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Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsc20 DOING THINGS: EMOTION, AFFECT, AND MATERIALITY Jo Labanyi Version of record first published: 18 Feb 2011. To cite this article: Jo Labanyi (2010): DOING THINGS: EMOTION, AFFECT, AND MATERIALITY, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 11:3-4, 223-233 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2010.538244 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Jo Labanyi DOING THINGS: EMOTION, AFFECT, AND MATERIALITY This paper considers some implications of the recent affective turn in cultural studies, focusing on the ways in which it may help us explore the entanglement of the human with the material. This latter aspect has synergies with Georgina Dopico- Blacks exploration in this issue of the limits of the human. The overall drift of my paper, as should become clear at the end, is to try to find ways of thinking beyond, or outside of, representation. My discussion draws on the work of scholars in the humanities and the social sciences (anthropology, communications); if the social sciences underwent a cultural turn in the 1970s, the humanities can profit today from culturally-oriented research in the social sciences. The paper is entirely exploratory. It is intended as a stimulus to new forms of research which, to my knowledge, have not been tried in Spanish studies*at least, not with explicit reflection on the issues involved. My title Doing Things is intended in two senses: that of 1c. things and that of doing |.. The first sense*1c. things*raises the question of what it might mean to think of emotions as .o...., rather than as states that exist inside the self and are often regarded as properties of the self. Thus, following Sara Ahmeds 1|. co!o.o! tc!... c ic.c, I want to consider not what emotions o.. but what they 1c (4). Here I am influenced by anthropology as a discipline which studies the symbolic systems constituted by social practices. Subjectivity*a term used regularly by literary and cultural critics*is not a word used by anthropologists, since they are concerned with the behavior of groups, and since the methodology of participant observation allows access to what individuals are feeling only insofar as it is externalized through social practice. 1 I do not propose that we abandon the study of subjectivity, but would like to argue for a concept of subjectivity that is based on relationality with others and with things. That means paying attention to feelings as well as ideas, and viewing feelings, not as properties of the self, but as produced through the interaction between self and world. And it means seeing that interaction, not as the coming together of two separate entities, but as a process of entanglement in which boundaries do not hold. It also means taking into account not only conscious feelings, but also what is felt at the level of the body, questioning the body/mind divide. The other sense of my title*Doing |.*is concerned with how we might, as cultural scholars, study materiality, with reference not just to bodily processes, but also to the material world outside. The aim would be to get beyond thinking about our relationship to things in terms of a subject/object divide, which puts agency on one side of the divide (our side) and supposes that things exist solely as objects to be mastered. In this respect, I am again influenced by anthropology, in which material culture has become an important field; it is a topic which has also been taken on board by historians. A question here is whether it is only possible to study things in terms of what people do with them*much work in material culture is concerned Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Vol. 11, Nos. 34 SeptemberDecember 2010, pp. 223233 ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818 online 2010 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14636204.2010.538244 D o w n l o a d e d
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with this: for example, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurais 1|. :c..o! t.. c 1|. (1988) or the historian Lisa Jardines Pc.!1!, ccc1 + :. u.c., c |. r.o.o.. (1996), both of which consider how commodities circulate. I should like to consider what it might mean to study what things themselves do*what we might call doing things-that-do-things. I will devote most of this paper to an overview of recent theorizations of affect in English-language cultural theory, since this is the least familiar of my three terms, and since it stands as a midway point between, and thus in relationship to, the other two more readily graspable terms: emotion and materiality. I shall be brief in my discussion of emotion (I am keenly aware of how much more could be said), focusing on the ways in which it is distinct from affect. After discussing affect, I shall give a brief review of recent theorizations of materiality. Although affect is often used as if it were synonymous with emotion (and dictionary definitions support that interchangeability), in recent English-language cultural theory it has taken on a distinct meaning borrowed from cognitive science. This is a problem for scholars working in Spanish studies, since in Spanish afecto remains equivalent to sentimiento (emotion). Curiously, the Spanish emocion comes closer to what is meant by affect in its restricted English sense, since emocion designates excitement; that is, a strong response to a stimulus (as in Que emocion!). Emotions (in the English sense) are by definition conscious: if I feel afraid, I am aware of feeling afraid, and I have a word to give to that emotion: fear. (Of course, different languages classify emotions differently.) Emotions additionally involve judgment: hate, love, fear express moral attitudes (Ahmed 1956). As defined by Teresa Brennan in 1|. 