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These are our questions for the MLA roundtable. Section one takes up genealogies of affect
theory; section two takes up the problem of affect in the historical present; section three takes up
a variety of concerns about queer theory, sexuality, racialization, specific cases and archives, and
modes of orientation that are in proximity to whatever we might call affect but in different idioms.
745. Affecting Affect Theory is scheduled to take place at 1:45+3:00 p.m. on 08-JAN12 in 615, WSCC; Washington State Convention Center, 800 Convention Place (Pike
St. and 8th Ave.)
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Affect Theory Roundtable Questions, MLA 2012
Authors: Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Jonathan Flatley, Neville Hoad, Heather
Love, José E. Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o
I. Genealogies of Affect Theory
1. How do we think about the different trajectories of affect theory now, especially as the
Deleuzian/Massumian project/idiom has become so important to its critical circulation? How do
we think the proximity of public feelings, minor affects, psychoanalysis, Sedgwickian syncretism
(Buddhism, Tomkins, Klein), and affective labor’s version of affect-as-immateriality in relation to
the Spinozan tradition? How to keep the event of affect open to maintaining the multiplicity of
traditions, trajectories, tendencies, and critical tactics? Is spanning all traditions important to
ways we think about addressing future problems?
2. Affect vs/alongside mood, feeling, emotion etc. What are the stakes of synthesizing these
different ways of talking to our about states of the sensorium?
3. Cavell (a great affect theorist who is not often included in the genealogies of affect theory) says
that professional philosophy has been emancipated from an obligation to be therapeutic, but that
it should be haunted by that very emancipation. What about the critical work we do: what about
questions of theory and utility, of reparativity, of failure?
4. In response to thoughts about genealogies and the increasing institutionalization of Deleuzian
affect studies, I would like to take the chance to think in some detail about genealogies for public
feelings/feel tank type affect studies. The Cavell thing got me thinking about other possibly
overlooked figures.
And I have also been thinking a lot about the fact that the affective turn
in Sedgwick comes with the turn to Tomkins—perhaps we could think about this moment less in
terms of what Tomkins has to offer specifically and more in terms of the question of periodization
(which Sedgwick already sort of does...). Sedgwick highlighted cybernetics as a key framework,
but for me it would be interesting to think about social psychology, microsociology, anti-
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psychiatry, social interaction studies, kinesics, and other related fields that might figure into
alternate or unthought genealogies for some of the work we do.
5. Lately I’ve been thinking about the historicity of the affective turn (to follow up a little on the
question of periodization in question 4). What are the historical situations for the impressively
wide and cross-disciplinary turn toward affect as an object of inquiry in the 1990s? What role did
the widespread and much discussed use of a new generation of anti-depressant medications play
in the turn to affect? To what extent is the interest in affect related to the increasing importance
and changing function of affective labor? My own initial thought is that one way to start thinking
about this question is to ask what the mood/Stimmung of the affective turn is. One of the moods
of the affective turn would certainly seem to be depressive, but perhaps there are several moods to
the affective turn, different affect theories having their own moods or modes of being attuned to
particular historical situations, problems or contexts. Might this then be another way to sort
through different affect theories?
6. To continue the line of inquiry from the questions above, I am wondering too about
Sedgwick/Tomkins vs. Massumi/Deleuze and the set of unresolved (and irresolvable?)
terminological issues that come along with sorting through the different paradigms, theories, and
traditions. For example, do we need or want to agree on what “affect” refers to as opposed to
“emotion,” or “mood” or “feeling”? Or, at least, do we want to agree about what we are
disagreeing about when we don’t agree? Is there less terminological agreement in affect theory
than elsewhere? How are the conceptual problems affect theory faces distinct from other kinds of
conceptual problems?
7. Affective Turns
Is this term useful and what does it mean? Like others, I’m interested in how and why we might
articulate multiple locations and lineages for the affective turn(s), while also acknowledging how
Deleuzian theory and terminological distinctions among affect, emotion and feeling have helped
to move forward the project of thinking about embodied and sensory experience. What other
resources and lineages are useful? Of late, I’ve been thinking about the ongoing legacy of lesbian
separatism, consciousness-raising (and the relations between therapy and politics), the sex wars,
and other messy feminist histories that produce emotionally charged and divisive conflicts. And
I’d also like to discuss how new vitalisms, animal studies, ecocriticism, cultural geography,
neuroscience and other fields converge around revised understandings of the relations between
mind and body, humans and objects, the biological and the material.
