11/6: The Invisible Gland – Affect and Political Economy
October 30, 2007
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- Bargh/Cartrand: The Unbearable Automaticity of Being
- Berlant: Unfeeling Kerry
- Grusin: Affect, Mediality, Abu Ghraib (visuals on bB)
- Grusin: Affective Life of Media
- Grusin: Premediation
- Hardt: Affective Labor
- Jameson: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
- Jameson: Culture and Finance Capital
- Jameson: The Brick and the Balloon
- Massumi: Autonomy of Affect
- Massumi/Zournazi: Interview
- Sedgwick/Frank: Shame in the Cybernetic Fold
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1.
Jule | November 6, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Jule Wallis
Grusin’s article “Premediation” dissects the ways in which post 9/11 society has
attempted to deal with the fear of the unknown and the possible catastrophic future. Grusin defines the logic of predmediation: “premediation, on the other hand, insists that the future itself is also already mediated, and that with the right technologies the future can be remediated before it happens. This remediation is not only formal but reformative.” We now find ourselves existing within a world in which every attempt to mediate the future is explored and put into practice. Grusin notes that the role of premediation post 9/11 can best be seen within the media: “The media responses…suggests the way in which the role of the media—particularly the news media—has become increasingly to consist not of reporting what has already happened but of premediating what may happen next.” The connection between the media and premediation is highly intriguing and seems applicable to a reading of the popular show Law and Order: SVU.
It would not be a stretch to assert that SVU functions as a premediated rhetorical tool against rape. Intervening into the discourse of rape, the show can and has been read as a form of rape prevention. A majority of rape victims portrayed within the show are women and children. Often, women question their role in the violation “I should have never gone back to his place”, “Why did I get so drunk”, “I can’t remember, does that still mean I was rape” and so on. So, on a very basic level, the victim’s questions can be read as a warning; if you do this, this, and this, you will be raped. In the article “It Could Happen to You” the author argues that rape prevention rhetoric actually produces the rhetoric of unavoidable risk. This rhetoric of risk creates programs that focus upon prevention. In other words, similar to Grusin’s concept of premediation, anti-rape programs, pamphlets, and even theoretical discourse produces and relies upon preventative measures in which they attempt to ensure the future does not hold the promise of rape for women. Yet, if women are raped, it is often rhetorically explained away as the result of offending, non-preventative actions of the woman. Similar to rape prevention rhetoric, SVU could be read as perpetuating the myth that women are naturally rapeable subjects, and that women must follow precise and constricting rules if they hope to premediate a future of violation.
It seems valid to read SVU as just another form of rape prevention rhetoric, in which females are seen as a rapeable space. Yet, a seemingly susceptible and unsettling reading might refigure the role of premediation and victimhood within SVU. In other words, how can Grusin’s theory of premediation be read against the grain of rape in which it is defined as the “natural” experience of heterosexual women? How does SVU attempt to premediate and refigure personal and social concepts of the who, how, and when of rape? In many ways, SVU endeavors to fracture and question how femaleness, victimhood, and rape becomes regulated, normalized, and materialized. By performing rape and gender that runs against the grain of established ideas, SVU invokes Butler’s insistence that “Identifications [and gender] are never fully and finally made; they are incessantly reconstituted and, as such, are subject to the volatile logic of iterability” (105) and yet “It is this constitutive failure of the performative, this slippage between discursive command and its appropriated effect, which provides the linguistic occasion and index for a consequential disobedience” (122). Resistance, in other words, is possible only through the recognition of performativity (regulated norms) as performativity.
A counter argument to my unique reading of SVU may be that the problem with shows such as SVU is their enmeshment within the normalizing matrices of power. Characters who are raped within the show are still predominantly women and often blamed by others for the rape. While I cannot contest this argument, what I find interesting is the ways in which the show questions the validity of such claims. Yes, one performs the gendered role, because as of yet, there is no other role to perform; to exist in any meaningful way, one must and does exists in the relation to regulatory norms. Yet, these norms can and are contested in SVU. What seems ingenious, then, is the way in which SVU works within the regulating structure in order to create a space for resistance. Thus, like Butler, SVU refuses to view rape or sex as irreducible and inevitable. Sexual difference and violence can only occur within a space that insists upon and produces that difference.
As materially produced beings, we are simultaneously subject to and implicated in the social structures that surround us; yet we are never fully determined by them or free from them. This, it seems, appears to be the power of SVU. The show largely focuses upon the connection between women and rape because, unfortunately in our current culture, women are in greater danger of being rape. Yet, this is not to say that SVU reinscribes rape as “natural” and as a biologically inherent female experience. Instead, SVU insists upon investigating why it is that women and men are raped. SVU attempts to understand rape victims as embodied subjects, and in doing so, the show is able to take the crime and violence committed seriously without endowing the victim with an identity of enduring helplessness. Thus, the premediation that occurs in the show SVU does not rearticulate rape myths. Instead, the premeditated show attempts to open up a previously silenced and shame infused discourse and re-articulate and re-imagine the violence of rape in society.
2.