1.o..c c +.. (2004), feeling is an umbrella term straddling emotion and physical sensation (5). Like emotion, feeling is conscious*one feels it*and also involves a degree of judgment since it does not just register sensory information but interprets it (5). By contrast, affect is the bodys response to stimuli at a precognitive and prelinguistic level. Nonetheless, Brennan insists that affect is not value free; she defines it as the physiological shift accompanying a judgment (5). In his path-breaking to.o/!. c. |. ..oo! Mc.., +.., :.o.c (2002), communications scholar Brian Massumi defines affect as intensity*an arousal that can be measured physiologically but which happens so fast that consciousness cannot register it. Once a conscious response kicks in (half a second later, according to neurological research), we are in the realm of sensation (awareness of the physical experience, for example, of fear) and, following shortly after, emotion (the reflective acknowledgment I am afraid). Emotion is thus, in practice, an amalgam of feeling and thought*though the element of judgment involved in sensation and even affect makes it difficult to call them entirely thought-free. It is hard to find a vocabulary to talk of the kind of judgments made by affect in that half second preceding conscious response: this is a kind of thinking done by the body and not the mind. As Brennan stresses (136, 141), by comparison with affect, conscious thought*traditionally privileged*is slow. Affect, sensation, and emotion thus occupy different points on a continuum going from body to mind, each having a different temporality. All of theminvolve judgment in some way; sensation and emotion are felt consciously; and emotion forms a further continuum with reason in that both are forms of conscious moral thinking. 2 As a neurological response, affect involves the brain but not consciousness. It has nothing to do with the 2 2 4 J OURNAL OF SPANI SH CULTURAL ST UDI E S D o w n l o a d e d
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Freudian unconscious, which consists of repressed emotions, since affect, not having reached consciousness, cannot be repressed; it is preconscious. Affect is, in a way, matter in motion since it moves the body*quite literally if it makes us start running away from the bear that has made us afraid, in that half-second before we become conscious of the physical sensation of fear, which in turn makes possible the reflection I am afraid (Ahmeds example, 78). As Michael Hardt notes in his introduction to Patricia Cloughs edited volume 1|. +.... 1o. (2007), affect has become a current object of study because it demonstrates the impossibility of thinking of body and mind as separate (ix). Clough and Massumi trace the genealogy of affect back through the work of Deleuze and Guattari to Bergson and Spinoza (Clough 203; Massumi 17). Affect also complicates the notion of agency: it is not a passive Pavlovian response to an external stimulus*as we have seen, it involves a kind of judgment enacted at the level of the body*but, being preconscious and prelinguistic, it cannot be directed by reasoned argument. Affect requires a view of the body, not as an organic closed system (as in Freud), but as something close to Deleuze and Guattaris concept of a machinic assemblage (Clough 112), radically open to the world*that is, existing in a self-world continuum in which the terms subject and object make no sense. In effect, the neurological study of affect shows the body to be an information system whose potential is greater than that of consciousness. Massumi calls this zone of potentiality the virtual, located in that half-second before response becomes conscious (30)*that is, before stimulus and response become perceived as real and consciousness closes down the bodys defenses. The belatedness of consciousness suggests a need to revise psychoanalytical interpretations of the belatedness of trauma. 3 Massumi (5) observes that affect is the real-material-but- incorporeal; it is to the body what energy is to matter. This real-material-but- incorporeal dimension of the body cannot be called a thing for, in Massumis neat formulation: A thing is when it isnt doing (6). Affect is doing all the time, though at different levels and rhythms of intensity. (The last part of this paper will challenge Massumis suggestion that things dont do; nevertheless, his definition of things is correct inasmuch as they are inanimate matter.) Massumi notes that affect does not have a straightforward relation to content, nor to emotion. He describes a neurological experiment with children, wired up while watching three versions of a short film*one wordless, one with purely factual voice- over, one with a voice-over incorporating expressions of emotion*and interviewed after the screening (235). When asked which scenes they had liked the most, the children came up with the scenes they had found most scary, contradicting*as Massumi notes*Freuds supposition that pleasure is linked to the drive for stasis (235). The experiment showed that the emotional version was the one the children remembered best (and also found pleasurable). But the one they rated the most pleasurable of all (meaning the scariest) was the wordless version, which produced the greatest bodily response at the level of the skin: that is, at the level of interface with the outside world. Curiously, the factual version*least liked and least re- membered*was the one that produced the greatest bodily response in terms of quickened heartbeat and deep breathing. Massumi attributes this agitated bodily response to the impact of (conscious) narrative expectations set up by the factual voice-over. While accepting this divided physiological response, Massumi concludes that the response at skin level is the barometer of affective intensity, particularly since E MOT I ON, AF F E CT, AND MATE RI AL I TY 225 D o w n l o a d e d