II. The Historical Present/ The Way We Feel Now
8. Neoliberalism and Affective Labor We might want to think about Shaviro’s PostCinematic Affect and its claims that the flows of financialization are saturating fictional worlds
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such that a new realism appears not in plot or representation or relations to objects as such but in
relation to time and movement as affective performances. What kinds of contribution do our
different orientations or approaches to affect theory make to thinking the historical present and
how it gets represented? How are we historicizing neoliberalism in relation to affect, atmosphere,
and mediations of presencing?
9. Market Feelings
The ambient rhetorics/ metaphorics of the economic crisis are saturated with affective language:
ebullience, depression, and the one I find the the most interesting “greed.” I have struggled with
greed for a long time – particularly its imagined self-evidence – in other venues. Economic
historians have long-debated whether the British empire was actually profitable, yet the
imagining of the drive to self-enrichment remains the default psychological explanation for
appropriation, exploitation, conquest. I see greed everywhere as the vernacular of critique across
the political spectrum – the bankers were/are greedy, public unions are greedy, governments are
greedy. What is greed, both categorically and substantively? Is the term being calibrated
somewhere between an appetite and a feeling? An over-compensatory repetition compulsion
driven by extremes of lack and scarcity (Lauren’s fort/da question at the end of supervalent
thought’s blog post?) or a plenitude of desire? What are the antonyms of greed? Need? Restraint?
Self-sacrificing generosity? Overlaying feeling and appetite in relation to greed there also seems to
be some idea of secular sin in a world of proliferating religiosity: invisible hands are everywhere
clutching, grabbing, pulling??
10. Life Might affect become a tool in relation to conceiving of “life” or the “philosophy of life”?
Are we participating in a new vitalism, a new humanism, a new universalism? Is it necessary to
think about what’s in common (life, the commons) given the crisis of the reproduction of the
world? How can the central questions about affect get us to a place that might enable us to say
something transformative about singular and collective being?
11. The Untimely in Contemporary Black Aesthetics
This is a book project, I'm pretty sure, that tries to revisit and extend the 'afrofuturist' formulation
that has spurred so many innovative theoretical, artistic and musical projects in recent years, by
looking more broadly (or is it more narrowly?) at the question of the untimely in general. I.e. it
seems to me that much of what goes by the way of afro-futurism is, variously, retro-futurism,
utopianism, apocalypticism, hermeticism, melancholia, anachronism, and antinomianism. The
technological and posthumanist fetish that most readings of afro-futurism gravitate towards seem
therefore to be part but not all of what has to be said about the untimely, feeling or imaging out of
sync or out of time with the present. Here I will be drawing on José Muñoz’s work on utopia, of
course, and also some other contemporary critics of black aesthetics, including Paul Gilroy, Fred
Moten, and Kara Keeling, who emphasize the melancholic and fugitive frequencies of the
theoretical register. I'm also engaged with Steven Shaviro's work on post-cinematic affect: he and
I share an obsession with the untimely aesthetics of Janelle Monáe.
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(Note: Another project on Donny the Punk and the cultural politics of the Seventies also has a
connection to affect, I am sure, but I cannot get my way to what that connection might be at the
moment. And I've presented on Donny enough recently that it might be good to withdraw into the
archive for a bit.)
12. Political Feelings: Dialectics of Hope and Despair
The activities of various Public Feelings groups in Chicago, Austin, and New York emerged in the
context of 9/11 and the Bush presidency. To what extent, especially when viewed as ongoing
rather than event-based and not just catastrophic but ordinary, have more recent political
conditions – Obama’s election, Arab uprisings, financial collapse, Occupy movements -generated new feelings? Does the category of “political depression” remain relevant, especially if
it was meant to remain in conversation with hope, utopia, possibility? Are the ups and downs of
feelings and movements another form of “market feelings” and are there other ways to think
about the co-existence of hope and despair?
13. Archives and Public Memory
Where are we now with the production and critical discussion of cultures of public memory? How
is critical work on archives, ephemera, and other related categories enabling new reparative
practices? What is the transnational scope of this work and can it offer any alternatives to “human
rights” (or does it exhibit the same necro/trauma-philia queried above)? Is there a value to
remembering and archiving histories of activism and, if so, how can theories of affect facilitate
better versions of activist histories (and other forms of collective action)? In the “Occupy”
moment, what affective histories are a resource?