Andrea J. Vought | November 6, 2007 at 8:44 pm
In Dr. Grusin’s “Affective Life of Media,” a single sentence jumped off the page while I was reading: “Thus technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training” (16). Given my conference paper topic, I immediately connected this sentence (and too, the entire paragraph in which it is situated) with my research on ancient rhetorics, namely, the progymnasmata. Dr. Grusin’s use of the word “training” is especially interesting in this regard, since the progymnasmata are just that, rhetorical training devices. As Dr. Grusin reminds our Critical Theory class as we read each week, sometimes complicated essays “open up” and become more accessible once we read one particular passage. I did not have express difficulty understanding Dr. Grusin’s “Affective Cyborgs” chapter, though I will not focus on affect here. Yet I have been at a loss for ideas in my attempts to make my conference paper topic original (or, at least, not to beat a dead horse) while still incorporating ancient rhetoric into the contemporary composition curriculum.
So I’d like to return to the quotation that originally caught my attention to perhaps better inform my research: “…technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training.” If technology acts to train us to enhance and multiply our cyborg selves just as progymnasmata exercises equipped students with an arsenal of rhetorical devices to create variant “personas,” then perhaps digital progymnasmata would serve a dual purpose: both to reinscribe ancient rhetorical practices into contemporary curricula and also draw students’ attention to our symbiotic relationship with the technology we use everyday.
It would be foolish of me, of course, to think that such work was not already being done in the Academy at the undergraduate level. Like our own class, many undergrad classes have online components, in the form of blogs, discussion boards, or a source for additional material. However, as Dr. Grusin explains through this essay, there is much more technology out there. He cites Walter Benjamin and the medium of cinema, “which might work to enervate the mass public of modernity to conter [sic] or challenge the dominant socio-technical, aesthetico-cultural formation” (17). Much in the same fashion, the website YouTube—and other sites with video posting capabilities like Facebook and Myspace—has become a sort of amateur cinema for budding directors or for people wishing to air their disgust at the government, social injustice, celebrities’ missteps, etc.
But what is especially interesting about these social networking sites is that they have also become a legitimate political platform. Remember, of course, the presidential debates that were broadcast live on MySpace, where viewers could call in and ask questions in real time. This change in format brought about a great deal of controversy, especially when one question was posed not by a person, but by a snowman. Dissecting this move could alone warrant an entire response paper, so I will be brief. But this snow man (because, indeed, there must—or must there?—be a human behind the aggregation of snow) is itself a cyborg, isn’t it? At the very least, it serves to blur the line between human and non-human and complicate the meaning of identity.
If this sort of digital trick belongs in a discussion of the formation of the posthuman, then it ought to be incorporated into academic discussions too.
To tie this in with my original discussion: As I stated earlier, YouTube and similar websites have given cinematic agency to the average Joe and Jane, and teens and young adults are a large part of YouTube’s target demographic. And truly, technology has subjected the “human sensorium” to complex training because it has challenged the way we interact with and change the world in which we live. It has become a part of ourselves and the “outside world,” if such an exterior to ourselves even exists. So why not incorporate these technologies into the composition classroom? Refutations, explications, and defenses can be scripted (or not), filmed, and posted to YouTube or another video hosting site. They can be edited, rewatched, mimicked, or refuted by classmates both in the classroom and on the video hosting site. Furthermore, tudents can use their multiple identities or faces—like the snowman—for each exercise. Along these lines then, these exercises will act as a forum for questioning the foundations of Western thought, what it means to be “human” (if we can even be so) and to challenge Current-Traditional writing practices as well.
3.
eric herhuth | November 7, 2007 at 1:28 pm
It may be that the influence of affect on everyday life explains most if not all of what seems unexplainable. To start, I cannot help but take pleasure in the automaticity described in the work of Bargh and Cartrand. Although not the extent of their conclusions, their description of the human tendency to mimic and unconsciously socialize the self by mimicry of the surrounding others is particularly practical: “The natural tendency (because of the automatic effect of perception on behavior) to take on the posture and behaviors of people with whom one interacts, even when that person is a complete stranger, has the positive function of facilitating social interactions and increasing liking between people” (Unbearable Automaticity 468). This is something to keep in mind whenever I have an interview or need to make a good impression; it is always good to throw-in a few moves of subtle mimicry. Nonetheless, the optimism of Bargh and Cartrand does feel slightly naïve or one-sided. Sure, human automaticity helps us work productively and learn and live with each other but at the same time this automaticity creates structuralized injustices, prejudices, and inefficiencies. These “‘mental butlers’ who know our tendencies and preferences so well that they anticipate and take care of them for us, without having to be asked” (476), will learn to perform bad habits as well as good ones. Their own article illustrates several examples of stereotyping and prejudicial thinking that result from automaticity, and I am not quite feeling their optimism just yet.
Granted, capitalists have been appealing to affects and automatic cognitive processes for a while now. Hardt explains the effects of prolific affective labor: “Labor works directly on the affects; it produces subjectivity, it produces society, it produces life. Affective labor, in this sense, is ontological-it reveals living labor constituting a form of life and thus demonstrates again the potential of biopolitical production” (Affective Labor 99). Indeed, I have worked in service industries where smiles, warm greetings, handshakes, and comfort were emphasized in the selling more so than any product. Of course, the products are essentially designed to elicit a similar positive affect in the consumer. But what follows from this observation? Hardt is both hopeful and cautious, warning that this biopower may be used to propel “capitalist accumulation and patriarchal order” and suggesting that “the production of affects, subjectivities, and forms of life present an enormous potential for autonomous circuits of valorization, and perhaps for liberation” (100). I am curious about possible futures if Hardt’s analysis of affective labor is accurate. With the proliferation of affective labor, will affect itself change? Or what seems more feasible, how will human affect be treated if it is relegated exclusively to the market sphere? There is a phrase I’ve heard in the service industry—particularly retail—that haunts me; it is a rationale for friendly, personable sales: “Yours may be the only smile they see all day.” If this is the state of affairs then what is at stake—the diminution of the uncommodified smile?