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it is a response to a wordless version. The fact that the emotional version, while the most remembered, was the one that produced the least bodily arousal leads Massumi to claim a disconnect between emotion and affect, concluding that they follow different paths and pertain to different orders (27). Massumi notes the tendency in contemporary cultural theory to see the body as always already mediated; that is, as a discursive body (2) constituted through technologies of knowledge production. Affect, being outside of discourse, presents a challenge to Foucauldian theories of biopolitics. (I will later ask whether affect really is as non-discursive as Massumi gives to understand.) As Massumi observes, late capitalist culture may have seen a loss of belief but it is characterized by a surfeit of affect. Thus, he pleads: Much could be gained by integrating the dimension of intensity into cultural theory (27). Massumi warns that the incorporation of affect into cultural theory would mean accepting the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox*something to be welcomed since structure is that explanatory heaven ( . . . ) where nothing ever happens (27). But, as he notes: The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect (27). Massumis own vocabulary comes primarily from a mix of Deleuze, cognitive science, and communications theory. He does, however, hold out some hope, observing that, while one cannot observe a force, one can observe its effects: Newton did not see gravity. He felt its effect: a pain in the head (160). Noting that to work on affect is to work on relationality (234), Massumi suggests: The difference[s] between minds, bodies, and objects are perhaps not as essential as philosophers stuck on the subjective-objective divide make them out to be (201). In his final chapter, he attempts an analysis of the mystique of Frank Sinatra as popular singer, in terms of his ability to turn his body movements into a carnal melody that repeated at a sensible level the linguistic content of his lyrics (249). This is an analysis of expressive culture as embodiment, communicable in pre-cognitive terms through what Massumi calls lifestyle contagion (250). Teresa Brennans 1|. 1.o..c c +.. (2004) is concerned specifically with the ways in which affect breaks down the subject/object divide, making possible an ethics of relationality. Affect means to be affected by and to affect; one persons affect affects others. Brennan seizes on the Spanish expression of sympathy Lo siento as an example of this ability to feel what others are feeling, arguing that neurological research into affect shows that we are wired up to feel with others if we can stop thinking of the self as a bounded subject (123). This also means ceasing to privilege vision over the other senses, since vision is what constructs the person who sees as subject and the person seen as object (179, 150). As Brennan puts it, the theorization of affect shows that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies (6). Indeed, reversing the traditional notion that thought is objective because it is impersonal, she argues that: Thoughts, indeed, appear more individual or personal than affects (7). Brennans book contains some interesting discussion of how thinking about emotion has changed over the centuries, noting that the pre-Enlightenment concept of the passions had much in common with the contemporary theorization of affect, inasmuch as it supposed that the passions entered the body from outside: the passions were bodily phenomena that one suffered and it was taken for granted that they were transmitted (16). It was only with the Enlightenment theorization of 2 2 6 J OURNAL OF SPANI SH CULTURAL ST UDI E S D o w n l o a d e d
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the autonomous individual, reinforced by the privileging of vision over the other senses, that the term passions gave way to sentiments or emotions, viewed as constituent elements of an authentic, bounded self. The notion of transmission would be revived in the late nineteenth century but in the pathological form of the primitive contagion that drives crowd behavior (514). Nevertheless, as Brennan observes, for the Enlightenment, sensibility went hand in hand with reason as a civilizing force. David Hume picked up on Adam Smiths 1|. 1|.c., c Mc.o! :... (1759) to argue that all ethics are based on passion or emotion, since sentiment, as a reflective stance on what one feels, involves moral judgment (1045). Passion, emotion, and sentiment are here used interchangeably, as Brennan notes (105). Starting with Romanticism and increasing in the course of the nineteenth century, a major shift occurs as reason and sentiment come to be seen as in conflict; this is not the same as the premodern notion of the conflict between reason and passion since, in the earlier period, passion was not our true nature (Brennan 105) but came from without. The collaborative research project Emotional Cultures in Spain from the Enlightenment to the present which I co-direct with Elena Delgado (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Pura Fernandez (CSIC, Madrid), bringing together an interdisciplinary team of scholars from the US and Spain, has shown how the increasing dissociation of reason and emotion in the course of the nineteenth century affected a range of cultural fields. Having explored the continuum that runs from emotion to materiality, with affect occupying the complex middle ground of the real-material-but-incorporeal, I will move now to recent theorizations of materiality*what the critic of American literature Bill Brown has called thing theory (1|. 