is often sponta-
neously overwhelmed by memories shows that remembering is in itself an unset-
tling experience for him, in that he can scarcely “distinguish dream from waking”
(Banville 2005, 96) or past from present: “Grief blurs timespace.” (Maddrell 2006,
62) Furthermore, the process of remembering as such seems to be guided by
feelings. On the one hand, moments of extended ‘mind time’ are engendered
through affective associations, and on the other, perceptual or sensual stimuli
often lead the narrator to plunge into the past (cf. Imhof 2006, 171–72).
This also shows that places function as powerful cues for memory and affect
and that, indeed, the concept of “spatial mourning” (Watkiss 2007, no pag.) is
central in Banville’s novel. In order to grieve, the protagonist not only retreats
into the past mentally, “wandering through the chambers of horror in [his] head”
(Banville 2005, 212), but also physically, by travelling back to a childhood place
and thus literally relocating himself in relation to past scenarios. When the house
becomes a “hollow”, “hostile”, “vast echo-chamber” (146) after Anna’s death, his
return to ‘the Cedars’, the former holiday home of the Graces and now a guest-
house, feels like a homecoming:

When Miss Vavasour [the landlady] left me in what from now on was to be my room I […] felt
that I had been travelling for a long time, for years, and had at last arrived at the destination
to where, all along, without knowing it, I had been bound, and where I must stay, it being,
for now, the only possible place, the only possible refuge, for me. (157)

At the same time, however, Morden finds these once familiar surroundings
disturbing, and “experience[s] a sense almost of panic” (156) as he becomes

5 Whereas the ‘cold’ present and the even ‘colder’ future are obviously negatively charged, the
past is referred to through images from the semantic field of ‘home’, offering ‘shelter’, ‘comfort’,
and ‘cosiness’; – a ‘retreat’ or place of ‘womby warmth’ to ‘cower’ and ‘hide’ in (Banville 2005,
60–61).
138 Stephanie Frink

aware of the “incongruence of actual and remembered realities” (Rostek 2011,

157): “Everything was slightly out of scale, all angles slightly out of true.”
(Banville 2005, 156) Despite his desperate search for a place of belonging – “I was
determinedly on my way somewhere, going home, it seemed, although I did not
know what or where exactly home might be” (24) – Morden remains homeless
until the end of the novel, when his daughter Claire takes him home: “home she
says!” (259)
Another aspect that deserves further consideration from an affective-narrato-
logical point of view is focalisation, that is to say, the question of whose cognitive,
emotional, and perceptual perspective orients the narrative. Since remembering
inevitably involves adapting an original experience to present needs, one has to
distinguish between the emotions actually felt at a certain point in time and their
necessarily retrospective narrativisation. When looking at the interplay between
Morden’s earlier selves and the narrating self, one realises that his past and
present vantage points often overlap: many passages are ‘doubly focalized’ (cf.
Phelan 2001, 60; Birke 2008, 72–79) insofar as they contain traces of both past
and present selves. The fact that Morden’s different self-perspectives both inter-
sect and diverge shows him as oscillating between an emotionally involved and a
distanced, detached stance towards his memories. On the one hand, past mo-
ments are disturbingly real and accessible to the narrator in his here-and-now,
but on the other, he constantly questions the accuracy of his account, with the
effect of creating distance.6 At times, “the past has a force so strong it seems [he]
might be annihilated by it” (Banville 2005, 47). Field memories reproduce former
emotions and perceptions in such a way as to create the impression of a tangible,
immediate past (cf. Neumann 2005, 30–31, 172–73); when recounting emotionally
intense situations, Morden sometimes even switches to the present tense. Mo-
ments in which the narrating ‘I’ steps back completely are, however, rare. Large
parts of the story are filtered through the consciousness of his present self, who
zooms out of the narrative to take an observer-perspective on his former vantage
point, thus dissociating his different selves. Many episodes in the novel illustrate
how difficult it is for Morden “to speak as [he] spoke then” (Banville 2005, 34):
“Where am I, lurking in what place of vantage?” (10) What is more, there are also
instances in the narrative present in which the narrator sees himself “as if from
[the] outside” (193), “at a distance, being someone else and doing things that only
someone else would do” (43). In short, Morden’s crisis of loss turns out to be, in
essence, a crisis of identity. As “a distinct no one” who “never had a personality”
(216), he has always defined himself through his relationships with others. With

6 See Vandelanotte for a discussion of distancing features in The Sea.

 The Past Beats Inside Me Like a Second Heart” 139

Anna gone, he now faces the twofold task of dealing with bereavement and of (re)
establishing a sense of self.

4 Limits of Narrative as an Affective Instrument

Although writing allows Morden to shape his pain and to impose structure on his
emotional chaos, the story does not end in line with productive affectivity, since
after all, his feelings are not discharged, but merely retained. Therefore, I want to
suggest that the narrator’s crisis of memory and identity may be linked to certain
weaknesses in using narrative as a cognitive and affective instrument (see also
Birke 2008; Nünning 2013, esp. 157–63).
The first aspect standing in the way of his coping effectively is related to
coherence, which Dan McAdams considers crucial for creating ‘meaningful
selves’ (McAdams 2006, 109). Self-narrators generally have to fulfil the task of
interconnecting their different selves, i.e., of integrating their heterogeneous
experiences into one diachronic self-defining story.7 Morden’s inability to make
sense of his inner turmoil may partly be due to the fact that his narrative lacks the
specific temporal and causal-motivational markers required for coherent story-
telling. His narrative is not governed by identifiable plot patterns, but is shaped
by random feelings and associative memories. The intermingling of different time
levels – “it has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible
present” (Banville 2005, 96) – makes it hard to establish causal connections, as
Morden himself admits: “All this I remember, intensely remember, yet it is all
disparate, I cannot assemble it into a unity.” (139) His challenge, therefore, is to
reassess the turning points in his life in such a way as to make each more
manageable, meaningful, and consistent (cf. Bruner 1994, 42).
The second prevailing problem is Morden’s diminished agency. According to
pioneer narrative psychologist Jerome Bruner, we construct self-concepts “by
assembling and conceptualizing instances of our own agentive acts” (Brunner
1994, 41). Psychotherapists stress that coping may, in general, “be more success-
ful if the process of re-narrating the event involves not only confrontation with
emotions, but also a process of increasing interpretative activity” (Habermas and
Berger 2011, 208). Banville’s narrator, however, does not attempt to regulate his
feelings, but rather settles for “writh[ing] in [his] misery” (Banville 2005, 46).

7 Note that coherence does not necessarily imply closure in the context of contemporary fiction,
which is marked by discontinuity and indeterminacy; ‘authentic life’, according to Morden, ‘is
supposed to be all struggle’ (Banville 2005, 60).
140 Stephanie Frink

Since he fails to establish himself as agent in both the past and present, his
narrative is characterised by passivity, which becomes visible in eventlessness on
the level of action and in his inability to control the process of telling. Instead of
using the advantage of hindsight to critically position himself towards the nar-
rated incidents, he sees himself as a victim, admitting that he has “always been a
moaner” (42).
A third problem lies in the gaps and ambiguities that characterise Morden’s
discourse. Psychologists have criticised these blanks in autobiographical narra-
tive, which result in Morden’s case from his own constricted perspective as well as
from his shutting out of others’ thoughts and feelings:8 “The more points of view
are omitted, especially those of one’s own motives, the less feasible and hence
neurotic does one’s own story become.” (Habermas 2006, 501) Despite clinging to
the past, the narrator seems to withhold important information and avoids ques-
tioning certain aspects of his life. We get the impression that he is torn between
the wish to address “the old, unasked questions” (Banville 2005, 261) and the fear
of doing so. He simply rushes from one past moment to the next, because in
directly confronting his memories he would have to take responsibility for his
actions, or rather non-actions: “[L]et me creep […] past all this past, for if I stop I
shall surely dissolve in a shaming puddle of tears.” (50–51) Of course, this is not to
say that Morden does not display any self-reflexivity at all; rather, I am suggesting
that his splitting off of unwanted parts of the past can be seen as a defense-
mechanism, or form of suppression. This also throws a different light on the
function of Morden’s self-narrative: the purpose of his journal-writing is not
simply to allow him to grieve, but also to atone. Accordingly, the feeling at the
heart of the story is guilt, paired with helplessness. Morden may feel guilty about
the death of the Grace twins, about “not-having-known” his wife more thoroughly,
and about having used their marriage as “a way of fulfilling the fantasy of [him]
self” (Banville 2005, 215–216). Now that it is too late, he is overcome by the feeling
of having missed out on something in life (cf. Banville 2005, 218; Imhof 2006, 177).
This belated culpability also explains Morden’s “self-disgust” (Banville 2005, 70)
and why he prefers “anger, vituperation, violence” over “solicitude” or “tender-
ness”: he returns to Ballyless precisely so “that it should be hideous, that it should
be, that [he] should be, in Anna’s word, inappropriate” (149).

8 We only get glimpses into the emotions of other characters through their behaviour and speech.
Claire, for example, not willing to ‘indulge [her father’s] foibles and excesses as others do’
(Banville 2005, 50) and blaming him for his self-absorption, offers an alternative model of dealing
with loss, thus functioning as a foil to Morden.
 The Past Beats Inside Me Like a Second Heart” 141

5 Conclusion: The Narrative-Emotion Nexus as a Promising

Field of Research

This chapter has shown that narrative, as a way of worldmaking and a mode of
writing that can draw on genre-specific conventions, serves as a privileged
means of mediating, reflecting on, and managing affectivity. In The Sea, narra-
tive, visual, and lyrical strategies of coping with emotions are juxtaposed. Rather
than simply describing his feelings, Morden actually produces his affective
reality through the act of self-narration. Given that his story is not just about
emotions but constitutes an integral part of the feeling process, one could even
argue that he performs narrative and emotion simultaneously in the process of
storytelling. Challenging traditional forms of expression, the novel questions our
extra-literary knowledge about emotions and their role in self-constitution, and
offers an ambiguous, flexible view of the relation between narration, identity,
and affect. Although Banville does not propose a solution to his narrator’s crises,
indicating the impossibility of closure and of an accurate reconstruction of the
‘real’ past, he seems to insist on the cathartic function of telling one’s story (see
Peters2008, 42) – on the value of what Joanna Rostek terms ‘mnemic therapy’
(Rostek 2011, 163). Hence, The Sea implicitly underlines the importance of inter-
personal emotion-sharing, of interactional storytelling, and of including the
perspectives of others for an adequate understanding of one’s past (cf. Rostek
2011, 170).
Given this almost natural bond between emotions and stories, it is indeed
surprising that narratology has not sooner sought a dialogue with affective
science and that, conversely, narratives have not occupied a more prominent
place in current critical discussions about affectivity. At once drawing on and
adding to scientific research, literary analysis might substantially contribute to an
interdisciplinary theory of affect, providing a framework for synthesising existing
emotion studies:

[L]iterature is a valuable site for interdisciplinary study that integrates psychological, socio-
logical, neurological, and other approaches in the context of nuanced, complex depictions
of human emotional experience (Hogan 2011b, 6).

Albeit still in its infancy, the burgeoning field of affective-narratological research

provides fertile ground for further exploring the nexus of stories and emotions
from diverse angles. While most literary scholars would readily and quickly agree
that narrative and emotion ‘somehow’ intermingle on different levels, few have
actually pursued a research program specifically geared towards the emotions,
and thus the complex, reciprocal relationship between the two notions still awaits
further and differentiated conceptualisation. The analysis of ‘narrative emotions’
142 Stephanie Frink

is, of course, not restricted to the realm of prose fiction, or to literature more
generally. On the contrary: an understanding of narrative processes in encoding,
expressing, sharing, and coming to terms with emotions may not only inform
other fields concerned with affectivity, such as psychology or psychotherapy, but
may also help us form self-defining and emotionally meaningful stories in our
everyday lives (see Nünning 2013).

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———, Michaela Meier, and Barbara Mukhtar. “Are Specific Emotions Narrated Differently?”
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———, and Nadine Berger. “Retelling Everyday Emotional Events: Condensation, Distancing, and
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———. “Cognitive Approaches to Narrative Analysis.” Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps.
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———. What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion. Cambridge, et al.: Cambridge UP, 2011b.
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Imhof, Rüdiger. “The Sea: ‘Was’t Well Done?’” Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies
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3 Affective Thinking
Clare Hemmings
Affect and Feminist Methodology, Or What
Does It Mean to be Moved?

1 The Many Lives of Affect

What we might call the ‘turn to affect’ has been strong for at least the last twenty
years, and has helpfully, as well as problematically in my opinion, intensified
interrogation of the body and its relationships to others within the Social Sciences
and Humanities. To begin, I will outline some of the main strands of recent thinking
on affect, as a way of raising concerns about the limitations as well as productive
aspects of an affective orientation. While affect has long been theorized within
psychoanalysis and psychology as related to drives, or as a form of defense in
respect of bodily or temporal knowledge (anger as a defense against shame or grief,
say), psychoanalytic understandings of affect as displacement are not, in fact, cen-
tral to the ‘affective turn.’ This absence tells us something important: since current
interest in affect is primarily concerned to critique a perceived critical impasse in
cultural theory, to offer an alternative form of bodily truth or evidence to counter
the excesses of theory’s obsession with language, accounts of affect as displace-
ment would not do the required work of reorientation.
There are three main strands of argument about the role of the ‘affective turn’ in
this genre that I want to flag here.1 Firstly, post deconstruction we doubt the
capacity of constructivist models of the subject to account fully for our place in the
world as individuals or groups. Theorists of affect argue that constructivist models
leave out anything that is not socially produced, and that constitutes the very fabric
of our being. Thus Brian Massumi insists that affect is important to the extent that it
is autonomous and outside social signification, and John Bruns suggests that
affect, and in particular laughter, foregrounds the unexpected that throws us off
balance, that unsettles us into becoming someone other than who we currently are.
Secondly, post deconstruction we doubt the methodological capacity of both
quantitative empirical approaches and textual analysis to account for the fullest
resonance of the social world we wish to understand. Advocates of affect offer it up
as a way of deepening our vision of the terrain we are studying, of allowing for and
prioritising its “texture,” in Eve Sedgwick’s words (Sedgwick 2003, 17). This texture

1 This overview draws on my earlier work “Invoking Affect” and extends my discussion of which
views of affect are sidelined within the ‘affective turn.’ (Hemmings 2005)
148 Clare Hemmings

refers to our qualitative experience of the social world, and in particular to embo-
died experience that has the capacity to transform as well as exceed social subjec-
tion. Queer theorists in particular have taken up Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s
emphasis on the transformative capacities of shame, insisting that it should not be
something we strive simply to overcome by turning to its dependent opposite,
pride. Shame itself, as Elspeth Probyn has argued, has a resonance well beyond its
homophobic generation, enabling queer subjects both to identify the bodily reso-
nances of a heterosexual status quo, and to create community through the empathy
born of shared experience (Probyn 2000). And thirdly, post deconstruction we
doubt that the oppositions of power/resistance or public/private can fully account
for the political process. Interestingly, in respect of this last arena, the question of
affect tends to be approached less through the lens of ‘affective labour’ (Hochschild
1979; Hardt 1999), and more through affective belonging to social movements or
the disruptive role of affect within the political mainstream. As with psychoanaly-
sis, ‘affective labour’ – in its attention to gendered and sexual structures of attach-
ment – does not fit with the interest in affect releasing us from social constraint.
Such approaches share an interest in exploring analog rather than digital
(circular rather than oppositional) modes of power and community. They empha-
sise the unexpected, the singular, or indeed the quirky over the generally applic-
able. Thus affects may be autotelic (love being its own reward), or insatiable
(where jealousy or desire for revenge may last minutes or a lifetime). Work within
the ‘affective turn’ draws on the work of Silvan Tomkins who moves away from
psychoanalytic work that sees affect as servicing drives, and proposes that affects
have a complex, self-referential life that gives depth to human existence through
our relations with others and with oneself. Tomkims asks us to think of the
contagious nature of a yawn, smile or blush. It is transferred to others and doubles
back, increasing its original intensity. Affect can thus be said to place the indivi-
dual in a circuit of feeling and response, rather than opposition to others. Others
take up Gilles Deleuze, who proposes affect as a bodily truth that pierces social
interpretation, confounding its logic, and scrambling its expectations. In contrast
to Tomkins, who breaks down affect into a topography of myriad, distinct parts,
Deleuze understands affect as describing the passage from one state to another, as
an intensity characterised by an increase or decrease in power (Deleuze 1997, 181).
Such developments are helpful in many ways. They challenge rigid opposi-
tions between mind and body, or between structure and agency, and suggest new
methodologies for engaging politically. They open up the importance of bodily
connection to others and productively explore the ways that affect works on and
with us. As indicated in my article “Invoking Affect” (Hemmings 2005), the
questions I have with respect to the ‘affective turn’ are less with the importance of
affect – as a site of knowledge, as that which connects us to others, as politically
 Affect and Feminist Methodology, Or What Does It Mean to be Moved? 149

relevant in a range of ways – and more to do with its proponents’ over-investment

in its positive capacities. Of key significance from my perspective is the under-
statement of continuities in attention to the body across the history of cultural
studies. To make an entirely new case for affect’s transformative dimensions, it
seems that the ongoing preoccupations with embodiment and feeling that char-
acterize minority theorizing in particular (Critical Race, Feminist and Postcolonial
Theories) are frequently elided. One reason might be the reliance of these theories
on psychoanalytic or affective labour accounts, of course, in which the extent to
which affect works to consolidate rather than transform existing social relations
is often centred (as I discuss more fully below). Another, is that attention to these
theoretical and political traditions would challenge the history the ‘affective turn’
inaugurates, and the certainty about its proper critical subject (who will always
know the difference between subversive and hegemonic affect). But in fact it is
precisely the critical attention to affect as a contested site of reproduction and
disruption, and as a particular form of knowledge that requires methodological
invention, that remains so compelling. In this always compromised task I have
been particularly influenced by feminist queer and postcolonial critics who fore-
ground the relationship between affect and political economy or colonialism,
often combining multiple understandings of affect, and always with attention to
the historical constitution of race, gender and sexuality. For both Lauren Berlant
and Sara Ahmed (who I take as exemplary of these approaches) affect is mobile
and ordinary, producing attachments to the normative, or the normative through
those attachments, as well as holding out the possibility of their transformation.
For Ahmed, in “Affective Economies” but also in a broader range of her work,
(The Cultural Politics of Emotions; The Promise of Happiness) emotions are not
innate, but create relationships between bodies, and meanings of surfaces and
interpretations. Emotions mediate the relationship between the psychic and the
social; it is their mobility that makes them ‘binding,’ and they partly work by
concealing their traces. Affect works to mark the ordinary through fantasy, so that
how we see and engage the other is already suffused with meaning, dualistic,
precisely not ‘free.’2 Ahmed gives the example of the good/bad asylum seeker,
and importantly notes that the argument that meaning is not settled (that anyone
could be a bogus asylum seeker) is not so much freeing, but part of how fear
circulates to cement conservative, post-colonial attachments. Affective econo-
mies accumulate value over time for Ahmed, providing attachments to the norma-

2 This reminds me of Jennifer Biddle’s argument that in matters of gender and sexuality, the
carrier of others’ affect has already been determined, such that for example it is the woman who
sells sex and not the man who buys it whose being is suffused with shame.
150 Clare Hemmings

tive as well as holding the potential for their transformation. It is through refusing
to refuse these economies – working with rather than against the historical and
affective characterization of the black feminist as “angry,” say – that the opportu-
nities for change arise.
In related vein, Berlant’s work foregrounds the ways in which intimacy and
love are mobilized in the service of late capitalism. In The Queen of America Goes
to Washington City, Berlant tracked the mobilization of national sentiment
through gender and sexuality, excavating the function of intimate life in prop-
ping up the very idea of the nation state. In more recent work, she argues that as
the contract between the state and individuals has weakened, the intimate is
invested with renewed rather than reduced intensity – an intensity it can never
deliver (The Female Complaint; The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in Amer-
ican Culture; Cruel Optimism). Intimate feelings are taken up and generated in
order to secure attachments to a crumbling economy, and she insists (though
does not fully explore) the ways in which this is always a gamble, since affective
mechanisms are always “deeply ambiguous, compromised and unstable” (Ber-
lant 2007, 297). For Berlant, we are drawn back to ‘familial scenes,’ not because
they are complete and their meaning settled, but because they are unfinished,
suffused with ambivalence, and endlessly compelling – we return (optimistically)
not only to repeat the pain, but to tease out ‘something else.’ In both Ahmed and
Berlant, affect is an intersubjective glue that is both remarkably open to manip-
ulation, and also excessive, in the sense that it cannot be fully limited to the uses
it is generated through or put to. Both authors open up the question of the
possibilities of alternative attachments, ambivalences and habits that might form
the basis of a different history of the relationship between the intimate and the
public, thus providing alternative “moods” in the present. Neither theorist really
pursues this aspect of “excess” as strongly as they do the affective ties that bind,
however.
In my own more recent work, I am interested in taking up that pursuit
through a focus on the temporality of affect, the ways in which affect not only
binds us to (or is produced in) a particular set of historical circumstances, but also
has the capacity to disrupt them. This is not simple or straightforward, I have
discovered, and in that sense this work is also a critique of the optimism that
many affect theorists have about the capacity of affect to align us differently. In
my own thinking, to be able to inhabit affect in ways that do not reaffirm the
normative – from national to economic – requires facing the potential of annihila-
tion of the subject we think we are. If the subject is constituted through affect in
historical contexts of racism and other inequalities, the desire for affect to move
us differently is a political desire that cannot skip the disruption of subjectivity if
it is to seriously move towards affect as the basis of creative alterity, let alone
 Affect and Feminist Methodology, Or What Does It Mean to be Moved? 151

solidarity. This possibility, and the likelihood of it being transformative rather

than reproductive, is based in a series of methodological reflections on affect, on
what it tells us, and what kind of evidence it is – this is hard work, and cannot
simply be invoked, in my view.

2 The Temporalities of Affect

Let me give you a clearer sense of what I am interested in. In recent work on Why
Stories Matter my final chapter tried to focus on what cannot be said about ‘the
other’ as a starting point for providing a different relationship between self and
other, one that redraws the history and the temporality of modernity. In other
words, I was interested in how affective limits – the unspeakable that is felt not
articulated – can be thought of as a particular kind of evidence, for a way of being
able accurately to draw the boundaries of relationality as currently constituted
and imaginable. In relationship to both Female Genital Cutting (FGC) and trans-
sexual embodiment (both vexed issues for feminist theorists) I tracked when ‘gut
reactions’ were cited as evidence by those seeking to engage but also distance
themselves from the unfamiliar other (in both cases here, ‘the happily cut body’).
Drawing on Julia Kristeva and postcolonial theorists such as Ranjana Khanna and
Rey Chow, I explored how horror both draws one to and marks off the other in
ways that preclude empathy as well as alternative narrations of the historical
present, alternative temporalities in which who ‘the other’ is to become is not
settled. It is ‘the unspeakable’ that finally substitutes for political engagement
when this becomes ‘too tough,’ when that engagement would fundamentally
challenge where we think we have got to in feminist terms, which is always also
to say when we think we are. The work affect does here is to separate while
standing in for un-narratable judgment, to protect the subject in familiar ways,
while appearing to be ‘outside’ of the social. The work of affect then here is
precisely to feign a-sociality in its unmarked reiterations of the known. In that
chapter, and as a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion to the book as a whole, I
experimented with the unspeakable as a place of profound discomfort that has to
be settled into, accepted as discomfort, if there is to be any hope of a real
engagement with ‘the other’ that does not simply reproduce assumptions of one’s
own subject position.3

3 Here I am also influenced by Amal Kabesh’s work on the horrors of recognition as always
foreclosed or banalised by presumptions of positive affect as the most transformative kind.
152 Clare Hemmings

But of course, it is not particularly helpful to leave any subject – privileged or

otherwise – mired in anxiety, horror and discomfort. And in a more recent return
to affect, I think through the ways in which affective discomfort might be crea-
tively engaged or transformed so that the world could be seen and inhabited
differently (Hemmings 2012). In her work on Sexing the Self, Elspeth Probyn fore-
grounds the dynamic nature of the relationship between ontology and epistemol-
ogy, and the ways in which the category of ‘experience’ is an important resource
for understanding that relationship. Probyn insists that reflection on the lack of fit
between our own sense of being and the world’s judgments upon us constitutes a
kind of feminist reflexivity, a negotiation of the difference between who one feels
oneself to be and the conditions of possibility for a livable life (Probyn 1993, 16).
Indeed, for Probyn, it is in theorizing experience in this way (shuttling back and
forth across these dimensions) that feminist theory finds its raison d’être. Over the
years, I have come back to Probyn’s distinction between an embodied sense of
self and the self we are expected to be in social terms, between the experience of
ourselves over time and the experience of possibilities and limits to how we may
act or be. In particular, I have found her description of feminist reflexivity to be
compelling and moving since it prioritizes feeling and acting (reflexive disrup-
tion) over identity or belonging, and raises the question of affect as a kind of
judgment (rather than reiteration). Discomfort in Probyn is generative rather than
paralyzing.4
I think my attachment to Probyn’s view of reflexivity arises in part from the
way in which it reframes my own history of marked dis-identification from femin-
ism. Aged seventeen, I remember being enraged by my experience of a lecture at
Sussex University we were taken to as A-level students, in which a feminist
literary scholar made the case for Shakespeare’s As You Like It being a feminist
text. Complaining bitterly that this was biased nonsense that had nothing to do
with the objective value of a text, I also insisted on feminism more generally as
nonsense. When quizzed by parents perhaps too easily amused by my opinio-
nated rants, my reasoning was as follows: I was a strong, self-reliant, intellectual
equal to any boy or man and would not be told that my chances in life were any
less than theirs. I simply would not accept there was something that needed
transgressing, and my rage at the very thought found feminism as an object, since
the social world could not so be. My indignation, if we follow Probyn, arose
precisely because I did not see a difference between ontological and epistemologi-
cal possibilities. Experiences had not yet taught yet me. Rage here marked me as
marvelously privileged in class and race terms, as well as fortunate in my family

4 The argument here is taken from my article “Affective Solidarity”.

 Affect and Feminist Methodology, Or What Does It Mean to be Moved? 153

support, and remarkably un-empathetic in my orientations towards others. It will

come as no surprise that as time went on I discovered rather profound differences
between my sense of self and the social expectations I occupied with respect to
gender and sexuality, and subsequent reflections on my experience of these
differences also, I believe, helped me gain some feel for other onto-epistemologi-
cal gaps, I hope. My outrage found another object – social and cultural inequal-
ities and the knowledge systems that naturalize these – and I attached to femin-
ism which now offered a way both of preserving a coherent sense of self (still
equal to any boy or man) and of bringing ontology and epistemology closer
together again (through politicized intervention). What at one time was an affec-
tive impulse that made feminism repellant became an impulse that made me cling
to it for dear life.
It was Probyn and my own experiences then that began to make me think
about the importance of feeling in the development of the judgments that femin-
ism necessitates. That moment of affect – anger, frustration, or even rage – that I
want to claim as the core of a judgment essential for transformation is of course
unstable and its impact cannot be controlled. The possible next actions it results
in are myriad. The affective dissonance, the judgment arising from the distinction
between experience and the world, may be suppressed, the clarity it produces
may be harnessed to foster advantages, or it might be mobilized to justify lack of
intersubjective care or nihilism. The one who has experienced affective disso-
nance may retreat into a taciturn non-acceptance, protective of self, may manip-
ulate others in the jostling for position, and so on. Affective dissonance cannot
guarantee feminist politicization or even a resistant mode, though I think it is an
important condition for that resistance. And yet, it just might…. That sense of
dissonance that is also a register of injustice may too become a desire to rectify
that. Affect might flood one’s being and change how everything else is seen and
understood too, from this time on. What anyone who experiences that dissonance
might do is transform judgment into action or knowledge, into a politicization
through attachments to communities that already exist (as Patricia Hill Collins
insists) and that value different ways of knowing and being in the world. That
feeling of discomfort and the dissolution of the self that relies on and produces
distance might not only figure annihilation but alternative attachments, as in my
own narrative. Other people have already made these judgments and acted upon
them indeed. Thus affective dissonance does not just describe standpoint margin-
al experience and the critique of dominant knowledge, but the temporal process
of moving from affective judgment to a mutual recognition and an affective
solidarity.
In a roundabout way, I am here trying to mobilise those ‘old approaches’ that
somehow get written out by an account of affect theory as a new way of attending
154 Clare Hemmings

to embodiment or as wholly distinct from the epistemological. These include

standpoint theory (that a marginal location produces superior knowledge), and
black feminist or queer approaches that see embodiment itself as both suffused
with dominant meaning, but also as the resource for critiquing that dominant and
joining with others doing the same. Certainly, I want to insist that whatever else
may happen, affective dissonance has to arise if a feminist politics is to emerge,
and for that reason it may even have the status of a universal condition. When the
kind of reflexivity activity I have been describing does lead to reflexive politicisa-
tion, this may be a productive basis from which to seek solidarity with others, not
based in a shared identity or on a presumption about how the other feels, but on
also feeling the desire for trans-formation out of the experience of discomfort, and
against the odds.