III. Further Questions
14. What is the affect in affective labor? Relatedly, how do we think of the multivalence of the
concept “object” in relation to immaterial/affective labor? What can object relations
psychoanalysis tell us about the material object/thing? How has the materialist account been
modified by accounts of life in contemporary capitalism that take on the sensorium, and how does
analysis through affect articulate with psychoanalysis? What is the relation between necessary
labor time models of value constitution and the fantasmatic investments in objects and object
worlds? Clearly we’re thinking the autonomia tradition here: but also how does a Latourian
problematic, which sees objects (including subjects) in proximity as making transformative
epistemologies and worlds potentially change the ways affect theory takes on materializing the
historical present? Would anyone like to speculate about Graham Harman...
15. Biopolitics Many of us work in proximity to biopolitics--especially sexuality and race--and
mobilize the orientations of affect theory. How can we think about being-in-common in relation
to certain particularities without making difference into an irreducible property, or an affective
fact?
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16. Performativity What has happened to performativity? What should happen?
17. Feeling Numbers
I was horrified (and embarrassed that I did not know something so basic) to learn this summer
that birth and death registration for black South Africans started in 2003. Small wonder
HIV/AIDS death statistics were so contested in the moment of AIDS denialism. As I panic about
surveillance, privacy settings on facebook, Big Brother etc, it might be salutary to be reminded of
sovereignty’s indifference, that what Keith Breckinridge calls “documentary citizenship” is really a
privilege, and then yesterday someone reminded me of the etymology of privilege – literally
“private law.” I am teaching Appadurai’s “Fear of Small Numbers” this semester. I had forgotten
that its subtitle is “An Essay on the Geography of Anger.” In it Appadurai describes ethnic
violence as a kind of “folk vivisection.” What were/are the public affective dimensions of will-toknowledge projects: being counted, uncounted, discounted, lumped, split, moved?
18. Public Feelings and Human Rights
Does the contemporary practice – more than the idea – of human rights need to make ordinary
violences extraordinary? The numbers question returns here. The piling up of bodies needs to
become pornographic spectacle in order to engender the geographically stratified and necessary
sympathy/shame, witness/perpetrator, victim/testifier dialectics intelligible. Do human rights
institutions stand in something like a pharmakonic relation to “necropolitics,?” Is this kind of
hypertheatricality the only tonality left for political agency? Is the end point of this
spectacularizing inevitably “AIDS, Famine, X fatigue?”
19. Mood: Many of us work on mood in conjuncture with affect: involving a relation of
Heideggarian Stimmung to a psychoanalytic model of a haunted affected state, for example. The
gestural, the ephemeral, the occasional, the episodic: the transindividual or social, the
atmosphere or movement. Moods and modes challenge the melodrama of the emotional event
without being simply static or comic. What does thinking about scenic relations of liking, flirting,
cruising, playing, stuckness, or being-with, or moods involving the playful, the aleatory, the
neutral, or the fatalistic do to how we think about affect? How do analyses of gesture impact our
comprehension of the affective event? How is our capacity to be affected a capacity to be in a
mood related to plotting, to narrative, to having aims? (Is there a like plot the way there’s a love
plot? If a state doesn’t induce a plot what else could it induce?)
20. On negativity: how does the historical location of the subject in its encounter with its own
internal incoherence matter? What does it mean to encounter what’s unbearable in one’s own
negativity when that encounter confirms one’s own habitation and fantasmatic formation in the
ordinary, one’s own political location and movement in the social?
21. Abstraction: How do different scales come into play? What is the place of the experiential,
the material? What genres could be better mobilized alongside of the autobiographical, the
aesthetic, the performed, and how would they change the conversation? Is sound the privileged
mode of affect’s transmission, as Teresa Brennan suggests? Are illness and health? This would
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point to concepts like “atmosphere” and “uncanny” as central topics for research. Where are
other different senses in relation to the mediation of impacts?
22. Glee and the Uncovering of the "American Songbook"
This is a prospective essay? short book? op-ed? about what the show Glee teaches us about
precarity in contemporary American adolescence, particularly the "management of stigma"
(Goffman reference intended). I want to look at two things: 1) how the show 'universalizing'
stigma by suggesting that everyone has it, at least potentially, and 2) how the show then proposes
the cover song, often the most clichéd, inauthentic option, as the truest route the expression of
authentic feeling. What I am mulling over here, in a way I can't yet formulate as an argument, is
how the show simultaneously serves to goad the right -- with its Hollywood liberal tolerance of
teen pregnancy, homosexuality, transvestism, Lady Gaga -- and depoliticize a broad range of
social issues on the left, by converting them into grist for a competitive mill (use your stigma to
excel at regionals, nationals, etc.) Some of this latter will no doubt riff on Jack Halberstam's new
work on being a loser, which is a value the show repeatedly, and deceptively, extols.
