The Anxiety of Irrelevance: Digital Humanities and Contemporary Literary Theory (original) (raw)
The motor of being: a response to Steve Pile's 'emotions and affect in recent human geography'
Here, I argue two points related specifically to what Pile refers to as ‘affectual geographies’: firstly, to defend ‘what is important about this work’, and secondly to consider the slippage between affect and emotion, its genealogy and potential pitfalls, and what this means in terms of the ‘space in-between’ the affective and the subjective registers. Finally, I suggest an alternative, materialist approach towards the interplay between these registers, to Pile’s suggestion of a ‘transplanting’ of psychoanalytic concepts.
The Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2024
Affective dynamics shape spatial practices and social relations. Various strands in human geography have contributed to the study of affect, emphasizing its irreducibility to discourse and conscious understanding. This entry provides a comprehensive review of the role of affect in geographical research. It addresses the variety of expressions of affect that geographers have studied in different spatial contexts, discusses historical shifts in geographic research on affect, and traces the theoretical references, methodological directions, key concepts, and empirical fields of affective geographies. Furthermore, the entry points to the critical implications of affective geographies as well as to the promises and tensions that emanate from geographical research with and on affects.
Feeling as Method? Affective Encounters with the Political Theory Canon
As articulated by Nicholas Tampio (2015, 147n13), Gilles Deleuze engaged the history of philosophy by "citing accurately but arranging elements to say something new" (cf. Deleuze 1995, 6). Such a theoretical practice, Tampio suggests, enables this history to become a "keyboard that may play many songs depending on how the notes are arranged" (131). Taking a cue from such a relationship to canonicity, I argue in this paper that a turn to affect theory presents a particularly generative modality for playing new notes and songs with the keyboard of political theory. More specifically, I contend that an affective turn in political theory helps us to create three new compositions, so to speak. First, it makes a claim about political theory in general, on the level both of orientation to the canon and of methods and reading practices: I suggest a greater need to attend to embodiment, affect, and emotion in the canon itself, and do so from an interdisciplinary standpoint. Second, an affective turn in political theory offers a vector for re-reading and re-imagining particular theorists in rewarding ways, as well as for reassembling the canon to generate surprising and fruitful connections. The third composition is a more normative-ontological one, a claim that attention to affect and emotion impels a renewed effort to theorize politics and ethics together in a way that centers on the interactive, sensing body. I thus mobilize feeling as a reading-writing-theorizing-feeling practice, one which explores Pheng Cheah's question: "what is the matter of the political and what is the matter of politics?" (2010, 90). Feeling, as a method, engages the materiality of affect and emotion to offer one standpoint -or perhaps a Deleuzean line of flight -for answering this prompt. Given that McMahon 2 affect itself has not generally been part of political theory or of the ways the political theory canon is regularly interpreted (with some exceptions, of course), such a practice and method are necessarily experimental, and unsure in advance of what emerges from affective-emotional readings of political theory. Indeed, as I will discuss later, one of my motivations for such an approach is to remain open to where reading canonical political theory beside affect theory can take one. Spinoza claims that we do not yet know what a body can do, and that this fact should impel inquiry into the affects, capacities, powers, and knowledges of the body (Spinoza 2005, pt. III prop. II scholia; Deleuze 1990, 226). In terms of this paper, not only do we not yet know what a body is capable of, but we also do not yet know what certain modes of theorizing embodied affect and emotion in political theory can do. I thus seek to mark out one possible method for