3 The Scents of Affect

I want to extend this centering of affect in relationship to methodology by reading

it as key for how we understand the importance of feeling as evidence, but also as
a way of foregrounding other issues within feminist research, namely interdisci-
plinary, intersectionality and the question of knowledge and community. So here I
want to turn to two theorists – Audre Lorde and Avtar Brah – who use affect as a
way of reimagining the relationship between self and other, and challenging the
historical legacies we are presumed to have inherited. Audre Lorde’s Cancer
Journals proffers embodiment as a direct challenge to institutions that seek to
impose sameness on bodies, to force difference into homogeneity, but importantly
this critical knowledge is accessed through the feeling of ill fit, not abstractly.
Lorde’s strength of feeling also has the capacity to move us, as well as provide a
relationship to structures of power, to provide an intersubjective relationship that
asks us also to align, whether or not we share her feelings. I find it useful to go
back to Lorde and others to think through a politics of emotion as opening up
space for recognition and solidarity as well pointing us to material conditions that
frame us. Knowing through affect is not self-referential then, but shared and
ongoing, resolutely social, where ‘social’ or ‘political’ do not only mean epistemo-
logical, but also refer to processes of being open or closed to difference. In her
loving documentary of Lorde’s years in Berlin, Dagmar Shultz sutures audio and
visual fragments from Lorde’s visits in the 1980s to underline the importance of
her role in creating a black feminist and lesbian consciousness in the city: Lorde
mobilises affect to create a counter-history in which black women are subjects of
knowledge and authority (based in bodily consciousness). At a meeting soon after
she arrives, Lorde asks the black women to stay behind after her lecture; she asks
 Affect and Feminist Methodology, Or What Does It Mean to be Moved? 155

them to look at each other, acknowledge each other – the harm and joy – and to
use this connection to write another reality through literary creativity and perfor-
mance and through political history-making based in remembering others
through remembering oneself in connection. Affect and memory for Lorde, as for
Berlant and Ahmed, constitute normative subjects, but they can also be mobilised
politically – through desire – to validate the marginal and create new possibilities
for embodiment, historical recognition and alternative histories.
For Lorde, the affective subject of community remains the basis of creativity,
while for Brah that political desire and affective commitment are as unsettling of
subjectivity as they are affirming. In her piece, “Scent of Memory,” that I focus on
here, it is the dynamic between the knowing, speaking subject and their unravel-
ling that is the basis of a particularly methodological understanding of affect and
an extension of Lorde’s ‘ill-fit.’ Stuart Hall notes of this piece that when you read
“Scent… you come as close as you can to feeling on your pulse, rather than just
knowing rationally, what it is like to think complexity” (Hall 2012, 33). Affect
works in several different ways in the piece to my mind. Brah certainly highlights,
as Ahmed and Berlant do, the ways in which affect functions as a kind of
hierarchical glue, reinforcing forms of attachment to nation and community that
one might want to challenge. Thus in discussing early research settings, she
shows that the white people she interviewed in Southall, South London, repro-
duced understandings of otherness and foreignness through their expressions of
anxiety, mirroring dominant understanding of communities as separate and
separable, and difference as a challenge to self. But she also shows that affect is a
complex beast, not only attaching us to what we already know, or producing
affects that capture us in the most familiar and routine of ways, but that also
suture us to others in different, often surprising, ways. Thus, Brah shows that the
white subjects she interviews demonstrate desires to share what they know and
who they are, as well as an attachment to ‘nearness,’ to community through
proximity. This mirrors what Paul Gilroy describes as conviviality, the dailiness of
getting along because of rubbing along. The affects forged in and through that
dailiness, through space rather than only time, open up intersubjective possibili-
ties not fully known in advance, because they reference multiple histories rather
than singular, linear ones.
Importantly, Brah’s piece is framed by her own desires and attachments as a
researcher, her desire to know “Scent’s” central character Jean other than through
others’ representations of her. Jean was a white Southall dweller who took her
own life, leaving only a note about changes in Southall that her son publishes
after her death. Avtar (I want to match her first name with Jean) has a passion for
knowing Jean, who – importantly – she knows will remain unknowable, precisely
because she is constructed as her own opposite in terms of the categories we are
156 Clare Hemmings

given to think ourselves through: white/Asian; gendered; generational. In refus-

ing to insist that we already know who Jean was – racist, stuck in her ways,
captured by discourse or difference – Avtar also refuses the endless repetitions of
violence between subjects and knowledges, as well as demonstrating how com-
passion is a methodological as well as ethical gift. This is partly why Avtar’s work
is interdisciplinary, fragmented, autobiographical, uncertain, but also why
“Scent” itself is clear about its process of becoming, the moving back and forth
between past research and a moment of ‘intrigue,’ the shuttling between histor-
ical and contextual analysis and interpretation, the subject and object of research.
In demonstrating that we none of us know the other, neither through empiricism
nor imagination, Avtar challenges a firm grid of intelligibility, referring us back to
the capacity of affect to challenge what we know, and who we think the subject of
history and object of research are. In this sense, Avtar’s work is both a brilliant
example of intersectionality in its attention to gender, age and race, and also a
refusal of the presumptions that tend to underpin intersectional research, namely
that we know in advance who is marked and in what ways by those same pre-
existing categories of analysis.
Avtar’s piece is also not an isolated event, a hermetically sealed contribution
to knowledge. It was originally published in 1999 in Feminist Review, a socialist-
feminist journal run by a collective since 1979. Avtar has been on Feminist Review
since the 1980s, and is the longest-standing member of the collective, sticking it
out through its many and various arguments over race, sexuality and the nature
of the political. I was also on the collective for ten years from 2004–2014, and so
am not a neutral presenter of her work. I am deeply invested in Avtar as a key
figure in the history of British feminism, and as a colleague who reminds me of
the importance of ethically investing otherwise. In considering what to do for our
100th issue recently, the collective decided to honour the history and processes of
the journal (and of course Avtar) by publishing a special issue entitled “Recalling
the Scent of Memory” (Gedalof and Puwar 2012) drawing on papers given at a
conference at her retirement, and the contributions of collective members. These
affective ties allowed us to celebrate Avtar’s work in ways we often forget to do for
each other. Affective academic life can frequently be grim and critical, rather than
expansive and generous. Interestingly I think, the pieces formed part of an on-
going interdisciplinary conversation that Avtar herself had invited in “Scent.”
There were direct take-ups, reflections prompted by it, and developments of
similar forays into the difficulties of knowing otherwise and otherness. The issue
includes poetry, theory, interviews, co-authored and single-authored responses,
reflections on film, music, ethnography, history and memory and dialogue. These
contributors were all moved by Avtar’s thinking, and all felt strongly enough to
write back in generous and thoughtful ways.
 Affect and Feminist Methodology, Or What Does It Mean to be Moved? 157

Suki Ali’s piece uses affect to think through what cannot be said or ex-
changed, but lingers, as a way of accessing cultural memory, collective feelings,
buried histories and bruises that are also part of knowledge. Lyn Thomas revisits
her own childhood in terms of working class whiteness and the fragments of
unknown possibilities that surface as well as the blunt difficulties of refusing to
inhabit whiteness defined through racialization of others. And Joan Anim-Addo
and Laleh Khalili compose their feelings through poetry as inaugurating and
inaugurated by history, as placing people in competing narratives but shared
space. But lest I glamorize, these aspects of ‘affective solidarity’ that I have come
to crave so much also always threaten to disperse. At the party to celebrate the
issue, questions of race and representation became tethered to difference despite
our best efforts to think and engage otherwise; and previous members of the
collective expressed rage at not being included (in the issue or the party) to the
extent they felt they deserved. Thus the affective life of this issue remains restless.
And this is perhaps a good point to end on. As we continue to struggle to inhabit
affects that so quickly calcify, that affective alterity – if it is to be real rather than
a theoretical proposition that thinks it knows all about epistemology already –
will always involve risk, at the level of research design, form, content, and
importantly subjectivity. As I hope I have also indicated through this paper, we
cannot think through affect and remain the same.

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Robert G. Ryder
The Curious Case of Affective Hospitality:
Curiosity, Affect, and Pierre Klossowski’s
Laws of Hospitality
In Of Hospitality, Jacques Derrida writes about a curious case in which a host
anxiously awaits his guest, a stranger. At the sight of the stranger on the horizon,
the host hastens to call out to him: “Enter quickly, as I am afraid of my happiness”
(Derrida 2000, 123). Derrida continues to parse out this ‘strange logic’ of the
master’s call, echoing it in his own way by writing, it’s “as if the stranger or
foreigner held the keys […]; it’s as if the master, qua master, were prisoner of his
place and his power, of his ipseity, of his subjectivity (his subjectivity is hostage)”
(123). But Derrida tarries only briefly on the desire that clearly induces this
“strange master” to call out in the first place: “‘Enter quickly,’ quickly, in other
words, without delay and without waiting. Desire is waiting for what does not
wait” (123). This strange mode of hospitality is not just fueled by desire and fear,
but is fundamentally determined by them. It is as if the emotions themselves are
what force the master to be so exceptionally hospitable. The host is prisoner not
only of his ipseity and subjectivity, but also of his desires and fears, of what he
conceives to be the destructive force of happiness, which threatens to destroy him
from within if he does not immediately bring someone – anyone – from without.
This scene, taken from a charter on hospitality in Pierre Klossowski’s Laws of
Hospitality (Les lois de l’hospitalité, 1965), sets the stage upon which traditional
laws of hospitality are circumvented and transmogrified in the service of strong
emotions. It also leads to a more general question about the role of emotions and
affect in these laws of hospitality. With collections such as The Affect Theory
Reader (2010) and this present volume, theories of affect are bleeding into every
mode of theoretical inquiry. And yet, no single monograph or article has yet to
attribute affect to theories of hospitality. The same can be said for scholars study-
ing hospitality: no one has yet to explore hospitality’s relationship to either
emotion or affect. In the opening example above, it is clear how much emotion
structures the host’s own version of hospitality. And yet, even in more traditional
examples of hospitality, the structural laws of hospitality cannot easily be sepa-
rated from what would be considered the underlying emotions that are felt when
encountering a stranger at our doorstep. I write ‘underlying emotions’ here
because traditional laws of hospitality typically set up modes of repressing or
subsuming emotions. In other words, curiosity, attraction, or fear must necessa-
rily be hidden or suppressed so as to make hospitality as effective as possible. For
160 Robert G. Ryder

instance, one could read the repression of affect/emotion in Derrida’s uncondi-

tional law of hospitality, which he composes in the form of a question: “must we
ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of the
term, in all its possible extensions, before being able and so as to be able to
welcome him into our country?” (Derrida 2000, 15). To welcome into our home the
stranger/foreigner who wishes to enter without invitation, to offer him or her our
unconditional hospitality, means not only to not ask for any disclosure or verifica-
tion of identity, but it also means for us as host not to account for any feelings or
‘first impressions’ that we may have towards the stranger, including fear. One
always has to remain ‘hospitable,’ which in the OED means to be “open and
generous in mind or disposition.” And yet, the scene I began with above describes
the host’s desire overriding any traditional or conditional laws of hospitality: get
in here, he says, I don’t care who you are. Indeed, hospitality in Klossowski’s
scene above is conditioned not on tradition or laws, but on desires.
Hospitality is rarely discussed in terms of emotion and affect, in part because
its law(s) set up behaviors that are meant to stifle any feelings – fear, hatred,
desire – towards the stranger. But an equally fundamental reason why theories of
affect and hospitality have so rarely been thought together is because both have
their own tumultuous relationship with the notion of subjectivity. Although affect
theory and its terms continue to be hotly contested, its relation to the dissolution
of the subject is more or less agreed upon. Spinoza’s dictum on affect, as
elucidated by Deleuze in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, is typically cited in this
regard: “There is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of an
anonymous force” (Deleuze 1988, 128). Whether hailed by Gilles Deleuze or
condemned by Nigel Thrift,1 this dissolution of the subject appears alongside
every notion of affect. Even Brian Massumi, in his Parables of the Virtual, distin-
guishes between ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ based on the apparent absence or presence
of the subject, respectively: “emotion,” he writes, “is a ‘subjective content’
whereas affect is unqualified. As such, [affect] is not ownable or recognizable and
is thus resistant to critique” (Massumi 2003, 28). Whether or not we agree with
Massumi’s distinction between emotion and affect – and for the purposes of the
present chapter, I will attempt to do so – it is clear that the definition of affect is
constituted at least in part by the necessary dissolution of the subject.
Whereas affect involves this particular dissolution of the subject, where
nothing is ‘ownable,’ hospitality seems to set up a situation in which there are

1 In Non-Representational Theory: Space/Politics/Affect (2007), Thrift not only erroneously credits

the above citation of Deleuze to Spinoza, but further comments that “dropping the human subject
entirely seems to me to be a step too far […]. I want to keep hold of a humanist ledge on the
machinic cliff face. I hold to a sense of personal authorship” (13).
 The Curious Case of Affective Hospitality 161

clear distinctions between property, ownership, and a strong sense of subjectivity

in the form of the host. And yet, like affect, hospitality also tends to break down
the traditional notion of subjectivity. As we have already seen in the opening
scene above, Derrida describes how the host is prisoner “of his subjectivity (his
subjectivity is hostage)” (Derrida 2000, 123). These words in parentheses are in
fact not his own: they are a direct reference to Emmanuel Levinas, who in his own
work defined subjectivity as both host and hostage. In his concluding remarks of
Totality and Infinity and under the specific heading of “subjectivity,” Levinas
writes: “[s]ubjective experience derives its features from separation [… it] accom-
plishes separation positively, without being reducible to a negation of the being
from which it separates. But thus precisely it can welcome that being. The subject
is the host” (Levinas 1991, 299). And yet, later in Otherwise than Being, Levinas
goes on to write that, by taking on the responsibility of the neighbor, the subject
also becomes a hostage.2 Already in Levinas’s work, then, subjectivity cannot be
thought of as self-contained or unified, but as simultaneously the host that
welcomes the other and a hostage to the responsibilities of being that host.
Indeed, if subjectivity is caught in this paradoxical role of being both host and
hostage at once, the opening scene above also suggests that the subject is as
much held hostage by his own emotions as he is by the laws of hospitality and
responsibility towards one’s neighbor.
This chapter thus imagines an encounter between two apparent strangers:
affect theory and hospitality. A reading of Pierre Klossowski’s Laws of Hospitality
is crucial in this endeavor, since more than any other thinker or writer of the
twentieth century, Klossowski made explicit the underlying emotions that both
drive and problematize traditional laws of hospitality. But instead of examining
the mixture of fear and desire that are explicit in the master’s call above – “Enter
quickly, as I am afraid of my happiness” – I will begin by focusing on one emotion
or affect that not only motivates the master’s call,3 but one that I would argue lies
at the heart of hospitality: curiosity. In what follows, I will first explore the notion
of curiosity, arguing that it can and perhaps should be defined more as an affect
than an emotion precisely because of its problematic relation to the subject.
Secondly, I will turn to a few short passages from Pierre Klossowski’s Laws of

2 See pages 112–123 in Levinas 1991, especially page 123: “this desire for the non-desireable, this
responsibility for the neighbor, this substitution as a hostage, is the subjectivity and uniqueness
of the subject.”
3 The motivating factor certainly seems to be the fear the master feels towards becoming
complacent in his happiness. But as we shall see in our subsequent reading of Klossowski’s laws
of hospitality as they are outlined in the opening pages of Roberte ce soir, the fundamental way of
alleviating this fear will be for the guest to excite the host’s curiosity.
162 Robert G. Ryder

Hospitality in order to argue that curiosity is central to any theory of what might
be called ‘affective hospitality.’

1 Curiosity as Affect

Curiosity is indeed a curious thing. According to William James in his influential

Principles of Psychology (1890), curiosity is shared by both human and animal.
James writes the following under the heading of curiosity:

I have seen alligators in the water act in precisely the same way towards a man seated on the
beach in front of them, gradually drawing near as long as he kept still, frantically careering
back as soon as he made a movement. […] Some such susceptibility for being excited and
irritated by the mere novelty, as such, of any movable feature of the environment must form
the instinctive human basis of all human curiosity. (James 2007, 429; my italics)

James categorizes curiosity under emotions. But we must also keep in mind that
an emotion for James has a very particular meaning, in that it always “follows
upon bodily expression,” hence his famous phrase: “we feel sad because we cry,
angry because we strike” (450), and not the other way around. If an emotion is
reactionary, that is, if it always derives from bodily expression, then a Jamesian
emotion – like the way he describes the alligator’s curiosity – appears much
closer conceptually to Spinoza’s affect than to any emotion that, according to
Massumi, involves “subjective content.” This is because, as Deleuze writes in his
book on Spinoza:

if you define bodies and thoughts as capacities for affecting and being affected, many things
change. You will define an animal, or a human being, not by its form, its organs, and its
functions, and not as a subject either; you will define it by the affects of which it is capable.
(Deleuze 1988, 124; my italics)

In the case of James’ inquisitive alligator – and as James informs us, many
animals “pretty low down among vertebrates” express this trait (James 2007, 429)
– curiosity is the result of being affected by whatever excites attention. The
alligator is thus for James defined neither by its functions nor its subject, but by
what affects it.
Already in William James, then, we read that curiosity is more of an affect
than an emotion, which leads us to the following question: how exactly might we
define curiosity? Is it an emotion, affect, instinct, trait, or something else entirely
different? The OED labels curiosity a “personal attribute,” which with its empha-
sis on ‘personal,’ tends towards the subjective. But there are more specific ways
to think about curiosity. For instance, one usually speaks either of intellectual or
 The Curious Case of Affective Hospitality 163

sexual curiosity (such as Augenlust, or ‘lust of the eyes’). In the philosophical

tradition, curiosity is often defined as a passion for knowledge. But from Augus-
tine to Heidegger, it has also acquired a fairly negative connotation, in that
curiosity “simply wants to ‘see’ and know things in order to be distracted by
them” (van Buren 1994, 179). Heidegger, for one, exploits the German etymology
of the word “Neu-gier.”4 Its vision – curiosity is also more connected to sight than
to any other sense – is quite literally being ‘greedy for the new.’ In this sense,
curiosity is always directed toward the new rather than to the now. That is to say,
it is turned toward that which is already beyond what it currently sees; curiosity
thus “sees everything passé almost before it has seen it” (North 2102, 120).
But curiosity’s openness to the future and the new can also be translated into
the openness required by the hospitable host. In an insightful article on Pierre
Klossowski’s Laws of Hospitality, to which we will turn momentarily, Tracy
McNulty writes that curiosity is the required ‘emotion’ that makes the host
capable of being hospitable in the first place. What’s more, she argues that
curiosity, “as the ‘potentiality of the hospitable soul,’ is the emotion that corre-
sponds to the erosion of privative personhood” (McNulty 2005, 84). In other
words, while curiosity might be defined as a “personal attribute” by the OED, it is
also that attribute that tends to disassemble both privacy and personhood. Two
points should be highlighted here. First, McNulty in her article labels curiosity an
emotion, whereas elsewhere in the same article she labels it as an affect. She is
therefore herself not quite clear about whether curiosity functions as an emotion,
affect, or both. But second, the opening of privative personhood that appears
constitutive of curiosity is arguably what makes hospitality possible in the first
place. In other words, we would not be hospitable to our guest if we were not
already curious about him or her. This also says something about the relationship
of curiosity to subjectivity in general: the curious subject always leaves itself
vulnerable or open to the other and the outside. If curiosity erodes ‘privative
personhood,’ as McNulty claims, it also necessarily opens the door, so to speak,
between self and other.
As opposed to the more negative connotations espoused in the philosophical
tradition that defines curiosity as being greedy towards the new and acquiring
knowledge for its own sake, curiosity defined as the “potentiality of the hospita-
ble soul” appears to highlight its positive connotations, its potential for good will.
As a concept, curiosity thus remains difficult to pin down. We have seen that,
with both James and McNulty, curiosity is labeled an emotion but is nevertheless

4 For Heidegger, curiosity “besorgt ein Wissen, aber lediglich um gewußt zu haben [is concerned
with a knowing, but solely in order to have known]” (Heidegger 2001, 172; my translation).
164 Robert G. Ryder

highlighted as having an affective and even altruistic capacity, one that opens the
subject to the other. In what follows, I wish to explore curiosity as central to – if
not the central affect of – hospitality by reading a few passages from Pierre
Klossowski’s Laws of Hospitality, which I would argue represents one of the most
explicit uses of transforming and exploiting hospitality not to repress but to incite
emotions.

2 Klossowski’s Laws of Hospitality

The Laws of Hospitality is actually the name that Klossowski gave to a trilogy of
erotic novels he wrote between the years 1953 to 1960, which he then republished
as a trilogy with a foreword and afterword in 1965. Klossowski was himself not
only a writer of novels, but also wrote full length volumes on the Marquis de Sade
and Friedrich Nietzsche, translated numerous important writers from Virgil to
Walter Benjamin, and even illustrated his own novels. It is also important to
realize that Klossowski’s fiction has been largely dismissed as perverse erotica
and soft-core porn. “Even in France,” as McNulty writes, “Klossowski has become
the very signifier of perversion, [and] as Sade’s disciple and heir” (McNulty 2005,
71). His interpretation of hospitality is particularly ideosyncratic and sexualized.
Nevertheless, I would argue that, more than any other fictional writer or thinker
of the twentieth century, Klossowski explored the affective potential of hospitality
by making it explicit.
Let us turn to the opening pages of Roberte ce soir. Three characters are
introduced: Octave, the husband, Roberte, his young wife, and their nephew,
Antoine. The novel begins, more or less, with a peculiar set of laws of hospitality,
which the husband Octave wrote out by hand, framed behind glass, and hung
“just above the bed” in the couple’s guest bedroom. But these laws are anything
but traditional: Octave outlines with these laws the extent to which he invites his
guest to seduce his own wife, Roberte. As McNulty writes, “Klossowski’s host
[with his laws of hospitality] invites the guest to do his utmost to incite an emotion
resembling jealousy” (McNulty 2005, 79). But Octave makes a special distinction
in his laws between jealousy and curiosity, which I will now cite in part:

the essence of the host is proposed as an homage of the host’s curiosity to the essence of the
hostess. Now this curiosity, as a potentiality of the hospitable soul, can have no proper
existence except in that which would look to the hostess, were she naive, like suspicion or
jealousy. The host however is neither suspicious nor jealous, because he is essentially curious
about that very thing which, in everyday life, would make a master of the house suspicious,
jealous, unbearable […].
 The Curious Case of Affective Hospitality 165

Let the guest not be the least uneasy; above all let him not suppose he could ever be cause
for jealousy or suspicion when there is not even a subject to feel these sentiments. […] Let the
guest understand his role well: let him then fearlessly excite the host’s curiosity by that
jealousy and that suspicion, worthy in the master of the house but unworthy of a host. […]
the term generosity has no place here, it is without meaning in the discussion, since
everything is generosity, and everything is also greed […].
And so, cherished guest, you cannot help but see that it is in your best interest to fan the
host’s curiosity to the point where the mistress of the house, driven out of herself, will be
completely actualized in an existence which shall be determined by you alone, by you, the
guest, and not by the host’s curiosity. Whereupon the host shall be the master in his house
no more: he shall have carried out his mission. In his turn he shall have become the guest.
(Klossowski 2002, 14–16; my italics)

One way to interpret these peculiar laws of hospitality is to argue that Octave
wishes nothing more than to selfishly explore his own feelings of jealousy by
inviting his guest to make sexual advances on his wife, and to actualize a kind of
sexualized threesome. The modern reader might even call Octave a misogynist,
since it appears that his wife, Roberte, has not even been given a choice in the
matter and must participate as “an object of rivalry or even theft” (McNulty 2005,
79). There are of course ways to ameliorate this reading of misogyny, which I do
not have the space to go into here.5
Of particular interest in Octave’s laws for our purposes, however, are the
explicit references to the ‘sentiments’ of curiosity, jealousy, and suspicion that
are mobilized through the trinity of host-hostess-guest. Octave uses his power as
host to write these laws so as to explore his own curiosity about feelings of
jealousy and suspicion. Instead of typical laws of hospitality, which as I men-
tioned earlier tend to subsume any emotions under more ethical obligations of
universal justice contingent on domestic law and to conform to a more cosmopo-
litan tradition of hospitality,6 Octave is explicitly writing affects and emotions into
his laws of hospitality in order to explore and experiment with them.
A further comment should be made regarding the distinction between curios-
ity and jealousy. Octave’s laws explicitly state that his curiosity is what makes the
hospitable soul possible in the first place, but also that he is curious about the

5 One possible amelioration would be to compare Octave’s laws of hospitality to the story of
Abraham as host in the Old Testament. It should also be pointed out that Octave is a theologian,
though he has been ousted from his position for writing erotica.
6 In Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden, 1795), Immanuel Kant famously argues that hospitality
toward foreigners is never unconditional, but is rather an ethical obligation of universal justice
contingent on domestic law. This can be described as the cosmopolitan tradition of hospitality, in
that it recognizes a “pact” or contract between the host and foreigner that is due to the foreigner
by right.
166 Robert G. Ryder

feelings of jealousy and suspicion. As opposed to jealousy, which emphasizes

personal possession and therefore the properties owned by a self-contained and
unified subject, curiosity allows for the openness of the subject. One may argue
that both curiosity and jealousy are greedy in their own way: recall, for instance,
curiosity’s relation to Neu-gier (its greediness for the new). But again, whereas
jealousy greedily holds onto what it already has, curiosity greedily seeks out what
it does not possess. This is why Octave writes that “everything is generosity, and
everything is also greed” (Klossowski 2002, 15). It is this strange balance that
Octave, through his own curious laws of hospitality, is attempting to maintain: a
situation in which curiosity opens himself up to the feelings that are “worthy of
the master of the house” (16), but without necessarily feeling them. He wants to
keep his subjectivity open, but without falling into the emotions that involve
possession and ownership of a unified self. He thus explicitly programs his laws
of hospitality in order to open up this possibility.
Klossowski is thus employing curiosity in Octave’s laws of hospitality not as
an emotion, but as affect. Curiosity is an affect here in the sense that, like affect, it
allows for a singular openness, and in this case, an openness to the sentiments of
jealousy and suspicion. Also like affect, curiosity is being conceived here as a
kind of virtual concept, which is defined by Massumi as follows: “Concepts of the
virtual in itself are important only to the extent to which they contribute to a
pragmatic understanding of emergence, to the extent to which they enable
triggerings of change (induce the new)” (Massumi 2003, 43). Curiosity, as neu-
gierig, is also forever in this act of “inducing the new.” In their particular relation-
ship to the emerging quality of the virtual concept, both affect and curiosity tend
to function in similar ways.
But another way curiosity arises in Klossowski’s trilogy as affect is through
the various references to solecism. In the second novel, The Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, Octave praises the ability of his most favorite painter, Tonnerre, a
fictional artist invented by Klossowski. Octave is himself most curious about
Tonnerre’s “skill at suspended gesture,” which he surmises Tonerre received
inspiration from the genre of tableaux vivant (Klossowski 2002, 99). At one
moment, Octave returns to a particular detail in Tonnerre’s own rendering of the
famous Titian of “Tarquin and Lucretia.” Octave writes in his diary:

I return to the detail of Lucretia’s panic-stricken face, to that hand which under the pretext
of warding off Tarquin’s greedy mouth, in the most flagrant manner presents her palm to it,
to that other hand, lower down, which, far from forbidding access to the treasure, strains,
reaches its fingers… . What Tonnerre was endeavoring to express was moral repugnance and
the irruption of pleasure simultaneously gripping the same soul, the same body, and he
rendered this conflict through the position of the hands, one of which is lying and the other
avowing a crime that seeps from its fingers. (Klossowksi 2002, 111)
 The Curious Case of Affective Hospitality 167

If one is aware of the legend of Tarquin and Lucretia, it will become evident the
extent to which Klossowski layers multiple references to hospitality, the trans-
gressions of its laws, and the consequences. But instead, I wish to point out that
Lucretia’s body, through this singular detail of her hand gestures, reveals a
rupture of conflicting affects: on the one hand (literally!), fear and terror, on the
other hand, curiosity. This means that, in this painting at least, curiosity has
changed its place on the body: although with both Augustine and Heidegger,
curiosity is the ‘lust of the eye’ (Augenlust), here with the painted figure of
Lucretia, affective curiosity is found not in the eye, but in the hand.
Octave’s own curiosity towards this affective solecism, depicted in Lucretia’s
hand gestures so ingeniously by his beloved Tonnerre, is no doubt related to the
curiosity that he explicitly writes into his laws: Octave is excited as much by a
rupture of emotion (in the case of jealousy) as much as by bodily affect (in the case
of Lucretia’s conflicting hand gestures). But in the end, I would argue that Octave
ultimately wants to keep his own hands clean, so to speak, which includes his own
handwriting. Recall that Octave wrote out by hand his own laws of hospitality,
framed them behind glass, and hung them above the guest’s bed. In this way they
remain untouchable. Similarly, and very much in opposition to the hostess, the
host must not be touched by sentiments like jealousy and suspicion, which are
‘unworthy’ of the host. The glass thus protects both the laws and the host from such
sentiments. At the same time, the glass also allows for the laws to be read, makes
them transparent, so to speak, just as Octave’s explicit references to curiosity and
jealousy allows for these emotions to be explored transparently, without tarnishing
the host. The condition is this: only if the host’s curiosity is aroused without being
tarnished by jealousy and suspicion, will his specific laws have been followed, and
the goal – of substituting the host with the guest, and vice versa – been achieved.
Derrida writes in Of Hospitality that such substitutions – that is, of host into
guest, and guest into host – are “what make everyone into everyone else’s
hostage. Such are the laws of hospitality” (Derrida 125). But what Derrida, Levinas
and others do not fully explore, and what I hope to have initiated with this brief
chapter, is an examination of how affects and emotions implicit in hospitality –
and in the case of Klossowski, made explicit – act as the metaphorical chains that
help make hostages of us all.

References

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights
Books, 1988.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2000.
168 Robert G. Ryder

Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. 1927. Tübigen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001.
James, William. The Principles of Psychology. 1890. Vol. 2. New York: Cosmo, 2007.
Klossowski, Pierre. Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 1965. Trans.
Austryn Wainhouse. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso
Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, North Carolina:
Duke UP, 2003.
McNulty, Tracy. “Hospitality After the Death of God” Diacritics 35.1 (2005): 71–98.
North, Paul. The Problem of Distraction. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2012.
Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representable Theory: Space/Politics/Affect. London: Routledge, 2007.
van Buren, John. The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1994.
Ane Martine Lönneker
“What Can This Sorrow Be?”: Elegiac
Affectivity in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room

I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel’.
A new – by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy? (June 27, 1925)

Many critics have noticed Virginia Woolf’s interest in the word ‘elegy’, an interest
that can be seen in the diary entry that serves as my epigraph (Woolf 1980, 3:34),
and in her essay “Poetry, Fiction and the Future”, where Woolf discusses the
future of poetry’s “lyric cry of ecstasy or despair” and reflects on the possibilities
for prose to “chant the elegy” (Woolf 2009, 74, 82). In the existing criticism, an
attention to elegy frequently coincides with a focus on mourning in Woolf’s
novels (e.g. Clevell 2004). However, by limiting study of the elegiac aspects of her
work to matters of mourning, we perhaps fail to recognise a complexity in this
affective dimension – one that resists reduction to a thematic interest in death
and loss, a therapeutic effort, or the psychological process of mourning explored
as narrative. As a literary affect with a long cultural history, the elegiac resists
identification with any simple cognitive or evaluative emotion, being both a
feeling in and of artworks, not unlike sorrow, but different in being principally
tied to the aesthetic. This historicity, and the ambiguities of the elegiac, may have
been what fascinated Woolf and prompted her to attend to the concept of elegy
and to canonical English elegies in her novels. I propose that the configurations
of sorrow and sadness in Woolf’s works are intertwined with elegy, and bear
traces of the changing shapes of elegiac lamentation.1 In this essay, I analyse the
occurrences of elegiac sorrow in her novel Jacob’s Room (1922) in order to
elaborate on the affective perspectives of Woolf’s understanding of elegy.2 My aim
is to contribute to the understanding of an aesthetics of negative affectivity
grounded in, but not restricted to, poetic elegy. I also consider how the study of
genre motifs and literary conventions can be brought into dialogue with contem-
porary debates on the ambiguities of affect and emotion.

1 As Jane Goldman notes on Woolf’s ‘new elegy’: ‘[I]t is possible that Woolf was also working with
a deeper, more specific and more technical understanding of elegy’. (Goldman 2010, 51)
2 I am not the first to discuss the elegiac dimension in Jacob’s Room (see, for instance Zwerdling;
Wall). My reading differs particularly in my emphasis on the affective dimension of elegy, as well
as in its focus on generic traits other than the ones discussed in those texts.
170 Ane Martine Lönneker

Considered as elegy, Woolf’s bildungsroman centres not so much on a reac-

tion to loss, but rather its elegiac dimension concerns the anticipation of loss as
the primary affective-aesthetic format, a different structure than the trajectory
from mourning to consolation, or desolation, often associated with elegy. The
novel’s numerous images of sadness and sorrow, rendered as states of anticipa-
tion rather than aftermath states, create the peculiar feeling that the protagonist
Jacob Flanders is already dead and absent from the beginning, that his prema-
ture death is destined from childhood (although it is not realised until the very
end of the novel, when he disappears in Greece as a soldier in World War I). As
Alex Zwerdling notes, for contemporary readers this ending would have been
inscribed in Jacob’s surname, ‘Flanders’, which is suggestive of death in battle in
the Flanders mud (Zwerdling 1986, 64). But even if the novel’s multiple refer-
ences to sorrow and sadness forestall the sad outcome of the narrative, feeling in
the novel attains an unsettling autonomous status, and becomes highly difficult
to diagnose and delimit. Indeed, from the very outset when Jacob is established
as the absent addressee, the novel seems to display an ambiguous operational
logic of feeling. In the opening scene, Jacob and his brother Archer are playing
on the beach, and Archer loses sight of Jacob: “‘Ja-cob! Ja-cob!’ shouted Archer,
lagging on after a second. The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all
body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered,
breaking against rocks – so it sounded” (Woolf 2004, 2–3). How are we to under-
stand this ‘extraordinary sadness’? What is it directed at, and to whom does it
belong? After giving a brief account of the historical and conceptual span of
elegy, I will pursue the novel’s tendency to extend feeling from human emotion
to spatial condition, and discuss how this produces affective tensions that may
be termed ‘elegiac’.

1 The Elegiac Lamentation

Since it is a genre defined by its affective register, feeling lies at the heart of
elegy, but the character and workings of that feeling differ according to the two
main meanings of the word ‘elegy’. An elegy is typically defined either as a
mournful poem lamenting the death of a person, or as a meditative poem with a
sad and sombre tone. In English literature especially, the elegy has functioned as
an occasional poetry that has its roots in the funeral and pastoral elegies of the
late sixteenth century. This was when the elegy entered into vernacular lan-
guages and abandoned its metrical form, a hexameter followed by a pentameter,
which had defined the genre in Greek and Roman antiquity. Examples of funeral
elegies include canonical poems like Milton’s “Lycidas” and Shelley’s “Ado-
 ”What Can This Sorrow Be?” 171

nais”.3 These have a commemorative function and use the genre as an institution
for the reaffirmation of literary authority. The expressed ‘grief’ of this type of
elegy is often strongly object-directed (in the sense of being for a fellow poet) and
its poetic ‘weeping’ involves a negotiation of poetic voice.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, a second shift of definition takes
place, as the elegy no longer necessarily functions as an occasional poem, is
associated less with form and content than with mood and sensation, and tends
to render a more general sadness than occasioned grief. Around the same time,
the concept ‘elegiac’ is established theoretically as a mode, most notably by
Friedrich Schiller in On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, where he describes the
elegiac as an ‘Empfindungsweise’ [mode of feeling]. It is also explored by critics
like Thomas Abbt and Johann Gottfried Herder, who reflect on the poetics of
affectivity linked with the elegy, and combine it with notions of mixed emotions
and temporal distance. According to Herder, the elegy is governed by a specific
tone of feeling; a diminished, mild sadness – a ‘gentle feeling’ (‘das Sanfte
Gefühl’) that can appear in any genre (see Ziolkowski 79–80). Similarly tempered
are the meditations on mortality in English graveyard-poetry, especially the
mellow atmosphere of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”,
with its twilight churchyard setting, which frames the poet’s contemplation of the
lives of his unknown ancestors and encourages a “longing lingering look be-
hind”. These two lines of tradition (occasional elegy vs. elegiac mode) allow for
two possible readings of ‘elegiac feeling’ with respect to affectivity: one is likely
to be grandiose, extrovert, strongly intentional and committed to the public
performance of grief. The other is more introverted, subtle, and less object-
directed, and it does not necessarily present itself as someone’s emotions, but
rather emerges as a ‘tone’ or as an affective environment.