4.
mike | November 7, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Me/dia, Myself, and I
To my reading, the most striking trope shared by our readings this week is that, in many of them, the assumed causative linearity of affective experience—stimulus-recognition-response—becomes a scene of problematic, nonlinear causality. In Sedgwick and Frank’s reading of Silvan Tomkins, the subject’s experience of affect is dissociated from assumed object-oriented stimuli (“any affect may have any ‘object’”), and affective stimuli are themselves called into question in the assertion that “relevant stimuli for the affect system include internal as well as external events”. Brian Massumi’s reading of neurological research into affect causation reveals a temporal slippage between stimulus, autonomic somatic responses, and conscious reaction that casts the experience of affect into a space which Massumi reads as spanning both the actual and the virtual. As instructive as these two texts are, I would like, rather, to focus on Grusin’s “Premediation” and Bargh and Chartrand’s “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being.”
At first, these two pieces would seem to have little in common: Grusin argues for a media trope that attempts to inhibit the potential for shock by casting the future as that which is always already mediated, so that—when it inevitably arrives in the present—it is also already remediated in our experience of the medated present. Bargh and Chartrand, for their part, argue for a model of behavior that is learned not, as convention would have it, from conscious/internal reflection on behavioral models, but rather from automatic/external perception of behaviors. Given that these essays stem from fundamentally different disciplinary epistemes, and that they seem to be asking radically different questions, what might we have to learn from reading them in tandem?
I would contend that despite these differences, the phenomena described in both essays is fundamentally similar in that each describes a movement from the potential multiple to the actual singular. Consider: Bargh and Chartrand contend that “the activated contents of the mind are not only those in the stream of consciousness but also include representations of currently present objects, events, behavior of others, and so on” (465). From this jumble of external and internal perception, behavior is enacted on, often (but not exclusively) without reference to conscious deliberation. The automatic perception detailed here suggests a bodily cognition that remains open to more stimuli than conscious reflection can accommodate (similar findings are treated in Massumi as well). Grusin’s premediation relies on a similar from-multiple-to-singular logic; he suggests that premediation is “not necessarily about getting the future right as much as it is about trying to imagine or map out as many possible futures as could plausibly be imagined” (28). The aim of all this premediating, the much-esteemed departmental chair asserts, is to “require that the future be premeditated in ways that are almost indistinguishable from the way the future will be mediated when it happens” (29). Thus, the relationship of the future-qua-future to the future-become-present is, at least in part, one of recognizing out of the multiplicity of possible futures that one that confronts us in the here-and-now. This, I suggest, shares obvious similarities to Bargh and Chartrand. Just as behavior is manifested out a multiplicity of internal and externa perceptual stimuli, so the mediated present is derived from the premeditated future.
At stake in this comparison is a reflexive analogy drawn between the two essays. In inviting this comparison, I have likewise established an implicit comparison between mind and media. This is neither accidental nor unwitting. In my paired reading of these two essays (even within the necessarily abbreviated and reductive form it takes in this venue), I seek to point to two further questions for discussion or research.
5.
Crystal Starkey | November 7, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Crystal Starkey
ENG 7007
Dr. Pruchnic
Grusin
In his essay, “Material Literacy and Visual Design,” Lester Faigley discusses the materiality of literacy and the ways in which technology has forced the intersection of three historical trajectories within the confines of defining literacy. These trajectories are: writing systems; images; and capitalism. Faigley notes visual literacy as previously being considered a lesser literacy, reflecting low level developmental learning achievement in the learner; while written literacy has been thought of as the literacy which requires its learners to master deductive reasoning and logical thought through the written word. While this early dichotomy between literacies was widely accepted, for Faigley, literacy has always been “a material, multi-media construct, even though we only now are becoming aware of this multidimensionality…” (176), through images, writing systems and capitalism. In this sense, then, Grusin showcases Faigley’s theory in his analysis of the pictures from Abu Ghraib.
In “Affect, Medality and Abu Ghraib,” Grusin offers an example of what can happen when written and visual literacies are dissected. For Grusin, combining written and visual literacy when analyzing the affect of the Abu Ghraib pictures creates what he calls medality. The dichotomy between the visual and the written are overcome when Grusin applies media logic to the process of physical actions required in: taking the digital picture; saving the file to a memory card; uploading the file to a public site and/or attaching it to emails for friends and family. These actions are, for Grusin, “themselves a specific, distinct media event with their own consequences”. For Grusin, medality functions as part of Foucault’s “governmentality” in that medality “works both to help dispose these things and to spur institutions of government to act, to do their job…”. Then, my question is: do Grusin’s purposes here with Abu Ghraib, reflect Faigley’s trajectories, scaffolding for each other in that capitalism is driven by the writing systems which in turn are driven by the images, which ultimately are what creates Grusin’s medality in connection with Foucault’s governmentality?
