Desire After Affect argues that this affective euphoria cannot be explained solely in terms of a repression of language, logos, and reason. It argues that the affective turn is symptomatic of a fundamental shift in modes of thinking about the human condition. It explores what this means for the human and the posthuman, animal and machine, and calls for a new theory of subjectivation, a philosophy of media affect.
Desire After Affect argues that this affective euphoria cannot be explained solely in terms of a repression of language, logos, and reason. It argues that the affective turn is symptomatic of a fundamental shift in modes of thinking about the human condition. It explores what this means for the human and the posthuman, animal and machine, and calls for a new theory of subjectivation, a philosophy of media affect.
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Overview
Desire After Affect argues that this affective euphoria cannot be explained solely in terms of a repression of language, logos, and reason. It argues that the affective turn is symptomatic of a fundamental shift in modes of thinking about the human condition. It explores what this means for the human and the posthuman, animal and machine, and calls for a new theory of subjectivation, a philosophy of media affect.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783481323 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/24/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 990 KB |
About the Author
Nicholas Grindell has been living and working in Berlin as a translator since 1993, specializing in the history and theory of the arts. Recent translations include books by Jörg Heiser, Isabelle Graw and Manfred Hermes (all Sternberg Press) and a volume of poetry by Monika Rinck (Burning Deck Press).
Read an Excerpt
Desire After Affect
By Marie-Luise Angerer, Nicholas Grindell
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Marie-Luise AngererAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-132-3
CHAPTER 1
Affective Troubles in Media and Art
Media Emotions, Cinema Feelings, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, The Power of Feelings, The Inner Touch, Affect and Emotion, The Affect Theory Reader — The picture painted by these book titles was matched over the same period in the field of exhibitions: In 2004, the Art Center in Hasselt, Belgium, presented Feel: Tactile Media Art; in April 2005, Antwerp's Museum of Modern Art (MuHKA) staged Emotion Pictures; and over the last decade, one show after another — to name just two of the most recent, Real Emotions at Berlin's Kunstwerke in spring 2014 and Affekte in Erlangen, Belgium, and Holland. The academic community also got involved, organizing symposia and conferences on the emotional and affective turn in media, art, and the humanities, from Thinking through Affect to Timing of Affect.
In their foreword to Kinogefühle, the editors write, "It is striking that the turn towards the emotions is being accompanied by a crisis regarding models in social and communications theory that are based primarily on the potential of rational discourse." Whereas Jonathan Crary, in his book Techniques of the Observer, identifies a turn at the beginning of the nineteenth century that focused attention on the body as crucial to the functions of perception, one could adapt this for today by saying that emotion and affect are now viewed as crucial to cognition and communication.
With this focus on affect, the long history of classical western dichotomies, especially that between mind and body, seems to have become surmountable. Affect theory brings a new picture of consciousness, of thought, of mind and of language that no longer accepts division, placing the emphasis instead on the fluid intermingling of matter and nonmatter. Since Descartes formulated his famous "I think therefore I am", there has been an ongoing debate on body and mind, soul and matter, reason and emotion, which has also shaped (and continues to shape) the categories of masculine and feminine, public and private. This debate had its high points and latent periods. One such high point was the twentieth century, when language, the power of the word, the chain of signifiers and the symbolic order were enthroned in order to enclose the unutterable and nondiscursive in this language — as its "obscene underside" (Slavoj Zizek) and as the "real" defined by Jacques Lacan as constitutive of the symbolic order. At the same time, however, there were always attempts to claim a balance, a mutual support of language and matter, or to couch this balance in theoretical and conceptual terms, in particular in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
Likewise, a look at the art of the second half of the twentieth century shows the extent to which language as a system of representation took centre stage, providing subject matter for conceptual art and groups like Art and Language. Language became a powerful structure that not only conveyed reality but actually generated it. Long before the affect-laden attack on the system of representation, however, philosophical positions like that of Deleuze were already criticizing this primacy of language. In his book on Foucault, published twenty years after The Order of Things in 1986, Deleuze drew attention to a possible error on the part of Foucault, who had linked the disappearance of (modern) man, his reformation, and the emergence of new power relations to language, writing that the "dispersion of language" could be reversed, that "to discover the vast play of language contained once more within a single space might be [a] decisive [...] leap towards a wholly new form of thought." Deleuze underlines the fact that Foucault assigns this power to neither life nor labour — the other two terms in the Foucauldian triad besides language — attributing it exclusively to language and above all to literature (disconnected from linguistics). As Foucault wrote, language responded to its "demotion" as an object of academic study in nineteenth-century linguistics by generating a countertendency, regrouping to "emphasize a 'being of language' beyond whatever it designates and signifies, beyond even the sounds." But what Foucault did not see, Deleuze continues, is that biology and work also had to regroup in order to be accorded a new existence in the "genetic code" (of molecular biology) and in "cybernetics and information technology" (third-generation machines).