2 Curious Sadness and Audible Lamentation

Woolf incorporates both types of lamentation in Jacob’s Room: the apostrophic

cry for Jacob from the opening scene as a strongly object-directed, ‘loud’ lament,
as well as the configuration of a discrete and less intentional feeling, where the
concept of elegy is applied as a metaphor for the emergence of atmosphere:

3 References to the canonical English elegies can be found in the works of Woolf. In Jacob’s
Room, Jacob’s lover Florinda leaves Jacob’s room “with one of Shelley’s poems beneath her arm”
(Woolf 2004, 72) followed by an explicit mention of the poem “Adonais”. This indicates an
intertextual consciousness in her concept of elegy.
172 Ane Martine Lönneker

[S]he had the rapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer’s afternoon, when the
trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of the present seems like an
elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if
time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing
tragically to destruction. (Woolf 2004, 164)

Sadness here is above all curious, being apparently without cause, and associated
with a summer’s afternoon, or with loveliness. Woolf emphasises the uncertainty
and ambiguity of affectivity, and she questions the very nature of sorrow:

[T]he Cornish hills have stark chimneys standing on them; and, somehow or other, love-
liness is infernally sad. Yes the chimneys and the coast-guard stations and the little bays
with the waves breaking unseen by any one make one remember the overpowering sorrow.
And what can this sorrow be? It is brewed from the earth itself. It comes from the houses on
the coast. (Woolf 2004, 43)

Although phrased as a human emotion, ‘sorrow’ is depicted not as a psychologi-

cal property, but rather something distinctly non-human, a material and spatial
feature, and it attains an indeterminate yet objective status as an external condi-
tion in the novel; as something that comes from the environment.
Regarding this objective status, there is a striking preoccupation with sad
sounds or the sound of sadness in the novel. This intermingling of affect and
sound is arguably inscribed in the genre of elegy, which is haunted by its
identification with mournful song. Milton’s “Lycidas” famously phrases elegiac
sorrow as a “melodious tear”, and Shelley pleads for the “Most musical of
mourners” to “weep again” in “Adonais”. There is a certain mythos implied in this
relation between sorrow and song, originating perhaps in Orpheus’ lament for
Eurydice, a common reference in the English elegiac tradition, in which Orpheus
figures as an ‘ur-elegist’ (Zeiger 1997, 45)4 exemplifying the sovereignty of poetic
lament transcending mortal loss. An idea of the ultimate power of song underlies
poetic elegy, an idea of a transformative potential in the voicing of suffering,
where grief becomes musical and audible.
In the most explicit references to negative emotionality in Woolf’s novel,
affect is frequently configured as sound. When for example Woolf turns feeling
into the sound of a factory siren, she seems committed to shielding feeling from
subjective ownership: “At this moment there shook out into the air a wavering,

4 Zeiger’s emphasis, however, is on the gender politics of the Orpheus myth in elegy – on the
female threat in the symbolic exchange of masculine poetic authority. I am indebted to her
emphasis on the importance of the myth for the dynamics of elegy, though I do not take matters of
gender and sexuality into account here.
 ”What Can This Sorrow Be?” 173

quavering, doleful lamentation which seemed to lack strength to unfold itself,

and yet flagged on; at the sound of which doors in back streets burst sullenly
open; workmen stumped forth.” (Woolf 2004, 71). Sound has a special function as
a constituent of Stimmungen in the novel, ascribed with a distinctive affective
agency as the ‘doleful’, and the lament become an acoustic signal that organises
movement. These signals imbue the space of the novel with a certain tone,
whether it be the loud lamenting siren as in the quotation above, or a more
discrete noise in an atmosphere governed by absence: “Listless is the air in an
empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the
wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there.” (Woolf 2004, 33). This privile-
ging of sound corresponds to the etymology of the concept of Stimmung, which
has its musical roots in ‘Stimme’, meaning both ‘voice’ and to ‘tune an instru-
ment’, a concept in which the relation to music and human voice serves as a
strong semantic resource (Wellbury 2003, 5:704). That the genre of elegy is
concerned with the semantics of sound and hearing is apparent in the self-under-
standing of many elegies: the elegiac utterance is determined by its ability to be
heard and thereby to move its audience. Woolf’s take on this audibility of
affectivity goes beyond the metaphorical, since she strengthens the link between
sound and sadness and foregrounds the acoustic materiality of atmosphere.

3 Echoes of Apostrophe

The affective quality of atmosphere is associated precisely with the ability of

sound to unfold in space. This is also the case with the refrain of Jacob’s Room,
the apostrophic call “Jacob! Jacob!” heard throughout the novel, which first
appears in the opening scene, when Jacob’s brother’s voice goes “out into the
world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks’ with an ‘extraordinary sad-
ness” (Woolf 2004, 2–3).
According to Jonathan Culler, apostrophe, the addressing of absent persons
or inanimate objects, is a trope of self-reflection, a pseudo-dialogical figure that
constitutes a poetical persona. It marks poetry’s performativity, its power to make
something happen, as it constitutes a fictive discursive event. Moreover, a special
temporality characterises the apostrophic – a temporality of discourse rather than
of narrative, and Culler mentions the elegy as one of the clearest examples of a
tension between the two:

[A] temporal problem is posed: something once present has been lost or attenuated; this loss
can be narrated but the temporal sequence is irreversible, like time itself. Apostrophes
displace this irreversible structure by removing the opposition between presence and
174 Ane Martine Lönneker

absence from empirical time and locating it in a discursive time. The temporal movement
from A to B, internalized by apostrophe, becomes a reversible alternation between A’ and B’:
a play of presence and absence governed not by time but by poetic power. (Culler 1981, 150)

The curious thing is that Woolf’s ‘elegy’ somehow reverses this structure or
temporal problem: the play of presence and absence governed by poetic power
does not replace an irreversible temporal disjunction, in a move from life to death,
rather, the apostrophising play of presence and absence is placed before loss and
thus superposes the temporality of sequence. One might question the figurative
status of the call for Jacob, because his absence is not absolute until the novel
ends, and so could, perhaps, be read more literally. But the apostrophic call has a
curious appendage here; the voice breaking against the rocks – an echo-motif
that appears strikingly frequently in the history of elegy (Sacks 1985, 24–25)5 –
and this echo-motif seems somehow to confirm that the underlying premise for
the call is a more radical absence.
The semantic potential of resonance or reverberation appears compelling to
poets engaged in poetic lamentation, one of the early instances being Bion’s
lament for Adonis, repeated by Echo. Other examples include the reference to
Sorrow’s “hollow echo” in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (Tennyson 1974, 77), and
the echo as a metaphor for the undying fame of the elegised poet Keats in
Shelley’s “Adonais”, where Echo also appears as a character who falls silent,
since she can no longer mimic the lips of the deceased. The echo is a potent motif
in the Orpheus story as well, particularly in Virgil’s version, after Orpheus loses
Eurydice for the second time and his head floats down the river, calling “Eur-
ydice, oh poor Eurydice!”, and the riverbanks echo her name (Virgil 2003, 77).
The echo is an exemplary motif, as it illustrates how the apostrophising voice
is essentially speaking to itself when calling for the absent other, thus underlining
the self-reflection and the pseudo-dialogical nature of apostrophe. In her use of
apostrophic address, Woolf detaches the dialogical potential and the possibility
of response when she engages with the echo-motif. This is crucial for under-
standing what is at stake when Woolf reflects on her novels as elegies: it is a
matter of elaborating in narrative the space that the apostrophising voice is
speaking into, and thereby rendering tangible the play of presence and absence
performed by language.

5 Peter Sacks calls attention to the echo-motif in elegies, however, his starting point is Freud’s
concept of mourning, and in his reading, the echo signifies a phase of mourning when repetition
is necessary for the mourner to recognize the fact of loss.
 ”What Can This Sorrow Be?” 175

4 Affective Resonance

As a template for the configuration of elegiac sorrow, the echo establishes a link
between apostrophe and atmosphere. When she applies the echo, Woolf seems to
foreground the more phenomenological aspects of the echo, and the motif thus
embodies the ambiguities of the phenomenal features of Stimmung or atmo-
sphere, having a double nature as something both subjectively felt and spatially
distributed. Interestingly, the physical phenomenon of an echo bears striking
similarities to the way contemporary critics talk about affect and atmosphere, as
in Ben Anderson’s notion of ‘affective atmospheres’: “[A]tmospheres are spatially
discharged affective qualities that are autonomous from the bodies that they
emerge from, enable and perish with.” (Anderson 2009, 80). The blurring of
boundaries between the subjective and the objective is precisely what is at stake
in the echo-motif as a template for elegiac sorrow: in her application of the
apostrophic call, Woolf constructs a real space around the elegising address as
the apostrophising voice is detached from its speaker and is turned into an
autonomous material device, into resonance.
This brings the question of the novel’s configuration of feeling close to notions
in contemporary affect theory, particularly the distinction between affect and
emotion found in the Spinozist-Deleuzian-inspired branch, where critics conceive
of affects as bodily relational intensities distributed across space, as forces at work
beyond named emotions and different from individualised, articulated feeling
(see, for instance, Massumi 2002, 27). However, if one looks at the signification of
sorrow in Woolf’s novel, the named emotion takes on many of the same features
as affect: spatiality, objectivity, and trans-or-pre-personality. Alternatively, per-
haps more correctly and in tune with the echo-motif: affect is featured as a post-
personal condition when elegiac sorrow is extended beyond emotion.
The echo-motif implies a pursuit of that particular moment when ‘extraordin-
ary sadness’ is no longer an entirely subjective and psychological property, but
becomes an objective reality, integral to the landscape. It is only after ricocheting
on the rocks that the child’s call for his brother is fully articulated as an affective
utterance; when the utterance comes back to the speaker as affective. Thus,
feeling must be understood as something at work in the transitions from subject
to space, and vice versa. I think the turn to resonance in Jacob’s Room marks an
attempt to capture the moment when the subjectively voiced utterance becomes
affective in the process of ‘going out into the world’, becoming spatial and social,
albeit remaining ‘unanswered’. By elaborating on the conventional connection of
apostrophe and echo, and by configuring elegiac sorrow in accordance with
physical resonance, the novel emphasises the reversibility that governs that
affectivity, thereby blurring the distinction between emotion and affect.
176 Ane Martine Lönneker

Responsiveness becomes a key issue in the relation between apostrophe and

atmosphere when Woolf plays with the expectation of an answer, implied in the
explicit address. This is underlined in the novel’s final scene, which mirrors
Archer’s call for Jacob on the beach. Jacob’s mother and his friend Bonamy gather
in Jacob’s room to sort through his things after the report of his death in war:

Bonamy crossed to the window. Pickford’s van swung down the street. The omnibuses were
locked together at Mudie’s corner. Engines throbbed, and carters, jamming the brakes down,
pulled their horses sharp up. A harsh and unhappy voice cried something unintelligible.
And then suddenly all the leaves seemed to raise themselves. ‘Jacob! Jacob!’ cried Bonamy,
standing by the window. The leaves sank down again. (Woolf 2004, 173)

The verbal action of apostrophe is transposed into the space of the novel’s story
as Woolf discretely indicates a kind of causal relation between the human voices
and the leaves that ‘raise themselves’ and subsequently sink down again. The
happening of the apostrophic event is reinterpreted as physical action: the ‘lyric
cry’ is no longer spoken into a poetical sphere, but rather confronts a real world of
real time that undermines the discursive temporality of apostrophe. Thus, the
constitution of the novel’s ‘elegiac’ character must be understood as more than a
question of mourning over loss. It emerges as an affective tension in the encoun-
ter between the apostrophic performance and the representation of atmosphere.

References

Anderson, Ben. “Affective Atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2009): 77–81.
Clevell, Tammy. “Consolation refused: Virginia Woolf, the Great War, and Modernist Mourning.”
MFS Modern Fiction Studies 50.1 (2004): 197–223.
Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs. Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1981.
Goldman, Jane. “From Mrs Dalloway to The Waves: New elegy and lyric experimentalism.” The
Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2010.
Gray, Thomas. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” [1751]. The Norton Anthology of English
Literature. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986: 2480–2483
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2002.
Milton, John. “Lycidas” in The Works of John Milton. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1994: 34–39
Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore & London:
The John Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Schiller, Friedrich. Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung [1795]. Oxford: Basil, 1957
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Adonais” [1821]. Romanticism. An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. Malden:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006: 1199–1217.
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Tennyson, Alfred. “In Memoriam A.H.H.” In Memoriam, Maud and other poems. Ed. John D. Jump.
London: J.M. Dent & Sons Limited, 1974: 75–153.
Virgil. Virgil’s Georgics: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Janet Lembke. New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2005.
Wall, Kathleen. “Significant Form in Jacob’s Room: Ekphrasis and the Elegy.” Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, 44.3 (2002): 302–323.
Wellbury, David. “Stimmung”. Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Ed. Karlheinz Barck. Stuttgard: J. B.
Metzler, 2003.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press, 1980.
———. “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” [1927]. Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009: 74–84.
———. Jacob’s Room [1922]. London: Vintage, 2004.
Zeiger, Michelle. Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality and the Changing Shapes of Elegy. Ithaca
& London: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Ziolkowski, Theodore. The Classical German Elegy 1795–1950. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980.
Zwerdling, Alex. “Jacob’s Room: Woolf’s Satiric Elegy.” Virginia Woolf and the Real World.
Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986.
Elisabeth Skou Pedersen
“One Thing Melts into Another”: Unanimism,
Affect, and Imagery in Virginia Woolf’s The
Waves

In The Transmission of Affect, Teresa Brennan describes affect transmission as a

notion that challenges naturalised conceptions of the body as a space of indivi-
dual self-containment (Brennan 6). Brennan studies phenomena such as phero-
mones, emotionally triggered chemicals which are secreted externally and can
enter into a foreign body, for instance via the sense of smell: “the transmission of
affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject.
The ‘atmosphere’ or the environment literally gets into the individual.” (ibid. 1).
Her conception of affect thus seeks to challenge dichotomies between the indivi-
dual and the environment, and between the social and the biological (ibid. 7).
According to Brennan, earlier studies of affect transmission have not done
full justice to the phenomenon. While she finds the French turn-of-the-century
theories of the ‘group mind’ interesting (as outlined by Gustave le Bon, for
instance), she criticises them for being too romantic and ultimately failing to
explain the actual mechanisms of group affects (ibid. 17). One theorist not
mentioned by Brennan whose ideas are closely related to this tradition is the
French author Jules Romains (1885–1972). Romains initiated a literary and philo-
sophical movement called unanimism, which was inspired by the new conditions
for social relations formed by urbanisation and advances in transport and com-
munication technologies. During the twentieth century, Romains seems to have
been more or less forgotten in the history of literature. In train with the upsurge of
research in affect, like-minded contemporaries such as Gabriel Tarde and Henri
Bergson have become the focus of renewed interest, but little has been published
on unanimism.1
However, there was more interest in Romains among his contemporaries.
Significantly, several members of the Bloomsbury Group in London paid public
attention to his work: Leonard Woolf reviewed one of his works (Woolf, “‘Les
Copains’”), Desmond MacCarthy and Sidney Waterlow translated one of his

1 André Cusinier. Jules Romains et l’Unanimisme remains one of the most comprehensive works
on unanimism. Later writings include P.J. Norrish, The Drama of the Group (1958), Rosalind
Williams, “Jules Romains, Unanimisme, and Urban Systems” (1992), and Allen McLaurin, “Virgi-
nia Woolf and Unanimism” (1982).
 “One Thing Melts into Another” 179

novels (Romains, Death of a Nobody), and as noted by Michael Whitworth (“Virgi-

nia Woolf and Modernism”, “Porous Objects”) and Allen McLaurin (1982), Woolf’s
work bears a resemblance to unanimist ideas.2 That is to say, Woolf is a signifi-
cant exponent of literary and philosophical ideas similar to those of Romains.
Since Romains gives the concept of affect a literary emphasis, his theories of
unanimism are of interest to the study of the representation of affect, and to
efforts to identify affective structures in literary form. In this essay, I will proceed
from a presentation of Romains’s philosophy to a reading of the relation between
affect and imagery in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), in which, I suggest,
unanimist thematical and formal experiments take centre stage.

1 Unanimism and Literature

According to the theory of unanimism, the city triggers the spontaneous creation
of communal consciousness in groups, the so-called unanimes, and this pheno-
menon is largely due to changes in the flows of common emotions. Romains’s
novel Mort de Quelqu’un (The Death of a Nobody) (1911) describes how a man’s
death causes emotional currents to flow in his house, his hometown, and at his
funeral, creating more or less transient unanimistic constellations. In a manifesto
titled “Poetry and Unanimous Feelings” (1905), Romains underlines the affective
aspect of unanimism: “These affects that translate into the heart’s language the
new relations and the intimate human union are by nature unanimous. Even more
unanimous still are those affects which are manifested spontaneously by groups,
which are affects outside of and beyond individuals” (48).3 By describing how
collective affect transgresses the individual and inhabits space, Romains antici-
pates the overlap of the social and the spatial in modern theories of affect. From
this perspective, unanimism could be seen as a turn-of-the-century equivalent to
the strand of human geography advocated by Nigel Thrift, who argues that the
urban space of late modernity is a system comprised of affective intensities
arising in certain social situations (Thrift 171).
Romains’s oeuvre testifies to his interest in literature as the central medium
of unanimism. This is in tune with the argument he advances in the 1905
manifesto, that unanimist feelings cannot be contained in the rigid conceptual
signification of scientific language:

2 On unanimism and the Bloomsbury Group, see Michael Whitworth, Virginia Woolf (2009).
3 In the online essay “Unanimism and the Crowd”, Louis Cabri who translated “Poetry and
Unanimous Feelings” notes the affinities between unanimism and Brennan’s theory of affect.
180 Elisabeth Skou Pedersen

The procedures of scientific analysis end here. Such feelings – too indeterminate, too
unconscious, too distant from the precision of conceptual language – refuse the coldness of
reflection that measures and records. But is it not precisely the role of Poetry to give
expression and shape to emotions humankind has been content to experience without
formulation? (“Poetry and Unanimous Feelings” 47)

The decisive element that Romains thus brings to the theoretical complex sur-
rounding affect, I would argue, is the literary or poetic element.
The idea that affect is unconscious and beyond literal signification is a
recurring argument in modern affect theory. Brennan distinguishes between
affects and feelings, the latter being ‘sensations that have found the right match
in words’ (5). Addressing the spatial and transpersonal qualities of affect, Ben
Anderson invokes the concept of ‘affective atmospheres’ to designate different
states of tension between opposed categories (Anderson 80). The language of
affect thus holds a conflictual relation to literal language. In the poetry and prose
through which he develops his theories, Romains offers as a new perspective on
the problem of the idea of literary language – and of figurative language in
particular – as a medium for representing the tensions implied in the concept of
affect.

2 From a Body in Space to a Bodily Space

Although unanimism is in many ways a transcendental concept, concerned with

ideas of the soul and the spirit, Romains’s use of figurative language assigns the
body and the sensual a paradoxical role. While the individual transgresses his
body in joining a unanime, the body remains a metaphorical frame of reference in
Romains’s descriptions of unanimist urban space. Thus, in the programmatic
collection of poems La Vie Unanime (1907), the passage of the individual into the
collective unanime results both in the transcendence of the individual body and
in the creation of an urban space in which material surroundings take on bodily
characteristics: “N’étant plus moi, je ne sens plus ce qui me touche ; Ma peau,
c’est le trottoir de la rue et le ciel” (133) [“Being myself no longer, I no longer feel
what touches me; My skin is the sidewalk of the street, and the sky”4]. Romains
seems to describe a transformation from a body in space to a bodily space.
Just as Brennan seeks to break down conceptual barriers between the indivi-
dual and the environment, between bodily and social phenomena, the body in

4 Translation of quote: Williams 190.

 “One Thing Melts into Another” 181

Romains’s work is at once the epitome of individuality and the medium through
which the social community comes into being. The description of transcendence
here seems to contradict the notion of the soul as separate from the body. The
abolishment of individuality is described in sensual terms (“L’unité de la chair
commence de craquer” (91) [“The unity of the flesh begins to crumble”5]) and
even the spiritual presence of the unanime in space oscillates between an abstract
transcendence (‘L’allure des passants n’est presque pas physique”) and a con-
crete sensual impression (“L’air qu’on respire a comme un goût mental”):

Qu’est-ce qui transfigure ainsi le boulevard?

L’allure des passants n’est presque pas physique ;
Ce ne sont plus de mouvements, ce sont des rythmes,
Et je n’ai plus besoin de mes yeux pour les voir.

L’air qu’on respire a comme un goût mental. Les hommes

Ressemblent aux idées qui longent un esprit.
D’eux a moi, rien ne cesse d’être intérieur ;
[…]. (47)6

The expression that ‘nothing ceases to be interior’ implies an extension of the

intimate space of the body to include the public space of the street scene. Thus, a
strict distinction between mental, bodily and material urban spaces does not
seem to apply in this vision of unanimism.

3 Woolf and Unanimism

Virginia Woolf’s prose pays attention to a range of liminal borderlines: between

the sexes (most clearly in Orlando (1928)), between the body and its surroundings,
the individual and the social. Ultimately, one could argue, the description of a
state of tension between categories, similar to Anderson’s concept of affective
atmospheres, is a recurring effort in Woolf’s literary production. Like Romains,
Woolf favours figurative language as a means of containing liminality and para-
dox in literary form.

5 Trans. Williams 190.

6 My own translation: “What is this, which is transfiguring the boulevard?/The speed of the
passers-by is almost not physical ;/They are no longer movements, they are rhythms,/And I no
longer need my eyes to see them.//The air one breathes has a mental taste. People/Resemble ideas
which follow a spirit./From them to me, nothing ceases to be interior […].”
182 Elisabeth Skou Pedersen

Of all Woolf’s novels, the lyrical novel The Waves (1931) most clearly displays
an inheritance from Romains. The relation between the individual, the body,
emotions, and community is the main theme of The Waves, and urban space and
modern transport systems are described in unanimist terms. For example, when
the character Bernard travels by train into London:

Over us all broods a splendid unanimity. We are enlarged and solemnized and brushed into
uniformity as with the grey wing of some enormous goose (it is a fine but colourless
morning) because we have only one desire – to arrive at the station. I do not want the train
to stop with a thud. I do not want the connection which has bound us together sitting
opposite each other all night long to be broken. (83)

As in the unanimist visions of Romains, the construction of community in The

Waves is tied to material spaces, and the novel’s social and spatial dimensions are
intimately connected.

4 Two Figurative Strategies

The novel is constructed as a series of interweaving monologues by six characters

balancing between individuality and collective unity. In the course of the novel,
there are several moments when the characters describe a feeling of becoming one
with each other. One of these is a dinner scene that takes place before Percival, who
is a seventh character without a voice, leaves for India. In this scene, the characters
struggle to capture in words their sense of collective affects. The passage is
dominated by two different strategies for such a description, and I will argue that
they are characteristic of the novel as a whole. The first strategy fixes conceptual
complexity in a concrete object outside the group by indicating a symbolic repre-
sentation, which then recurs later in the novel. The other strategy uses the body as
a vehicle for metaphorical expression. In the following passage, I will show how
these two strategies represent opposing spatial conceptualisations of affect:

‘We have come together, at a particular time, to this particular spot. We are drawn into this
communion by some deep, some common emotion. Shall we call it, conveniently, ‘love’?
Shall we say ‘love of Percival’ because Percival is going to India?
‘No, that is too small, too particular a name. We cannot attach the width and spread of
our feelings to so small a mark. We have come together (from the North, from the South,
from Susan’s farm, from Louis’ house of business) to make one thing, not enduring – for
what endures? – but seen by many eyes simultaneously. There is a red carnation in that
vase. A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled,
red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves – a whole flower to which every eye
brings its own contribution. (The Waves 95)
 “One Thing Melts into Another” 183

Bernard’s description of their problems in giving the ‘common emotion’ a linguis-

tic expression recalls Romains’s conceptualisation of transpersonal affect as an
intensity that evades articulation. The solution here is to narrow the focus by
creating the symbol of the flower on the table in which the complex emotion is
anchored. The figurative ‘movement’ can thus be said to correspond to the spatial
movement of the characters, who have travelled from different parts of the
country to this ‘particular spot’. In this way, the flower symbol creates a centripe-
tal structure of space.

5 The Body as Metaphorical Expression

In contrast to the symbol as a figurative strategy, the scene displays another

strategy, which creates a different vision of spatially distributed affect:

‘Look,’ said Rhoda; ‘listen. Look how the light becomes richer, second by second, and bloom
and ripeness lie everywhere; and our eyes, as they range round this room with all its tables,
seem to push through curtains of colour, red, orange, umber and queer ambiguous tints,
which yield like veils and close behind them, and one thing melts into another.’
‘Yes,’ said Jinny, ‘our senses have widened. Membranes, webs of nerve that lay white
and limp, have filled and spread themselves and float round us like filaments, making the
air tangible and catching in them far-away sounds unheard before.’ (Woolf 2000, 101)

If placing the collective affect in the flower symbol in the centre creates a
hierarchically organised space, this passage demonstrates a metaphorical lan-
guage that uses references to the body as a vehicle for describing a horizontal
affective space. This figurative strategy takes its starting point in a metonymical
principle, in which the eye refers to the glance, for example. The nearness
principle enables the creation of a bodily space, similar to that described by
Romains. Because this figurative use of the body does not fix emotion in space, a
horizontal, limitless flow of sensual impressions is created. The passage seems to
invoke the unanimist paradox of the body: there are no clear boundaries between
the body and the surroundings, and ‘[o]ne thing melts into another’.
The last example thus oscillates between a literal and a figurative interpreta-
tion. It is figurative in the sense that meaning is transferred to the body: the
experience of affective fusion is presented in concrete form as a fluid bodily
space. If collective affect is perceived as an immaterial phenomenon, the use of
the body is a metaphorical substitution. At the same time, it could also be read as
an extreme expression of the view that Brennan advocates when she says that
interpersonal affects have a concrete, physical presence in space. In this view, the
metonymical principle of contiguity overrules the metaphorical one of substitu-
184 Elisabeth Skou Pedersen

tion, producing in language a formal expression of the horizontal flow of collec-

tive affect. The figurative strategy focusing on the body (in contrast to the
symbolising strategy) thus mimics the relational character of affect. The body in
Woolf’s work could very well be described as an “in-between-ness” (McKim &
Massumi 2009, 1), a term employed by Brian Massumi to describe affect. Because
the description of bodily fusion balances a figurative and a literal description of
collective affect, it also attains a linguistic in-between-ness that challenges pre-
cisely the type of dichotomies that Brennan confronts: between the bodily and the
social, the individual and the environment.

6 The Circle and the Wave

While the flower symbol echoes the frequent circle imagery in The Waves, the
second example could be likened to the wave imagery of the title, and of the
symbolic interludes in the novel describing a sunrise over an ocean shore. I would
argue that the wave holds a structural significance that renders it the over-arching
figurative expression of the novel. For example, the polyphonic speech of the
characters is characterised by slight repetitions, with the same expressions
appearing in different contexts, accumulating meaning in wave-like formations.
The circle does not have the same general significance. In the novel, the circle is
connected to the momentary experience of unity – whether it be the unity of the
individual or of social space: while Jinny describes “the circle cast by my body”
(Woolf 2000, 52), elsewhere sensual impressions of the city are given circular
characteristics: “All separate sounds […] are churned into one sound, steel blue,
circular” (101). In contrast, the image of the waves seems to represent the con-
tinual horizontal flow of the formation and deconstruction of community.
Woolf thus pays attention to the problems of a notion of collective affect by
focussing on liminal points, which are points of both transcendence and of
resistance. She develops a language that encapsulates the complexity of the
concept of affect. Instead of succumbing to the idealistically positive view of
transcendence characteristic of at least some parts of Romains’s work, she pre-
sents collective emotion as something that challenges but does not abolish the
limits of individuality. The primary effort of The Waves is thus to keep individuals
in the tension between problematic individuality and collective transcendence. In
this respect the novel is more complex than Romains’s work, in which the pursuit
of unanimist union is to a large extent an uncontested ideal.
 “One Thing Melts into Another” 185

7 Performative Language

In the novel, the character Rhoda poses the question: “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’ –
but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” (Woolf 2000,
123), suggesting that the structure of metaphorical language implies a distance in
its implicit reliance on the figure of the simile. The metonymical language of The
Waves, however, seeks to create a sense of presence rather than a distance of
comparison, conjuring in its formal properties ‘the thing that lies beneath the
semblance of the thing’.
The body in affect is in excess of its own individuality, spilling over its own
borders. When it comes to a literature of collective affect, such as that proposed in
unanimism, the body is arguably also in excess of the text: as a material, visceral
phenomenon it evades the structures of linguistic representation. If literary lan-
guage is conceived as a mimetic reference to a material phenomenon, then body
and text, the sign and the referent, remain ontologically irreconcilable – the
notion of ‘semblance’ keeps them separate, although in a state of interchange. So
the idea of mimetic language as such implies the difference in nature between
text and world so central to the anti-mimetic paradigm of Derridean deconstruc-
tion, in which it was famously asserted that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (Derrida
2001, 1825). If, however, as a third option, we respond to Jonathan Culler’s cue
that the notion of performativity – the ability of language to formally create its
own referent – indicates a principle of literary language in general (Culler 2000,
506–507), then literature can perhaps after all inform our understanding of extra-
representational phenomena such as affect and the body. Rather than being an
attempt to re-present, literature can perhaps give a presentation of an unstable
concept such as affect, which, by pointing to its own formal complexities, gives
shape to a phenomenon that exceeds more stable and literal definitions. In this
way, it becomes possible to speak of the body of the text rather than juxtaposing
text and body in terms of sign and referent.
In her discussion of Romains’s contemporaries, Brennan recognises the in-
tuitive appeal in literary representations of affect transmission, but she also
dismisses it in terms of its actual epistemological value (Brennan 2004, 17–18).
Keeping in mind Romains’s assertion that literary language holds sway over
scientific language when it comes to describing affect, I would argue that the
paradigms of objectivity and literal precision inherent in scientific language stand
in contrast to affective relationality. The notion of performativity, exemplified
through Romains’s and Woolf’s use of figurative language, allows us to think of
literature as the processual creation of a referent, which can then give formal
expression to the relational nature of affect. While literary interpretations of affect
can be no substitute for scientific research into the biological and chemical
186 Elisabeth Skou Pedersen

properties of the phenomenon, they can perhaps act as a valuable supplement to

such studies by giving shape to the experiential dimensions of affect.

