Today’s Plan:
- Project Two: Affective Objects
- Discuss: Jenkins
- Discuss: Kalman
- Quick Write / Brainstorm
- Homework
Project Two: Affective Objects
As I said on Friday, our main purpose today is to develop the parameters for our second project. I can get us started by supplying it a name: “affective objects.” We spent last class reviewing Murphie’s essay on various definitions/approaches to affect. I’ll offer this: “affect” refers to bodily responses to other people and our environments that occur at a layer prior to or “below” consciousness. Attending to affect theory means recognizing that our sense of self, our conscious thoughts, our feelings and emotions, and the choices we make are influenced by something outside of ourselves. D. Diane Davis on “physiological laughter.”
I’ve taught this project once before. Here is how I introduced it:
In our first project, we worked with Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy and Walter Ong’s notion of literacy. I shared a reading from Ulmer’s Heuretics in which he argued that a major consequence of literacy was a shift to issues of method. Rather than bask in the magic of a long, persuasive speech (as the oral mind would), the literate mind wanted to know how the speech worked, how to (re)create the speech. The literate mind wanted not magic, but method.
Ulmer’s argument–one I enjoy–is that the development of electrate tools opens up possibilities for new genres and new methods (since a genre can be understood as a collection of typical/expected/productive methods). In project two, I am attempting to invent–or at least delineate–methods for a new genre (which I am calling Affective Objects). How does one affectively explore the affectivity of an object?
This is not a question to which I have an answer. I have ideas, but not answers. My goal is for you to develop an idea that approaches an answer. As I indicated in our last class, I have put together some readings that can help us do that. Today’s readings get us started, albeit in different ways.
Of course, this time around I didn’t teach Gregory Ulmer or Walter Ong in the first project–because I want to spend more time with our other projects this semester. Last time we read Kalman and Jenkins as well, and I asked the class to think about how those texts work, what methods the writers use, to look paragraph by paragraph at how the texts are made more than what they actually say.
And that’s the first task I’ll give you before we get started.
A Few Thoughts
I have a few thoughts I need to write down. First, I hope the projects maintain an oscillation between what an object “means” or “is” objectively, scientifically, to others. What Barthes would call the “studium.” And at the same time is an exploration of what the object means to you, how it feels, what it connects, what it does to you. How it affects. A tension between the scientific, the rational, the objective and the personal, the phenomenological, the subjective. What laughs you?
Homework
Read Schroeppel, Bare Bones, Chapter 6 (Montages), 7 (Lighting), and 8 (Sound).