Although he noted the signs of the times (rise of biology and molecular biology, dawn of the cyber age), it is uncertain, as Paul Rabinow writes in his Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, whether Deleuze was able to properly gauge the importance of these new practices. For today, as Rabinow stresses, one's assumptions must be based on a fragmenting of language, life and labour, calling for an engagement with the question of anthropos. And whatever one's position on this question, any project seeking to grasp these developments can be described as follows: "What if we took up recent changes in the logoi of life, labor, and language not as indicating an epochal shift with a totalizing coherence but rather as fragmented and sectorial changes?" Changes that are currently seeking their form — thus necessarily taking the figure of the anthropos with them. Today, "anthropos is that being who suffers from too many logoi." We, then, are witnesses to a reformulation of anthropos.
In his account of the twentieth century, Alain Badiou has identified its second half — the golden age of (post-) structuralist theory — as a moment marked by a conflict between "life" and "concept", a conflict in which two philosophical currents that had crossed paths again and again, always trying to throw the other off balance, joined forces for one instant in history. Badiou calls them "philosophy of concept" and "philosophy of life". The latter runs from Henri Bergson to Gilles Deleuze, the former from mathematical formalism (as elaborated by Léon Brunschvicg) to Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. For the brief moment when they meet and intertwine, these two movements outline a dispute over the concept of the subject. From this moment in the late 1960s, Badiou claims, the subject can no longer be based on Cartesian rationality nor on self-reflexivity. Instead, it must be something experienced more in terms of life and the body, something more comprehensive than the conscious subject, something that is more comparable with a production or creation and that unites more far-reaching forces within itself.
Psychoanalysis plays an ambivalent role here. On the one hand, during this period it became the institution in which the theory of the subject took on a radical form. On the other, as Foucault and Deleuze/Guattari never tired or repeating, it trusted too little in its own radicality. These thinkers, as Badiou explains, thus developed a concept of the subject along psychoanalytical lines with a different understanding of the unconscious and its explosive power within society, a concept first presented by Deleuze and Guattari in their "schizoanalysis" in Anti -Oedipus. As these exciting years slowly neared their end (the era of adventure, in Badiou's account, being followed by a period of re-ordering), the French voices were joined by others, who mounted attacks on the philosophy of concept and who pushed that of life in a direction that no longer pursued the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.
Analytic philosophers of language like John Searle were also actively involved in the debate against the dominance of language. Searle, who with John L. Austin cofounded speech act theory (which has made a comeback within discussions of performance), had declared years previously that the twentieth century was the century of the unconscious and thus the century of psychoanalysis; now, he argued, the time of consciousness has come and hence the time of neurology, biology and the digital regulation of networks and feedback. Today, this appears increasingly prescient: The brain as the seat of consciousness is now being analysed using methods of cognitive psychology and neurophysiology, as well as new recording and visualization technologies, to find out how and where human feelings and affects originate and take effect. Cognition is now portrayed only in connection with emotion and affect, and there is a consensus, following the American neurologist Antonio Damasio, that feeling is the basis of our being: "I feel therefore I am".
In 2004, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht published Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, in which he sets himself vehemently apart from the recent trend toward proclamations of a "beyond", "after" or "post". With this gesture, he draws attention to a materiality, a physicality and a sensuality that have been radically lost, to the point where we no longer know we ever had them:
But would we also have to say — to admit? — that today we are experiencing a stage beyond that point of — seemingly — absolute loss, a stage where, paradoxically, the desire for what we had absolutely lost is coming back? A stage where, strangely enough, this lost desire is even being imposed 'back' upon us? For contemporary communication technologies have doubtlessly come close to fulfilling the dream of omnipresence, which is the dream of making lived experience independent of the locations that our bodies occupy in space (and in this sense, it is a 'Cartesian' dream).
Gumbrecht states clearly why we are now being reminded of this original loss: With their promise of immediacy and ubiquity, he says, digital media give us something like a premonition that there could be something else, something more.
And indeed, the first cyber wave did cause quite a stir. With its promise of tactility, immediacy, and the dissolution of time and space, there seemed to be a new paradise in the making, a paradise where language — as the founding, existential category of the human — would be dislodged from its dominant position.
Derrick de Kerckhove, who worked with Marshall McLuhan and directed the Program in Culture and Technology at Toronto University until 2008, went so far as to confer on new media the task of compensating for the collateral damage caused by the alphabet. Today, he argues, the computer and the brain are defined as parallel facilities that have entered into a now inescapable synthesis with far-reaching consequences, as the human body with all its senses becomes integrated into the new devices. Its sensory and preconscious reactions in particular play an increasingly important role here since the forms of communication in digital media simply omit the stage of articulation in words, entering into a gradual symbiosis with the physical body. The extent to which new media machines have already conquered the body can be seen in the computer games boom. In Kerckhove's view, immersing oneself and being drawn in like this is a fascinating new phenomena, heralding an "end of theory" (and of the associated distance) as well as an "end to the dominance of the visual". In their place, the senses of smell, touch and hearing are being "cyberculturally" adapted.