122). There is sometimes a fine line between the study of objects in order to disclose the social practices that determine their disposition in time and space, and the study of objects in order to show how they produce the subjectivities of the humans with which they intersect. Daniel Millers ethnographic study of the objects in the homes of the diverse inhabitants of a London street, 1|. ccc. c 1|. (2008), claims both to reveal how people express themselves through their possessions and the role of objects in our relationships, both to each other and to ourselves (6). 4 This second claim echoes the anthropologist Marilyn Stratherns well-known proposition, in her study of a Melanesian gift economy, that the gift is what constitutes the partners in the exchange as social persons in the first place (cited in Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 19). In his edited volume Mo...o!.,, Daniel Miller (editor of the journal Mo...o! co!o..) notes that in most of the religions that dominate recorded history ( . . . ) [w]isdom has been accredited to those who claim that materiality represents the merely apparent, behind which lies that which is real (1). Such a supposition, shared by many world religions and not just the legacy of a Western Platonic tradition, forms the basis of a theory of representation: the world is not simply what it is but a cipher of a higher reality. Examinations of material culture that seek to prise out the human relations behind things could be said to partake of the same representational paradigm, whereby things always represent something else (this, for example, underlies much analysis of ...... in film studies, especially in melodrama where ...... is theorized as a projection of repressed emotion). Marxs commodity fetishism inverts this paradigm, arguing that the abstract value of commodities is E MOT I ON, AF F E CT, AND MATE RI AL I TY 227 D o w n l o a d e d
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worshipped as a way of not seeing the all-too-material labor relations that produce all- too-material artefacts. Much has been written on fetishismin relation to material culture; I will limit myself here to Peter Stallybrasss brilliant re-reading of Marx in his essay Marxs Coat. Drawing on the earlier work of the anthropologist William Pietz, Stallybrass notes that the term fetish derives from the word feitico used by sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Portuguese traders in West Africa to refer to objects which the indigenous peoples refused to sell, thereby rejecting the capitalist market economy based on abstract monetary value. Pietz notes how the concept of the fetish was taken up by Enlightenment thinkers because it offered a non-deist explanation of the origins of religion. In these eighteenth-century readings fetishism became interpreted, not as the attachment of value to things for what they are rather than for their monetary value, but as a superstitious belief that inanimate things could have animate properties. For Enlightenment thinkers, fetishism*the worship of things*was the definitive mistake of the pre-enlightened mind (Pietz 139): that is, a category confusion which refuses the binary opposition person/thing (or subject/object). Pietz notes how subsequent theorizations of the fetish progressively dematerialized it, making a discourse about things into a discourse about something else, the salient examples being late nineteenth- century sexological interpretations of fetishism, and Baudrillards late twentieth- century semiological reading which makes fetishism an idolatry of signs (1234). Stallybrass suggests that Marxs theory of commodity fetishism was one of his least understood jokes (184), ridicul[ing] a society that thought it had surpassed the mere worship of objects supposedly characteristic of primitive religions (186). Stallybrass, like Pietz, sees Marxs theory of fetishism as an attempt to return to the original sense of fetishism as the attribution of value to things on account of their materiality: what, in a famous quote, Marx called the religion of sensuous desire (Pietz 133). In a joke of his own, Stallybrass argues that Marx wrote co.o! (the text in which he elaborated his theory of commodity fetishism) so as to give the coat back to its owner (187); that is, in order to redeem his overcoat, cherished for its material qualities, from its repeated trips to the pawnbroker where it became converted into abstract exchange value. In contrasting a negative capitalist fetishization of monetary value with a positive pre- capitalist worship of things for their materiality, Marx*in Stallybrasss reading* demolished the subject/object distinction on which modernity depends. Daniel Miller echoes Marxs materialist analysis when he claims that it is philosophically incorrect to talk of subjects and objects since our humanity is not prior to what it creates (Mo...o!., 10). Indeed he argues, following Latour, that there is a sense in which one can talk of the agency of things, as when a computer crashes or a landmine kills: Where material forms have consequences for people that are autonomous from human agency, they may be said to possess the agency that causes these effects (Mo...o!., 11). Miller also echoes Marxs materialist reading of things* valued for their material qualities and not as a cipher of something else*when he argues against representational readings of material culture that assume that objects represent people: what he calls the tyranny of the subject (Mo...o!., 29). Decrying the tendency to assume that a material form makes manifest some underlying presence which accounts for that which is apparent, he proclaims, the clothes have no emperor (Mo...o!., 29). For, he continues, if your very understanding of the nature of representation is such that it privileges the immaterial, it is that much harder to give 2 2 8 J OURNAL OF SPANI SH CULTURAL ST UDI E S D o w n l o a d e d