In his article, Grusin furthers this possibility when he discusses paranoid reading, in which “literary, cultural, and media texts are understood chiefly in terms of the ways in which they either subvert or enable the hegemony of global capital, or patriarchy, or ideology”. Again, it would seem, motivation from one trajectory is directed by one or both of the other trajectories. Showcasing this point in his essay, Faigley dissects teenagers’, Ben Syverson and Jessica Draper’s website to ascertain his theory on trajectories while Grusin analyzes Chris Wilson’s website to demonstrate his on medality. Both Faigley and Grusin do this to show, “…thinking of medality in terms of affect is to think of our media practices not in terms of their structures of signification or symbolic representation but in terms of the ways in which they function to discipline, to control, to contain, to manage, or to govern the human and its affiliated things, at the same time that they work to enable particular forms of human action.”
6.
Kim Lacey | November 7, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Connecting to last week’s readings, an affective response seems to be especially performative. While reading, I was reminded of the time I spent back-in-the-day waiting tables and bartending, a job that requires one to constantly maintain certain affective responses—politeness and happiness all while submitting oneself to your guests’ often mundane and annoying requests. One quickly learns to manipulate affective responses by showing gratitude after being stiffed while seemingly enjoying being bossed around. In “Affective Labor,” Michael Hardt argues that economic paradigms can be viewed as succeeding one another, beginning with agriculture, moving to industry and manufacturing, and finally into today’s process of economic informatization (90). This current economic process, in which Hardt includes the service sectors, provides services and manipulates information, thus reminding me of how often I “faked” gratitude while serving (90). To Hardt, the service sectors produce an “immaterial labor,” one that “produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication” (94). In restaurants, managers hounded us employees (often referred to by catchy titles such as ‘starting line-up,’ ‘crew members,’ or even the restaurant themed ‘Outbackers’) to constantly appear agreeable and happy while in uniform. Since I often ran errands before and after my shift in our oh-so-attractive uniforms, I was transformed into a machine “both inside and outside the factory” (94). Furthermore, the uniform served a dual affective purpose: on one hand, it reminded those shopping along side of me of a great times they had while dining at the restaurant, hopefully bringing them back to recreate the experience. However, on the flip side, I had to work (i.e. falsify my affective responses) before I was even on the clock.
What is tricky about this dual affective response is that I was most often faking it. I knew that at the end of my errand running was the start of another shift (i.e. I was cranky). Lying behind my thankfulness and pleasantries were unpaid bills that were not going to be paid by average tippers. Now, I realize I’m sounding a bit cynical and greedy, but I am attempting to distinguish an automatic affective response and a performed affective response. In “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being,” Bargh and Chartrand investigate the development of various automatic responses. The removal of conscious response occurs when one repeatedly, and purposely, makes the same choices in a situation, therefore transforming purposefulness into an automatized response. Returning to the restaurant example, by putting on my uniform, I eventually learned to set aside the melancholy and be happy for the duration of my shift. I learned to automatize my responses by relating a necessitated performed response (e.g. my tips depended upon a certain level of servitude, so therefore I needed to be grateful and accommodating). When actions become automatized, they are no longer performed choices, but unconscious affective responses.
Question for class/Grusin: In “Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib,” the included pictures are embedded with certain automatic responses (arousal or disgust). Do you think these images create certain responses based upon the media in which they’re shown (for example, if one sees these on ntfu.com or rotten.com the viewer expects to be grossed our or excited, but in a news clip, we have sympathy or even censorship issues)? How are responses framed?
7.
Jen | November 8, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Country Music “Affects” the 2004 Election
For my response, I want to explore the other side to the Berlant’s “Unfeeling Kerry,” the “Emotional Bush” in relation to this week’s readings. It is a topic I explored, not through affect but through media reception, last semester when trying to explain the severe reaction to the Dixie Chick’s negative comments about President Bush during a London Concert. This week’s readings supported the claim made by one of my favorite sources for that project, “The Honky Tonk Gap: Country Music, Red State Identity, and the Election of 2004” by David Firestein, which argued that country music played a large role in the election of George W. Bush.
There is a parallel ideology that was developed by the Bush campaign and sung about in country music: “family, country, and God.” Through Bush relating to themes in the popular music genre of the red states a powerful perception was developed on a non-conscious level that voting for Bush would be affirming their identity. You could say that country music ‘primed’ voters to pick Bush in the 2004 election. If I understand the concept of affect correctly (and this is questionable), it seems to be a type of priming similar to what psychologists were cited as doing in Bargh and Cartrand’s “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being” when individuals exposure to certain stimuli affected their perceptions. By constant exposure to certain experiences, our freedom of thought or emotions are limited to the potential these experiences create. If your unconscious self-perception is intimately linked to your favorite music, country music, wouldn’t it make sense that your identity is not as free to roam beyond the ideologies that run rampant through the constant feed of radio stations and Country Music Television (CMT)?
It seems to be very much the non-rational at work, the targeting of what Berlant refers to as “the importance of people’s fantasy of the good life.” The good life in country music is often a nostalgia for simpler times and the joys of a traditional family, which is a vision Bush purported to share. Even though some country music fans disagreed with Bush on core issues such as stem cell research and abortion, they still voted for him because they saw themselves as people who voted conservative and felt that Bush represented their vision of America (Firestein 7). He was mirroring people’s images of themselves, much the same way that people mimic gestures to create a more favorable impression.