References

Anderson, Ben. “Affective Atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2009): 77–81.
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Cabri, Louis. “Unanimism and the Crowd”. jacket2.org/article/unanimism-and-crowd [February
9, 2014].
Culler, Jonathan. “The Fortunes of the Performative.” Poetics Today 21.3 (2000): 503–519.
Cusinier, André. Jules Romains et l’Unanimisme. Paris: Flammarion, 1935.
Derrida, Jacques. From De la Grammatologie. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds.
Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.
McKim, Joel & Brian Massumi. “Of Microperception and Micropolitics: An Interview with Brian
Massumi.” Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation 3 (2009).
McLaurin, Allen. “Virginia Woolf and Unanimism.” Journal of Modern Literature 9.1 (1981/82):
115–122.
Norrish, P.J. The Drama of the Group. Cambridge University Press, 1958.
Romains, Jules. “Poetry and Unanimous Feelings.” Trans. Louis Cabri. The Capilano Review, 3.13
(2011): 46–48.
———. Death of a Nobody. 1911. Trans. Desmond MacCarthy & Sydney Waterlow. New York: A.
A. Knopf, 1944.
———. La Vie Unanime: Poème 1904–1907. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.
Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge, 2008.
Williams, Rosalind. “Jules Romains, Unanimisme, and Urban Systems.” Literature and Technol-
ogy. Eds. Mark L. Greenberg & Lance Schachterle. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press,
1992. 177–205.
Whitworth, Michael. Virginia Woolf. Oxford University Press, 2009.
———. “Virginia Woolf and Modernism.” Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Eds. Sue Roe &
Susan Sellers. Cambridge University Press, 2000. 146–163.
———. “Porous Objects: Self, Community, and the Nature of Matter.” Virginia Woolf out of bounds.
Eds. Jessica Berman & Jane Goldman. Pace University Press, 2001.
Woolf, Leonard. “‘Les Copains’.” Essays of Virginia Woolf vol. 2. Ed. A. McNellie. London:
Hogarth, 1990. 16–18.
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. 1931. London: Penguin, 2000.
Marlon Miguel
Towards a New Thinking on Humanism in
Fernand Deligny’s Network

Fernand Deligny worked with autistic children during a period of more than
fifteen years at a farm in the Cévennes, France. Deligny was neither a psychiatrist,
psychoanalyst, nor pedagogue. He never intended to cure the children, or to
rehabilitate them into ‘normal’ social life. Deligny always dealt with a type of
autism that is silently perceived as ‘low autism’1, referring to children who are
considered to have low mental capabilities, some even being unable to speak. The
first thing that we might notice is that Deligny entirely rejects these categories, as
well those of ‘normal’ or ‘pathological’. In this sense, he is never interested in
seeking the causes of autism. Deligny’s proposal is instead to find a way of living
together, of sharing a common space and life.
Deligny states that during these years, all of his work was no more than a very
precarious attempt. With no preconceived ideas or goals to achieve, he equates
this attempt with something close to a ‘work of art’. His only starting point was to
respect the radical difference of the children’s behaviours in comparison to ‘our
own’, or to what we as socialised people are used to. Yet, and this is very
important, this has never been a question of respect for the sake of respect, but
rather of the idea that respect is the only reasonable way of treating this Other, so
radically Other, in order for all to live together – though this ‘together’ itself is
very particular, since even verbal communication may not be possible.
I would like, within the limits of this short essay, to briefly present Deligny’s
attempt, and to investigate some of his key ideas. Deligny’s thought can open very
useful paths for thinking about highly contemporary questions such as that of the
common, of territoriality and its occupation, and of the meanings of normal and
pathological. Furthermore, in describing the singularity of autistic children, we
discover a wholly different way of being, and thus also of affectivity. How do
desire and affect operate in people who do not have the use of speech? Is it
possible to think of a radical ‘Other’ in its very positive singularity, without
referring it to a certain absolute norm?

1 In opposition to ‘high autism’, referring to autistic patients who develop very specific proficien-
cies.
188 Marlon Miguel

In his text L’Arachnéen, Deligny (Deligny 2008)2 defines the notion of network
(réseau), through which he tries to envision a way of living together with autistic
children. According to him, a network is a ‘way of being’; it is generated by
chance and is intrinsically marked by the fortuitous. This way of being is inti-
mately related to what Deligny calls the arachnidan (arachnéen), and the arachni-
dan in turn is related to an innate structure of human beings. What is the
arachnidan? To begin with, it is something that forces us to weave or to spin – as
a spider spins a web. With this idea, Deligny wants to convey the idea that a
network cannot be intentionally or consciously constructed, but is the fruit of
chance and of spontaneity. In opposition to the notion of ‘society’, there is no
project in a ‘network’.
We can already begin to see Deligny’s proposal. He wants to conjure a space
different from that of society; a space without pressure, coercion or subjection, a
space, according to Deligny, that rests at an impersonal level, in the register of the
infinitive, thus without the conjugation of the person (Cf. Deligny 2008, 95).3
Although the image of a spider web is evoked, we understand this web as one
without a spider, or, in parallel, a network without subjects.
But why is this? Deligny at the time of writing lives with children who do not
speak, and who seem absolutely beyond our ‘symbolical world’. Deligny says that
they are resistant, adverse (réfractaires) to everything that seems the most natural
to ‘the-human-that-we-are’ (l’homme-que-nous-sommes). Through this category of
‘the-human-that-we-are’, Deligny wants to mark the difference, the ‘crevice’
(fêlure), between beings who speak and live in the ‘reign of the symbolical’ (‘us’)
and those who do not, who live instead in the ‘reign of silence’ (‘them’, the
autistic children). This difference seems a very radical presupposition, but it is in
fact the opposite. The crevice is not a difference of level, degree, or quality, but
just a ‘mark of acceptance’ in which nothing is presupposed. Deligny refuses to
accept the faculty of will (vouloir) and of self-consciousness as naturally given,
and nor indeed even the capability of speaking, of meaning, and of signifying; he
does not presuppose the meaning of the children’s actions, movements, and
behaviours. If the children do not speak it is not because, due to some pathology,
they are unable to, but because they live in a different register from ours; and if

2 As the grounds for my argument, I will use this book (and specially the first article, called
“L’Arachnéen”), which gathers together texts written between 1976–1982. All translations from
French are mine. From now on, I will just give the name of the text and the page reference.
3 Deligny wants to think beyond the register of the Cartesian and Kantian all-powerful Subject.
The question of ‘being in infinitive’ appears also constantly in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s works.
 Towards a New Thinking on Humanism in Fernand Deligny’s Network 189

they seem to speak, they do so in a way that is void of meaning, their use of the
voice is just of another type (Cf. “La voix manquée”).4
The first step in Deligny’s challenge of living with radically different people,
and of seeking for a common space beyond what is usually fundamentally
common to us, is to respect the crevice, and to accept that it persists. Furthermore,
a common space is necessary, a topos, where they live together, producing their
food, taking care of the space, etc. This topos is above all where common life takes
place. How it should take place, however, remains completely uncertain, and
does not follow very strict rules. In order to make this experience successful, this
topos must nonetheless structure itself in a way that avoids the symbolical world.
If we follow Deligny, this topos is far from an intellectual undertaking, and is
nothing more than a place to create an ordinary (coutumier) life with daily tasks,
where, in order to accomplish these tasks, one needs to move from one place to
another, take paths, follow routes.
It is with methods of cartography that Deligny develops his research. He maps
the paths of the children, lots of them inexplicable because they follow unpredict-
able directions or because they make wide detours, in proportion to what would
be needed to accomplish a certain task. By mapping theses movements, Deligny
begins to locate, to spot (repérer) some connecting points, nodes where the paths
have become entangled (enchevêtré, chevêtre). These nodes, Deligny claims, are a
manifestation of a commonality between the inhabitants of this space, of a
persistent crossroad of paths. It is also important to note that Deligny’s mapping
method is not intended to interpret the meaning of these movements, but only to
follow their directions – question then, of drawing the lines of these movements,
their nodes, their ‘erratic lines’ (lignes d’erre).5
Deligny’s question is that of how to build a common space: how can one
build something in common without knowing what we have in common? This
paradoxical question guides his purpose: to create a space without knowing what
that space is beforehand. This is why Deligny starts to map, without a pre-existing
formula, the lines and the traces of these movements, thus questioning the
connection between the space and its subjects. It is through a theory of lines that

4 We could also think about the film Le moindre geste (1971), another experience made in the
Cévennes. The film follows Yves G., a twenty years old autistic man, immersed in the landscape
and saying meaningless things to no one in particular; his speech is a delirious one, free from
any practical use. Yves appears as a counter-image against the idea that what we say belong to
us.
5 As Deleuze notes, if the archeological method of the psychoanalysis searches an origin and a
sense, Deligny’s cartographical method is rather an evaluation of the displacement (Cf. Deleuze
1998).
190 Marlon Miguel

Deligny then starts to interpret his maps. Deleuze and Guattari were also, inciden-
tally, much influenced by Deligny’s theory of lines, and included the cartography
of lines as the central aspect of their Schizoanalysis program, in order to under-
stand individual and social phenomena. Why talk about lines? Lines, in contrast
to points, evoke movement and becoming (devenir); they can be seen as vectors
and directions. Points, on the other hand, are the marks of positions that are
stable and simple. Lines are complex, composed by rhythms, speeds, forms. For
this reason, lines present better possibilities for thinking about social, political or
affective fields.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) quote Deligny in several places in A Thousand

Plateaus (See the Introduction (Rhizome), the eighth plateau and the eleventh
(Ritournelle). See also Deleuze and Claire Parnet’s Dialogues). Moreover, they
transpose his concept of lines. The notion of ‘line of flight’ (ligne de fuite) is
broadly inspired by Deligny’s ‘erratic line’ – a real line, incomprehensible and
creator of new possibilities. We could also think that the lines of ‘rigid segmen-
tarity’ (the lines of organisation) and the ‘supple lines’ from Deleuze and Guat-
tari are, respectively, translations from Deligny’s ordinary lines (the children’s
and adults’ daily paths) and the lines that represent the children’s actions.
Finally, the very notion of network is in fact a rhizomatic notion – a horizontal
organisation without centre and hierarchy, where all the points are connectable
because they are not ordered following transcendental laws. On the one hand,
the autistic children are a radical Other, but on the other hand, they are not
considered of a lower degree to ‘us’ – the transcendental law of the normal and
abnormal are not at work in the network. ‘Line’ is one of the more frequently
employed notions in A Thousand Plateaus, and it is a useful concept for analys-
ing fields that are complex; engaged at the same time with structuring or
organising orders, as well as with disorganising and breakdown forces, and with
energies that absolutely flight (and ‘put to flight’) these fields. The cartography
of the lines, according to Deleuze and Guattari, would serve to retrace these
different lines – be they from a social group, or from an individual. An individual
can be organised by large lines (his work, his social position, his gender), and be
traversed by lines that disturb or ‘molecularize’ this organisation (a secret
passion or desire, a dream) and finally by lines that completely destroy this
structured world. For Deleuze and Guattari, these three types of lines constantly
and simultaneously traverse us. It seems that affectivity could also be analysed
through these notions, since affect is not a stable point, but rather a ‘transition
 Towards a New Thinking on Humanism in Fernand Deligny’s Network 191

line’ from one state to another.6 We cannot fix affect, but rather follow (map) the
movements it provokes.
It is important however to remember that for Deligny, Deleuze, and Guattari,
an individual is literally constituted by different types of lines.

The network is a complex permanent or fortuitous of interlaced lines. What I wanted more
or less to say is that the traced lines of the arachnidan are as permanent as the lines of the
hand, only just that the network of lines of the hand is easily seen, while that of the
arachnidan is constantly to discover (Deligny 2008, 59).

Deligny intends to create a space in which a radical difference exists and is

maintained, allowing it to exist. He accepts that it is perhaps not possible to deal
with this difference; that is to say, it may be impossible to go beyond it. But by the
simple fact of sharing a place, a topos, and of occupying this place together, with
ordinary activities, a common begins to appear. Something additional happens
here: as soon as Deligny starts to draw the lines of the customary paths taken by
the children, he discovers that ‘tracing’ is somehow a language shared by every-
one – both by those who speak, as well as by those who live in silence. Deligny
differentiates between tracer (the pure act of tracing in infinitive) and tracée (the
traced, the trace itself as mark or sign). A trace understood as a sign remains
within the order of representation, but to trace is a pure gesture. Indeed, Deligny
often observed that if an autistic child had a pencil in his hand, he or she would
start to draw without stopping and would continue to do so even when the pencil
was gone and only the hands were left. However, Deligny states that this action of
drawing was never intended to represent something (Cf. Deligny 2008, 130).
Deligny classifies the pure act without an end as innate. He talks about an agir
sans fin, which evokes a double idea: the absence of a goal and the idea of
endlessness. It is innate for a human being to act – this is all we can assert.
Whether this act has a sense, an intention, a meaning or a goal, none of this can
be presupposed. The act of tracing-drawing-painting (tracer) is for Deligny a form
of acting par excellence.
Deligny considers the simple act without end (l’agir) as an elementary stratum,
a fossil element. Through the idea of the ‘fossil’, Deligny suggests that ‘the-human-
that-we-are’ is the product of a long history of superposition of strata, and a long
process of domestication. The most ancient and ‘original’ strata never disappear,
however, but remain, acting somehow. This fossil element, says Deligny, is simul-

6 The definition of affect given by Spinoza in the Ethics is ‘by which the body’s power of activity is
increased or diminished’ (Spinoza 2002, Ethics, III, def. 3.), that is to say its transition to passivity
or to activity.
192 Marlon Miguel

taneously “tacit and manifest” (Deligny 2008, 64). This means that ‘the-human-
that-we-are’ is a self-conscious being, who wants, wishes, and desires things, who
acts always intending to achieve goals. But what happens, asks Deligny, when we
are faced with children who do not act according to desire? Deligny will answer
that ‘the-human-that-we-are’ can never exhaust what human is.
It is doubtless difficult to say whether the children express desire or not. If we
follow Spinoza, and Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, the essence of human beings is
precisely desire (see Ethics, III, first definition and last propositions). Desire,
according to Spinoza, and quite at odds with psychoanalysis, is the very activity
or power of an individual. We should say rather that in describing another way of
being, Deligny describes a desire that does not follow the mechanisms of the
wanting and of the willing. We could say, using Deleuzian terms, that Deligny, in
his work, describes an entirely different semiotics (Cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
fifth plateau); he describes beings that are spatial, that are drawn by objects and
things. What is at stake then is an entirely different way of the operating with
desire and affectivity. Good affects, according to Spinoza, are those caused by a
good encounter, those that make someone active. Maybe what makes an autistic
child act – that is to say, that accomplishes his or her desire – is not the same
thing as would do so for ‘us’. Still, it is a question of finding what makes someone
active and not passive; it is the question of ethologically mapping someone’s
affects. Because, according to Spinoza, we never know beforehand what a body is
capable of, one must discover this through experimentation in order to under-
stand the relation of compositions within a body, and its relation to things, to
space, and eventually to its own possibilities for action (Cf. Ethics, III, Proposition
2, Scholium; see also Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, specially the sec-
ond chapter).
Should we say then that the autistic children are closer to the essence of the
human? Absolutely not. However, we have to consider that these children offer
some radically different elements which allow us to rethink the definition of
human and which above all remind us of elements whose existence, due to our
engrained familiarity with a certain way of being, we have forgotten. Rather than
offering a positive explanation of what autism means, Deligny extracts a counter-
image of what ‘we’ are.
What ‘we’ are, the ‘human-that-we-are’, is the superposition of strata, the
long history of culture and of language, that has created this whole symbolical
reign where Man now resides. The reign of the symbolical is the reign of the
Subject who is able to speak (pérorer), to reason and to rationalise, to be con-
scious of himself and of his wishes. This is what seems to distance Man from
nature and make him different from other animals. Deligny constantly says that
this ‘species of ours’ only exists as its own project. It is a new paradox that guides
 Towards a New Thinking on Humanism in Fernand Deligny’s Network 193

this reflection: Humanity as a species exists and simultaneously does not exist
anymore. The species is then what exists and persists, as the very thing that Man
lacks:

And the human appears then as what remains, somewhat in scraps, of the arachnidan
traversed by this kind of blind meteor, which is consciousness. […] In fact, the species exists
and persists. It is what Man lacks, what fills in and seals up and makes blind this lack with
all he tells himself, and he adores the consciousness, thanks to which he can protect himself
against the vertigo, against the absence that he feels before the openness of the arachnidan
(Deligny 2008, 81–82).

According to Deligny, ‘Man’ is what our species became, the project we gave
ourselves. The ‘human’ is then what remains when this whole project collapses;
it is below our self-consciousness. The human is what appears in fragments
through the arachnidan. What makes a spider spin its web is its instinct to
perform an innate capability of its species. In this sense, the maître d’oeuvre of
the spider is its species or nature. Our maître d’oeuvre seems to have disap-
peared since the onset of self-conscious of our actions, since everything we do
seems to be reflexive. This capacity to be self-conscious is not everything,
however, and can in fact be at once a limitation and a protection. It protects us
and prevents us from other ways of being by claiming that it is the achievement
of Mankind. The arachnidan is what destroys the security of consciousness and
of this claim.
If on the one hand, our species seems to have disappeared, Deligny claims on
the other that humans always find themselves amongst other humans; humans
are always, due to circumstances, forced to find themselves in networks. This
seems to be a natural or intrinsic necessity from which we cannot flee; something
below this self-conscious capability seems to persist, constantly bringing into
question the all-powerful and reasonable Subject. Humanity, this species that
persists despite the superposition of strata, is related to the ‘arachnidan’. As we
noted earlier, the arachnidan is itself linked to the innate structure of a network,
but also to acts in the infinitive form, the impersonal acts, the non-subjected acts,
everything that seems to belong more to the side of ‘animal’, but still traverses us.
Would Deligny be trying to give content to humanity? The response is compli-
cated, entangled, but at the same time clearly negative. Deligny states that in fact
that he feels himself adverse to Man, but, and exactly for this reason, he feels the
necessity of being human and of thinking about it:

If in being adverse, it is possible to find a certain idea of breaking down, of refusal, of

resistance, then war is just one aspect of what Man can do. It was thus against Man that I
was adverse, which imposed upon me the necessity of being human (Deligny 2008, 22).
194 Marlon Miguel

Humanity is something that means nothing, the name of a species that has long
since disappeared, and yet Deligny insists in talking about the human. What does
the ‘Arachnidan’ denominate? Arachnidan is Deligny’s name for something with-
out a name, for the pure exteriority that marks us and cannot be essentialised at
any level; it is also the name for the resistance against concrete content. Arachni-
dan is the name of something that binds us all and which at the same time and
above all resists a positive or linguistic definition.

If the arachnidan simultaneously is and is not something, how can it be under-

stood or accessible? Deligny claims that “the only access that conscience can
have to the arachnidan is to traverse it” (Deligny 2008, 82). His project in the
Cévennes is such an undertaking, and it follows the principle of not overburden-
ing the children. Criticising Françoise Dolto, Deligny shows how problematic it to
apprehend a child as a “little man” (petit homme), as if a child were a proto-adult
who should incorporate the image of an adult in order to become one himself. The
notion of “image of the good-natured human” (image du bonhomme), is a decisive
to approach our problem. Indeed, Deligny confronts every prefabricated image of
the human. Nonetheless, he constantly refers to an immutable (immuable). Fol-
lowing this argument, there are two types of immutable: one is the image that Man
has given himself – a unified image of the bonhomme, as if every individual had
to accomplish this model-image in order to be a Human – the second is an image
which comes from what Deligny calls the specific (Cf. Deligny 2008, 152), and
could be related to the arachnidan, to the innate. We are in fact facing the
problem of the essential non-essentialised exposed above. But what is the pur-
pose of this distinction? Firstly, it is necessary to prevent the idea that Man could
declare what is to be Human and then draw a border between those who corre-
spond to this image and those who do not. Every unified image is this image of
the bonhomme. On the other hand, there is something that binds all of us, some
kind of immutable, an image without image, an image of an imageless.
It is exactly this imageless that appears after many years of work in Deligny’s
maps. Through this means, Deligny intends to find the common ground between
the inhabitants of the Network, and this commonality appears in the chevêtres,
the tangles, entangled curls, or nodes, where different lines from different per-
sons have crossed each other over many years (Cf. Deligny 2008, 141). Concerning
the children, Deligny observed that these chevêtres were repeatedly the same;
they persisted in spite of the different individuals to which they referred. Very
often the children were attracted to regions where there was water or some
 Towards a New Thinking on Humanism in Fernand Deligny’s Network 195

magnetic force, and it was there that several paths crossed and sometimes just
stopped. Why were they attracted to that point and not to another? The chevêtres
indicate something that escapes our comprehension, something radically differ-
ent that is, precisely on account of its difference, hidden to us.
A chevêtre marks a threshold, a dead-end, although it can be perceived as
something structural because of its repetition over so many years (Cf. Deligny
2008, 206). A chevêtre is the mark of this immutable that traverses us all; it is the
mark of the human, of the common. It is an image of the imageless, that is to say,
an image which simultaneously shatters every image that claims to be total and
unified, and thereby opens the path to a humanity we all share. It seems that
Deligny conceptualises an impossible humanity, a humanity without content, an
empty universality along with the attempt to construct an impossible community,
a community that does not preexist:

What remained, openly, between us and them, was the there: topos. When I say between, I
do not want to insinuate a barrier, on the contrary, we had at least something in common,
the topos, the settlement, the outside (Deligny 2008, 140).

Deligny’s purpose is somehow circular. Finding himself close to these children,

he felt impelled to build something, though he did not know what or how. He and
others who wanted to carry out this attempt moved with the children to a farm in
the Cévennes in order to live together, sharing a common life. They performed
daily tasks, wandered and occupied the space, doing things, leaving a place to
chance, letting things take place ‘naturally’. The act of wandering incorporates
the fortuitous, the non-intentional, and, through this, the possibility of discover-
ing/finding/inventing (trouver) different connections to this place of theirs, con-
nections that we, ‘the-human-that-we-are’, cannot perceive. Through the mere act
of wandering, a network of paths starts to appear, a web is spun. Parallel to this
work of constant movement in space, Deligny undertook the cartographic method
in order to follow these unusual movements. In the end, however, the maps do
not represent something in particular; on the contrary, they show our incapacity
or ignorance towards the Other. Deligny began without knowing what to do, and
finished exactly in this condition, except for the fact that a common life was
finally established.
This undertaking cannot however be reduced to a negative procedure. After
so many years of tracing-drawing maps, the act became itself a way of being, and
an indication of something to unceasingly construct and discover. Nothing here is
supposed to be accomplished, but everything is to be constructed. We can note
the refusal of a given image of the human, as well as, on the contrary, the need to
continue seeking for something that binds us all. Furthermore, Deligny constantly
196 Marlon Miguel

claims that we, ‘the-human-that-we-are’, are unable to completely escape our

symbolical reign. Still, we can perceive the Real that traverses us, this exteriority
that distorts everything that seems most natural. We can try not to completely
close the doors to this Real by not assuming that what ‘we are’ is the only possible
world. But of course, ‘we’, who speak and symbolise, must do this work from the
inside. Perhaps this explains why Deligny wrote so much, compulsively, always
shifting the significations, trying through language, inside the language, to avoid
the traps of signification. The ‘arachnidan’ as a project is an attempt to construct
networks: antidotes against the concentration of power and identity; it is the form
of an impossible resistance:

The arachnidan (or if we want, the non-conscious being) fulfils the metaphor of the network
according to an ethological definition: a complex form, innate, ritualized, acted without
will, anti-utilitarian. (Deligny 2008, 33)

References

Deligny, Fernand. L’arachnéen et autres textes. Paris: Éditions Arachnéen, 2008.

Deleuze, Gilles. “What children say”. Essays Critical and Clinical. London: Verso Books, 1998.
61–67.
———. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, 2001
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987.
Deleuze, Gilles & Parnet, Claire. Dialogues. Paris: Champs Flammarion, 1999.
Spinoza, Complete works, trans. Samuel Shirley. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.,
2002.
4 Circulating Affect
Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage
Sympathetic Mobilisation
1 Introduction

This chapter will analyse two cases where DIY producers attempt to mobilise
receivers to support given causes – organ donation and environmentalism – via
the creation of ‘vernacular’ audiovisual material (Howard 2008).1 Sympathy
seems to be crucial for the social effects of these media objects, because they use
this intersubjective and affective relation between bodies as a way of engaging
viewers. In other words, these media texts not (only) use rational argumentation
and deliberation, but affective transmission, to secure political involvement. Our
overall goal is therefore to contribute to the understanding of the use of bodily
and affective mobilisation tactics in contemporary DIY political communication
(see also Knudsen and Stage 2012a; Knudsen and Stage 2012b).
Our empirical material consists of two large composites of audiovisual and
written media texts. The first is blog posts and videos produced over a 4-year
period from the blog 65 Red Roses made by Canadian blogger Eva Markvoort. Here
she blogged about her illness, the genetic lung disease cystic fibrosis, in order to
raise public awareness of the lack of organ donors. The second is the website of
the green hunger strike Climate Justice Fast, where environmental activists per-
formed a long lasting bodily investment (fasting) to communicate dedication and
the need for urgent political interventions in relation to climate change. These
cases are compatible because producers more or less strategically use their own
weakening bodies as catalysts of affective mobilisation in both of them. But the
result of this strategy is different from case to case, varying from relatively
unchallenged support to political contestation. Therefore our overall argument is
that these cases show that the weak body is surely an effective-affective mobilisa-
tion tool in terms of attracting reaction, but also a precarious tool, because the
content of these reactions can be very different and unpredictable.
According to John Fiske, texts can be intertextually connected in a horizontal
way, which is the case when primary texts “more or less explicitly” (Fiske 1987,

1 This essay is an amended version bringing together and developing analyses from two recently
published articles: Carsten Stage, “The Online Crowd: A Contradiction in Terms? On the Potentials
of Gustave Le Bon’s Crowd Psychology in an Analysis of Affective Blogging,” Distinktion: Scandi-
navian Journal of Social Theory 14.2 (2013); Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage, “Contagious
Bodies: An Investigation of Affective and Discursive Strategies in Contemporary Online Activism,”
Emotion, Space and Society 5.3 (2012).
200 Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage

108) link to each other (e.g., when a music video by Madonna (primary text 1)
refers to a film by Marilyn Monroe (primary text 2)). Intertextuality can also be
vertical when primary texts (a video by Madonna) are being linked to secondary
texts produced by media institutions (e.g., a newspaper review or an interview in
a magazine about the video), or by tertiary texts made by users (e.g., a Facebook
update, an email, a letter of opinion about the video). Our methodological
approach, in terms of collecting texts, has been to assemble both primary and
tertiary textual material, in order to be able to trace affective transmissions
between the primary texts and the receivers. In other words, we use the tertiary
responses – all made in an online context enabling spontaneous textual reactions
to audiovisual stimulation – to analyse the affective processes of these online
interactions.
Brian Massumi defines affect as related to bodily sensations of microshock:
“Affect for me is inseparable from the concept of shock. It doesn’t have to be a
drama. It’s really more about microshocks, the kind that populate every moment
of our lives” (Massumi 2009, 4). As so described, affect arrives at the level of the
body before language has clearly conceptualised or interpreted it. We agree with
recent research arguing that a too clear-cut distinction between body and cogni-
tion, affect and discourse, is not productive (Leys 2011; Blackman 2012; Wetherell
2012). Doing affect research by means of textual material is nevertheless still a
challenge – for several reasons. One of these is the possible disconnection of
online subject and offline subject, making it difficult to verify the authenticity of
affective statements online (Howard 2008; Turkle 1994). Following Nancy Baym,
we establish our analysis based on the fact that most online interaction can be
seen as augmentations of real life practices, not as a zone of make-believe and
inauthenticity (Baym 2010). Furthermore, studies have shown that online interac-
tions are often more honest than offline interactions, because of the possibility of
somehow hiding your offline identity behind avatars and creative profiles. The
second challenge is to define what affective traces in language might look like.
Here we follow Brian Massumi’s idea of affect as either expressed through content
that re-states an affective bodily sensation, or through forms where narrative
structures and formalised communication are disturbed by the affective sensa-
tion, which thereby manifests itself through discursive ruptures and denorma-
lised language (Massumi 2002).
The guiding questions this chapter investigates in relation to the two specific
cases are: 1) How are bodies used in the primary texts of the media platforms to
politically mobilise viewers, and in what way is affect a part of the mobilisation
strategy? 2) How do the users respond (in the tertiary texts) to this affective
mobilisation strategy: positively or negatively, via sympathy or opposition, via
imitation or rejection of the bodies put on display?
 Sympathetic Mobilisation 201

1 Theoretical Framework

1.1 Imitation and Biopolitics

It seems to be widely acknowledged that truth, rationality and discourse need to

be supplemented as adequate terms for analysing ‘the social’, whether this
happens through what some call the affective turn (Massumi 2002; Clough 2007;
Gregg and Seigworth 2010), through non-representational embodiment theories
anchored mostly in cultural geography and aesthetics (Thrift 2008; Marks 2000;
Paterson 2007; Anderson and Harrison 2010), or through a more thorough discus-
sion of the relationship between representation, discourses, cognition and affects
(Butler 2009; Leys 2011; Wetherell 2012).
The investigation of the more-than-representational layers and potentialities
of the social is closely connected to the development of digital media as a
complex system of communication that weaves together technologic, social, and
bodily systems. Digital social media are broadly characterised by creating the
‘immediatisation’ of social time, erasing the gap between receiving, being af-
fected, and acting (Tomlinson 2007; Baym 2010; Baron 2008; Kuntsman 2012;
Benski and Fisher 2014). Furthermore, they offer easy ways for non-professionals
to up- and download material, and to facilitate uncontrolled and user-generated
transmissions between bodies (Gauntlett 2011). In order to grasp the affective
dimension of this media-cultural situation, we take our theoretical point of
departure in the affective turn’s awareness of more-than-representational social
processes, but also in early sociological theories about the corporeal uncon-
scious. Focussing on the latter, Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon understood the
social in terms of crowds and publics, and described the relations between
crowd-members as acted out through sympathy, prestige, suggestibility, imita-
tion and contagion, which could take both a horizontal, hierarchical form of
exerting influence (e.g., the people imitating a king as a celebrity because of his
inherited prestige) and a more lateral form (e.g., imitation based on the extra-
ordinary affective potential of specific human beings because of their strictly
personal qualities).
Tarde points to imitation as a key concept in understanding the dynamics of
societies. He outlines various reasons to imitate: imitation out of respect, out of
admiration, or out of fascination, and he terms the act of instinctive imitation
‘somnambulist’; thus unconscious (Tarde 1903). Those we imitate have prestige –
and they get prestige through their imitation-impact-factor – by exerting a force
of attraction. They have power over, and the strategic use of that power to
contaminate, others: to be able to make others imitate someone or something is at
the heart of power in modern societies, according to Tarde. The celebrity with an
202 Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage

ability to make people imitate him/her is socially powerful because of this

relational capacity to contaminate – not because of an institutionally acquired
coercive power.
The political channelling or managing of bodies, e.g. the forms of imitation
and contagion that are motivated by the bodies of ordinary citizens, is a form of
biopower in Foucault’s sense, and thereby a key to understanding social dy-
namics. Foucault’s definition of power is the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault 1994,
341), or a governing or management of bodies through institutions, architecture,
and practices. This power over bodies is often translated into long lasting institu-
tions through which societies create stability and continuity keeping in check the
possible disruptive force of uncontrolled imitation. Prisons and schools are
explicit examples of long-term and stable institutional power exerted over bodies
for centuries.
But the power to channel the bodies of others is likewise a biopolitical tool
that can transgress or resist well-known institutions, escape control, and create
new worlds. We therefore consider as very important Negri and Hardt’s shift of
prepositions from the Foucaultian biopower as power over life to biopolitics as
the power of life to resist and determine an alternative production of subjectivity
(Hardt and Negri 2009, 57). Supporting the environmental cause in Tasmania,
Australia, eco-warrior Alana Beltran appeared in the form of an Angel, attached
to a giant tripod, dressed in a long white curtain, with white paint on her face,
and with wings of white cockatoo feathers attached to her back. She thus became
the Weld Angel, a strong visual symbol of weak biopolitical power against careless
non-sustainable politics.
The primary weapon used to open a new world in our cases is the visually
mediated body, and its biopolitical capacity to establish social relations and
political attachments between bodies and causes.