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respect to the nature of human action and history as merely material culture (Mo...o!., 31). This last phrase resonates with the philosopher Simon Critchleys eloquent homage to the poet Wallace Stevens, entitled 1|. M...!, +.. The principal theorist of non-representational theory is the cultural geographer Nigel Thrift, whose book :cr....o.co! 1|.c., :o..tc!...+.. (2008) explores ways of analyzing everyday life in terms of what he calls the geography of what happens (2). This means exploring the materiality of experience: something that is continuously changing since the human sensorium is constantly being re- invented and what is experienced as experience is itself variable (2). Thrifts aim is to capture life in movement, by studying persons as forces rather than subjects* forces being relational rather than existing in the individual. This is a performative concept of culture which includes the precognitive, since consciousness seems to be a very poor thing indeed (6). Thrift calls for modes of perception that are anti- biographical: Biography did to the dead what Freud feared that psychoanalysis might do to the living. Instead I want to substitute a o...o! .|.o. in which the world is made up of all sorts of things brought in to [..] relation with each other by many and various spaces through a continuous and largely involuntary process of encounter, and the violent training that such encounter forces (78). This means considering the human body as not separate from the thing world (10). Thrift acknowledges the importance of not idealizing this world of swirling affect, since embodiment can involve negative experiences, in which not everything is intensity* indeed, not all intensity is nice. In keeping with his attempt to get beyond representational thinking, Thrift proposes to question the divide between theory and practice by using practice to theorize (22). Consequently, Thrift defines affect as a kind of non-reflective thought: thought in action (175). He is similarly concerned with the doing of emotions, noting that, although conscious, they are largely non- representational since they tend to be ways of expressing something going on that talk cannot grasp (176). Since emotions come from encounters with the world, rather than from within, to be emotional is, literally, to be beside oneself (180). Thrifts example of a practice that generates theory is the video-art of Bill Viola (193 7), not coincidentally since the video image moves at a speed which allow only a fraction of what impacts on the brain to be experienced consciously (this is true even of the 24 frames per second of pre-digital 35 mm film). Digital media, as Mike Featherstone notes in a 2010 special issue of ic1, :c..., on +.., allow one to slow down the image to observe what, at the normal speed, is not perceived but felt at a pre-cognitive level (199). Featherstone suggestively takes as his example of affective intensity the charisma communicated by movie stars: It is the sense of energy, of a force, of a change of register*an ..., It is an unstructured non-conscious experience transmitted between bodies, which has the capacity to create affective resonances below the threshold of articulated meaning (1989). As cultural scholars, then, how might we benefit from this new interest in the non-representational*a new interest in emotions, affects, and things, and what they do? Its relevance for the analysis of cultural practices is clear*and more work is needed in Spanish cultural studies on practices rather than texts. It is less immediately obvious how this new interest in the non-representational might help us talk about cultural texts. But it might be strategically useful to look at cultural texts not through E MOT I ON, AF F E CT, AND MATE RI AL I TY 229 D o w n l o a d e d
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the lens of representation (representation of what?) but as examples of expressive culture*the term used in performance studies as well as anthropology. To analyze the experience of watching a film in terms of affect*levels of intensity*is not so difficult. Since the mid-1990s, thanks to the work of Steven Shaviro (1|. c..o.. ic1,), Laura Marks (1|. :|. c |. t.!), and Giuliana Bruno (+!o c ic.c), a key concept in cinema studies has been the haptic*Deleuzes termfor the tactility of vision. Contrary to the earlier critical paradigm of gaze theory, which saw the cinematic gaze as an objectifying tool of control, theories of the haptic suppose that viewers abandon themselves corporeally to the flowof images on screen. The concept of the haptic can also be productive for analyzing still images*after all, Deleuze first theorized the termin his reflections on the paintings of Francis Bacon. But what would it mean to analyze print culture in terms of affect? I see no reason why this should not be possible*particularly in the case of literary texts, since literary