In the opposite corner in the 2004 election was the very unrelatable Kerry. Berlant writes that Kerry came off as cool and distance, which connected him to perceptions of apathy and a variety of other negative emotional captures, such as “dramatic and undramatic versions of hopelessness, helplessness, dread, anxiety, stress, worry, lack of interest, and so on.” As Grusin writes, we are drawn to maximize the positive and to minimize negative affect. Bush was very much tied to traditional values, national security, and had an everyday quality as he did his own chores on his ranch (at least when the photographers were present). Hence, voters were more drawn to Bush, voting to maximize the positive associations instead of voting rationally on issues.
To return to the concept behind my initial studies into the demographics of country music, why did the audience get so upset when Natalie Maines proclaimed how ashamed she was that the President was from Texas? Could it be because music is a form of escapism similar to the video games Grusin describes as “a space that is free from, or protects people from, the violent or threatening affective states produced by an ever threatening world.” One of the most interesting observation Grusin makes about video games is that the highest level of stimulation or stress comes when there is a malfunctioning with the software of the game, pulling the player out of the trance of the game. Perhaps Natalie Maines comment worked like a malfunction in a game, interrupting the smooth flow of identity confirmation and shattering the protective bubble of the media. I would argue that this is the case.
Question for Richard Grusin:
In your article, “Affective Life of Media,” you discuss a type of training that enables “use to deal with the complex environment of our media everyday,” such as premediations of violence acts and crimes. You relate this to the kind of training that has us automatically stop at a curb before crossing the street. What do you think is the relationship between being trained to deal with potential harm and crises and apathy? Do we stop short of being emotional pulled towards action like we are pulled to stop before crossing a street?
Postscript:
Jeff posed an interesting question about how the left can co-opt affective techniques from the right which made me wonder how we would reframe who is “the most electable” in the upcoming election based on affect theory? In 2004, would John Edwards have been a better choice for a presidential candidate because he is good looking, has a likable wife, and came from a coal-mining family in Virginia?
8.
Jared | November 8, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Here is the link to my Wiki on Berlant’s edited collection…
in case anyone is interested. Sorry it was so hard to see in class. There are some great angles on compassion and affect though… and the titles of most essays are particularly revealing of how an essay might suit someone with more of a literary focus vs. say rhetorical interests or political ones (… it is good to know though that the first three essays deal with politics explicitly). You can always email me if you want to know more about a particular essay in relation to a project…c-ya
http://berlantcompassion.pbwiki.com/
9.
Jack McIntyre | November 8, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Bargh and Chartrand’s “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being” understands humans as primarily automatic; while it is possible to consciously, willfully control behavior and thought, it is difficult and can only be done slowly, inefficiently, and to a very limited extent. They conclude their piece by saying “[…] the ‘automaticity of being’ is far from the negative and maladaptive caricature drawn by humanistically oriented writers; rather, these processes are in our service and best interests-and in an intimate and knowing way at that. They are, if anything, “mental butlers” who know our tendencies and preferences so well that they anticipate and take care of them for us, without having to be asked” (476).
The ancient Greeks as described by Foucault in The Hermeneutics of the Subject had, in some respects, a very similar understanding of how humans function, in the sense that they believed humans are formed by habit and experience and tend to act without automatically, without conscious thought. However they considered the forces that formed the automatic self suspect, and most philosophies of the time centered on undoing and reforming these habits. This was thought to take a lifetime, so only at the end of life could one enjoy the fruits of one’s efforts to become a properly and fully developed subject. Willfully changing the self is possible, but difficult and time consuming, consistent with Bargh and Chartrand. The big difference between the Greeks and Bargh and Chratrand is the latter trust the “butler” and the former don’t.
Grusin writes in “Affective Life of Media”: “[…] just as our cognitive sense of our own body is not stable but always in a process of becoming, so our affective sense of our body (and other’s bodies), as well as of the world more generally, is being constructed and reconstructed through affective feedback loops not unlike those cognitive ones engaged in language learning or visual scanning”. Applying Bargh’s and Chartrand’s work here, these feedback loops and the formation of one’s sense of the body are primarily automatic, but the conscious mind can intervene to some extent and modify them. The same thing could be said of Grusin’s contention in “Affective Life of Media” that people have affective relationships with objects, technology, machines. It also applies to his argument in “Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib” that soldiers mistreated prisoners and photographed their humiliation as an expression of anger, and that the response of the American public to the photographs is at least partly a response to this anger.
I’m particularly interested in the latter example because, if Grusin is right, it seems the American public is not using media effectively. What these photographs do to us is recreate, to an extent, the affect of the soldiers in and taking the photos, and what is horrifying is partly that ostensibly normal American men and women can take pleasure in such affects and seek to distribute and receive them as so-called normal people distribute pictures of a birthday party (or whatever). The problem, as far as the American public is concerned, is not entirely what the soldiers did, but partly that soldiers would have such a desire at all; Grusin emphasizes this in his discussion of the photographs as media; the motivation behind the taking and distribution of the photos is a big part of what is so disturbing, because it equates to what so many “normal” people do with photos of other kinds. Yet such desire seems normal, unavoidable, inevitable, for soldiers in the Iraq war, as Grusin points out. What these photos do is effectively communicate what countless news reports have tried but failed to communicate: what it is like to be an American soldier in Iraq. The American public responds with horror at the media, and the individuals involved in the specific scandal, but fail to acknowledge what the photos most effectively reveal: the horror of what war does to the participants in general.