23. Theoretical Self-Fetishizing or, Bad Habits So many of our anchors are really
shorthands. How do we avoid the shuffling of the cards, how do we keep the discourse from
sedimenting? What are the habits we already have that have become normative, under the radar,
what goes without saying: and are there ways anyone has thought of to interrupt x norm or y
knee-jerk presumption? What do we wish our work could reach that it doesn’t do but might?
Topics we don’t know how to write questions for: sanity; academic labor; the idea of a
life; depression and the medical; happiness studies; professionalization and politics; mastery and
non-mastery; pedagogy; writing...
How do we have the conversation where we really engage each other not only in the places where
our work is strong but also where it feels willful or unworked-through, where it is more organized
by a desire to sound a certain way or be a certain way? (Is the question about Glee a version of this
question?) Or whether we could look in to our own work and list the kinds of limits we think are
constitutive of it. How can we foster a genuinely engaged atmosphere of collective criticality that
doesn’t make this or anything look like a flattery-fest but that produces the respect of a critical
engagement for which each of us is a resource? (Is there a way to ask this question, really, at
MLA?)
24. The Queer and the Affective I am interested in the way that queer studies has morphed
into affect studies, temporality studies, geopolitics, and other things—this is the “After Sex”
moment where sexuality studies does not require sexual minorities or sex or subjects at all. Yet
queer studies names a field nonetheless. I wonder if affect studies as it ages might start to have a
similar trajectory: can work that has happened under the sign of affect continue to flourish even if
feeling itself becomes less of a specific focus? Has a field constellated around affect that might not
“need” affect per se? I am thinking about this a lot as I am working on a project that is
inconceivable without that body of recent work, but is actually about coldness, the lack of affect,
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etc. But also I think work on affect has opened up other questions about pedagogy, ethics, the
conditions of academic life, reading methods, etc.
25. What is the Affect in Affective Labor? This is a supplement to question 8. What is the
function of mood/Stimmung in relation to affective labor? Do particular kinds of affective labor
require as their precondition being in a certain shared mood? Might mood function as something
of a means of production in this sense?
26. The Neuroscientific and the Affective I am persistently fascinated by affect theories
from neuroscience and psychiatry, such as the recent work on mirror neurons. Even though that
work is engaged with phenomenological traditions, for example, I still find it very difficult to
figure out how to make use of it in my own writing. Part of the problem, I suppose, is the very
different nature of the epistemological claims in scientific work. But still, it seems like this kind
of cross-disciplinary work should be easier. Has anyone else had this experience, or better yet,
had luck in making use of work on affect from the ‘sciences’?
27. Queer Feelings How would we describe and account for the specific contributions of queer
theory to affect theory? Many recent topics of discussion have a strong affective dimension –
reparative reading (in which affective responses complicate critical ones), the anti-social thesis (a
debate which is partly about the efficacy of negative affects and the relation between negative and
positive affects), queer temporalities (which are about affective relations to history), and critiques
of homonormativity and neoliberalism (in which notions of happiness, intimacy, and kinship are
contested). What is important about these intersections of queer theory and affect theory and to
what extent do they get picked up on or circulated outside of queer studies?
28. Writing Feelings To what extent has Public Feelings been a project about writing? What
new forms of descriptive and critical prose and what methods of inquiry are necessary in order to
describe ordinary feelings, sensory life, and the way things are? In Austin, for example, we have
done a number of writing workshops and salons over the past year, and a number of us have now
produced books and collections that have emerged from our collective discussions. What new
forms of creative practice and intellectual collectivity have we sought to produce? What further
desires might we have? How does this work also entail better histories of creative practice and of
the intersection of art, politics, and social intimacies?
29. Archives and Public Memory Where are we now with the production and critical
discussion of cultures of public memory? How is critical work on archives, ephemera, and other
related categories enabling new reparative practices? What is the transnational scope of this work
and can it offer any alternatives to “human rights” (or does it exhibit the same necro/traumaphilia queried above)? Is there a value to remembering and archiving histories of activism and, if
so, how can theories of affect facilitate better versions of activist histories (and other forms of
collective action)? In the “Occupy” moment, what affective histories are a resource?