language depends on surprise effects. To analyze a literary text in terms of affect would mean exploring the ways in which it offers forms of embodied knowledge. This kind of reading ought to produce a renewed interest in poetry, whose rhythms impact on us with particular intensity; in recent decades, there has been a return to the notion of the poet as performer and not simply as author. Study of affect*intensity*would certainly require drama to be studied as performance and not as text. It would also allow critical revaluation of sensationalist popular literature like the nineteenth-century c!!. and the early twentieth-century mass-produced c.!o .c.o But even classic realist novels affect us not only cognitively but also as a patterning of varying levels of intensity. I am not, of course, suggesting that we abandon thinking about the meaning of texts: structuralism tried to prescribe that when I was a student in the 1960s, fortunately with short-lived effects. If structuralism made us think about what texts are rather than what texts mean, the affective turn can make us attentive to what texts do*and what texts do is communicate all manner of things. So affect takes us back to meaning, but to forms of meaning that are not restricted to the cognitive (the cognitive has been the focus of most reader response theory, with the notable exception of the later Barthes of 1|. t!.oo.. c |. 1. and co..o to..1o). What would require some thought is how this kind of reading of cultural texts in terms of intensities might contribute to cultural analysis in the sense of exploration of how texts intersect with broader cultural processes in a particular historical moment and place. First one has to deal with the problem that affect, being precognitive, is* according to Massumi*outside of discourse. Or is it? That depends how one conceives of the body. Body memory, for example, is a well established concept in the social sciences, which supposes that bodies learn certain habits through repetition; this is a process that can take place only within specific cultural constraints (Connerton). It is also important to remember that all the points on the bodymind continuum* affect/sensation/emotion/reasoned argument*are entangled with each other, even though, as responses to external stimuli, they occur in a temporal sequence, with affect kicking in first and reasoned argument last. Massumis insistence that affect and emotion obey different orders warns us not to establish a mechanical causal sequence between affect and the sensations and emotions that follow; nevertheless, if affect can be studied through its effects, those effects impact on sensation and emotion, which in turn can impact on reasoned argument. Perhaps we are in the presence of the marks of affect when we encounter particular intensities at the level of sensation or emotion, 2 3 0 J OURNAL OF SPANI SH CULTURAL ST UDI E S D o w n l o a d e d
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or indeed at the level of reasoned argument*what we refer to as passionate conviction, for reason and emotion cannot be kept separate, as Martha Nussbaum argues. 5 One thinks here of Carl Schmitts concept of political intensity, explored suggestively in this issue by Alberto Moreiras. Since affect, sensation, emotion, and reason are all responses to the outside world, and*as previously argued*all involve a measure of judgment, it is logical to assume that they are, at least in part, culturally specific. Beyond the study of intensities, it is clear how attention to textures of emotion can tell us much about the cultural specificity of a historical period*this is, after all, what Raymond Williams (one of the founders of British cultural studies, whose work has been hugely influential in Latin America) meant when he coined the phrase structure of feeling in 1961. 6 Ann Laura Stoler has demonstrated, with reference to the former Dutch East Indies, how colonial archives, despite appearing at first sight to be mere repositories of information, can tell us a huge amount about the emotional life of both colonizers and colonized, provided one knows how to read in between the lines. Justus Nielands recent Feeling Modern, which takes Massumis work on affect into account, argues that modernist culture exalts feelings as public products of modernity rather than as properties of the self. Nielands book does not mention the Spanish avant-garde, which could profitably be explored in the same vein. The Spanish avant-garde is also fertile ground for analysis of the presence and function of things in cultural texts. It is a commonplace to talk of the importance of Spanish artifacts in the cubist collages of Picasso and Gris; why is there, to my knowledge, no study of things in Spanish avant-garde literary texts? Ramon Gomez de la Sernas El Rastro, for example, questions the subject/object divide by dehumanizing persons and animating things, as does Francisco Ayalas Cazador en el alba, and indeed Garc a Lorcas Poeta en Nueva York*this is something much more fundamental and exciting than the mere recognition of urban alienation. Rachel Moores insights into Eisensteins and Epsteins fascination with modern film technologys potential for the recreation of savage thought (primitive animism) by giving life to things has not, to my knowledge, been taken up by scholars of early Spanish cinema, despite the fact that Bunuel trained with Epstein. Although there is in Spanish studies an established tradition of scholarship on the history of the book as material object (albeit based on empirical data rather than cultural analysis), there is no equivalent to Bill Browns exploration, in his book A Sense of