My question is: can Americans change their relationship with media in such a way that these technologies become more useful and beneficial? Can we link media and affect in such a way that it produces more appropriate and beneficial responses then it has in the cases Grusin discusses? Should the photographs from Abu Ghraib be interpreted as valuable insight into the minds of American soldiers? Could they be used to develop more effective methods of coping with the problems soldiers face?
P.S.
The questions I raised seem to relate to what Dr. Pruchnic asked about the political left adopting the tactics that have been employed so effectively by the right, though my question seems to put it in a somewhat different context. Thinking about it now, perhaps the most powerful image of the decade (century – millennium) so far is those airplanes crashing into the towers and the ensuing collapses. The right has very effectively used these images and the fear and anger they inspire for war-mongering, the erosion of civil liberties, aggressive expansion of executive power, etc. Again, this raises the question: how can affect and action be linked in more beneficial way? I won’t answer in a specific sense because it would lead to a Bush-bashing rant which wouldn’t really do anyone any good…
But in general it seems to relate to training, as the ancient Greeks recognized. We (I, they, whatever) must train ourselves, consciously, to respond to affect differently. Bargh and Chartrand confirm that it (probably) could be done, but it would be difficult.
Of course the idea of fundamentally restructuring the human mind in this way raises plenty of questions and concerns (how will people be trained? who will be in charge? isn’t this brainwashing? etc) but I say let’s go for it. I share Rotman’s attitude: the world is in pretty sorry shape, so just what is it that we’re trying to preserve?
Your brother in the struggle,
Jack
10.
Katrina Newsom | November 8, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Michael Hardt’s article “Affective Labor” offers a powerful analysis of the affects of labor that help to perpetuate and reinvent the exploitation of labor practices. His piece on gendered labor reminded me of a book written by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild titled Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. This text provides perfect examples of affective production within the domesticated and sexual labors of third world women. Enhrenreich and Hoschschild looks at the situation of many women within third world countries whose employment opportunities are accessible through immaterial forms of production, in particular affect. In some cases, for example in the Dominican Republic, sexuality through the production of lust and pleasure provides women with the opportunity to gain viable income. For some women, it provides the hope and possibility of escaping their country. These women in the Dominican Republic are prostitutes whose performance creates desire and lust as an economic exchange for money. These women also extend this performance to the creation of feelings of affection and love through the use of letters in hope to continue the production of lust, affection and even love in order to maintain monetary exchanges or to receive proposals for marriage. Usually, the men who are receiving their serves are from Europe and America. These men go to the Dominican Republic to have extra marital affairs or to just have a “good time”. Thus, the question of who is really the victim arises from this analysis of women labor. Clearly, Hardt’s description of the “production and manipulation of affects” ( Boundary 2, 98) is present here, but the question becomes, who is truly manipulating and producing affects? The men are not ignorant of the women’s impoverished state. Many of the men promise to rescue the women from their present state by marrying them (the Cinderella Syndrome). Here, the affect of hope becomes the motivational factor that causes the women to pleasure the men and so forth. It appears to become a cycle of affect production on both sides.
Another case of affective production working within the realm of women labor is described in Enhrenreich and Hoschschild’s book when they tell of women who leave their countries to become nannies in other countries. Often times, these women are compelled to leave their children behind. The tragedy that arises within their employment is that many times they are not paid the amount of money due. Many employees claim to see the woman as part of the family. It is important to note that these women are not treated as such, but because of this claim, many woman are forced to work long hours while receiving little pay. This immaterial affective production of family in these instances, ultimately disrupts the women’s ability to obtain viable income. Besides the physical and mental abuse that the women endure within this form of labor as Enhrenreich and Hoschschild describe in their text, the woman are also subjected to long hours of work for little money or no pay because the employees believe the women are working from a place of love and affection. This truly is preposterous. It is just another form exploitative labor. In many cases, this form of employment leads to enslavement. Because many of these women travel from the Philippines, parts of Africa, and other third world countries, they have no legal resources. I
Although Hardt reference to gendered labor is in the form of biopolitics in which “ the traditional role of women [is] to fulfill the tasks of production that have been most severely affected by the ecological and biological interventions” (99), which I take to mean the “production and reproduction of life” (99), in what other ways has women labor utilized been used to create affect? In what ways does this labor perpetuate the subordination of women? How do they maintain or disrupt the classification of male and female gender that Judith Butler writes against?
11.
Kim Lacey | November 8, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Postscript:
I think Prof. Grusin’s appearance along with the other’s “appearances” (speaking through the SpongeBob speakers, of course) spoke directly to that listening-to-someone-on-a-cell-phone-moment to which he referred in class. We read these authors as just words, all the while knowing there’s someone behind them. Just as we know (usually) that there’s someone on the other line when we overhear conversations, we understand that someone actually wrote the blogs or the theories we’re stressin’ over. But, until they’re embodied – either IRL or through SpongeBob speakers – there is no there, there. Or, is there? (with no pun intended, or maybe so, not sure.) Anyway, without going to Foucauldian on y’all, I’m just wondering how our responses to the actual author interfere/interrupt/add to our initial understanding of a text?