1.2 Prestige and Sympathy

Many affect scholars, like Massumi and Thrift, have worked on the strategic use
of affect in politics in order to discipline bodies through the creation of atmo-
spheres of fear/terror, or in more sophisticated ways, to look at the cues that
attune bodies. Attunement is in this context a term that signals both the potential
for sameness and difference in the bodily responses to affective stimuli (e.g., an
audience that is clearly affectively touched by a performance, but in different and
sometimes contradictory ways). Others, like Anna Gibbs, point to the fact that the
act of imitation, as opposed to the act of ‘invention’, is hierarchical (according to
Tarde) because it is always channelled by prestige, and thus not democratic in
 Sympathetic Mobilisation 203

character: “Imitation, as Tarde conceives it, represents the conservation of the

past and the preservation of a social bond. But it is not democratic in character. It
is always suggested by prestige: it flows along hierarchical lines of force from the
centre to margins, city to provinces, and from the nobility to the lower social
orders” (Gibbs 2008, 136). Later, according to Gibbs, “Tarde comes to see imita-
tion as a process that is lateral and sometimes mutual as well as hierarchical”
(136). Gustave Le Bon agrees that prestige motivates imitation as a form of social
action: “the thing possessing prestige is immediately imitated in consequence of
contagion, and forces an entire generation to adopt certain modes of feeling and
of giving expression to its thought” (Le Bon 1895, 88). But Le Bon is more open to
the possibility of non-hierarchically channeled processes of imitation. The aura of
a leader creating imitation is thus secured by his/her prestige, which is either
acquired (via their name, fortune, or reputation, that is, hierarchically) or personal
(via personal characteristics, that is, potentially non- hierarchically) (Le Bon
1895, 81). Personal prestige is:

possessed by a small number of persons whom it enables to exercise a veritably magnetic

fascination on those around them, although they are socially their equals, and lack all
ordinary means of domination. (Le Bon 1895, 83)

Le Bon seems here to confirm the idea that prestige is not hierarchically distrib-
uted, and that imitation can therefore be a political force transgressing estab-
lished institutional boundaries. In this chapter, we analyse precisely the strategic
uses of affect by entrepreneurial individuals who do not necessarily have institu-
tional hierarchical prestige, but who try to gain prestige and motivate imitations
by means of DIY media-production. A key question, accordingly, is that of
whether imitation works as a counterforce towards dominant regimes, centres,
majorities, power-geometries, and higher social classes in the cases? Is imitation
a socially transformative force contributing to the “re-materializing of democ-
racy” (Thrift 2008, 223)?
Situating ourselves in a posthuman framework that stresses the relational
and de-centred nature of humanity, introducing nature, materiality, and technol-
ogy as non-human actors into the study of reality, our focus is no longer sub-
jectivity and its inherent imaginary logics of identification (ego-ideals), but on the
contrary, the open-ness, intensive awareness, affectedness, and changeability
that characterises bodies (Massumi 2002; Latour 2004; Thrift 2008; Blackman
2012). The question is not what a body is or what a body can be or look like, but
what kind of attachments, relations, transactions, and connections characterise a
composite of bodies and entities, and more importantly: what those constella-
tions of bodies are capable of, what they can suggest, and how they can affect and
mobilise other bodies.
204 Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage

How bodies contaminate other bodies online seems to be a crucial question,

both when it comes to determining the prestige of the mobilising person (or with Le
Bon, ‘the leader’) and when it comes to investigating how things travel and spread.
Instead of looking solely at the communication of signs and discourses to consoli-
date the leadership of the leader, the study of bodies as receivers and transmitters
of movements, and of bodies taking part in the (rituals) and rhythms of everyday
life, is key to the knowledge of how these transindividual processes work. But how
does the leader gain prestige, and how to characterise the relationship between
bodies under the ‘spell’ of affective contagion? Sympathy is a crucial part of the
answer to this question. Gary Weisman makes an important distinction between
“pity as a feeling felt for another, where as sympathy is a sharing of another’s
feelings” and he suggests that “whereas pity enables us to feel for the survivor, the
‘sympathetic imagination’ enables us to feel like the survivor” (Le Bon 1895, 110).
Sympathy is thus the affective and mobilising glue between bodies, or rather a type
of affective investment that allows one body to overlap with another body, and in
that way be moved or transformed by that body (Blackman 2012). Or to put it
another way: sympathy becomes a way of listening to the body (and its political
voice) of the other, through an immaterial process of affective transmission, that is,
through an affective intertwinement of self and other, creating a momentary
sameness where political world views and agendas are transferred.
Our two cases, the blog 65 Red Roses and the green hunger strike Climate
Justice Fast, are examples of two DIY political campaigns that use bodily strate-
gies in order to mobilise audiences. They hope to raise awareness, to stimulate
actions, and to change practices regarding climate change, and to channel other
bodies to donate organs. They do so by putting the weakening or vulnerable body
on display (Doherty 2000). The body with a deadly disease and the hungry body
seem to be politically powerful, both as belonging to individuals having the
courage to put human weakness on display, and as transmitters of the desire for
social change based on relations of sympathy. Sympathy towards these perform-
ing weak bodies seems to be the force enabling affective investments and reac-
tions, while the ‘collective sympathy’ they motivate accordingly turns these
individuals into socially prestigious quasi-celebrities. In our cases, sympathy
generated through digitally mediated environments simply connects ‘weak
bodies’ with a collective of ‘not necessarily weak bodies’, and thus becomes a
potential facilitator of the movement and multiplication of political dedication
towards a specific cause.
 Sympathetic Mobilisation 205

2 Analysis

2.1 Mobilising Illness Awareness: 65 Red Roses

In the following, we first present the two cases by making a short factual
introduction of them. After this we analyse primary texts with a focus on how the
body is used to mobilise by generating sympathy, as a form of affect, between
certain social agencies and causes. Next we analyse how these affective tactics
are received in the tertiary texts of the comments on the media platform: does the
affective stimulation actually lead to sympathy and imitation, or perhaps to
counter-affects?
From 2006 to 2010, Canadian Eva Markvoort (1984–2010) blogged about her
life with the terminal lung disease cystic fibrosis. At the time of writing, the blog
consists of more than 550 entries explaining the project of EM, which have
received more than 20,000 comments or tertiary textual responses.2 The blog (and
documentary of her life) raised substantial public awareness of CF and of organ
donation in Canada, which was one of Markvoort’s goals. On March 27, 2010,
Markvoort died, after having blogged very intimately about the process of dying.
The blog posts consist of audiovisual and written material mostly produced by
EM herself. In this way the blog is a kind of DIY media platform, where the blogger’s
media productions following her everyday life can be followed. In opposition to
many other intimate blogs, the illness blog as a genre is of course more than
usually affectively invested – especially when the illness is life-threatening and the
blogger is a very young person. The blog of EM hence exposes a body in danger, a
body in excess (e.g., because of fear and pain), and a body socially invested as a
natural object of concern, sympathy, anxiety and, finally, grief.
The blog is both a site of intimate bodily expression and biopolitical entrepre-
neurial activities that focus on using existential contingencies (disease, misfor-
tune) (Sarasvathy 2001) to establish political projects of everyday history-making
(Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus 1997) with social goals transcending the life and
death of the individual blogger. The mobilising and transformative potential of
the blog is based on the affective intensities motivated by following the body and
story of EM. The blog seems to create a kind of cross-appropriation (Spinosa,
Flores, and Dreyfus 1997) by integrating dimensions known from the social fields
of politics (e.g., communication stimulating action by creating affective attach-
ments to causes) into the social world of illness, which is normally dominated by
notions of public invisibility, passivity, and recovery through a privatising with-

2 http://65redroses.livejournal.com/58813.html
206 Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage

drawal of the body (Foucault 1963). Thus, the style (Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus
1997) of the world of illness is challenged, as ideas of how an ill person normally
behaves and situates herself in ‘the social’ are renegotiated via EM’s biopolitical
cross-appropriation. Or rather, the public visualisation of the blogger’s body
becomes a biopolitical act, an attempt to rearrange the perception of illness as
something private, and to make individual illness instead a collective bodily
responsibility (i.e. all people ought to sign up as organ donors). In one way EM
simply sacrifices her body to the public (via exposing her intimate problems),
because she wants the viewers to do the same (via organ donation). And sym-
pathy becomes the key affect making the receiver ‘feel like’ EM, and thus more
susceptible to her political agenda.
EM sometimes seems to aim directly at creating affective microshocks by
means of her body. One of the clearest examples of this is a video entry from
January 18, 2008, which lasts three minutes and shows a close-up of EM having a
severe coughing attack that is clearly extremely painful.3 She uploads the video
in a situation where she is getting better, and alerts the receiver: “I warn you, if
you don’t have CF, its not easy to see and is probably not work or child-safe”.4
According to EM the video serves as an “honest glimpse” of life with cystic fibrosis
and consists of no narrative or speech – only EM continually coughing while her
face is tormented with pain. The sound of the rattling lungs and the face-to-face
view into EM’s eyes make the video almost unbearable to watch. As the citation
shows, EM is well aware of the affective power of the video, which seems to aim to
transmit the bodily state of EM’s pain to the body of the receiver via an affective
response of sympathetic co-suffering.
One of the comments made on the day of the video upload seems to confirm
that an affective body-to-body transmission has taken place. The response states:

It was for the eyes for me too… damn those eyes… they hurt. The first few coughs I felt / in
my chest. I felt your fear… my fear… wow. / Damn girl, we need to go out and change the
world… cure cf, and while we’re waiting make people donors… / because no one should hurt
like that. / HUGS! / :) and a smile because I can right now5

Following Massumi, the comment can be understood as an emotional qualification,

re-registering an already felt affective sensation on the body (“the first few coughs I
felt / in my chest”). After this re-registering, the response then re-establishes a
narrative logic (“we need to go out and change the world… cure cf, and while we’re

3 http://65redroses.livejournal.com/42315.html#comments
4 ibid.
5 ibid
 Sympathetic Mobilisation 207

waiting make people donors”). Going back to Weissman, this is a sympathetic more
than a pitying reaction because the receiver starts to feel like EM by feeling her lung
pain in his own chest: a clear example of the affective transmissions that EM’s blog
enables, but also of the way a sympathetic transgression of the boundary between
self and other can lead to a certain political preference moving from one body to
another. Sympathy in this way becomes a mobilising affective force.
Another example is the video Farewell from February 11, 2001, showing EM
with her father, mother and sister, in a hospital bed.6 In the video, EM explains
that her “life is ending” (00.00.57) as the doctors can no longer find effective
treatment. Despite this dramatic information, EM is remarkably calm and remains
focussed on the positive dimensions of her situation and life – that she has loved
and been loved more than you can expect – and on the support she has received
during her illness (for instance by showing the so-called wall of love in her
hospital room; letters and pictures sent by her blog readers and supporters). Her
bodily weakness is not only reflected in the content of her words, accepting that
she will soon die, but also in her rusty voice and in the way she sometimes leans
towards her family to find rest. The affective power of her words is directly
transmitted to the faces of her family (e.g., to her sister’s shaking chin after
hearing the words my life is ending (00.00.57)).
In the Farewell video, EM is very much focussed on love and loving – a focus
that is contagiously transmitted and imitated by most of the receivers, who also
declare their love for EM. EM seems to have gained a kind of social prestige,
making her a social centre of attention motivating responses from more than
2,000 media users, with many of them imitating her rhetoric of love. These are
three examples that show the contagious character of her message of love:

lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove
lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove
lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove
lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove
(February 12, 2010)

I love you.
I love you.
I love you I love you I love you
(February 12, 2010)

LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE
(February 12, 2010)

6 http://65redroses.livejournal.com/2010/02/11/
208 Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage

Following Massumi, the redundant passages are due to the fact that language
functions as the dampener of affect, rather than the creator of narratives or
structures. This redundancy expresses a certain bodily state of sympathy or hole
in time, and similarities in the specific type of redundancy deployed in the
comments (‘love’) show how certain behaviour becomes contagious and spreads.
Again sympathy seems to lead to a deconstruction of the self/other-boundary
expressed through the diffusion of a state of total love emanating from EM’s
video.
The intensity of the blog is underlined by Markvoort’s deprivatised practice
when it comes to documenting the last hard weeks of her life. On March 25, two
days before Markvoort’s death, the following post is uploaded:

i’m at that point now / i’m done with the poetics / asking for help / my sister is helping me
write / actually helping me write / the medications have been piling up / they are taking
their toll / i am supersaturated with medications / i’ve been medically missing in action for
two days / the docs started taking me off some of them to see how i would manage / and i
am not managing / not managing at all / i’m drowning in the medications / i can’t breathe /
every hour / once an hour / i can’t breathe / something has to change7

Looking at the comments, the post clearly scares her readers, who share their fear
and want to help: “Eva, love love love breathe breathe breathe. If only we could
all breathe for you. LOVE LOVE LOVE……… tears”.8 Here sympathy is clearly
expressed through the desire of total bodily intertwinement and in the repetitive
rhythm of the responses, which seems to try imitating and keeping up the breath-
ing rhythm of EM.
EM is an example of an individual possessing personal prestige related to her
individual characteristics, and therefore becoming an object of imitation (Tarde).
As shown, the blog commentators, as an act of sympathy, imitate her way of
writing and describing reality (the focus on love); but imitation also occurred
through bodily transformations like those connected to the Reddy for a Cure
campaign, where people dyed their hair red in remembrance of Eva, who was
herself red-haired, to raise awareness of CF.9
And when people describe EM, they focus exactly on her ability to transmit
energies and positive affect to her surroundings. The host of the Eva’s Celebration
of Love event, CBC broadcaster Gloria Macarenko, described her first meeting with
Eva as follows:

7 http://65redroses.livejournal.com/139069.html
8 http://65redroses.livejournal.com/139069.html
9 http://www.facebook.com/pages/Reddy-For-a-Cure/108071815888330?sk=photos
 Sympathetic Mobilisation 209

I was instantly impressed with Eva’s spark; that spirit and that energy that you just instantly
feel when you meet her … I will never forget the day in our CBC studios where she came
bounding in with her fresh new lungs and she had this wild shock of red hair. You know she
was the epitome for me of ‘joie de vivre’. It just shone through her (Eva’s Celebration of Love
(part 1/3): 00.01.02)10

In other words Eva served as a radiating figure, transmitting energy to and

vitalising her surroundings – an instance of personal prestige that seems also to
have been effective in an online context. Her prestige is personal, because it is not
founded in any established political or social hierarchies. She is an ordinary
citizen with an extraordinary ability and will to share her bodily suffering, and
with a diffuse capacity to attract attention and create sympathetic transgressions
of the bodily boundary between herself and the blog followers. This sympathetic
permeability of the involved bodies, and the prestige it attributes to EM, motivates
a range of collective imitations on the blog, showing how imitation is not con-
servative or hierarchical per se, but can surely be a way of participating in
political processes that are democratic and capable of developing societies in a
more just direction.

2.2 Mobilising Environmental Awareness: Climate Justice Fast

Climate Justice Fast is an environmental campaign that was performed by activists

ahead of and during the COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference in
Copenhagen in December 2009. The campaign consisted in performing an inter-
national hunger strike against political inaction on climate change. The fast
began on November 6 and ended after 44 days of fasting on December 18 – the
final day of COP15. The Climate Justice Fast campaign had 9 long-term faster-
members located in Denmark, the US, and Australia. Approximately 3,000 soli-
darity fasters completing shorter hunger strikes, ranging from one day to three
weeks, joined them. CJF further attracted a lot of media attention and created
much debate.
The political focus of the campaign was climate change, Its goal was to avoid
‘a crime against humanity, and against all life on earth’ and to install a just world
“where people from all nations enjoy the same, fair, sustainable level of con-
sumption”. The CJF activists used the website www.climatejusticefast.com as a
tool to mobilise external allies, to attract attention to the cause, and to enable

10 http://65redroses.livejournal.com/144422.html
210 Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage

effective internal communication and support. The call for urgency of climate
action happens through the fasting bodies of the political activists slowly becom-
ing more and more depleted of energy, but gaining more and more political power
through the bodies in starvation.
Our material consists of texts from the CJF website (focusing on the texts
introducing CJF, the video blogs of the activists). Here CJF articulates the hunger
strike as a tactic used by desperate and virtuous groups/individuals facing over-
whelming and morally inferior state powers. Furthermore, the act of hunger
striking is linked to a certain spiritual pureness and righteous quest for emancipa-
tion, but also explained as an act of solidarity with people who are starving
involuntarily. Last but not least, the hunger strike is encoded as an appropriate
way of responding to climate change, because it creates a stronger moral protest
and finds a new contagious way of pointing at the urgency to act, as compared
with traditional forms of activism.
The weakening of the body provides a visible embodiment of the state of
urgency that the climate is facing, and as such these weakened bodies can
motivate an immediate, pre-reflexive, and drastic response from people witnes-
sing them. The affective potential of the starving body becomes very obvious
when looking at the blog of Paul Connor, the initiator of the campaign.11 The blog
consists of written entries followed by numerous comments and still photos from
Australian events, including CJF appearances at COP15. The most interesting item
on his blog is the video-diary he keeps to describe the 44 day long fast. It includes
29 videos produced intensely at the beginning of the fast, but becoming more and
more sporadic from day 20 of the fast. The diary communicates hope for the future
of activism in spite of the lack of results produced by political leaders and
societies: “There is more to us than the physical”, “We are better than what we are
doing at the moment” (Paul Connor December 19, 2009). But the videos also have
implicit affective and aesthetic qualities stressing the effect of the videos on the
audiences. As the fast progresses, the videos get rare, but more intense. The
energising of the viewer no longer passes through the explicit and efficient
rhetorical strategies of Paul’s speech, but is transmitted directly through Paul’s
fasting body. He giggles sometimes, he speaks in a lower slow voice with slouch-
ing movements, he stumbles over the words at the end, and the sight of his visible
loss of weight is an important visual marker for change. The energising of the
viewer thus oscillates between being a result of Paul’s explicit inspirational

11 The blog is no longer active, but can be accessed via this link: http://web.archive.org/web/
20101210055501/http://www.climatejusticefast.com/author/Paul
 Sympathetic Mobilisation 211

rhetorical strategies to being a sympathetic reaction to his long-term fasting body

depleting of energy.
Connor elaborates on why the hunger strike is necessary in one of his early
posts titled “Will extreme actions ‘alienate the mainstream’?”. Here he very
clearly uses affective arguments by underlining that people’s inclination to act
when facing a danger is grounded in a logic of contagion or imitation. He uses a
fire alarm in a shopping mall as an example, and explains that the individual will
only act in a dramatic way – running or screaming – if other people are doing the
same in response to the alarm. If the alarm does not affect the other people in the
mall – if they keep on shopping in a quiet, normal way – the individual will
probably also react rather non-dramatically. The role of imitation is therefore
stressed: people do what other people do, and if CJF wants people to act in a
drastically new way, they will have to do just the same themselves. Or to quote
Connor: “To inspire a generation, we ourselves must be inspirational. We cannot
afford to wait around for miracles. We must be the change we need to see” (Paul
Connor December 20, 2009).
In this way, the activist body imitates the physical state of the less privileged,
thereby making the activist body into a canvas embodying both a more abstract
‘state of urgency’ and the specific results of climate change on a certain group of
marginalised people. Internally, this strategy was contagious to a certain extent,
even if it was not intended to be viral and to spread: “It was not intended to be a
petition – it just happened in solidarity” (Anna Keenan and Matthieu Ballé
December 11, 2009). Many followed some of the path in a double solidarity with
the hungry and the long-term fasters (3,000 on a global scale), imitating the
fasters to create a collective bodily protest against the lack of political will in the
area of climate change. The political protest here took the form of a collective
imitation of particular political leaders using weak power as a strategic tool.
To investigate the reactions to CJF, we have analysed responses on 1) the CJF
website and 2) a large Danish media platform – the website of the national
broadcast channel DR1 – where CJF was the object of two extensive online
debates. How did people react to this affective strategy? On the CJF website, the
responses are most often supportive of the activists. The long-term fasters gain
prestige and the celebrity-status of achieved celebrity (Rojek) through their
accomplishment of the long-term fast. The prestige that the fasting bodies get is
directly expressed through devotion and sympathy: “ I cant’ feel more proud of
you, you fasted for 43 days and still so optimistic and willing to keep going”
(Augustina Galeano December 19, 2009), “Call me a psycho fan” (Michelle
November 30, 2009). The political engagement of a large audience is dependent
on these long-term fasters as endorsers, and also on their ability to communicate
as well as on their screen appearance. The metonymical bodily sacrifice of the
212 Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage

long-term fasters is received as a symbolic exchange that puts us all in debt. The
imitation strategy that the solidarity fasters performed was perhaps not intended,
but rather a result of the strategy being mediated and therefore inclined to
reproduce fandom-responses and imitation.
But while the responses to the fast on the website are highly supportive,
external reactions to the campaign were often of a more oppositional character.
For some the starved body is first and foremost associated with desperate childish
behaviour, anorexia, or bad communication. For others the ‘hunger strike-body’
is associated with the terrorist actions of IRA. The point is that the campaign
cannot control what type of association, affect, or interpretation is established
when the receiver sees images of the starved bodies. As an image the voluntarily
starving body is simply semantically and affectively overdetermined, and for that
reason it can trigger oppositional responses. Prestige is thus not attributed to the
fasting bodies, thereby excluding sympathetic imagination and bodily imitation
as adequate political reactions in relation to the fasters.
As shown in our analysis, the mobilisation of outsiders is very much handled
by using affective forms of appeal: by trying to embody and move energy, devo-
tion, and force from the activist to the spectator. Nigel Thrift’s point that contem-
porary critiques of neoliberal tendencies should not avoid being affective, but
rather engrain affect in the project, is something that is clearly exemplified by CJF.
Here affect plays a prominent role as a way of creating inner relations among the
activists, and as a way of connecting to the outer world. But returning to the
theoretical framework, is it necessary to clarify how one should understand this
affective relation created by CJF and people responding to the campaign? Is CJF
creating a process of imitation, where the involved person become more identi-
cal/alike, or rather a process of attunement (Massumi 2002), where a certain
affective environment is established, but without creating ‘sameness’ among the
people being affectively touched by CJF?
Our suggestion would be not to think of imitation and attunement as contra-
dictory concepts, but instead to conceptualise imitation as one way of responding
to an attunement. We thus stress that affective environments are always highly
complex situations, where a certain investment (e.g., self-starvation) can create
pre-reflexive reactions in many different ways. Looking at the spontaneous cri-
tique of CJF, this could also be understood as an affective reaction of opposition
to the shock created by seeing the weakened body, but not an affective reaction
creating sameness between activist and spectator. The starved body certainly has
a contagious effect, but the results of this contagion are manifold, meaning that
they can both be oppositional, negotiating, or imitating. The act of imitation is
also highly differentiated, as we can see by looking at the more supportive
responses to CJF. Some respondents initiate a concrete process of imitation by, for
 Sympathetic Mobilisation 213

example, becoming solidarity fasters for a couple of weeks or just one day. Others
follow the activists by simply acting in favour of the cause by donating money,
participating in other forms of protest, or writing a comment. The dimension of
imitation must be distinguished in two ways: imitation as mobilisation (I act on a
cause, because I see you act on a cause), or as concrete imitation, meaning doing
exactly like you (fasting). In this way the affective environment created by CJF
attunes a range of bodies, and while one way of reacting is by imitating the
activist in various ways, another is to make an opposing, but nevertheless
affective, response to the fast.
It is a fact that CJF mobilised a rather large ‘offline’ audience, and not just a
small closed group or “radical ghetto”, to use Natalie Fenton’s expression (Fenton
2008). Looking at the responses on the CJF website, one of our findings is there-
fore that the weakening body is a highly powerful energising entity that specta-
tors have difficulties not relating to and caring for. Looking at a broader field of
responses, a range of oppositional reactions was identified. As we see it, these
very different responses indicate that the voluntarily starving body is a rather
uncontrollable catalyst for responses, due to the many different connotations and
affective processes of pulling and pushing that it triggers. In this way the body
serves as a powerful convergence point of contesting affective-discursive pro-
cesses. The starved body thus seems be both affectively powerful and semanti-
cally unruly.

3 Conclusion

EM and CJF mobilise receivers through the display of weak bodies. Using bodies
as biopolitical tools, these two DIY political communication strategies become
efficient to the degree that they have, and are attributed, prestige – to the degree
that they stimulate sympathetic imagination in receivers and increase awareness
through imitation processes. The primary actors in 65 Red Roses and CJF are
entrepreneurs or locally based non-governmental groups that have personal
prestige and critically try to change dominant ways of understanding either organ
donation or climate change. In both cases, imitation is critical towards status quo.
The cases present strategic uses of affective contagion and imitation because the
primary goal of the two campaigns is change, and the will to conduct people’s
conduct in certain areas.
We thus read the cases as examples of actions exerting biopolitical resistance
or “biopower from below” (Grusin 2010, 77). Grusin takes the example of the Abu
Graib vernacular photos, showing the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners, as
biopower from below that supports biopower from above. In 65 Red Roses and
214 Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage

CJF, we see ‘biopower from below’ and imitation as part of democratic processes
that are critical towards the current state of affairs in certain areas by trying to
prompt receivers both to re-act and act. The differences between our cases are
likewise obvious: although weak bodies seemingly have a strong mobilising
potential, ‘voluntary weakness’ versus ‘weakness as destiny’ motivates very
different reactions. Although both examples make strategic use of their own
bodies, ‘weakness as destiny’ blocks criticism and makes prestige practically
unquestionable, while ‘voluntary weakness’ remains contested.

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(13 February 2014)
Lise Dilling-Hansen
A Strategic Romance?
On the Affective Relation between Lady Gaga and Her Little
Monsters in Online Communication

1 Introduction

This article investigates the online communication between Lady Gaga and her
fans through an affect analytical approach. For a century, both the visual repre-
sentation and influence of stars have been closely linked with various media;
from movies to music videos, and recently to online social media. In relation to
the latter, Lady Gaga is a central figure, with more than 63 million followers on
Facebook, and a huge number of ‘likes’ and comments on her posts.1 Taking
Gaga’s Facebook page as a point of departure, this essay investigates how Gaga
uses media to create an impression of a private, close, and mutual relationship
with her fans online, in which the fans are offered ways to deal with inner
personal issues and thus to connect with Gaga at an affective level. This will be
followed by a short discussion on whether or not affect can be used as a performa-
tive strategy for artists in their communication with the fans.

2 Establishing Stardom Through Media

The Hollywood film industry fully emerged around 1910, and along with it came
the phenomenon of movie divas. Through the following decade, divas evolved
from random vamps to established stars, and by the 1930s, Hollywood star-based
films were produced en-masse (see Thomsen 1997, 98–104). The visual glamour
of Hollywood had a major influence on the fashion boom of the 1920s and 1930s,
with which stars became identified as symbols (Thomsen 1997, 15, 22). The
relation between star, media, and the public was thus established in this period.
The role of reflecting existing fashions, and the shaping of future fashions,
culture, and identity by female stars of the following decades, such as Greta Garbo
and Marlene Dietrich, were closely linked with the central medium of their time:
movies. With the launch of MTV in 1981, a new era of visual media began, and the

1 The number of followers in February, 2014.

 A Strategic Romance? 217

music video became a new media platform from which artists could establish
themselves as stars. One of the central ‘divas’ here was Madonna, who embodied
the new postmodern feminist heroine more than any other (Kaplan 1987, 117).
Through the sexualised body image Madonna presented in her videos, she dis-
rupted the dominant culture, and thereby proposed a new “social order” (see
Vernallis 2004, 229–232). Like movie divas, such music industry artists used the
media both to cite and to push the borders of the norm of their times, and thereby
to establish themselves as stars.
Social media, which developed in the mid-1990s, established a market-place
for the self-mediation and self-promotion of established stars, as well as, in a new
democratising tendency, for the self-promotion of people completely unknown in
the music industry (see Page 2012, 181–82). Hence Tila Nguyen, a former model,
became the most ever viewed artist on Myspace by creating a profile as Tila
Tequila, and mass e-mailing several thousand people, which resulted in 30–
50.000 followers the first day alone.2 The rise of Youtube (2005) also offered new
opportunities for gaining fame, for example for Justin Bieber, who was discovered
through a video uploaded onto Youtube, and now has almost a billion views of
his video for ‘Baby’, and for South-Korean rapper Psy, who in December 2012
broke the Youtube record with more than one billion views of his ‘Gangnam
Style’. Social media, which involves creating a personal profile, generates atten-
tion and visibility for the creators of these profiles, but also helps to “develop
their personas” (Keel and Nataraajan 2012, 697). This means that besides music,
music videos, concerts, and public appearances, the performativity of artists
today holds an extra (online) dimension in which artists can shape their self-
images. Although the music video is still a central medium through which stars
can establish their visual image, the pop star of today is reliant of a supplemental
social media platform.
When Tila Tequila was asked what she thought was the key to her success,
she answered: “There’s a million hot naked chicks on the Internet. There’s a
difference between those girls and me. Those chicks don’t talk back to you.”3 The
sense of the artist talking back is central in this new form of online self-promoting
culture. Besides having a self-mediating function, what makes social media
interesting is that they also encourage interactivity, especially in the cases of
Facebook (launched in 2004) and Twitter (launched in 2006), creating what
Henry Jenkins describes as a participatory culture (2006), where fans can ‘like’,
‘share’, ‘hashtag’, ‘tag’, and communicate with their idol. My thesis here is that

2 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570728,00.html#ixzz2HfDFIxnM.
3 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570728,00.html#ixzz2HfDFIxnM.
218 Lise Dilling-Hansen

Lady Gaga uses social media not only to promote and establish herself as an
artist, but also in a very high degree, to take advantage of this participatory
culture and create an illusion of a private, close, and mutual relationship with her
fans online. Beginning with a short digression on Beyoncé, I will move on to
examine Gaga’s online performances in more detail. It is important to stress that
my online observations were made in 2012, and that the analysis of Gaga’s online
performativity in this article therefore deals with this time specific performativity.
Since then, the increasing popularity of littlemonster.com – a social networking
site developed by Lady Gaga for her fans – which is linked to the Twitter and
Instagram profiles of Gaga and of many of the fans, her main online activity
streams from these three social media sites and not from Facebook. This recent
shift will, however, not be addressed here.

3 Performing Privacy Online

When Beyoncé’s new tumbler4 was launched, Anne Helen Petersen highlighted
two of its key elements: authenticity and intimacy.5 According to Petersen, the
compelling thing about the webpage is that we know it is Beyoncé’s, because of
her ‘analogue’ signature on the front page and the statement “this is my life,
today, over the years, through my eyes.“ In addition to the impression of authen-
ticity, the webpage also gives an impression of intimacy. Petersen highlights
codes such as the warmth in the private pictures, the lack of make-up, the
goofiness and the relaxed atmosphere, which create the impression that “we have
access to the Beyoncé ‘between’ the best shots” where the ‘real’ self lies.6 This
aesthetic strategy is an example of what Joshua Meyrowitz calls middle region
(Meyrowitz 1985, 47); a staged performativity that creates an illusion of showing
what traditionally is considered to take place backstage (Goffman 1959, 115).
Beyoncé’s Facebook page, on the other hand, does not use the codes of privacy,
as the posts are often written in the third person, which indicates that it is not
Beyoncé herself who writes them, and both the words and pictures are primarily
professional: it does not appear authentic or intimate.
Lady Gaga’s Facebook page is based on a quite different performative strat-
egy. It is used to mark news, such as concerts, new singles, and happenings, but
mostly to post everyday communication. Gaga communicates almost daily

4 A blogging platform on which it is possible to post multimedia.

5 http://www.annehelenpetersen.com/?p=2952.
6 http://www.annehelenpetersen.com/?p=2952.
 A Strategic Romance? 219

through her Facebook wall with personal and private posts; saying goodnight,
stating that she has been working out and that she is tired, sharing the food she
has just eaten, referring to family gatherings, and so on. The pictures Gaga posts
often show her without make-up and are generally non-styled, taken in private
spaces (e.g., the bathroom or in bed), and are close-ups, self-taken, and blurry.
These features together give an impression of Gaga showing her ‘real self’ to her
fans. This essay argues that 1) Lady Gaga, through her verbal and visual perfor-
mances on Facebook, manages to a great extent to create an atmosphere of
authenticity and intimacy for her fans online, and 2) that this private atmosphere
is intensified by offline performances in which Gaga deals with personal issues
like feeling excluded (sexually, bodily or otherwise), insecurity, and loneliness.
The artist has in this way created a symbolic space for those who somehow
consider themselves outside the norm. Gaga’s Facebook page functions as an
extension of this affective space, constituted online.
Lady Gaga’s numerous pop hits have appealed to a massive mainstream
audience. At the same time, Gaga has challenged the gender and body discourses
of mainstream pop culture, since she deconstructs the heterosexual matrix (Butler
2006, 208) of female pop culture through her performances, in which she inte-
grates female masculinity (Halberstam 1998, 9). Gaga has also challenged norma-
tive body discourses by performing with body modifications, intentionally mak-
ing herself look more abnormal. By attaching positive values to physical and
sexual deviations, she exemplifies how abnormality can transgress the dichotomy
of accepted and non-accepted representations of gender and body, and can thus
be understood as ‘extraordinary’ rather than ‘wrong’ (Garland-Thomson 1997, 5).
Besides this implicit broadening of the category of normal, Lady Gaga also works
more explicitly in this field by speaking against the norm of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell’, which denied American soldiers the right to be open about their homosexu-
ality; by being a voice for bullied children and youth, by often expressing her love
for homosexual people through her Born This Way Foundation, created in 2011 to
“build a youth empowered, braver and kinder world,”7 and, most recently, by
launching the ‘Body Revolution’, encouraging people to be brave, proud, and
take action by uploading pictures of their varying and often non-ideal bodies in
order to try to change the image of the body ideal in modern visual culture.
Because Gaga deals with minority identities in her performances, she not only
appeals to a mainstream audience, but also to those who consider themselves
outsiders.8 In this way, she offers a symbolic space where her fans can feel

7 http://www.bornthiswayfoundation.org/.
8 This shows in the comments written by the fans on Facebook, see section 4.
220 Lise Dilling-Hansen

accepted in spite of their personal deviations. With this offline starting point, the
following will investigate the online communication between Lady Gaga and her
fans, and discuss how affect is produced in this extension of the symbolic space
created by Gaga.

