The “affective turn” is by now long established, part of a wider surge of interest in emotion playing out in a range of disciplines. In literary studies, the conversation about how affect theory might help us to interpret literature is still emerging. The goal of the present discussion is to provide a critical overview of work by scholars who draw on the insights of recent theory to read literary texts written in English. At the same time that the discussion offers (...) an appraisal of the current state of scholarship, it also seeks to identify emerging new directions in research. (shrink)

This essay offers a critique of the philosophical ‘turn to affect’, a formation represented here by the work of Brian Massumi and Mark Hansen. In such discourses, affect is celebrated as an entity that is inimical to conceptualisation, subjective intention and linguistic transcription. However, insofar as it boasts such qualities, affect cannot, I argue, be celebrated or made the object of a critical ‘turn’. In drawing on Deleuze's work, contemporary scholarly discourses on affect dispense with Deleuze's most profound proposition: of (...) an order of philosophy, perception, reflection and thought that originates outside, or is no longer dependent upon, a human perspective. (shrink)

This article examines the reparative turn in current queer feminist scholarship by tracking its twin interest in the study of affect and time. By foregrounding Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential critique of what she called paranoid reading, I am interested in the ways that various critics – Ann Cvetkovich, Heather Love, and Elizabeth Freeman in particular – take up the call for reparative reading by using the temporal frameworks of the everyday, backward feeling, and queer time to reparative ends. In the (...) process, I consider the reparative work being done to reclaim Sedgwick as a major thinker for queer feminist concerns, and speculate on the attraction, in a time of declining economic and cultural support for the interpretative humanities, of a critical practice that seeks to love and nurture its objects of study. (shrink)

Sensory and tracking technologies are being introduced into workplaces in ways Taylor and the Gilbreths could only have imagined. New work design experiments merge wellness with productivity to measure and modulate the affective and emotional labour of resilience that is necessary to survive the turbulence of the widespread incorporation of agile management systems, in which workers are expected to take symbolic direction from machines. The Quantified Workplace project was carried out by one company that fitted sensory algorithmic devices to workers’ (...) computers and bodies, which, this article argues, identify workers’ so-called agility and reveal management practices that track affective and emotional labour, categorized in the project as stress, subjective productivity and wellbeing. Capital’s accelerated attempts to capture more areas of work and workers’ capacities facilitate the conversion of labour power into a source of value but also results in alienation and abstraction. Participants’ resistance to participation in the Quantified Workplace reveals tensions in the labour process when affect is measured in processes of corporate change. (shrink)

Digital and analog: What do these terms mean today? The use and meaning of such terms change through time. The analog, in particular, seems to go through various phases of popularity and disuse, its appeal pegged most frequently to nostalgic longings for nontechnical or romantic modes of art and culture. The definition of the digital vacillates as well, its precise definition often eclipsed by a kind of fever-pitched industrial bonanza around the latest technologies and the latest commercial ventures. One common (...) response to the question of the digital is to make reference to things like Twitter, Playstation, or computers in general. Here one might be correct, but only coincidentally, for the basic order of digitality (the digitality of digitality) has not yet been demonstrated through mere denotation. And the second question—the question of the analog—is harder still, with responses often also consisting of mere denotations of things: sound waves, the phonograph needle, magnetic tape, a sundial. At least denotation itself is analogical. This article will aim to define the analog explicitly and argue, perhaps counterintuitively, that the golden age of analog thinking was not a few decades past, prior to the wide-spread adoption of the computer. In fact, the fields of structuralism and poststructuralism that emerged in the middle to late twentieth century, concurrent with the deployment of the digital computer, were characteristically digital, what with their focus on the symbolic order and logical economies. If anything, the golden age of analog is happening today, all around us, as evidenced by the proliferation of characteristically analog concerns: sensation, materiality, experience, affect, ethics, and aesthetics. (shrink)

:How can a properly relational and anti-substantialist conception of masculinity be understood as belonging to the territorialising assemblage of the garage? Focusing on the relation between the suburban garage and masculinity, this article develops the concept of “opportunity” as part of a gendered passage of action. Two examples of the garage-assemblage are examined through their popular cultural myths. The first involves the example of disaffected working-class male youth working on cars as represented in the Australian film Metal Skin. The second (...) belongs to the “two-guys-in-a-garage start-up” allegory of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture in the popular narrative accounts of the Apple computer. These examples are used to explore how different cultural contexts can have a shared but differentially attuned sense of a techno-aesthetic appreciation of the relation between technology and masculine action. (shrink)