12.
Clay Walker | November 9, 2007 at 1:36 am
Global Affective Economies
In “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion,” Lynn Worsham offers a precise notion of emotion as the combination of affect and judgment, which she nevertheless fails to unravel in any great detail. Also, she argues that the primary work of pedagogy is to “organize an emotional world” and the primary violence of pedagogy is to mystify emotions as personal experiences rather than socially constructed ways of feeling by limiting the vocabulary available to access, articulate, and interpret our “affective lives.” Worsham’s target is the dominant paradigm of social power that controls society by binding individuals to affective lives, by tying them to social classes while mystifying the emotional tethers that always lie just out of the reach of semantics. Our infantile movement from the nurturing power of the mother to the verbal law/power of the father is our first pedagogy and all other forms of social control are mapped onto this originary emotional education and limitation. While Worsham does not deny the power held by emotions in underpinning our affective social relationships, she criticizes feminist pedagogies of nurturance for reifying what Worsham views as a resubmission of the female teacher to a pedagogic authority of the dominant discourse that exploits the the woman’s emotional labor while failing to recognize its value in the capitalist economy/political system. Critical for Worsham is the argument that before emotion may be put to political/pedagogical ends, the entire sex/affective system must be restructured in ways that recognize the emotional labor of women. In my response, I want to depart from Worsham’s argument in Michael Hardt’s notion of affective labor.
Published the year after Worsham’s article, Hardt points out that systems of production in this, the late capitalist economy, have undergone significant change from the Fordist model of industrial manufacturing to the Toyotist model of informatic manufacturing. As a result of the transition to the new service/informatic economy, “knowledge, information, communication, and affect” play key roles. In fact, Hardt argues, affective labor has become positioned “at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of laboring forms” (90). The service economy provides not material goods, but an immaterial feeling of ease, pleasure, content: “embedded in the moments of human interaction and communication [;] This labor is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible: a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion – even a sense of connectness or community” (96). This makes me wonder if the sex/affective system articulated by Worsham is not in fact one tied to earlier systems of economic and political power – more in line with Foucauldt’s disciplinarian society than Nealon’s society of control.
Despite the biopower of these positive feelings suggested as part of the new economic landscape by Hardt, “women and nature may be dominated together” (99) and “could easily serve to reinforce both the gendered division of labor and the familial structures of oedipal subjection and subjectification” (100) – the same threats posed to a pedagogy of emotion according to Worsham’s account. But Hardt continues, “These dangers, however – important thought hey bight be – do not negate the importance of recognizing the potential of labor as biopower, a biopower from below” (100). Potential – the restructuring of emotional labor seems to be underway as we speak, Hardt seems to give us the reins – it isn’t too late for nurturance to become a valued commodity, a labor not unrecognized, but valued, positioned, perhaps, at the top of the social hierarchy. Hardt sees the actuality of affective labor as a foundation of the information economy, also discussed in great depth by Doyle, Deleuze, Nealon. Hardt sees the potential of such a move or opening, or valuing, or validating of emotional labor as one that may valorize circuits of autonomy, “and perhaps liberation” (100).
I don’t think we can say that the nurturing mother and the law of the father have been swept away. In my own experience, the child has an emotional and overtly and fundamentally physical relationship with the mother that develops over the course of 40 weeks and is cemented through the breast of her lactating nipple. The father, must begin to build a relationship with the child ex-utero, and denied the close proximity of the nipple must employ a variety of strategies including hugging, holding, touching, but also and more directly, with words, gestures, toys, games, play, signs – but laws I am not sure about laws. Certainly, my wife’s word has as much law to it as mine in our family. My question: so what do you think – what is the worth of being a nurturing parent in todays informatic society of control?
Postscript:
Not too sure where I was going with that last paragraph, but I have just left it as it is. The real question is really more along the lines of the following: in an American economy where the class divisions no longer fit under the marxist ideological superstructure/base paradigm put forth by Althussier, where capitalism no longer produces material goods but immaterial goods, where individuals are no longer controlled by the disciplinarian society in physical institutions like school, work, prison but through non-physical systems of control like the sort of passwords and codes proposed by Deleuze in “Postscript” (also I think we can think about Doyle here, too) — anyway, in this new economy of global finance capitalism, where the material physical barriers no longer matter, what do we do or how do we theorize, understand, motivate, apply, consider, manipulate, upload, download our own affective immaterial relationships (i.e. feelings, emotions, affects, consciousness, embodied cognition)?
13.
mlmcginnis | November 9, 2007 at 2:42 am
In response to Kim’s last bit above:
On one hand, I think, there is a matter of professional, personal courtesy. For example, we may think Prof. Doodah’s work is monolithic, essentialized, and dependent on assumed universals that were drummed out of us our first week as grads. But if we were to meet him in person–at least in this point in our careers–we’d bend over backward to be polite and show deference to him. Which is to say that in some way I think that there is–rather than than the complicating relationship Kim posits–an inverse relationship between the person and the author (even if he or she is dead–right, Michel?). Of course, to get more pointedly Foucauldian, this relationship is inscribed in situated regimes of power, hence a courtesy we might extend to the person while we would be merciless to the text.