4 Creating an Affective Online Environment

Affect has been described by Nigel Thrift as something that lies in between drive
and emotion (Thrift 2008, 221), and as semiconscious reactions to the meeting
between the body and the ‘particular event’, which can be understood as flows
moving through and across human bodies (Thrift 2008, 236). These embodied
reactions are what Brian Massumi calls micro-shocks, “something that is felt
without registering consciously. It registers only in its effects” (Massumi 2008, 4).
The effects that can thus be registered are emotions, understood as the “everyday
understandings of affect” (Thrift 2008, 211), or as affect that has been qualified
and inserted in semantically and semiotically formed progressions (Massumi
2002, 28). Affect here is the embodied micro-shock, which in itself is not recogni-
sable, but takes on the form of emotion. The process of putting the ‘affective
escape’ into words tends to give rise to positive connotations. since it is “nothing
less than the perception of one’s own vitality, one’s sense of aliveness, of change-
ability” (Massumi 2002, 36). Responses to Lady Gaga’s communications can be
found in the comments, likes and posts by her fans online. This means that access
to their embodied reactions to Gaga’s communication is only available in the
processed form, or as a verbal “dampening of the affect” (25). The investigation of
affect in this essay is thus based on the fans’ conscious ‘forming’ of their micro-
shocks.
Returning to Lady Gaga’s Facebook page, then, I suggest that several features
of this online space increase the possibility for an affective attunement to emerge.
Knudsen and Stage argue that because of the possibility of a high degree of
immediacy, personal interactivity, and the deterritorialisation of communication,
it is possible to create affective environments online despite a lack of physical
proximity (2). The communication on Lady Gaga’s Facebook page is indeed
deterritorialised, since both Gaga and her fans communicate from all over the
world. A high degree of immediacy is also present, as Gaga posts entries almost
daily, and her posts receive thousands of replies within a few minutes. Personal
interactivity is evident from the actions of liking and commenting on posts. The
content of these comments also reveals a degree of interactivity, as the fans share
personal information with Gaga (declaring their love for Gaga, but also leaving
comments like, “u give us a reason to live” and “you have helped me rediscover
 A Strategic Romance? 221

my religion.”)9 Finally, Gaga uses her Facebook page to encourage people to

support her campaigns, e.g., by posting their personal stories on the Born This
Way Foundation webpage, and by sharing pictures of themselves in her ‘Body
Revolution’.10 This means that Gaga’s Facebook page is not only a place where
Gaga communicates speaks to her fans, but also, or perhaps more importantly, a
place where Gaga activates her fans, and where mutual communication between
Gaga and her fans takes place.
As mentioned earlier, the verbal and visual communication on Gaga’s Face-
book page gives an impression of intimacy and authenticity – of meeting the real
Gaga. This personal experience of the page is reflected in fans’ replies to Gaga’s
posts. For example, a picture posted by Gaga, taken with her phone and tagged
with the text ‘Have a beautiful day’, receives comments like ‘have a beautiful day
too’, ‘we have the same phone’, ‘I like this look better for you GAGA you have
natural beauty and that’s something fame and money could never give you!’, and
‘I am your little monster’.11 The well-known claim made by Lawrence Grossberg,
that fans mirror themselves in their idol and thereby create their own identities
through an (affective) relation to him or her, is supplemented here by Matt Hills’
concept of a ‘playful potential’ to cross the border between reality and fantasy
and, thereby create an idea of a mutual relationship between the fans and their
idol (Hills 2002, 91). I would suggest that the comments above are an example of
such playful potential. Because Lady Gaga lets her fans into what seems to be her
private, intimate sphere, and shows herself, not as a perfectly styled pop star, but
as someone who is very much ‘like them’, her fans are able to experience their
relation to Gaga as mutual, close, authentic, and real.
Since Gaga’s Facebook page functions as an extension of this affective space,
constituted online, the fans’ communication on Facebook is already framed as
potentially affective, as it deals with issues many people can relate to and may
have problems with. ‘She’s beautiful but sometimes people are blind to true
beauty it’s a shame’, and ‘YOU R SO BEAUTIFUL. d eyes r d windows of d soul and
they beautify all d body…u r vry beautiful inside and out, stay focus on your one
self, dont let d world change you’, are some representative responses to pictures
that do not say anything directly about beauty, or about how we should deal with
beauty norms in society – for example, a picture of Gaga without make-up,
wishing them a beautiful day. Communication from Gaga seems to rake up

9 http://www.facebook.com/?ref=tn_tnmn#!/photo.php?fbid=475997254573&set=pb.103764645
73.-2207520000.1350909872&type=1&theater.
10 http://littlemonsters.com/#post/5061bde86d1be6f92e0014f2.
11 http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=10150742110079574&set=pb.10376464573.-22
07520000.1351262180&type=3&theater.
222 Lise Dilling-Hansen

strained issues and activate the fans on a personal level to share private and very
personal information about themselves. It also affects the fans in a way that makes
them respond to the micro-shocks of vitality, aliveness, and changeability passing
through their bodies in that specific moment, such as by crying, for example.
The presence of affect is more obvious in comments like the ones responding
to the picture of Gaga in her underwear, stating that the ‘Body Revolution’ has
begun.12 Here comments like ‘made me cry. means a lot to me <3 <3 thank you
gaga!’, and the following, are common:

I’m crying because you’re dealing with this and because i remembered when Demi Lovato
went into treatment because of this? issues. It’s really hard to find out that someone who
means the entire world to you it’s going trough a hard time and you didn’t know it (…). I love
you, Lady Gaga

My dearest Lady GaGa, this photo has made me realize I need to love who I am. I have
always compared myself to others and fought to be skinny like others. Thank you so much
for posting this beautiful picture and helping me see everyone is beautiful no matter what
they look like.

We cannot measure the micro-shocks this produces in the bodies of Gaga’s fans,
but we do have access to the words through which they express the effect of her
online communication. By creating a framework around her Facebook page
where affect can emerge, and through a communicative strategy that connects
with her fans on a personal level and keeps this intensity alive by constantly
adding new communications, Gaga establishes an experience of a mutual rela-
tionship in which affect is articulated on various levels.
Many of the thousands of comments on the page can be categorised as quite
emotionally strong, but some are also almost devoid of content. An average
comment – ‘I love you’ or ‘looks good’ (commenting on Gaga’s food pictures) –
can’t perhaps be said to constitute a dampening after a strong bodily reaction. But
although these more or less neutral comments do not express great a affective
attunement in the bodies of the fans, they are still worth considering as part of the
affective framework of Gaga’s Facebook page. On the subject of affect, Grossberg
states, “What matters is how much you care not how you care or about what you
care” (Grossberg 1997,163). Although it is important that Gaga affects her fans on
a personal level regularly in order to keep the illusion of a personal bond intact, it
is not important that she does so all the time. The crucial element of Gaga’s affect

12 http://www.facebook.com/?ref=tn_tnmn#!/photo.php?fbid=10151255251419574&set=a.101511
37024739574.452788.10376464573&type=1&theater.
 A Strategic Romance? 223

work, then, is that she keeps her fans affected, on any level, continuously. By
constantly giving her fans the possibility of interacting with her, Gaga keeps the
idea of a mutual relationship alive. The feeling of a shared experience is what
matters here. By commenting or liking a Gaga post on Facebook, her fans inscribe
themselves in a community. It may not create ground-shaking affective attune-
ments, but a daily ‘check in’ online enables fans to confirm their devotion and
relation to Gaga, strengthening the feeling of a personal bond, and thus support-
ing the whole affective experience.
The conclusion we can draw from this is that the comments made by Lady
Gaga’s fans on Facebook reflect an affective relation to their idol. The level of
affect varies, and cannot be found everywhere, but Gaga does manage to use
social media to create close ties to her fans by using codes of intimacy, authenti-
city, privacy, and personality.

5 Strategic Affect?

It seems that Gaga is very successful in using affect as a performative strategy. But
if we examine the comments on her Facebook page, we can see that affective
planning does not always work. Though most comments are similar to those
analysed in this article, there are also many different reactions. The picture of
Gaga with the tag line ‘Have a beautiful day’ did receive responses that commen-
ted on Gaga’s beauty, and stated that a kind of personal, mutual contact had been
established, but it also received comments like ‘you look ugly without make-up’,
‘you’re too weird’, ‘I love you but please be more normal’, and ‘wear some make-
up’. Thrift introduces the idea of staging affect, where affect can be used as a
manipulation tool in fields like branding and political issues (Thrift 2008, 245).
Massumi, on the other hand, is less radical, and suggests only a possibility of a
triggering of the cues that attune the body. Because people react differently, there
is no assurance they will act alike, and although one strategically aims at an
affective response one can never be sure of the effects (Massumi 2008, 6). Lady
Gaga uses strategic moves to establish a private and personal space online, in
which she can use verbal and visual performances to trigger the cues that attune
the bodies of her fans. She does so by constantly maintaining this contact, by
showing sides of herself normally belonging to private life, and by communicat-
ing on a personal level about issues that many people can relate to, and thereby
creating a platform for possible affective attuning. However, having said this, this
investigation of Lady Gaga’s online performativity shows that, while it is possible
strategically to plan an affective framing, it is far from certain that affect will
appear, since it lies in the bodies of the receivers.
224 Lise Dilling-Hansen

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 A Strategic Romance? 225

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Nathalie W. Soelmark
Experiences of Assisted Reproduction in
Video Blogs: On the Aesthetic-Affective
Dimension of Individual Fertility Projects on
YouTube1

Introduction

We got a call the next morning from the embryologist who told us they (embryos) had all
divided but had failed to progress to the stage they wanted for freezing. He had discarded
them. He said, ‘They probably wouldn’t have survived the freeze and thaw processes.’ Nice
of him to make that decision for us. We figure it is because the clinics want to produce the
highest live birth rates they can to attract business. And this is one way of controlling that.
(LucidIVF, IVF14 – Our Experiences. Embryo Transfer 2009)

The quote above, from an American couple in their video blog (vlog) on
YouTube, is remarkable because it illustrates how such couples are critically
involved, and how in their pursuit of fertility, they are subjected to the biotech-
nological and medical perception of the body as an object. The extension of
experiences with in vitro fertilisation (IVF) into vlogs on YouTube appears to
emphasise that fertility projects arise from couple’s self-realisation and pursuit
of individual wants, needs, and passion for kinship. Furthermore, the couple
seem to align themselves with the biotechnological and biomedical perception
of the body, where this can be transformed into a series of distinct and discrete
objects, each to be isolated, stored, accumulated, and replaced. Although the
value accorded to the body in these vlogs apparently reflects a distinctly
idiosyncratic fertility project, their aesthetic-affective orchestration presupposes
a shared physical and emotional existence – an appeal to the viewer to recog-
nise our commonalities through affectivity, thus exemplifying an intersubjective
orientation. Taking the aesthetic qualities of the vlogs on IVF as a starting point,
my aim is to nuance perspectives on mediated experiences conceptualised as

1 Acknowledgements: The author is grateful to editors Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup for
their invitation to contribute to this volume, as well for their thoughtful suggestions for revisions.
Thanks also to the Centre for Digital and Contemporary Performance, Brunel University, London,
particularly Susan Broadhurst and Johannes Birringer, who provided feedback on the overall
argument of this paper during a stay at the centre during autumn 2012.
 Experiences of Assisted Reproduction in Video Blogs 227

transformations of cultural and social discourses on kinship,2 and as a self-

technology.3 Taking the video blogs LucidIVF (2009) and Jenkins Family IVF
Diaries (2009) as examples, I discuss how the affective orchestration of these
vlogs creates sensitivity to biomedical and technological optimisation, by way
of a dialectics of involvement and detachment. This enables an understanding
of the fertility project, on the basis of relationality foregrounded by affect as
“central in the process of perception” (Featherstone 2010, 210).
LucidIVF (Silvia and Peter),4 and Jenkins Family IVF Diaries (Jennifer and
Marc), are vlogs produced, populated, and distributed by two American couples.
These vlogs are configured on YouTube as personal profile channels: Pages with
personal data as well as an overview of uploads/downloads, plus friends and
subscribers. They share identical storyline structures; covering thoughts on being
reproductively challenged, preliminary thoughts on hormone injections (drugs,
shots and emotional distress), examinations and scans in fertility clinics, egg
retrieval procedures, embryo transfers, the two-week wait, and the results of
treatments. In front of a transportable camera or webcam, the infertile couples
talk and move around in their homes, cars, and clinical surroundings before,
during, and after the IVF treatments. This re-encoding of their experiences of
undergoing IVF allows us to see things we usually do not see, offering a sense of
relationality based on recognition, which is to say, a sense of community based
on affect, in a biotech century that has “no sacred objectivities to refer to” (Ewald
1993, 225).

1 The Unique and Yet Modifiable Body – Pursuing Fertility

In The Politics of Life itself (2007), sociologist Nikolas Rose emphasises how
rationales about perceptions of disease and health are transformed by continuous
developments in pharmaceutics and biotechnology. This sets the stage for a
growing individual moral responsibility to administrate and secure the future – to
secure the good life. Rose emphasises how encounters with the perception of
human life as molecular human bodies open to targeted manipulations, and as
physical commodities (embryo/sperm/organs) as possessing great bio-economic

2 See Hvidtfeldt Madsen 2012; Grønning 2012. Both articles are provided with short English
abstracts but are otherwise presented in Danish.
3 See van Dijck 2004.
4 I have, in light of the private content, chosen to make the authors of the vlogs featured in this
paper anonymous. LucidIVF and Jenkins Family IVF Diaries are vlogs that in total represent the
material of my PhD research.
228 Nathalie W. Soelmark

value, fuel the individual’s sense of moral obligation to optimise his/her body and
life (Rose 2007, 5). Rose focusses on examining how the individual’s optimisation
of body and self is thoroughly regulated and controlled by informal power
structures, such as private fertility clinics, organisations, and corporations. The
moral obligation to optimise one’s body and life in this way is an illustration of
what Francois Ewald has termed “an order of pure decision” (Ewald 1993, 225).
Individuals feel obligations and expectations towards their health issues and
their lives in general, which transform the way they relate to themselves, promot-
ing a somatic orientation.5 Both Rose and Ewald, for the most part, argue that we
increasingly perceive ourselves as biological beings for whom the natural, fertile
body no longer functions as “a sacred objectivity we can refer to” (225). The
commodification of human reproduction – eggs, sperm, and embryos – has
recently been addressed by Charlotte Kroløkke, Karen A. Foss, and Samuya Pant,
in “Fertility Travel: The Commodification of Human Reproduction” (2012). They
identify bioethical concerns with a new form of citizenship that arises due to the
reproductive movements and fragmentary bodies involved in assisted reproduc-
tion (Kroløkke, Foss, and Pant 2012, 273). In LucidIVF, the fragmentary aspect of
the body is also at stake, since experiences are expressed through complicated
medical terms, and a picture of a petri dish showing “our babies,” for instance,
exemplifies an understanding of the couple’s bodies and lives in terms of repro-
duction technology (IVF14 – Our experience. Embryo Transfer).
Paradoxically, the ideal, norm, and value of the natural human body – and
concerns about alterations to this ‘sacred objectivity’ – lie at the heart of biotech-
nological and medical practices: the body here is at the same time both “a very
biologically unique body and a technologically modifiable one” (Thacker 2005,
262). The body is modified in order to optimise its ability to function as a natural
body; in terms of reproductive technologies, medical experts assist the infertile
body in becoming fertile. According to Eugene Thacker, the understanding of the
body as unique and yet modifiable within biotechnological realms validates
technological alterations of the body in the pursuit of its “‘natural’ function/state”
(262). For Thacker, this is an example of how the natural capacity of the body to
heal through the assistance of technology is emphasised, rather than of actual
biomedical modification (266–267).
This tension is also present in LucidIVF, where emotional reactions during
hormone treatments are naturalised by relating them to natural symptoms of the

5 The contemporary somatic orientation exemplifies, according to Rose, a change in scale; “It is
now at the molecular level that human life is understood, at the molecular level that its processes
can be anatomized, and at the molecular level that life can now be engineered” (Rose 2007, 4).
 Experiences of Assisted Reproduction in Video Blogs 229

body, such as menopausal hot flashes (IVF15 – Our experience. Symptoms and
silly). However, these vlogs are not expressions of individuals who in their pursuit
of fertility uncritically optimise their infertile bodies, challenge nature, or con-
form to a narrow cultural ideal of the natural fertile body. What they appeal to is a
recognition based on a shared physical existence; our ability to relate to them is
brought to the fore by an orchestration of affectivity. Precisely how powerful the
relational dimension of the body can be is discussed by Danish cultural theorists
Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage, who define the potential of the body as a
question of “both its contagious ability to attune other bodies and its semantic
‘wildness’” (Knudsen and Stage 2005, 144).
Negotiations and transformations of kinship are reference points in contem-
porary cultural studies on kinship and infertility. These are concerned with the
cultural, political, and social potentials of the discursive and semantic ‘wildness’
of the fragmentary bodies and kinship enabled by new reproductive technology.
This tendency also extends to research on weblogs (Hvidtfeldt Madsen 2012, 79)
and Facebook (Grønning 2012, 63) featuring experiences of relatedness. The aim
of this chapter is not to question these perspectives, but to bring more nuances to
fields of research emphasising cultural transformation due to the fragmentary
aspects of assisted reproductive technology. By focussing on mediations of ex-
periences of IVF as re-encodings, we gain insight into how individual fertility
projects (trans)form perceptions of pursuits of kinship that involve assisted repro-
duction through affective attunement.

2 Re-encodings – Strange and Yet Familiar Fertility Projects

In “The Mediatization of Consumption: Towards an Analytical Framework of

Image Culture” (2002), André Jansson explores the intersections of everyday life,
consumption, and (digital) media. He suggests that the challenge of an experi-
ence of society characterised by fragmentation is to apply new topologies and
genealogies that reflect its polyrhythmic aspects. He characterises the process as
one of encoding, decoding, and re-encoding,6 where individuals disassemble,
transform, and give new meaning to their experiences/consumption. By empha-
sising the individual’s processes of transforming and reflecting on experiences,
Jansson points to how classical (aesthetic) distinctions – such as taste, lifestyle
and consumption – are surpassed. In this way, vlogs exemplify how experiences

6 Jansson elaborates on what the British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1980) meant by encoding
and decoding (Jansson 2012, 18).
230 Nathalie W. Soelmark

and use of IVF treatments are fragmented, transformed, and given new mean-
ings.
One criticism of this culturalisation7 exemplified by the mediation of physical
optimisation is particularly concerned with the fragmentation of the body. In
LucidIVF and Jenkins Family IVF Diaries, this optimisation reflects an understand-
ing of the body as a distinct and discrete object, to be isolated, stored, accumu-
lated, and further, re-assembled. This illustrates a detachment from the body,
and, not least, from the perception of the body as a shared point of reference. In
LucidIVF, making a baby is expressed as uncomplicated, quick, and smooth. As
Silvia, sitting in the car outside the fertility clinic just before having an embryo
transfer says, “So this film is so that we can show our kids how to make a baby.
We’re gonna go make a baby now” (LucidIVF, IVF11 – Our Experience. Egg
Retrieval). This normalisation of IVF as the new natural way of making a baby
echoes Ewald’s notion that nature – here the fertile body – no longer serves as a
‘sacred objectivity.’ Re-encoding as a matter of anti-aesthetic intertextuality as
discussed by Jansson does not acknowledge the affective attunement by the
presence (Böhme 1993, 115) of people, objects and environments in the vlogs.
Neither does Ewald’s notion of an ‘order of pure decision’ encompass how knowl-
edge based on recognition of a shared physical existence form and inform our
feelings, thoughts, and actions towards the mediated fertility project.
Her statement in the vlog ‘IVF11 – Egg Retrieval’ illustrates Silvia’s reflection
on the experience of going in to a procedure that is performed in order to optimise
her body’s ability to conceive. What Silvia reveals is an awareness of the poten-
tially unnatural and unfamiliar features of optimisation through egg retrieval
procedures. As a consequence, it is not the optimisation itself that is shown or
commented on, but the fact that they are on their way inside to make a baby – an
idea that is quite familiar. This apparently seamless customisation of the fertile
body is countered in LucidIVF by close visual encounters with Silvia and Peter in
states of emotional distress and pain, as well as with her swollen and bruised
body during and after hormone injections, egg retrieval procedures, and embryo
transfers. This tinting of thoughts, sensations, and perceptions reveals the sig-
nificance of the body and emotions in the circulation of symbols and imaginative
appeals in social life.
Humour plays a key role in the vlogs. In one sequence, Silvia is injected with
hormones, but the sound effect of a gun firing is added, with a cartoon clip of a

7 Along broad Adornian lines, Jansson argues that the production of culture has been removed
from the sphere of everyday life into profit-making institutions, a movement in which the media is
a key element (Jansson 2012, 12).
 Experiences of Assisted Reproduction in Video Blogs 231

‘pow’ just as she injects the needle (IVF2 – Our experience. First Lupron Injec-
tion). These elements amplify the unfamiliarity of the situation, and also disman-
tle any potential shock of and repulsion towards not only the injection, but also
towards the fertility project in general. Such humorous effects disrupt the conven-
tional view of fertility projects and vlogs as idiosyncratic or limited to a certain
audience; that is, to others trying to conceive with the assistance of IVF. Through
humour, the vlog’s experiential quality is enhanced by photographs from every-
day life, such as a meatloaf, and Silvia’s comment that this is how her buttocks
looks post-injection, affectively involving the viewer. The IVF experiences fea-
tured in LucidIVF and Jenkins Family IVF Diaries are both fascinating and repul-
sive, as Silvia comments of a cake resembling a buttock with 31 needle marks and
a needle in it: “It is cute in a twisted way” (LucidIVF IVF14 – Our Experiences.
Embryo Transfer). In another sequence, music from the film Willy Wonka & the
Chocolate Factory, “Pure Imagination” performed by Gene Wilder, appeals to our
imaginations: an appeal through affectivity to “Take a breath, count to three.
Come with me, and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination. Take a look, and
you’ll see into your imagination” (IVF14 – Our Experiences. Embryo Transfer). In
this re-encoding, an actual experience of IVF is combined with music, text, sound
effects, and comics. What is produced by the presence of objects, people, and
spaces through the re-encoding is a “qualitative fringe” (Massumi 2008, 6)
brought about by the aura (Massumi 2008, 6) or atmosphere (Böhme 1993, 113) of
the likeness of objects.8 What is at stake is the potential of this relationality to
trigger changes in our perceptions of the fertility projects in the vlogs. This calls
attention to how these vlogs, alongside biotechnology (IVF), not only fragment
the body, but structure feelings (see Williams 1978), and cultivate our perception
of ourselves, our bodies, and the bodies of others, through affective attunement.
Sianne Ngai’s conceptualisation of ‘ugly feelings’ as a generally overlooked
aesthetic category invites us to consider how vlogs may fuel cultural productivity
by making the flipside of western capitalistic societies possible to encounter (Ngai
2005, 5). The affective orchestrations of vlogs, in this sense, not only relate to
pleasure and passion, but also to envy, fear of exclusion, and irritation about not
being understood. They also express paranoia of being “a small subject in a ‘total
system’” (Ngai 2005, 5) – in this case, the system of assisted reproduction.
Further, the orchestration of ‘ugly feelings’ promotes recognition of these emo-

8 Both Massumi and Böhme, although from different perspectives, discuss perception of appear-
ance/presence of objects re-encoded in infinite variations, and their affective capacity as a matter
of aesthetics. Aesthetics is not a popular position in new media art, Massumi asserts (2008, 2), nor
in studies of mediated consumption (see Jansson 2002). For a thorough discussion of the likeness
of objects and their potential to capacitate the body see Massumi 2008, 6–16.
232 Nathalie W. Soelmark

tions as shared states of being through their affective contagiousness. Thus, the
aesthetic-affective qualities of the vlogs enable critical emotional engagements
(by the performers themselves as well as the viewer) in needs, wants, and
passions that involve technological and medical interventions in the body.
However individualised the iconographic characteristics of these vlogs may
be in their choices of remediation of online communications with offline genres –
journals, diaries, comics, novels, music, and sound effects – their aesthetic-
affective dimension expresses a significant social codification. This potentially
enables viewers to recognise and to become actively involved in the everyday
lives orchestrated in vlogs. Neither this re-encoding nor the aesthetic-affective
orchestration is accidental. As Jennifer in Jenkins Family IVF Diaries states, after
excusing the low light setting because of the blinds:

We feel not so left out, I guess. You know what happens if we keep a diary of our progress.
Then what happens is people can get an idea of what IVF is like. Obviously you cannot
experience it first hand until you go through it yourself, but obviously you can understand a
bit of the fun, kidding. (Jenkins Family IVF Diaries, Very First Introduction 2009)

Although the value of the body and emotions mediated in the vlogs is an expres-
sion of the significance of these to the couples making the vlogs, the orchestration
of their aesthetic dimension is characterised by a quality of experience that spurs
thoughts, sensations, and perceptions (see Massumi 2008, 15) in the viewer of
themselves having experienced being infertile and undergoing IVF.

3 Concluding Remarks

Vlogs like LucidIVF and Jenkins Family IVF Diaries exemplify how the creation of
certain perceptions and narratives of the body and the self is a task individuals
have taken upon themselves when dealing with biotechnology, medicine, and
medical experts (see Liu et al. 2013). Such vlogs contain insight into how shared
physical and emotional states of existence are given value, adding new perspec-
tives to a field of research that centres on mediated experiences as negotiations of
kinship.
The vlogs create sensitivity to biomedical and biotechnological optimisation
by way of a “dialectics of involvement in and detachment” from how the body is
optimised, and the variety of feelings orchestrated (Elias 1956, 226–252). The
aesthetic qualities of these vlogs, in this sense, foreground certain imaginings of
the world, but they also allow the viewer to experience the world from a different
perspective. The aesthetic value of the vlogs is related to their contagious capacity
to attune the viewer to the banal and sensational aspects of mediated individual
 Experiences of Assisted Reproduction in Video Blogs 233

fertility projects. Our involvement in and detachment from the strange and yet
familiar elements in these vlogs is at same time created and challenged by this
aesthetic-affective dimension. By treating these re-encodings as significant con-
tributions to the circulation of symbols in social life, and acknowledging their
imaginative appeal, insight is gained into how individuals actively engage in and
produce cultural perceptions of contemporary bodily (fertility) projects. These
vlogs may reflect a fragmentary orientation towards the body, but they also reveal
how knowledge premised on abstract recognition is valued and produced in a
biotech century. Not only this, such vlogs show how our lives are structured by
feelings, and how feelings as cultural productions influence how we perceive the
world.

References

Böhme, Gernot. “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.” Thesis Eleven
36 (1993): 113–126.
Dijck, Jose van. “Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs.” Fibreculture: Internet Theory,
Criticism, Research 3 (2004) >http://journal.fibreculture.org< (12. February 2014)
Elias, Norbert. “The Problems of Involvement and Detachment.” The British Journal of Sociology
7, 3.8 (1956): 226–252.
Ewald, Francois. “Two Infinities of Risk.” Politics of Everyday Fear. Ed. Brian Massumi. Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 221–229.
Featherstone, Mike. “Body, Image, and Affect in Consumer Culture.” Body and Society 16,1
(2010): 193–221.
Grønning, Anette. “How To Tell You Are Pregnant.” Kultur og Klasse 113 (2012): 63–78.
Jansson, André. “The Mediatization of Consumption: Towards an Analytical Framework of Image
Culture.” Journal of Consumer Culture 2.1 (2002): 5–31.
Jenkins Family IVF Diaries,Very First Introduction. 13. October 2010. Web. (12. February 2014)
(2009) >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dsy_lEgfU6A&feature=plcp<
Knudsen, BT & Stage, C. “Contagious Bodies: An Investigation of Affective and Discursive
Strategies in Contemporary Online Activism.” Emotion, Space and Society 5 (2005): 148–155.
Kroløkke, Charlotte, Karen A. Foss, and Saumya Pant. “Fertility Travel: The Commodification of
Human Reproduction.” Cultural Politics 8.2 (2012): 273–282.
Liu, LS et al.“Health Vlogger-Viewer Interaction in Chronic Illness Management.” CHI '13 Proceed-
ings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2013): 49–58.
LucidIVF, IVF2 – Our experience. First Lupron Injection. 31. May 2009. Web. (12. February 2014)
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIP5UGSvsd4&feature=channel&list=UL<
———, IVF11 – Our experience. Egg retrieval. 5. June 2009. Web. (12. February 2014) >http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=SH6nW9yicX8&feature=channel&list=UL <
———, IVF14 – Our experience. Embryo Transfer. 14. June 2009. Web. (12. February 2014) >http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxnHzvRKi3A&feature=relmfu<
———, IVF15 – Our experience. Symptoms and silly. 31. May 2009. Web. (12. February 2014)
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRYRL4TrhS4&feature=plcp<
234 Nathalie W. Soelmark

Madsen, Karen Hvidtfeldt. “Surrogacy Mothers, Travels, and New Reproduction Metaphors.”
Kultur og Klasse, 113 (2012): 79–100.
Massumi, Brian. “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens.” Inflexions 1.1.5 (2008): 1–40.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself. Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First
Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Thacker, Eugene. The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2005.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Matti Kortesoja
Articulations of Well-being in Images of
Beauty and Health

1 Introduction

Over the past few decades, the number of pages in the Finnish women’s magazine
K&T has doubled, but the amount of editorial content has remained the same.1 In
spite of the fact that women’s magazines are commercial, the growing ratio of
advertising to content has affected the images of beauty and health portrayed.
This chapter is about the articulations of well-being in the images of K&T maga-
zine. Instead of articulating the public interests and concerns of the citizens of a
welfare state, it seems that the idea of ‘well-being’ now belongs to the field of
lotions and creams promising to promote and protect the health and beauty of
consumers. This change in the articulations of well-being is the starting point of
my visual analysis, in which the notion of well-being is seen as a ‘master-
signifier’.
The discursive field of K&T, where these articulations of well-being take
place, is organised as a ‘mattering map’ that guides affective attachments, in the
sense of investments that allows one to feel good about oneself (see Grossberg
1992, 80–82). Affective attachments to well-being articulate a desire for a better
life and the mattering maps guide readers in taking care of and feeling good about
themselves. By analysing a women’s lifestyle magazine that has discussed these
issues for a half a century, I indicate a change in its visual modes of representa-
tion driven by affective and pleasure-oriented articulations. I seek to determine
the nodal points around which the affective elements of well-being are articulated
in order to learn what is depicted as good for beauty and health, and what
remains unarticulated and left out of the discussion.
In this chapter, articulation is a practice that consists in the construction of
nodal points around which the affective elements of well-being are temporarily
organised or fixed (see Laclau & Mouffe 2001, 113; also Žižek 2008, 95). The

1 Kauneus ja terveys [Beauty and health] is the magazine: further references in the text area
abbreviated as K&T. According to the rate card of the magazine: “This positive and reliable quality
magazine has everything a woman needs: the newest information on health and weight control,
the best experts, the loveliest beauty and fashion tips, the freshest news on nutrition, delicious
food recipes, interesting people, support for life management, better human relations and sex
life.”
236 Matti Kortesoja

problem with this approach, however, is that the affective elements of well-being
and their connections not yet fully articulated are “at the very edge of semantic
availability” (Williams 1977, 131–132; see also Ngai 2005, 359–360). In this chap-
ter, I analyse articulatory practices that link the affective elements of well-being
from the point of view of the layout of the magazine, which showcases changes in
everyday life. In other words, I focus on articles where the gradual shift from
social and healthcare problems to beauty care and ‘wellness’ takes place. In doing
so, I search for an understanding in terms of the articulations that are ordering
the contemporary discourse on well-being according to the self-governance and
body-shaping practises of wellness and beauty care.
In previous studies, discursive change in well-being has been said to “man-
ifest a move from subjects as citizens to subjects as consumers” (Sointu 2005,
255). As a rule, the subjects of this discourse are the products sold to the
advertisers by the publisher of the magazine. The ideological struggle in the pages
of women’s magazines has been addressed by scholars such as Angela McRobbie
and Janice Winship, and studies of the women who read these magazines have
been undertaken by Janice Radway and Joke Hermes, for example. In the vast
array of studies written about women’s magazines, it seems that images are
generally neglected as also being ‘texts’ that can tell stories and form conceptual
relations in affective terms.
Methodologically, I account for the linguistic categories of well-being as
analogous to these visual and affective entities (see Kress & van Leeuwen 1996,
40–41). First, at ‘ideational’ level, an image is either a narrative or conceptual
representation. An arrow or anything that points indicates the narrative and,
without such a vector, the mode of representation of an image is conceptual.
Secondly, there is an interpersonal ‘metafunction’ that takes place between the
image and its viewer, which conveys a sense of interaction. The gaze of the
represented participant in the picture and its perspective, angle and point of view
imply various social meanings. In addition, ‘modality’ is a truth value of the image
created by technical and conventional means. Finally, the lay-out anchors the
relationships between the words and images, in which the images as ‘texts’ have
power over the words (see Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 6; cf. Barthes 1977). In the
densely printed pages of the magazines of the 1970s, for example, the body of text
is positioned from top to bottom and left to right, leaving no space for a wandering
eye. By contrast, in contemporary magazines, pictures and commodities are the
most salient visual entities. Such pages are made to be read in a few glances.
The textual corpus of this study consists of two winter month issues of K&T
from each decade between 1970 and 2000. The magazine spreads from these
issues were selected to give a representative view of the most important turning
points in the discussion on well-being, which are analysed and described drawing
 Articulations of Well-being in Images of Beauty and Health 237

on Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s book Reading Images: the Grammar of
Visual Design. Differing aspects of these changes can be grasped in terms of
gender, politics, economics, journalism and mass communication, and media
and information technology. My visual analysis approach, however, is contextual
and historical. I draw analytical distinctions between the prevailing modes of
articulating well-being that have been dominant in the pages of K&T at different
times, and make sense of these practices by analysing images of beauty and
health. Finally, I draw a conclusion on the basis of my findings.