In the next section, we see how strongly such comments are driving talk of new turns ("somatic turn", "emotional turn") in film and art theory.
FROM VIEWING PLEASURE TO EMOTION MACHINE
From 1970 until the mid-1980s, film theory was dominated by apparatus theory with its founding in post-Marxist ideology and psychoanalysis. According to Jean-Louis Baudry, one of its main proponents, cinema is an ideological state apparatus (in the sense of Louis Althusser) that constitutes visitors in a specific way as viewers, comparable to the way the church treats believers, schools treat pupils, families treat their members, and armed forces treat soldiers. The specific quality of cinema is that it possesses a setting that couches the viewers — like small children — in the mirror stage of screen, camera and gaze (the model of the mirror stage was developed by Jacques Lacan to define the psychosexual development of the child as a visual idealization of its self). During this period, the cinema appeared as the place to illustrate the ideological construction of the subject. Everything that takes place between viewer and screen is analysed (from the viewpoint of the Other) as an imaginary production between mother-child-mirror or screen-camera-gaze. Rather than inquiring into the impact of cinema, apparatus theory asks why films are able to exert such a powerful libidinous attraction. The answer it gives is that sexuality and desire, as the driving forces of the subject, are always already inscribed in the field of the visible (visual), as well as forming the basis for a dynamic that extends beyond the visible.
In the meantime, however, apparatus theory has been displaced by cognitive film theory, which now largely shapes the discussion on emotion and affect in the cinema, drawing on psychology and its repertoire of empirical theories of emotion. The techniques of film are discussed in relation to the cognitive makeup of the viewer in order to explain why cinema can make an emotional impact. The question posed by the two main proponents of cognitive film psychology, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, can be summed up as follows: How do depicted, staged emotions produce the emotions felt by the viewers? One reason for the rise of cognitive film theory is certainly the recent tendency within neuroscience to try to grasp feelings and affects via digital computing and recording techniques. In her contribution to the Mediale Emotionen anthology, Sigrid Weigel offers a good analysis of this notion of feeling, which is not strictly speaking emotion, but brain activity that has been localized and recorded, and then interpreted as emotion: "The current concept of feelings (emotions) represents [...] the return of a pathos formula from the age of sensibility". As early as the eighteenth century, she explains, emotion was conceived of as a medium between a sensibilité morale and a sensibilité physique, bridging the gap between mind and body. In the same anthology, Andreas Keil and Jens Eder summarize the relationship between audiovisual media and emotional networks today, showing the wide range of phenomena now understood to be "affective": brief, intense emotions on a romantic happy end; diffuse, subliminal moods at the opening of a horror film; and reflex-like reactions to explosions in a spectacular action scene; but also empathy, sympathy and desire, as well as aesthetic enjoyment and political or ideological concern. At the beginning of their essay, the authors stress that a shift in film theory can be observed in the early 1990s, pushing out "psychoanalytical affect theories" like those of Laura Mulvey and Louis Baudry because they were viewed as undifferentiated and unempirical. It must be stressed, however, that affect was not an explicit theme in the structural film theory of the 1970s and 1980s nor in apparatus theory, with the focus instead on unconscious identification and the ideological production of the subject.
In the course of an unmistakable focusing on affect in media and cultural theories, psychoanalysis (and the film theory long based on it) was now accused of having criminally neglected the emotions. In Moral Spectatorship, Lisa Cartwright summarizes the dispute over representation versus affect that shaped debate in the 1970s, accusing psychoanalysis and especially the feminist film theory of this time of having ignored affect on political grounds. Not so much conviction as political considerations, she argued, had motivated feminist scholars to support Lacanian psychoanalysis. But now, she claimed, an affective turn was necessary, calling for a new orientation toward such models as the object relations theory of Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein and the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins.
ON THE RETURN OF THE CINEMATOGRAPHICALLY REPRESSED
Shifts in the premises of film theory began much earlier, however. With Deleuze's L'Image-mouvement and L'Image-temps, if not before, a new way of talking about the cinema was introduced and with it a new theoretical angle. The focus was on cinema, the body and the brain, the cinematographic creation of the body, and brain research, which, according to Deleuze, not only created a break but actually enforced "new orientations" with regard to the classical image. In the wake of these books, numerous other essays and books expressed a more or less explicit opposition to psychoanalytical film theory, criticizing it as too rigid and not suited to the moving image.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Desire After Affect by Marie-Luise Angerer, Nicholas Grindell. Copyright © 2015 Marie-Luise Angerer. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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