14.
Clay Walker | November 9, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Here is a link to that Peter Sagal comment on NPR
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16053199
What I find interesting is the investment of hope and other potential positive affects in these spaces between classes. But I don’t mean proletariate-bourgeouis spaces because it seems to me the differences between these categories is quickly dwindling; rather it is something more along the lines of what Sagal articulates. What we want is not to own property and own a small business (the bourgeois dream); rather we want to develop a (virtual) website that many people will look at, giving us tons of advertising dollars and propelling us not to the middle-class but to another luxury class where we have the type of house MTV Cribs might go to, or we already have the car pimped out regularly on Pimp My Ride, or the private jet that we can use to fly around the world…
15.
Michael Cipielewski | November 9, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Woah! I must have spaced out this week. Totally late!
Undoubtedly, Hypermediacy involves speed, and the ubiquity of new media over old is infused with the idea that new media is faster than old media. When considering the BBSs and Prodigy of the eighties, the 56k connections and America Online in the 90s, and finally our current, “always on” high-speed connections and Wifi interfaces, connectivity is ever-increasing in “data speed” (both the “speed” of the information presented, and the actual speed of the bytes transferred), and ever-widening. San Francisco, Miami, Paris, … all are bidding to make their entire cities “hot-spots” (And Oakland County has done this… sort of.), where users can connect wherever, whenever. The image comes to mind not of drivers reading newspapers, but surfing the net while operating a motor vehicle. Scary. This seems to be a slide toward less of a “web” per se, but a spherical plane on which we are always connected to our network, always-on, always connected to each other.
The person-person interface, as discussed in “Remediation,” are theorized as person- technology-person interaction. (And tends to be human-nonhuman in cybernetic theory)
Through the conduit, person-person interactions, the telepresent are able to experience all forms of “true” emotion and other Massumi-esque variations of indescribable but true affect – “true” in the sense that, “All mediations are both real and mediations of the real, remediation can also be understood as a process of reforming reality.” (Remediation 346) The remediated body as avatar is “real” in virtuality producing corporeal affect, and so reforms reality in the same way that static artifacts may, in turn, create real affect and restructure reality.
But the cyborg, the interfaced human and machine, is a lonely creature, and finds itself communicating in various ways that are only mentioned in theory, so it seems. The medium is, after all, a medium, a conduit of interaction cyborgs, which would explain the dually social focalization on person-person relations (studies of netspeak, and the like), in lieu the academic sort of glazing over the sociological aspect of the cyborg (as Ann Weinstone stated,“the cyborg is never a hybrid of two or more people.”) The verb to say has replaced the verb to type in digital communication. User to user, when asked to repeat onself, one does not say “I typed”, rather, “I said.” We virtually speak.
So in “The Affective Life of Media” Grusin touches upon Picard’s work and affective bandwidth, this bandwidth being the bottleneck through which affect is rendered via technology. And truly, “the question of affect and media is not just about how much affect is transmitted but about the degree or characteristics of affect in our relationship with our media.” (29) I set apart communication technology from technological artifacts for one reason: communication devices are never truly artifacts, in that in each use, they are never quite the same because they interface cyborg-to-cyborg, that is, consciousness+media-to-consciousness+media. I would go out on a limb to generalize that technological artifacts are static (even if they are programmed to be random, there is a certain finitude in non-conscious randomness). Generally speaking, is there not room for discourse in emotional bandwidth, in cyborg communications?
With that in mind, how might one approach Remediation in context of the fluid sociological rather than the “static” artifact? Could we say that person-person relations are a facet of hypermediacy and the collage, or something else entirely?
If “a transparent interface is one that erases itself, so that the user would no longer be aware of confronting a medium, but instead would stand in an immediate relationship to the context of the medium,” are we to understand that the unobtainable transparent interface is subsumed into a pervasive “I”, the user’s identity turned cyborg, and what is the nature of that “relationship to the context of the medium,” between medium and user? How do they interact?
Also, how could we consider a translucent interface as having finite affective bandwidth, and the transparent as having infinite affective bandwidth?
POST: setting apart communication media from media?
Had I the ability to make diagrams in Photoshop, my post would look a bit different. Words will have to do!
The whole cyborg-cyborg model seems to mesh nicely with Grusin’s rending of the feedback loop. In the way I’m thinking of it in terms of communication technology, the loop seems more like a figure-eight: in essence, TWO feedback loops that both have their own path of travel (the path of travel that a solitary cyborg has with a technology), and a shared path of travel (the figure-eight, the two solitary paths combined into one).
I’d like to get my hands on more of Grusin’s material if anything for his ideas on how human-human relations are affective feedback loops.
It took me a while to parse through the different kinds of communication technology that currently exists. I still seem to have a problem wrapping my mind around “technology” as one umbrella concept that can be dealt with as a whole. Communication is no different. I was thinking about “static communications”, that is, communication that is a recording, an artifact, and communication that is not, i.e. “real time” communication. These two types… they seem to be different animals in emotional bandwidth. I’ll have to deal with this more when I have time… as I think this is going into my seminar work.
This whole discussion, along with the week on affect has really changed the way I’m approaching the seminar paper. Some weeks we’ve had seem to be exactly that way – I’ll read something new and want to write 9 different papers at once. Abstracts are due, I’ll have to settle!