2 Articulation of Affective Elements of Well-being in Imagery of

K&T Magazine
Having analysed the images of beauty and health featured in K&T, I would argue
that articulations of well-being have changed over the past few decades. In the
contemporary images of K&T, the affective elements of well-being are articulated
in a more pleasure-oriented and corporeal manner than before. These articula-
tions of well-being are driven by the vibrant, pleasurable and affective meanings
conveyed by a sensory coding orientation. Again, a strong reality principle driven
by analytical and problem-oriented articulations prevailed in older issues of the
magazine, where distinctions such as taste and the ability to judge what matters
were more valued than today. The notion of ‘well-being’ signifies a state of being
that is sought after on the discursive field of K&T. For us to be able to seek well-
being, however, it has to be articulated in a certain way, in a certain time and
place. This articulation refers to the link between the affective elements of well-
being and the act of enunciation, in order to put these elements in relation by
giving meaning to them in an effective manner, which involve investments and
affective attachments to images that move readers both emotionally and physi-
cally (see Grossberg 1992, 290). According to this view, intensifying calls for the
investments in pleasurable and good feelings occur in conjunction with the
accumulation of the affective elements of well-being that are articulated on the
pages of K&T.

2.1 The Analytic and Problem-oriented Articulations of Well-being

In the K&T issues from the 1970s and early 1980s, there is a constant and
normative appeal to the social consciousness and awareness of readers. These
analytic and problem-oriented articulations of well-being address lifestyle issues
that affect mental and physical health, conceptions of beauty and so on, which
238 Matti Kortesoja

are driven by a strong reality principle based on social distinctions such as

profession, gender, class and ethnicity. In addition to beauty care, there is also
discussion of social and healthcare issues such as pollution, and diseases such as
cancer, which are articulated as threats to public health and welfare. This is done
in eye-catching ways, by highlighting hyper-realistic modes of representation and
the cultural salience of visual entities, so that such problems appear as true,
factual, and real, in contrast with the fictional and more artificial world of couture
and beauty care.
The ‘A beautiful world’ column, for example, is the only feature in which
beauty care is discussed in the first issue of the K&T from the 1970s (K&T, January
1970 14–15). At the beginning of the text, the image of a butterfly signifies
metamorphosis on the symbolic level. In addition, a Parisian countess working in
cosmetics PR is introduced to the reader. There is an obvious distinction between
the voice of authority and the receiver of the message, a distinction deepened at
the bottom of the page, where a close-up photo of a woman is depicted. Further
classifications are made between indoor and outdoor workers, for whom a variety
of beauty care products is offered as beneficial. On the right-hand page, a fashion
shot appears without any caption, while the educative, informative, and factual
content of the written text keeps a polite distance. In this article, women are
taught how to protect their skin from the cold. There is also a commonplace
theme of fragile feminine beauty threatened by conditions such as severe weath-
er that can be defeated by using professional skin care products. A delicate and
pale skin is used as an overarching category naturalised through the ‘chain of
equivalence’, which is one of the prevailing ways of addressing women as
members of a certain group. In this article, beauty care products are depicted in
the sphere of everyday life in order to make them appear useful, natural, and
available to everyone.
“Why Do You Keep Moving?,” on the other hand, is a 1977 article that
discusses the urbanisation of Finnish society in the late 1970s (K&T, January 1977
74–75). The constant pressure of change in everyday life is seen here as a threat to
the mental health of children. This information is articulated by a psychiatrist
who is depicted on the left, at the bottom of the page. An image of an overarching
bridge on the right forms a strong vector that points towards the area with blocks
of flats. At the end of the bridge, a boy stands and looks at the camera from a
distance. In addition, an adult walks away from the boy towards the apartment
block, and in front there is a blurred image of a dog in motion. On this page, the
vanishing point and the frontal angle focus on the boy. This suggests that “what
you see here is part of our world, something we are involved with” (Kress & van
Leeuwen 1996, 143). In other words, children are shown intimidating change as
their residential areas become suburbs. Readers are represented as responsible
 Articulations of Well-being in Images of Beauty and Health 239

for taking care of their children and for the futures of their communities, mediated
through this hysterical moment in the discourse of well-being. A neurotic attitude
towards change is characterised by an anxiety that affects the articulations of
well-being that are opening up a discursive space for the new articulations of this
‘master-signifier’.
At the beginning of the 1980s, the modernisation process, economic growth,
and technological development suddenly seemed to offer solutions to the pro-
blems of well-being. Unlike in the previous decade, the idea of well-being now
anticipated a better quality of life, leading to a quest for new lifestyles. ‘She’s got
style!,’ for instance, is a cover story from an early 1980s magazine (K&T, January
1982 56–57), in which a woman poses on a throne. In the article, she is framed as
a well-known trendsetter advising readers to find their own styles. The repre-
sented participant is a carrier of the symbolic values that relate to luxurious
upper-class life. Readers are addressed on the basis of this social distinction,
which is formed from an overall impression of the elements that depict an
imaginary whole. This world of class and glamour, however, remains unattain-
able to the magazine’s readers, who admire it from a distance. In the article, the
ways of increasing one’s own well-being are shown as potentially available to
everyone, and the features of a prosperous and wealthy lifestyle become an object
of desire that is based on symbolic identification. These discursive changes in the
articulations of well-being led to a moment where the affective and pleasure-
oriented articulations emerged and the discussion on social and health care
problems went out of fashion, with new cultural meanings, values and practices
of well-being evolving and becoming dominant.

2.2 The Affective and Pleasure-oriented Articulations of Well-being

Individualistic and consumer-based conceptions of well-being took over the pages

of K&T in the mid-1980s. Moods and emotions that had not been expressed before
in terms of popular culture became dominant and organised the magazine’s
concept. In K&T, well-being was now depicted as a commonsensical idea: it
emphasised beauty care and wellness as relating to ‘body-practices’ that are
gender-based and normative. On the pages of the magazine during the 1990s,
women are represented as living independent and active lives. In addition, read-
ers are addressed as friends and equals. The presumed readership is made up of
interactive and competent participants in a process in which the magazine advises
its readers to master their own state of well-being. At the same time, the magazine
is filled with the images of beauty and health, which makes it effective in articulat-
ing well-being as a pleasurable and good feeling (see Massumi 2002, 42).
240 Matti Kortesoja

“Feeling Good”, for instance, is a mid-1980s article that discusses textiles

and fabrics (K&T, February 1986 46–47). The article’s introduction claims that
quality cloth against the skin feels good in ‘the crude world’. In the pictures,
models pose in silky nightdresses, high heels, and yellow jackets. The gaze of
these represented participants is focused on something outside of the picture’s
frame signifying a mental withdrawal from their immediate surroundings (see
Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 66). The represented participants allow themselves to
be looked at: this draws attention to them as isolated figures against what looks
to be a flat that is being renovated. As regards the compositional arrangement,
the photographs are positioned against a black background, and the text is
printed in white letters. Because of the strong contrast and the play of light and
shade, these images are not realistic. Instead, they make a statement about the
world with a low modality. A tension between pleasurable and good feelings and
this pessimistic atmosphere creates a strong sense of escapism. The lack of an
active engagement in the world as a source of well-being is felt and lived in the
imagery of these fashion shots, which gives consistency to the reality of mixed
feelings.
After a short period of consumerism and individualism in the 1980s, there
was again a turn towards more conservative modes of representation. “Thai
Massage Comes to Finland”, for instance, is an article about a former yuppie who
has withdrawn from the public eye (K&T, January 1990 30–31). The article is about
major changes in way of life: the protagonist tells reader that while on maternity
leave she studied traditional Thai massage, which is represented as a legitimate
practice, but can in the wrong hands be considered an unethical activity that
produces sexual pleasure for men. In the picture, a woman in white smiles
politely in front of an anatomical chart showing the skeletal system of a man. In
addition, she is wearing a cross necklace as a symbol of Christian purity. In the
article, it is pointed out that becoming a mother and professional masseuse has
made the represented participant happier and more prosperous than before. At
the same time, the unfamiliar and dubious ‘Thai massage’ is a practice appro-
priated by this famous face, who acts as a domestic source of its positive identifi-
cation. In the article’s commending of proper and traditional methods of mas-
sage, and condemning those that are not, pleasure is depicted in the sphere of
Western rationality, where it is prohibited by the laws of symbolic order. There is
thus a cultural negotiation here about the gendered space where pleasurable and
affective responses can take place legitimately.
“It’s Fabulous to be Broad-shouldered”, on the other hand, provides advice
to women who have trouble finding clothes that fit (K&T, February 1997 48–49).
According to the article, the increasing size of the population is due to the growth
of material well-being and wealth. On the page on the left, a woman look at the
 Articulations of Well-being in Images of Beauty and Health 241

camera with a big smile. We see her full length, in oversized clothes, a parody of
the prevailing normative conventions representing the female body. What is
depicted in the picture is real, but at the same time there is exaggeration or
hyperbole of its salient entities to evoke good feelings and laughter by comical
means. In addition, the artificiality of the set is uncovered: the woman stands in
the middle of a studio in front of an empty screen. Secondly, the full depth and
detailed background suggest high modality. By emphasising the authenticity and
maturity of the woman depicted, however, the more fictional world of fashion
industry and couture remains untouched. As such, the article does not question
the imagery of advertisements. Instead, it shows a contradiction related to pre-
vailing fashion norms and reality, a contradiction that does not challenge the
prevailing visual order in which the slim and fit body is depicted as an ideal.

3 Conclusion

The women’s magazine K&T is driven by the pleasure-oriented articulations that

carry the vibrant and affective meanings of well-being, which is why its visual
modes of representation are becoming more transparent and fluid than before.
The magazine is more visual so that it is pleasurable and easier to read. Because
of this, I would like to add an epicurean element to the proposition that the
discourse on well-being has changed during the last few decades: whether they
have to do with feelings and moods, or with states of mind and quality of life, or
with appearance, affective and pleasure-oriented articulations constitute the con-
temporary discourse on well-being in its imagery of beauty and health.
In the pages of K&T, discussion about well-being has shifted from general
issues to the lifestyles of women who take care of themselves and invest in their
looks. Thus, there has been a shift from health and welfare issues to beauty care
and wellness. What lacks in the contemporary images are normative appeals to the
social consciousness and awareness of readers to think and even feel guilty about
social problems. Instead, the magazine is filled with images of beauty and health
that are corporeal and gender-based. From the intensifying calls for pleasurable
and good feelings, the lesson to learn is that the cultural forms of affect and
affectivity should be taken into consideration when thinking about the imageries
that prevail and have become conventional in our contemporary culture.
242 Matti Kortesoja

References

Barthes, Roland. ‘Rhetoric of the Image.’ 1964. Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 32–51.
Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern
Culture. New York/London: Routledge, 1992.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London:
Routledge, 1996.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics. 1985. London/New York: Verso, 2001.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, North Carolina/
London: Duke University Press, 2002.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Sointu, Eeva. ‘The Rise of an Ideal: Tracing Changing Discourses of Wellbeing.’ The Sociological
Review 53.2 (2005): 255–274.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. 1989. London/New York: Verso, 2008.
Lauren Greyson
How to meet the ‘Strange Stranger’:
A Sketch for an Affective Biophilia

The great irony of biophilia is that a concept all about embracing life should have
itself become stagnant and devoid of vital force. Originally a pop-ecosophical1
term introduced by biologist E.O. Wilson, biophilia offers a celebratory vision of
the human – not as the most ecologically ignoble creature, but rather as the form
of life most capable of forming connections with an astounding variety of life
forms. Since this initial attempt at outlining a celebratory vision of the human in
the time of ecological crisis, however, little has been done with the concept on a
theoretical level,2 and it has acquired the most currency in evolutionary psycholo-
gical circles, where it has also lost a great deal of its richness.
This paper is an attempt to resuscitate biophilia as an ecosophical concept,
and to introduce it back into the kinds of discourses which insist on discarding the
human as a meaningful category. It begins by sketching out Wilson’s initial vision
of biophilia, then problematizes the concept, particularly as taken up in evolu-
tionary psychology. But the concept of biophilia need and ought not be discarded
altogether, and this is where affect theory might serve as a way to recover the
richness once promised by the concept. Biophilia has always possessed an affec-
tive dimension, and yet this has never been explored with abandon. This paper
will argue an affective biophilia, with its emphasis on the relation between human
and environment, rather than Wilson’s rigid upholding of this distinction (aimed,
perhaps, at justifying an anthropocentric politics of conservation) holds its own
potential for ecosophical thought in the age of the post-natural.

1 Biophilic Wonder

Biophilia has never lent itself particularly well to exacting definitions. The origi-
nal 1984 definition cast biophilia as “the innate tendency to focus on life and

1 Ecosophical is here understood in the sense of belonging to “a philosophical world-view or

system inspired by the conditions of life in the ecosphere” (Naess 1989, 38), and as guiding one’s
one practice in the world. The ecosophical thus mediates between theory and praxis.
2 The possible exception here is architectural and design theory’s use of biophilia. These fields,
however, generally appropriate biophilic concepts uncritically, neglecting any further conceptual
elaboration. See Joye (2007).
244 Lauren Greyson

lifelike processes” (Wilson 1984, 1). Later, in the 90s, it became “the innately
emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms” (Wilson 1993,
31). The definition, especially considering Wilson’s background as biologist, lacks
a certain amount of theoretical rigor, although, as ecologist Arne Naess reminds
us, “Being more precise does not necessarily create something that is more
inspiring” (Naess 1989, 8). Indeed, it is perhaps this inarticulatable quality of
biophilia that so many, scientists included, have found so entrancing.
With biophilia, Wilson transforms wonder from a mere accident in life, a kind
of aesthetic excess perhaps, into the very stuff from which our spiritual fabric is
woven. He says of biophilia: “To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and
religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it,
hope rises on its currents” (Wilson 1989, 1). The spiritual, for Wilson, is not
transcendent, not to be sought in a church, but immanent, found in the things
growing, chirping, multiplying, and digesting around us.
Biophilic wonder, however, is not just experienced in the singular (as op-
posed to the plural, but the sense of wonder itself is always singular in the sense
of irreplicable). One may simply admire the web of the spider, but one may also,
even simultaneously, ‘emotionally affiliate’ with the community of life. Wilson
gave us at least two good reasons for doing as much. The first of which is the fact
“life is an exceedingly improbable state, open to other systems, thus ephemeral”
(Wilson 1989, 85). Life here is happy accident, and we may wonder at its improb-
ability and our own improbable participation in it, just as we might wonder at the
exceeding unlikelihood of a singular friend or lover discovered among the multi-
tudes.
But we may also wonder at life’s intricacy and complexity. Wilson continues:
“Despite the fact that living organisms compose a mere ten-billionth part of the
mass of the earth, biodiversity is the most information-rich part of the known
universe. More organization and complexity exist in a handful of soil than on the
surfaces of all the other planets combined” (Wilson 1993, 39). The unfathomable
permutations of life we encounter on a day to day basis form only a small fraction
of this intricate assemblage. We cannot possibly conceive of it in its entirety, and
this is itself overwhelming and wonderful.
One can certainly experience a ‘naive’, ‘unmediated’ biophilic wonder within
Wilson’s framework, but he also makes a case for connecting biophilia to scien-
tific endeavors and, ultimately, to politics. He asserts throughout Biophilia that
scientific knowledge, for instance his own impressive knowledge of the leafcutter
ant, does nothing to undermine wonder and, in fact, may increase it (Wilson
1989, 10). Indeed, Wilson writes, “Humanity is exalted not because we are so far
above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very
concept of life” (Wilson 1989, 22). For Wilson, we as a species are not particularly
 How to meet the ‘Strange Stranger’: A Sketch for an Affective Biophilia 245

defined by peculiarities or our superiorities of physical biology, as much as our

curiosity and our sublime attunement to that which is not strictly necessary for
survival.
There is an ethical imperative and conservationist politics that follows from
this vision of the human. If we are innately drawn to other forms of life, and
indeed have evolved with them side by side, we ought to preserve them. This
biophilic justification for conservationism is one of the only anthropocentric
justifications to really take root in the ecological movement, perhaps because it
begins to acknowledge the degree to which the human is interwoven with the
environment. Here the impetus to preserve comes not just from the fact that we
are dependent on the natural world for our physical survival, but from the fact
that, without it, intellectually and spiritually, we would be subhuman.

2 Biophilia’s Discontents

What is equally important to note is how riddled the concept has been, from the
beginning, with problems. The first, and perhaps biggest of these issues, is
Wilson’s claim that biophilia is innate or instinctive, somehow coded for in our
genes. Joye and de Block, in one of the most exhaustive critiques of biophilia,
point out that the claim is a very convenient one, insofar as it renders a
conservation ethic a natural feature of human life – if we are indeed pro-
grammed to care for nature, it is culture, and particularly western culture, that
subverts this. To create a biophilic ethic, we need only unlearn what is, in any
case, unnatural behavior (Wilson 1989, 3). This, however, is just another incar-
nation of the extremely suspect figure of the ecologically noble savage (see
Hames 2007). Indeed, even if we merely want to claim that some aesthetic
aspects of biophilia are innate, we run into problems. While it is easy to prove,
for instance, that we pay more attention to lifelike movement (see Johansson),
and that natural landscapes do a better job at alleviating anxiety than artificially
created ones (see Ulrich 1979), preferences for certain landscapes and creatures
don’t necessarily align with what is evolutionarily advantageous (Joye and de
Block 2007, 201).
Even if we were to show a marked preference for certain landscapes, certain
forms of life and lifelike things, this is a shaky basis for any kind of ethic.
Ecosystems inhospitable to humans, creatures we find dangerous or threatening
or just spooky, or even aspects of the natural world not visible to the naked eye,
would receive no protection. Kellert, one of the major proponents of biophilia,
talks about how a meaningful conservation ethic is hard to develop from a society
that basically ‘affiliates’ only with megafauna (Kellert 1993, 65–66). In a complex
246 Lauren Greyson

world, channeling evolutionary psychology to create a conservation ethic is

simply not realistic.
The second major issue with biophilia concerns its use of ‘life and the life-
like.’ It has traditionally been used to apply to life and collective forms of life or
habitats (i.e. landscapes), but Joye and de Block are very right to point out, “Not
only is it inherently vague what ‘life-like’ might mean, it is also obvious that there
is a wide gap between a life-like process and life itself, and that something that is
life-like is not necessarily natural either” (Joye and de Block 2007, 191). This
becomes obvious when considering a phenomenon like the the proliferation of
sublime nature in the media, or even the number of genetically modified organ-
isms that come increasingly to populate our world. In a world in which digital life
and manipulated life proliferate, talking about an affiliation to life and lifelike
processes can include a dizzying array of activities.
The final established criticism of biophilia concerns the sheer scope of
responses and attitudes biophilia is capable of encompassing. In particular,
Wilson never definitively pins down the ‘philia’ aspect of biophilia. Theorists
have been left to decide whether biophilia ought to be conceptualized as ‘positive’
response, however we might understand that, or whether we can understand it
more broadly as a kind of tropism, a specific response to life that includes
negative responses, as well. The former is not very politically potent, insofar as
we tend toward large vertebrates more than ‘lower forms of life’ (Kellert 1993, 64).
The latter might be hopelessly broad.
One fundamental criticism that is not addressed in the literature is the
manner in which Wilson frames the relation between human and environment.
Biophilia, as formulated by Wilson, is embodied in his experience as the scientist
in the field, and this serves as his model for all biophilic experience. The natural
world here is always set up as a kind of object to be contemplated, at best a kind
of dramatic unfolding. The human, for its part, is the thinking subject, the probing
mind, or, sometimes, when nature gets really wild, spectator. The scientist ob-
serves:

I willed animals to materialize, and they came erratically into view. Metallic-blue mosquitos
floated down from the canopy in search of a bare patch of skin, butterfly-like on sunlit
leaves, black carpenter ants sheathed in recumbent golden hair filed in haste through moss
on a rotting log. I turned my head slightly and all of them vanished. (Wilson, 1984, 7)

Despite the fact that Wilson spends much of the book talking about the wonder-
ful autonomy of life, it is clear who is master here. Nature is object; we are subject
– sometimes we allow nature to perform for us, as with Wilson’s insects, and she
never fails to oblige. This view of the relation between ‘man and nature’ is all too
human. We cannot possibly account for the fact that, once we are in the field, we
 How to meet the ‘Strange Stranger’: A Sketch for an Affective Biophilia 247

are part of it, help to constitute it, even – we breathe the air; the soles of our
shoes smash insects into the dirt. Put the scientist, or whomever, in the field, and
you don’t get scientist and field, human and environment, but a more complex
field. We give ourselves up to the elements just as much as they give themselves
up to us.

3 Towards an Affective Biophilia

What we need is a biophilia that installs us on the plane of life (Deleuze 1988,
122), as a collection of forces immanent to the environment. For this I argue we
require an injection of affect. Affect here can be understood with Deleuze (and
Spinoza) as something “experienced in a lived duration that involves the differ-
ence between two states” (Deleuze 1988, 49). Affect is what transpires between
whether one takes states to mean entities or temporalities. It is the literally
incoherent, the indiscrete. Notably, Deleuze & Guattari also describe affect as
“nonhuman becomings of man” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 169). If human
subjectivity is a kind of kind of perceived continuity, affect threatens this, brings
us back to the world of impermanence, asubjectivity, of creatures, even.
With its emphasis on immediacy, processuality, becoming, affect can take us
beyond the largely unproductive debates on whether biophilia is innate or
learned, or a combination of the two. Biophilia here ceases to be a state in which
we merely contemplate the natural world; it becomes a particular openness to
letting ourselves ‘enter into composition with’ (Deleuze 1988, 19) so-called natural
forces. It becomes relational.
No longer do we have the scientist in the field, then, this subject/object,
mind/matter dichotomy, but we get something that finally begins to do justice to
the human relation to the natural world – we get a kind of ‘incorporeal materi-
alism’ (Massumi 2009, 5). Massumi writes of “an incorporeal dimension of the
body. Of it, but not in it. Real, material, but incorporeal” (5). This is a line of
thought that fully acknowledges the primacy of the material world, but also its
literally transgressive character, the strangeness of visible and invisible flux and
energy exchange.
Thus when Wilson tells us that our spirit is woven from material life, that
these moments of being physically in nature somehow instill in us a sense of
wonder that sustains us, he’s strangely unpersuasive. He gives us no obvious way
to get from the concrete field to the spiritual – he neglects the dimension of the
incorporeal material, this affective dimension, which runs through everything.
Sometimes, however, he gets close: “The brain is prone to weave the mind from
the evidences of life, not merely the minimal contact required to exist, but a
248 Lauren Greyson

luxuriance and excess spilling into virtually everything we do” (Wilson 1984,
118). This luxuriance and excess is affect, the infinite variety of forces in the world
that wash over us, and that we help to shape. It is what gets us from brain to mind
and back to brain again – this is the middle space. Wilson basks in this luxur-
iance, with wonder, in the activities of his alien ants, but then always returns to
science, the human, as an anchoring point.
If we go back to our definition of biophilia, then, “innately emotional affilia-
tion” might become something like ‘affective affiliation,’ or perhaps even the
openness to non-human becomings. The question becomes whether affect can
also help us think through life and lifelike processes, not to mention “evidences
of life.” Keith Pearson discusses Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of haecceity, and this
appears to constitute a more meaningful, though not necessarily more precise,
way of thinking life:

[…] it [a haecceity] has no reference to either subject or substance; on the contrary, it

endeavours to deprive both of these notions of their efficacy in order to grant primacy to a
mode of individuation that is not of a definite person, determined subject, or a formal
substance. (Pearson 1999, 181)

Haecceity is the deindividuated individual, a particular constellation of affects, of

degrees and intensities. A haecceity, needless to say, need not be alive in the
traditional sense – surely one can encounter a haecceity in a rock, even in “rosy-
fingered dawn,” just as easily as, say, a sloth’s singularity might hit you. Biophilic
wonder might be conceptualized then as something we experience when we come
into contact with a haecceity. It is hopelessly particular, in a way, but also general
insofar as it connects us to a world comprised of infinitely varied intensities and
forces – the weird world of flux. Massumi goes as far as to call the haecceity “the
agent of an infinitive” (182). The haecceity is a particular instantiation of complex-
ity, and as such entirely indiscrete. It is preferable here, as well, because it refuses
naturalistic conceptions of life.
Timothy Morton, in his so-called ‘dark ecology,’ develops the analogous
concept of the “strange stranger” (Morton 2012, 94). In his work, the living and
non-living world is conceptualized not as tree, not as web, but as mesh. Junctions
in the mesh, where we might understand affects as intersecting, are the “strange
stranger.” Ecological praxis, for him, begins with “loving the strange stranger”
(Morton 2010, 79). This gesture “has an excessive, unquantifiable, nonlinear,
“queer” quality. There is something utterly outrageous and, at the same time,
universal and unavoidable about it, something the phrase “tree hugger” fails to
capture”. Encountering the strange stranger, opening oneself up to haecceities, is
not about creature worship, not about the polar bear at the zoo or adrift on a slab
of ice, but the bear’s lazy gait, the glint of its teeth, its fishy breath – punctum
 How to meet the ‘Strange Stranger’: A Sketch for an Affective Biophilia 249

rather than studium (see Barthes 1981, 27–28; 32–34). The important thing is,
perhaps, that we choose singularity over cuteness.
And how do we do this? Is it an act of love, as Morton has it? Or how do we
interpret the ‘philic’ aspect of biophilia? None of the biophilia theorists do this,
i.e. theorize positive affect effectively, and this is because their understanding of
positive experience is usually fairly facile, related to variables like heart rate. But,
once again, Deleuze (with Spinoza) pushes us in a different direction. Here, “The
passage to a greater perfection, or the increase of the power of acting is called an
affect, or feeling, of joy, the passage to a lesser perfection or the diminution of the
power of acting is called sadness” (Deleuze 1988, 50). Biophilia might be con-
ceived of, then, as the joy of combining with or relating to or encountering haecce-
ities. Doubtless being faced with infinite weirdness can be sad, can be paralyzing,
but its liberatory potential is the ‘philic’ aspect. This is not about the sublime,
which can interpreted as a sort of triumphalism over the sadness of overwhelming
complexity and difference – this is not merely about mountain climbing, the
grand canyon, ecological tourism. That said, none of these contexts prohibit the
kind of embeddedness that is celebratory instead of opressive. The point is mostly
that one can especially locate biophilia in the everyday.
These are just a few of the axes along which we may rethink biophilia in
affective terms. There are certainly many more. What’s most significant is that
this, like many concepts when introduced to affect becomes much more disor-
ienting. The experience of biophilic wonder, rather than reassuring us of our
human relation to the ecosphere, constantly challenges it. Davide Panagia casts
affects as “moments of breakdown,” which “interrupt the assurances that guar-
antee the slumber of subjectivity” (Panagia 2009, 3–4). For people that spend
substantial time outside of human society, these are moments that often chal-
lenge the very uniqueness and coherence of the human itself. Human subjectivity
here is first and foremost understood as the intersection of affects, and this
means that it is open to experimentation, molding, rearticulation. There is a
reason that acquaintance with the ‘natural’ non-human world usually proceeds
ecological activism.
But, perhaps even more significantly, biophilia is how we realize that, spiri-
tually, materially, mentally, however you’d like to frame it, we are inevitably
caught up in the so-called mesh. Modern life seems to be structured in a way that,
as much as possible, allows us to deny this. Wilson’s framework, while making
some steps towards viewing the human in nature (i.e. saying our spirit is woven
from it), simply does not go far enough. Any environmental ethic or seeds for an
environmental ethic that does not also explicitly concern itself with people who,
for one reason or another, never find themselves in a forest is grossly incomplete,
but an affective biophilia goes some way toward rectifying this.
250 Lauren Greyson

Indeed, while Wilson’s biophilia may be interpreted in a way that sits well
with the conservative conservationism characterizing the early stages of the
environmental movement, and even much of it today, an affective biophilia is
more complicated. This does not, however, rob it of its political force. Instead, an
affective biophilia becomes a call to nurture complexity, intricacy, and what is
radically other. A corresponding praxis should thus concern itself with creating
(or preserving, or resuscitating) the richest affective registers. Right now, the
world we’ve synthesized from oil, even the sublime nature documentaries
we produce, have nothing on the creatures that populate it, nor, for that matter,
our sparsest ecosystems. Biophilia, in addition to provoking a constant reevalua-
tion of what it means to be human, also implies that we are all ‘custodians of
complexity.’

References

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Light
Books, 1988.
——— and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New
York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Hames, R. “The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate.” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007):
177–190.
Johansson, Gunnar. “Visual Perception of Biological Motion and a Model for its Analysis.”
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 14.2 (1973): 201–211.
Joye, Yannick. “Architectural Lessons from Environmental Psychology: The Case of Biphilic
Architecture.” Review of General Psychology 11.4 (2007): 305–328.
——— and Andreas de Block. “‘Nature and I are Two’: A Critical Examination of the Biophilia
Hypothesis.” Environmental Values 20 (2011): 189–215.
Kellert, Stephen. ‘The Biological Basis for Human Values of Nature.’ The Biophilia Hypothesis.
Eds. Edward O. Wilson and Stephen R. Kellert. Washington D.C. and Covelo: Island Press/
Shearwater Books, 1993, 42–72.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, North Carolina
and London: Duke University Press, 2009.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard
University Press, 2010.
Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle. Trans. David Rothenberg. Cambridge, New York,
Oakleigh, Madrid, Capetown: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Panagia, Davide. The Political Life of Sensation. Durham, North Carolina and London: Duke
University Press, 2009.
Pearson, Keith Ansell. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze. London and New
York: Routledge, 1999.
Ulrich, Roger S. “Visual Landscapes and Psychological Well-Being.” Landscape Research 4.1
(1979): 17–23.
 How to meet the ‘Strange Stranger’: A Sketch for an Affective Biophilia 251

Wilson, Edward O. Biophilia. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press,
1984.
———. “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic”. The Biophilia Hypothesis. Eds. Edward O. Wilson
and Stephen R. Kellert. Washington D.C. and Covelo: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1993,
31–41.
Yu Zhao
The Characteristics of Traditional Chinese
Theories of Affect and their Impact on
Artistic Creation: A Study Based on Several
Key Chinese Words

The question of affect, in the sense of experience of feeling and/or emotion, has not
yet been thoroughly treated in sinological research, nor in modern Chinese aes-
thetics studies, which are essentially based on Western theories. However, affect is
an important issue in understanding the particularity of Chinese arts, since the
definition of ‘aesthetics’ is the ‘science of sensitivity, sense and/or sensibility’. By
presenting several key Chinese words in their conceptual contexts, a basic view of
Chinese theories about feeling and emotion can be outlined. More generally, this
could also contribute to expanding the horizon of the contemporary science of
affects, and to a reconsideration of some of its axioms.1 Is it possible to interpret
Chinese classic artistic theories according to their own concepts of affect, based on
Chinese traditional cosmology and medicine, as opposed to using Western the-
ories? How does this conceptual system function in Chinese culture, and determine
the feelings or emotions evoked by the art – represented essentially by literary arts,
such as poetry, calligraphy, and painting? Are these arts, which are considered to
be national treasures, the free expressions of the Chinese literati?

