Today’s Plan:
- Watch Project One Videos
- Project Two Timeline
- What is Affect?
- Homework
What is Affect?
For the rest of the week I’d like to take a short break from discussing cinematography and technology and lay some aesthetic foundations for our second project. Our second project will attempt to fuse two inspirations: the work of multimodal artist Maira Kalman and contemporary work on affect.
In general use, the terms affect, emotion, and mood tend to be interchangeable. But in psychology–and by extension across the humanities–affect is different from emotion. Emotion is something that I know I feel. I can articulate it. I am consciously aware of it. For instance, I am sad.
Affect is different, however. It points to how “I” feel before I know how I feel. It is the feeling emanating through my body and influencing my consciousness. Affect affects how I exist in the world at a given time. This notion of affect I am developing resonates with Heidegger’s phenomenology–that our experience of our own being occurs within the bounds of a particular, but often inarticulable, mood.
In Rhetoric, studies of affect explore how places and spaces can subtly influence our moods. Thomas Rickert refers to this as attending to ambience: how space influences affect/feelings and thus structures or influences our experiences. One might be familiar with the derive of Situationalist International from the 1950’s and 1960’s. In the past, I have taught video projects that have attempted to tease out the affective registers of a place.
This semester I am interested in exploring something different. I am interested in having you explore your affective connection to an object–to, in a sense, think about how an object orders you, (re)frames you, changes you, authorizes you, affects you.
First, however, I want to make a concrete connection between video and affect. To do this, I’d like to reference Walter Ong’s work on literacy. Ong studied how the invention of writing changed the way people thought. Here’s a link to my stock lecture on Walter Ong. When I was writing my dissertation a decade ago, I was one of many scholars prompted by Ong’s work to think about how the Internet might change metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, etc. I was thinking particularly of Wikipedia, and argued that we would move away from singularity, autonomy, permanence,
and certainty and toward plurality, interactivity, transience, and risk/ambiguity.
But the Internets-as-wikipedia (digitally manipulable and responsive text) are not the only sweeping technological change constituting what Gregory Ulmer has termed “electracy.” There’s also video. Video is quite different than literacy–in either print or digital form. Video, I want to argue, amplifies feeling and mood. Video can capture ambience. It can–without words–explore and communicate feeling. But video is linear. It is determined by a single author. Once shot and/or streamed, it cannot be edited by the audience. We receive video the same way we receive a printed page. There is no “reply” box. We cannot speak back to a video the way we can to a tweet. But, again, video is always more than the words it communicates.
I call this project the “Affective Object” project. Over the next week, I’ll ask you to unpack what that might mean. I’ve started that work here. Next week, you will compose an assignment sheet in which you explicate what affect means, what an affective object might be, and lay out what object you might focus on for an affective object video. Following that you will generate a script for your project. You will indicate locations where you will shoot your video. Later, we will explore more of the Schroeppel and develop technical requirements for the video similar to the first project.
This week we will focus on reading material that might help us develop this project. One major relay will be Kalman’s My Favorite Things. I don’t want you to recreate Kalman’s project. That would be boring. I do want you to identify key elements of Kalman’s project (think like ingredients in a recipe) and then think about how you might incorporate those dimensions into your own project.
We will also read a smattering of affect theory. I will give a complete timeline of the second project in Friday’s class.
Homework
For Friday, read pages 1-104 of Kalman’s My Favorite Things.
For Monday, I will ask you to read three things. Please print copies of .pdf articles and annotate them. Come to class ready to share two elements of a potential affective object project per article (I will ask you: what is one sentence or paragraph in the article that helps us trace out a definition of an affective object?”).
- Kalman, 104-end
- Sarah Ahmed, “Happy Objects”
- Henry Jenkins, “Death-Defying Super Heroes” (pdf via files section in Canvas)