:Recent attempts to engage and develop modes of ethological practice that avoid deterministic and mechanistic accounts of animal action have often relied on affect as a way of articulating how animal bodies affect and are in turn affected by the animate and inanimate bodies around them. In this context affect has often functioned as an instigating site of change that opens up the experience of a particular animal to new possibilities for action and relation. This paper seeks to bring the (...) significant role that affect has played in opening up new directions in ethological theory and practice in contact with a discussion of two currents in affect theory – one shaped by the genealogy of philosophical thought that stretches from Spinoza, through Gilles Deleuze, to contemporary thinkers such as Brian Massumi, and the other emerging from the reception of the American psychologist and cybernetics thinker Silvan Tomkins, in the context of queer theory, through the work of Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank. The locus of intersection for these different modes of theoretical practice is the site-specific case study of monk parakeets who have drawn on and incorporated the ornamental elaborations of human architecture into their own complex architectural nest constructions at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. (shrink)

Brings the figure of the voice and the problem of mimesis in Heidegger and post-Heideggerian continental thought to bear on the dismissal of language by the affective and aesthetic turns of contemporary critical theory.

This article investigates how the turn to affect within the humanities and social sciences re-imagines the relationship between cultural theory and science. We focus on how the writings of two neuroscientists (Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux) and one developmental psychologist (Daniel Stern) are used in order to ground certain claims about affect within cultural theory. We examine the motifs at play in cultural theories of affect, the models of (neuro)biology with which they work, and some fascinating missteps characterizing the taking (...) up of scientific literature. While neuroscience frames the affective as part of a system of regulation that makes both self and social coherence possible, in cultural theory’s narratives, by contrast, affectivity becomes a placeholder for the inherent dynamism and mutability of matter. The article interrogates the consequences of cultural theory’s strange borrowings from neuroscience and developmental psychology in their institution of a model of subjectivity preoccupied with a lived present in excess of the hold of habit and embodied history. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Philosophy of religion has recently made a turn to lived religion, an approach which seeks to understand lived religion as it is experienced concretely by individual practitioners. However, this turn to lived religion has seen limited engagement with the notion of belonging. Belonging here refers to the felt sense of being part of a group – of insidership – along with the development of positive social ties and mutual affective concern. It is my contention in this paper that reflection (...) on this experience of belonging can improve our understanding of lived religion. In particular, I argue that human beings have an affective need to belong – a fundamental and affective need for belonging and positive social relationship which is felt in the body and rooted in human biology and evolutionary history. This paper makes the case for the affective need to belong, before examining its implications for understanding religion. It finds that the affectivity of belonging is capable of raising the affective salience of certain in-group beliefs, as well as creating affective hurdles to dissent, and in so doing can help to explain processes of religion conversion, sustained religious adherence, and religious disaffiliation. (shrink)

This article draws on feminism and post-structuralism to theorize a narrative framework for developing and critiquing therapeutic practices with women who have experienced child sexual abuse. I argue that both objectivism and relativism provide poor guides for conducting therapy and that it is only through situating our knowledges precisely that more liberatory therapy practices may be developed. This approach, termed ‘visible therapy’, is used to directly and explicitly challenge normative constructions of women, child sexual abuse and therapy. I argue that (...) it is necessary to explicate the embedded assumptions produced through practices of abuse, and which serve to construct children's experiences of that abuse, in order to ward against their reproduction within therapy relationships. I demonstrate that it is through situating and explicating the operations of power that the authenticity of experience and identity may be questioned and women's ongoing positioning as guilty victims may be challenged. Thus, I am concerned not with who women ‘really are’ but with how they come to know and be known through practices of both abuse and therapy. This, then, is about making the tactics of abuse and therapy visible. Problems are not located within individuals, but rather within the narratives which situate both past and current relationships but which, through reiteration, obscure their own social production. I conclude that it is only when categorical identity is no longer assumed that progressive therapy practices with women who have been sexually abused can be developed and maintained. (shrink)

Currently, the repetition of a critical way of speaking results in a stagnating tendency in educational debates. This had led to the endeavour of developing a ‘post-critical pedagogy’. This paper employs Rortyan and Latourian language in order to tackle the question of how such a post-critical pedagogy should deal with critique. It argues that if one takes critique as what Latour calls a debunking activity, then post-critical pedagogy should leave critique behind. If however critique means simply to say how something (...) should not be, then post-critical pedagogy should remain critical. In addition, however, there is a need for enriching the critical vocabulary with more affirmative language. For accomplishing this need, in contrast to recent suggestions to go back to ontology, the paper suggests that new propositions developed by literary theorists like Sedgwick and Felski are more promising. All these arguments are framed by Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics. (shrink)

Drawing on examples of mainstream sport and the philosophy of the Gay Games, this article uses sporting bodies to rethink the links between sexuality, pride and shame. The contrast between the two highlights the ways in which the Gay Games downplays the dynamics of shame and competition in favour of its project of pride. Against the domestication of the body in some theories of embodiment, it is argued that shame may provide a productive ground for revitalizing the study of the (...) body in terms of affect, politics and ethics. (shrink)