1 An Experimental Method for the Study of Key Words

This study has been carried out in the context of my doctoral research, entitled
Vocabulary and the Conceptual System of Pictorial Arts in Classical China. It is
inspired by my earlier work on Chinese aesthetics in the use of translation, using
a methodology borrowed from theories of terminology.
It seems important to start with some ‘decolonization’ work regarding Chinese
artistic vocabulary. Most of the time, we read (and translate) Chinese classic texts
about the arts using Western notions, which are rarely similar to traditional Chinese

1 I have chosen to avoid a comparative approach in order to limit this work. However, compar-
ativism has been omy starting point and is indeed a useful tool.
 The Characteristics of Traditional Chinese Theories of Affect 253

thought2. For example, many modern sinologists and Chinese aesthetics specialists
try to read and describe aspects of beauty in the Chinese classical arts. However, in
classical China, the word beauty (mei), was often used as a negative evaluation in
artistic criticism, because beauty is related to appearance, not to essence. Instead,
the Chinese literati emphasised the significance of breath (qi), resonance (yun), spi-
rituality (shen), the natural (ziran), subtlety (miao), etc. More importantly: to date, a
map of a Chinese arts conceptual system has not yet been established; people know
little about the relations between the notions, and in what ways they are linked.
My methodology is inspired essentially by modern terminology theories,
according to which relations between things, terms, and concepts form a triangle.
Ideally, a whole set of terms in one specific domain represents a series of linked
concepts. This is usually applied in scientific and technological contexts. The
operation is much more complicated in the case of philosophy or the human
sciences, which treat concepts as separate. Despite these difficulties, I have found
it helpful to understand affect in a Chinese context by examining its conceptual
system, using its own language and vocabulary.3
In my research, I have chosen a list of key words taken from a selection of
classic Chinese writings about the pictorial arts, and identified the scheme of
relations between these words. Using foreign languages to study Chinese words
can be advantageous to such a cross-disciplinary approach. Of course, there are
many divergences among the authors and according to the historic period con-
sidered; but some major commonalities occur, for example the role of air (qi), of
heart (xin), and the interactions between heart, environment, and artistic expres-
sion. Indeed, more than one scheme of the ‘structure’ of feelings exists. The
classic Chinese interpretation of this therefore constitutes one alternative –
among others – to the scheme based on the Western philosophical tradition and/
or the modern sciences. As we will see, its logic serve to guarantee the legitimis-
tion of an elitist culture supported by the graphic writing system. This explains
how some particular art forms have developed in China, such as calligraphy and
brush paintings (both derived from writing Chinese characters), that facilitate the
transmission of emotional expressions, but also their ‘channelling’.

2 Chinese language refers to Mandarin. Modern Chinese, which appeared at the beginning of the
tweentieth century, is itself a mixed product of classic Chinese, oral Chinese, and translations of
Western words and grammar. See Alleton. I do not radically oppose the ‘Chinese world’ and the
‘Western world’.
3 This can be argued using the concept of ‘rhizome’ as proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari.
254 Yu Zhao

2 A Conceptual System of Affect According to Chinese Thought

First of all, I present an outline of the Chinese concept of affect by introducing

some key words. What is the nature of human life? How are body and soul
unified? How does heart come into contact with environment, transform affect
into intellect, and then into expressions? To answer these questions, two aspects
are treated: the constitution of human life (air, soul, heart, and their interactions),
and the various elements of the affect-related activities (from feeling to thinking)
according to Chinese thought.

2.1 Air, Soul, and Heart: Three Keys of Human Life

Air

In Chinese philosophy, the principle and the manifestation of the universe is called
Tao, which means ‘way’, or ‘road’. Tao is based on the character meaning ‘air’ qi
(ch’i). In French, this term can be translated as ‘souffle’ (blow). Ch’i has a variety of
meanings: ‘steam’, ‘vapour’, and ‘air’, but also ‘energy’ and ‘spirit’. The origin of Tao
is chaos, a block of ‘original air’, yuanqi. When original air is dispersed, it separates
into two sorts of air, yin and yang, and the interaction between yin and yang results
in a phenomenal world; this is called ‘ten thousand things/beings’, or wanwu. Air is
considered to be the substance of all the beings in the universe. The condensation of
air gives rise to forms and beings; the dispersion of air signifies disappearance and/
or death. In Chinese philosophy, there is no ontology: there is only air, and vibra-
tions, mutations, and changes in the universe (see Cheng 2002; Hsu 2002).
The human is considered to have the most refined ch’i of all beings, and the
physiological and psychological structures of the body are believed to be the
same as that of the cosmos. As Zhuangzi (?369–?286 BC) affirmed: “human life is
the condensation of ch’i.” It is said in Chinese medicine that “semen, breath,
saliva, water, blood, veins, all these elements are transformed from chi” (By
Unknown, Leijing 1624): ch’i is the substance and the vital energy of the body.
This is why it can also be used to describe the appearance, the symptoms, and the
soul of a Human being.

Soul

Through this notion of ch’i, it is possible to understand that spirit and matter are
not radically separated in traditional Chinese thought. Consequently, the Chinese
 The Characteristics of Traditional Chinese Theories of Affect 255

notion of soul is also an abstract combination of spirit and vital substance. The
expressions of the soul are jing, shen, hun, and po. ‘Spirit’, or shen, is composed of
two radicals: ‘sacrifice’ and ‘lightning’. Its meanings include: god, divinity, spirit,
ghost, soul, mind, and energy, as well as the style of a person. As an adjective, it
can mean ‘supernatural’, ‘magical’, and ‘miraculous’.
‘Essence’ or jing is composed of ‘rice’ and ‘green-blue’. It means the best
quality of rice, and by extension, essence, spirit, energy, and intelligence. When
they are combined, shen and jing refer respectively to the two parts of the soul:
one which is derived from heaven, and the other from earth. Another set of
coupled of words referring to ‘soul’ is hun-po. Again, these are conceived of as
coming from heaven and earth respectively. Hun means air of yang; and po, air of
yin. They are united when a baby is born. When a man dies, his hun returns to
heaven, and his po to earth.

Heaven air yang spirit from heaven

↓ ↓ ↓
Man harmony of yin/yang heart
↑ ↑ ↑
Earth air yin essence from earth

As the French sinologist Marcel Granet has explained: “The Chinese do not
believe in the idea of a soul which gives life to the body; they believe, we can say,
that the soul appears after the enrichment of the corporeal life” (Granet 1980,
397). In this way, spirit and vital energy are unseparated in human life. This
explains why man is constantly in contact with, and influenced by, his environ-
ment. The heart is the key element of these interactions.

Heart

The word ‘affect’, in the sense of experience, feeling and/or emotion, is translated
in modern Chinese as qinggan or ganqing; gan: feeling; qing: emotion. Both of
these characters contain the key concept of ‘heart’ xin 心/忄. In traditional
Chinese culture, affect is an activity of the heart. But in this context, the ‘heart’,
xin, does not refer to the physical organ, as in Western medicine. And the Chinese
conception of how the heart feels and is moved, and of how the mind works and
is expressed by artistic work, are different from rationalism and scientism. Xin is
used to mean heart, but also mind, intelligence, soul, centre, humour, idea,
conscience, and emotion. In Chinese culture, the heart is “the master of all the
internal organs of the body, the seat of the soul” (Unknown, Huangdi neijing,
256 Yu Zhao

eighteenth-third centuries BC). Some theories consider the brain as the seat of the
soul, but more often, this role is attributed to the heart.
In Chinese medicine, the heart is a functional organ or a ‘meridian of heart’,
xinbaojing, situated in the centre of the body. Like all the other elements of the
body, the heart is constitued from ch’i. It is also connected with digestion and
respiration. In Chinese medicine, humans feel, think, and remember, all through
the heart. Incidentally, most psychological key words in a Chinese context refer to
the radical ‘heart’: nature (translated also to mean natural disposition) xing,
emotion qing, intention/idea yi, imagination/thinking xiang, feeling gan, thought
si, reflection lü and memory yi. Like the soul, the heart is formed from two parts,
one coming from heaven, and the other from earth. The natural disposition, or
xing, comes from heaven. Sensations, feelings, and perception come from earth,
and are developed throughout a person’s life. The activities of the heart are thus
the results of its interactions with the external world.

2.2 The Heart’s Inner Alchemy

In traditional Chinese thought, there is no opposition between ‘affect’ and ‘in-

tellect’, nor are there general terms to designate these two concepts. Indeed,
several words are implied in the concept of the heart’s activity. With many
simplifications, a linear pattern to represent this process can be proposed:4

feeling gan感
↓
perception zhi知
↓
excitation xing兴
↓
emotion qing情
↓
intention yi意
↓
thought si 思

4 All the diagrams of this paper have been produced by myself. The research on Chinese ancient
writings and vocabulary related to psychology in China’s own cultural context is still lacking. My
study is based on the documents collected by Yan Guocai. See also Erica Brindley.
 The Characteristics of Traditional Chinese Theories of Affect 257

Most of these key words are polysemantic. For example, ‘perception’, zhi, can also
imply ‘knowledge’, ‘intention’, yi, can also mean ‘sensation’, ‘emotion’, and
‘idea’. This can be confusing to a Western reader, but in fact, this characteristic of
Chinese vocabulary is necessary for linking all the factors of the heart’s activities
together.

Feeling

The heart is the seat of all the senses, because it is the most important of the five
vital organs of sense, or wuguan: eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and skin. Since each
part of the body is composed of ch’i, and all are connected by ch’i, the five senses
can communicate with each other, and they are often associated. For example,
the character referring to odour, wen, is also used to mean ‘hearing’. taste, wei,
also means ‘smell’. ‘Beautiful’ can designate the quality of a view and also that of
taste. Sense, gan, is composed of heart and ‘feel’. Gan refers to the heart affected;
removed. By extension, it means to be touched, resonance, sensation, feeling,
impression, and emotion. Here again, it is obvious that the air is the medium of
communication: the voices and the atmosphere of the external world remove the
heart, which is composed of air. And the emotions, as a kind of vibration, are
expressed again by voice.
In one of the most ancient Chinese historical records Zuozhuan, (fourth cen-
tury BC), it is said: “People have [six emotions]: attachment, aversion, joy, anger,
sorrow and pleasure. They are born from the six airs.” The ‘six airs’ are yin, yang,
wind, rain, obscurity and clarity (see Yan 1998, 35). People’s moods are affected by
the ‘moods’ of heaven; the atmosphere. The same idea is expressed by Liu Xie
(465–520), who wrote: “When the beings and the scenes move, the heart waves
too”. The heart is compromised of ch’i which is in contact with the outside world.
Heaven is not the only influencing factor: the feelings and emotions of people can
also influence the weather, the atmosphere, and even the political context.

Perception

In Huainanzi (Liu An, second century) it is said: “When one thing arrives and the
spirit answers, it is the movement of ‘perception’ zhi. ‘Perception’ enters in
connection with the thing, then attachment and aversion are born” (see Yan 1998,
184). The character zhi means ‘receive’ and ‘in contact with’. This word is used at
the same time to refer to ‘know’ and ‘knowing’. Distinct from ‘feeling’, gan,
‘perception’, zhi, is more associated with the mind. Feelings come from outside
258 Yu Zhao

influences, though perception is an act of the heart to ‘meet and receive’ sense,
with its memories and knowledge.

Excitement

‘Excitement’, xing, is a sort of impulse, an enthusiasm arising from the vibrations

of the heart in contact with its environment. From an etymological point of view,
this character means ‘cry in a procession while people together carry a ritual
object’. ‘Excitement’ is at the same time a collective and a personal quality; it is
contagious and transmissible. In Chinese art, it is the occasion and the motiva-
tional power pushing the artist to create, in some ways comparable to the role of
inspiration in Western art.

Emotion

The word ‘emotion’, qing, is composed of ‘green-blue’ and ‘heart’. Qing is the colour
of vegetation, so it refers to several different colours: green, blue, green-blue, black.
Actually, it is the changing colour of nature, and depends on the atmosphere, the
season, and the light, which is considered the ‘son of air’, so is by nature also ch’i.
Qing is a phenomenal colour, and in the same way, ‘emotion’, qing, is the constantly
changing colour of the heart. Qing refers to feeling, affection, love, desire, passion,
favour, nature, situation, the state of matter, reason, and spirit.
In Chinese ancient philosophies, there are different versions of the emotions’
contents. A version of the six emotions is cited above. Otherwise, one of the most
ancient ritual records, Liji (combiled in the second century) said of the human
emotions that: “joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love, aversion, desire: a man is able to
feel these seven things without learning” (see Yan 1998, 35), and suggested that
the two basic elements of the ‘human heart’ are desire and aversion, yu-e. This last
couple is also referred to by other authors as ‘love and hate’, ai-zeng, or ‘like and
dislike’, hao-e. Both of these words relate to taste and flavour. Here the meaning of
ai is not exactly the same as ‘love’ in English, but rather it has the connotation of
‘possession’, or ‘not wanting to be separated from someone or something’.
According to Chinese traditional thought, emotions are the product of ‘natu-
ral disposition’, xing, coming into contact with the mundane world, and desire,
yu, is born in response to those emotions.

natural disposition xing性 → emotions qing情 → desire yu欲

 The Characteristics of Traditional Chinese Theories of Affect 259

Intention

‘Intention’, yi, is composed of two elements: ‘voice’ and ‘heart’. It refers to

conscience, will, desire, imagination, meaning, and idea. But here ‘idea’ is not
meant in the abstract sense; it means a kind of thinking born with sensations and
emotions. As the ideograph shows, yi is the ‘voice of the heart’. The logic is that
when the heart, which is constituted from air, is removed by movements from the
outside world, the ch’i of the heart resonates with the vibrations of its environ-
ment, and also produces voices.
How is the ‘voice of the heart’ expressed and transformed into language?
According to Chinese medicine, the tongue is “the seedling of the heart” (see Ma
2005, 61). So it is the tongue that transfers intentions into voice; which forms
music, oral language, and songs.
‘Intention’, yi, also impacts all the other human expressions. When intention
is highly spirited, it can be very powerful. In the martial arts, for example, every
gesture is dictated by the intentions of those who practice them. It is the same in
the art of painting, as Zheng Xie (1639–1766) explained: ‘intention comes before
the brush’ (see Zhou 2005, 117).

Thinking

The word ‘thinking’, si, is etymologically composed of ‘heart’ and ‘fontanel’. Gua-
nyinzi (seventh-eighth centuries) wrote: “The heart thinks, it thinks by intention (yi),
notbyitself”(seeYan1998,336).Besidessi,severalotherwordsalsoreferto‘thought’
or ‘thinking’. As already discussed, there are perception, zhi, which also means
‘acknowledges’,andintention, yi, inthe senseof ‘idea’.The restof thecharacters (not
detailed here) are: reflection, lü, recognition, shi, mind, nian, and thinking/ima
gery, xiang. All of these forms of thinking are produced by the feelings of the heart.

Perception Digestion Respiration

↓ ↓ ↓
Heart
↓
Feelings
↓
Thinking/thoughts

In the image of Tao (‘road’), and supported by the notion of ch’i, the activities of
the heart – from feeling to thinking – are considered in a linear scheme in Chinese
260 Yu Zhao

thought. This ensures the fluent passage from flesh to spirit, from affect to
intellect, and from reception to expression.

3 Affect, Literati, and the Arts

3.1 Affect in the Arts

In ancient China, the mainstream artistic forms, especially those related to ideo-
graphic writing (literature, poetry, calligraphy, painting) were practised only by
educated people. These elite arts are all considered as expressions of the emo-
tions and the intentions of the artist, as shown in this paragraph written by Han
Yu (768–824), a famous scholar of the Tang dynasty:

Before, Zhang Xu excelled in the cursive script, he did not practise any other art. All that he
felt: joy, anger, awkwardness, frustration, delight, enmity, passion, drunkenness, irritation,
indignation, he had to express in the cursive script. By observation of the world, mountains,
rivers, valleys, birds, animals, insects, fishes, vegetation, flowers, sun and moon, stars,
wind, rain, water, fire, thunder, lightning, songs, dances, fights, all the changes in the
heaven and on earth made him delighted or stupefied, emotions that he expressed through
his calligraphy.5

Why does affect have such an importance in Chinese arts? To the Chinese men of
letters, the arts were the medium for communicating with heaven, the mystical
origin of the universe known as Tao, with the heart being the vector. As a conse-
quence, the process of artistic creation depended on the activity of the heart. We
have already discussed the dual natures of the heart and soul: it is the union of ch’i
from heaven and from earth, and also the results of interactions between human
nature and human culture. To go into the Tao is to go back to the Origin. The artist
must encounter affect, the bridge between the mind and the natural world.
For the same reason, the judgement of an artistic work is not based on the
beautiful, mei, but the spiritual, shen, the natural, ziran, and the free, yi. The
objective of the ‘observer’ is to come into contact with Tao through artistic
expression – through sensible forms.

→ sense of the elite’s culture / artistic creation →

Tao (nature) ↔ Heart (Affect/Intention/Idea) ↔ Arts and culture
← sense of spiritual pursuit / artistic reception ←

5 “Song gaoxian shangren xu”, cited in Lidai shufa lunwenxuan 292.

 The Characteristics of Traditional Chinese Theories of Affect 261

Actually, Chinese men of letters (in Chinese, wenren, literally ‘man of culture/
writing’) were themselves at the ‘heart’ of ancient Chinese culture. Their prede-
cessors in primitive Chinese culture were shamans, who were masters of knowl-
edge, especially in rituals and graphic writing, but also medicine, music, cooking,
and so on (see Zhang 1997, 62–66).
Chinese writing, which gave life to literati arts, originates from divination
activities. As the famous Chinese linguist Tang Lan said, “the idea of Chinese is
not to be understood, but imagined” (see Meng 2004, 105). This special place
accorded to the image is related to a kind of intention to remain in contact with
affect – as a natural part of human life. Michel Boccara’s thesis about Maya
writing can also be applied to the Chinese case: he considered that “this stop at
the image, which characterizes the glyphic writing”, is a way to “leave the
passage open that reiterates the affect without going to the word too fast” (31).

3.2 A Paradox in the Literati Arts

Chinese writing is at the same time a guarantee of Chinese mainstream culture

and the means by which an educated man could attain a kind of feeling of
freedom. This reminds us that the system of affect is not a ‘scientific’ system, but
a cultural product, which naturalises the cultural part of human existence.
Indeed, there is a contradiction in the Chinese elite’s tradition.
On one hand, affect is considered to be below the intellect, something that
should be civilised by a literary education. Actually, in Chinese thought, the
natural disposition, emotions, and desires of humans are compared to currents as
in a river: their natural energy can be very dangerous. In contrast, the function of
culture is to ‘harness the river’ by establishing rituals, laws, and canons, with
ideographic writing as the main tool for this. Literacy is also constituted from ch’i;
it is a kind of ‘spiritual food’. Su Shi (1037–1101), a famous scholar and artist of
the Song dynasty, said: “With poems and books in his belly, the ch’i of one person
becomes naturally brilliant”. Without it, a man cannot be called a ‘man’, but a
‘wild animal’ (He dongchuan liubien).
On the other hand, to join the Tao, one must go through one’s affect to
communicate with heaven and the spirits, because affect contains a heavenly
part. The literati arts were born in the course of this personal research of Tao. That
is why in the Chinese arts, skills (which demand attention to one’s affect) are very
important, as are experiences of life, but to become a real artist, one must ‘read a
lot’. Arts and affect therefore constitute an inseparable pair crucial to maintaining
the stability of Chinese society. A Chinese contemporary researcher, Yin Yijun,
has classified Chinese society as “a society of poetry and literacy, a society of
262 Yu Zhao

tender emotions” (405). These ‘tender emotions’ are the exact image of an ideal
Chinese relationship. Emotions should be at a medium level, not too low, nor too
high. Confucius said that: “[poetry is] developed from the emotions, and stops at
the rituals” (Maoshixu, ?second century BC). All the emotions that overflow from
the arts are recycled. Artistic work is in fact a kind of sensitive expression, the
ideas of which are expressed by allusion, which incites people to feel, taste, and
imagine, rather than to understand directly (see Jullien, Le Détour et l’Accès).
As another Chinese researcher, Zhang Fa, has remarked, in traditional Chi-
nese culture, the man of letters always felt far from his political and personal
ideals. Zhang Fa describes this as akin to the “scheme of courting a beauty”
inspired by an ancient Chinese poem of love called Jian-jia (third century BC.). In
this poem, the beauty stays on the other side of the river, far from the man in love,
who can only wander around without knowing how to approach and court her
(94–102). For Zhang Fa, the river in the story depicts rituals; the social laws. In
fact, heroes can never know if their beauty is really as perfect as they imagine, but
they cannot have doubts about the river, which is a natural presence. As a matter
of fact, in traditional literature, the beauty was usually a metaphor for the
emperor. Like the man in love in Jian-jia, the mandarin could never doubt
imperial authority, nor could his political ideal be developed by his literary
studies. So the only choice was to keep nostalgia in his heart, accept his sort and
go on dreaming by creating artistic forms.
Curiously, music and dance, which are the first products of the ‘vibrations’ of
the heart, are much less developed in the elite tradition. Why this exception? For
this elite, in fact, these two arts are too ‘free’ and too ‘dangerous’ for the imperial
authority, because they directly express people’s emotions (and in doing so
influence the atmosphere) without passing through written language – particu-
larly the disciplining of a person’s spirit and mind associated with this form of art.
Though the other arts related to Chinese writing (within the category of painting)
are somewhat ‘circuitous’ moods of expression – François Jullien called it ‘détour’
(Jullien 1995) – they are associated with the writing both in form and in content,
but give the impression that they are free expressions of the heart. This free
expression is somehow mute.

4 Conclusion

In conclusion, the system of affect in Chinese thought can be summarised in three

main points. Firstly, the structure of feelings is based on the concept of ch’i, the
substance and medium of the whole universe, including the human body. Sec-
ondly, affect is not radically separated from the intellect, but these are considered
 The Characteristics of Traditional Chinese Theories of Affect 263

as two parts of a single process. This conception ensures that nature (Tao) and
(human) culture communicate with one other and are thoroughly intertwined.
Thirdly, the confusion between affect and intellect, between the cultural part of
this coupling and the natural part, of affect, determines the development and
sense of Chinese arts. The arts, as practised by the elite, were treated as circuitous
expressions of emotions and thoughts, having the function of stabilising the
traditional social structure by maintaining people in their ‘tender emotions’.
Through the arts, the man of letters poured out his emotions and ideas in
accepted cultural forms. His mind became stabilised, and the social structure was
maintained, continuing its course as a steady flow. From this point of view, the
Chinese elite arts were at the same time a consolation to the unsatisfied men of
letters, and a barrier that prevented them from looking straight at reality.
It seems that this structure of feeling and emotion continues to function in
contemporary Chinese society. It is encouraged by the political authorities, who
have tried in recent years to bring ‘traditional Chinese values’ back into education
and the social culture. As Jean-François Billeter concluded in the postscript to his
L’art chinois de l’écriture (The Chinese art of writing), the whole uncritical fascina-
tion with the Chinese traditional elite’s arts (calligraphy, in the case of his study)
is probably related to a sort of reactionary ideology (Billeter 1989, 155). This
phenomenon is most likely not reserved to the Chinese arts.

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Index
Terms
aesthetics 17, 63, 68, 71–74, 121–122, 169,
201, 231, 252–253
agency 4–5, 12, 14–15, 18, 30, 35–37, 98,
113, 139, 148, 173
air 172–173, 181, 183, 247, 253–259
atmosphere 1–2, 7, 17, 29, 45–46, 67, 75,
136, 171–176, 178–181, 202, 218–219,
231, 240, 257–258, 262
autism 187, 192
biophilia 243–250
biopolitics 201–202, 205–206, 213
body 1–2, 7, 10, 14–15, 44, 47–48, 58–64,
71–72, 75, 77, 85, 99, 103–104, 106, 109,
112–113, 128, 147–151, 166–167, 170,
178, 180–185, 191–192, 199–207,
210–213, 217, 219–233, 236, 241, 247,
254–257, 262
consciousness 5, 20, 22–23, 63, 92, 94–96,
108, 126, 128, 138, 154, 171, 179, 188,
193, 241
crisis 29–30, 33, 35, 38–39, 59, 135–136,
138–139, 243
curiosity 60, 62–63, 81, 159–167, 245
desire 4, 13, 31, 41–44, 64, 111–113, 119, 122,
148, 150, 153–155, 159–162, 182, 187,
190, 192, 204, 208, 235, 239, 258–261
disaster 29–30, 33–39
ecology 15, 248
economy / economic / economical 2–3, 8,
10–11, 23, 29, 33, 40, 43–47, 68, 70, 78,
88, 149–150, 227, 237, 239
elegy 169–174
embodiment 46–48, 99, 109, 149, 151,
154–155, 201, 210
environment 2, 7, 10–11, 14–17, 33–34, 36,
58, 61–63, 74–75, 79, 81, 95, 162,
171–172, 178, 180, 184, 199, 202, 204,
209, 212–213, 220, 230, 243–250,
253–255, 258–259
fear 3, 25, 35, 53, 56–57, 74–81, 86, 89–90,
103, 117, 124, 126–127, 130, 140, 149,
159–161, 167, 202, 205–206, 208, 231, 258
feminism 152–153, 156
fertility 226–233
gender 40–48, 98, 103–113, 148–150, 153,
156, 172, 190, 219, 237–240
heart 10, 76, 100–101, 110–113, 125–128, 179,
201, 228, 249, 253–262
hospitality 81, 159–167
humanity 193–195, 203, 209, 244
imitation 68, 200–205, 208–214
institution / institutional 3, 20–24, 33, 35,
37, 70, 85, 93, 96, 101, 154, 171, 200,
202–203, 230
language 1, 6, 22, 41, 58, 94, 96, 100, 103,
110, 112, 136, 147, 160, 170, 174,
179–181, 183–185, 191–192, 196, 200,
208, 253, 259, 262
latent / latency 22, 126
lifestyle 229, 235–241
love 6, 40–49, 87, 92, 99, 101–102, 108, 111,
116, 136, 148, 150, 171, 182, 207, 209,
219–223, 249, 258, 262
map / mapping 8, 15, 43, 79, 189–195, 235, 253
memory 17, 51, 77–78, 85–95, 116–122,
124–131, 135–139, 155–157, 256
mobilisation 11, 199–200, 212–223
mourning 85–96, 137, 169–170, 174, 176
narrative 30, 51, 59, 74, 79, 86, 102, 112, 125,
130, 132–142, 153, 157, 169–170,
173–174, 200, 206, 208, 232, 236
network 13, 16–17, 29–38, 61, 125, 129, 131,
188–196, 218
performative / performativity 5, 17, 66–70,
86, 105, 136, 173, 185, 216–218, 223
perception 9, 14, 51, 59–62, 67–68, 71, 74,
78–79, 99–100, 105, 124–126, 132, 138,
206, 220, 226–227, 229–233, 256–259
pleasure 12, 44, 46, 68, 166, 231, 235,
237–241, 257
potentiality 31–32, 56, 68, 163–164
power 3, 10–11, 21, 30, 38, 41, 44, 55, 63–64,
69–70, 72, 77–78, 95, 99–101, 106,
124–125, 134, 148, 154, 159, 165,
172–174, 191–196, 201–214, 228, 236,
249, 258
266 Index
psychology 17, 55, 118, 125–126, 133, 142,
147, 243, 246, 256
queer 40–47, 148–149, 154, 183
rage 6, 10, 15, 152–153, 157
sexual / sexuality 40–48, 101, 148–153, 156,
163–165, 172, 217–219, 240
social media 9, 12–13, 18, 29, 34, 201,
216–218, 223
sorrow 86, 169–175, 257–258
soul 13–15, 100–102, 105–106, 112, 128,
163–166, 180–181, 221, 254–260
space 2, 11, 32, 53, 67, 71, 74–75, 79–81, 87,
99–100, 104, 108, 112, 118, 122, 133,
136–137, 154–155, 157, 160, 165,
173–176, 178–184, 187–192, 195,
219–221, 223, 231, 236, 239–240, 248
Stimmung 34, 173–175
subjectivity 16, 21, 41, 47, 57, 99, 101, 104,
150, 155, 157, 159–161, 166, 202–203,
247, 249
sympathy 9, 63, 111, 199–211
symptom 61, 89, 129, 228–229, 254
technology 30, 106, 203, 227–232, 237
thinking 10, 14, 17, 20, 22, 63–64, 74, 118,
147, 150, 156, 187, 190, 193, 246, 254,
256, 259
trauma /traumatic 86, 90, 118, 124, 133, 135
unanimism 178–181, 185
video 8–10, 42, 50–56, 58–62, 74, 79, 91,
199–200, 206–208, 210, 216–217,
226–227
well-being 18, 88, 134, 235–241
wonder 127, 243–244, 247–249

Names
Ahmed, Sara 10–11, 18, 40, 45–47, 49, 89,
96, 149, 155, 157
Barad, Karen 38–39, 69, 72, 105
Berlant, Lauren 10, 18, 48–49, 149–150,
154–155, 157–158
Brennan, Teresa 179–180, 183–186
Deleuze, Gilles 8, 31, 47, 49, 51, 53–58, 60,
62, 64–65, 148, 158, 160, 162, 167,
188–193, 196, 247–250, 253, 263
Derrida, Jacques 51–52, 55, 57, 155–161, 167,
185, 186
Fischer-Lichte, Erika 5, 18, 66, 73
Foucault, Michel 17, 96, 102, 105, 112, 114,
202, 206, 214
Grossberg, Lawrence 214, 221–224, 235, 237
Guattari, Félix 15, 18, 31, 64, 65, 188,
190–192, 196, 247–248, 250, 253, 263
Hardt, Michael 4, 18, 49, 73, 148, 158, 202,
214
Heidegger, Martin 34, 163, 167–168
Huyssen, Andreas 89–90, 97, 117–118, 123
James, William 162–163, 168, 214
Names 267
Latour, Bruno 34, 39, 203, 215
Le Bon, Gustave 178, 199, 201, 203–204, 215
Massumi, Brian 8, 47, 49, 61, 63, 65, 71–73,
75, 78–79, 81, 95, 97–98, 113, 115, 147,
158, 160, 162, 166, 168, 175–176, 184,
186, 200–203, 206, 208, 212, 215, 220,
223–224, 231–234, 239, 242, 247–248,
250
Negri, Antonio 4, 18, 73, 202, 214
Ngai, Sianne 12, 18, 118, 120–121, 123, 231,
234, 236, 242
Rancière, Jacques 66, 70, 73, 79, 81, 91, 97
Sedgwick, Eve K. 8, 51–53, 55–57, 147–148,
158
Sloterdijk, Peter 7, 11, 18
Stiegler, Bernard 51–52, 55, 57
Spinoza, Baruch 8, 15, 58, 62–65, 160, 162,
167, 191–192, 196, 247, 249–250
Thrift, Nigel 7, 11, 16, 18, 160, 168, 179, 186,
201–203, 212–213, 220, 223–224
Tomkins, Silvan 7–8, 18, 148, 158
Woolf, Virginia VI, 17, 143, 169–179, 181–186