Things, of the cultural meanings of things in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. Above all, attention to the cultural role of emotions and things could do a great deal to put Spains woefully understudied eighteenth century back on the map, since this is a key period for the retooling of sentiment and redefinition of the self in terms of personal property, including ones emotions as personal property. Studies of how the various Spanish terms for emotions have altered over time would also make a hugely valuable contribution to cultural understanding. Earlier in this paper I drew a distinction between cultural practices and cultural texts, as two different objects of analysis in cultural studies. But the above suggestions for future work involve treating cultural texts as cultural practices. To treat cultural practices as cultural texts, as became fashionable with the structuralist proposal that all forms of culture (and even the unconscious) were structured like a language, is no longer felt to be intellectually acceptable. But to treat cultural texts as forms of cultural practice E MOT I ON, AF F E CT, AND MATE RI AL I TY 231 D o w n l o a d e d
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would, I suggest, be productive. Above all, it would show that cultural texts are things that do things: that is, things that have the capacity to affect us. Notes 1 In practice, anthropological interviews*especially when they elicit life story narratives*can be used as a basis for the study of subjectivity, but that is not the focus usually adopted. 2 Martha Nussbaum (Loves Knowledge; Upheavals of Thought) has insisted on the concept of emotional intelligence. See also Carol Gilligans conclusions, based on psychological research, that girls tend to make moral judgments based on relationality (ethics of care) while boys tend to make moral judgments based on the abstract principle of the highest good of the individual (ethics of rights). Gilligans work has prompted a strand of feminist legal theory advocating the rethinking of legal principles in terms of an ethics of care. 3 For an attempt to think through trauma in terms of affect, see Clough (134) and Callard and Papoulias (2536). 4 See also Millers recently published Stuff. 5 See also Goodwin, Jasper, and Pollettas edited volume Passionate Politics. 6 Williams On Structure of Feeling, originally published in The Long Revolution, is reprinted as Chapter 1 of Jennifer Harding and E. Deidre Pribrams excellent anthology Emotions: A Cultural Reader. The volume brings together key texts from a wide range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Works cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Ayala, Francisco. Cazador en el alba. Seville: Renacimiento, 2006. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. (French original 1973). ***. Camera Lucida: Reections on Photography. 2nd ed. Hill and Wang, 1982. (French original 1980). Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2003. ***, ed. Things. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2002. Callard, Felicity and Constantina Papoulias. Affect and Embodiment. Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates. Ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. 24662. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 2 3 2 J OURNAL OF SPANI SH CULTURAL ST UDI E S D o w n l o a d e d
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Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. (French original 1981). Featherstone, Mike. Body, Image, and Affect in Consumer Culture. Affect. Ed. Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn. Special issue of Body & Society 16.1 (2010): 193221. Garc a Lorca, Federico. Poeta en Nueva York. Ed. Mar a Clementa Millan. Madrid: Catedra, 1989. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Womens Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Gomez de la Serna, Ramon. El Rastro. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1998. Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Harding, Jennifer and E. Deidre Pribram, eds. Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, eds. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. New York: Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday, 1996. Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. ***. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Miller, Daniel, ed, Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. ***. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. ***. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Moore, Rachel O. Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Nieland, Justus. Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Nussbaum, Martha C. Loves Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. ***. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pietz, William.Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx. Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 11951. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis, MN: London, 1993. Stallybrass, Peter. Marxs Coat. Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. Ed. Patricia Spyers. New York: Routledge, 1998. 183207. Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Discourse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representational Theory: Space/Politics/Affect. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. E MOT I ON, AF F E CT, AND MATE RI AL I TY 233 D o w n l o a d e d
(Human Rights Interventions) Tatsuya Yamamoto, Tomoaki Ueda - Law and Democracy in Contemporary India_ Constitution, Contact Zone, and Performing Rights-Springer International Publishing,Palgrave Macm.pdf