Much critical theory and art today can be said to be concerned with affect, as demonstrated by the essays in The Affective Turn, a book edited by Patricia Clough, one of this week’s guests. Brian Massumi states that “the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect” in Parables for the Virtual, which was introduced to me by one of our guests this week, Jordan Crandall. Much of Jordan’s work considers and explores affect. Perhaps a wonderful example of the kind of detail that evokes affect in Crandall’s work, like the quality of light or the positioning of a gaze, can be seen in his film “hotel”, which can be found here:
https://vimeo.com/7091631 Another guest this week, Lauren Berlant, describes the affective landscape of precarity in her recent book, Cruel Optimism. She cites Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadapoulos to describe the affects of vulnerability, hyperactivity, post-sexuality, fluid intimacies, restlessness and unsettledness as comprising a large part of contemporary experience under neoliberal capitalism, “in order to engage a broader range of physical and aesthetic genres that mediate pressures of the present moment on the subject’s sensorium”. In my own work on Ke$ha Feminism and femme disturbance, forthcoming in the June 2012 issue of Journal of Popular Music Studies, I claim that femme is an affect, different than an emotion, something that is in process, performative and challenges rigid definitions. Affect also has it’s critics, like Ruth Ley who says “if you don’t understand try to feel. According to Massumi it works”. [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/659353?uid=3739560&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21100855946111] This week, we will consider what role affect plays in queer theory and art today? How can it be used, if it exists outside of content as Massumi claims? How has it been deployed by contemporary artists? And how can we understand affect in relation to emerging forms of resistance to neoliberalism? This week's guests are: Lauren Berlant (US) is George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her national sentimentality trilogy — The Anatomy of National Fantasy (University of Chicago Press, 1991, Chicago), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Duke University Press, 1997, Durham), and The Female Complaint (Duke University Press, 2008, Durham) — has now morphed into a quartet, with Cruel Optimism (2011) addressing precarious publics and the aesthetics of affective adjustment in the contemporary U.S. and Europe. A co-editor of Critical Inquiry, she is also editor of Intimacy (University of Chicago Press, 2000, Chicago); Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New York University Press, 2001, New York); Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge, 2004, New York); and On the Case (Critical Inquiry, 2007). She blogs at Supervalent Thought and is also a founding member of the art/activist group Feel Tank Chicago. Jordan Crandall (US) (http://jordancrandall.com) is a media artist, theorist, and performer. He is a Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego. He is the 2011 winner of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award for outstanding theory and research-based digital arts practice, given by the Transmediale in Berlin in collaboration with the Vilém Flusser Archive of the University of Arts, Berlin. He is a collaborator at Eyebeam art and technology center in New York and the founding editor of the journal VERSION (http://version.org). His current project UNMANNED is a work of “philosophical theater”: a blend of performance art, political allegory, philosophical speculation, and intimate reverie that explores the ontologies of distributed systems and the changing nature of masculinity in the face of automated technologies of war. Patricia Clough (US) is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the co- editor with Craig Willse of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death and editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, both published by Duke University Press. Her books include Autoaffection (2000), Feminist Thought (1995) and The End(s) of Ethnography (1992, revised 1998). -- micha cárdenas PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California Provost Fellow, University of Southern California New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, http://amzn.to/x8iJcY blog: http://transreal.org _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
