In today’s class I want to work out a bit more what we might mean by “affective object.” Our first example came from Henry Jenkins, and his relationship to comic books in the essay “Death-Defying Superheroes.” Today we turn to Maira Kalman’s 2014 book My Favorite Things.
A question that can resonate throughout today’s discussion: why is she interested in broken furniture, shoes, buttons and books?
First, let’s listen to a bit of Kalman:
2012/10 Maira Kalman from CreativeMornings on Vimeo
Notes toward a process:
- A Focus on place
- How happy are you / how sad are you?
- “Which brings me to the chicken” / sudden transitions. Lack of explicit connection.
- The unexpected, odd little moment
- First instinct: Time. Precious. Fleeting. Be aware of the moment. Greatest moments when you are on your own. (Why? Because you are open to an encounter).
- Journey: walk around the block, or a trip to India. You can see as much in a walk around the block as you can on a trip around the world.
- How do you navigate the world with a sense of humor.
- An interest in history. Tracing the history of specific objects.
- Juxtaposition: Lincoln. Personal history [Subjective]. National history [Objective]. Breakfast at the museum. A hat. Serendipity.
- An empty brain. Not a stupid brain.
- The dog and bemused indifference.
- Idiosyncratic details.
- “I didn’t have to think, I just fell in love with it.”
- The countess / Cindy Sherman / presence as performance art as interruption
Ella Browning and I analyzed Kalman’s aesthetic process/product, outlined in the video above, concluding:
In this series of images from …And Pursuit of Happiness, we see representations of our four principles of choric invention: a prioritizing of space / place; a juxtaposition of subjective (affective) experience alongside objective history; a resistance to synthesis; and finally, a resistance to codification. As we have said, in line with this fourth principle, we cannot generate a prescriptive method for choric invention that guarantees specific results. However, Kalman’s processes and her work provide suggested practices that increase the possibility of moving through a particular space and experiencing an “ah ha!” or punctum moment, whether it is one of affective delight or a painful sting. This series of images, then, serves as an exemplary model for choric invention, and for all of its theoretical complexity, and all of its challenges to traditional notions of teaching, we believe choric invention lends itself to practice, particularly through the use of Kalman’s suggested principles.
Currently, I am working on a piece that deals with feminist theory and pedagogy, specifically the work of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. Lynn Worsham articulates how, taken together, these woman produce an approach to writing (and thinking) called “ecriture feminine.” In short, my argument is that the Ulmer’s call for electrate writing is an example of ecriture feminine–a form of writing that eschews the intellectual underpinnings of logo-centric (masculine) writing. And, again in short, this is a method of writing less interested in Universal truth, objectivity, and synthesis [what we have in common] as it is in affect, subjective experience, and idiosyncrasy [what marks us as unique].
While the theory/philosophy here might be complicated, I want to argue that we can unpack some of that complication by paying close attention to Kalman’s work. Here is my connection between Kalman and new media. And that’s what I want to do in class today: I want you to go through the book and trace a/the theme of this work.
To do this, I want to specify what I mean by theme. The theme of any aesthetic work, be it a novel, a television show, a painting, a graphic novel, a video game, is what it contributes to our understanding of what it means to exist or how we should/could live. At its most simple, it is the moral of the story (but not all themes can be expressed as a moral). So, I’ll ask you to identify what you think is the theme of Kalman’s work, and to find 5 pages that speak to this particular theme.
Potential Themes
I noticed two dominant themes in Kalman’s work, the first was the prevalence of sadness, it’s inevitability. The second, and obviously related, was the passing of time, the inevitability of change and, ultimately, the reality of death.
This theme first surfaces on page 15, when she writes “Somewhere not too far away, the czar and the czarina with their beautiful children, all in white, were taking tea in their palace.
Soon that would end. As all things do.
This sadness really hit me on page 61: “Watching a person eat soup can break your heart.” And again on page 37: “You can rely on sadness. Happiness, well…that is a different story.” Page 87/88, from a door: “People were always coming and going and dying. She was killed in the Holocaust. Which brings us inevitably to sorrow”
And this acknowledgement of sadness leads a realization of death. Page 34:
There is a piano, and music will be played in the room.
And it has something (or everything) to do with Life and Death.
And Time. Always Time.
And page 65’s nostalgic discussion of old candy stores and candy boxes carefully hand wrapped (a time long past). And these two themes wrap up in the book’s conclusion, on pages 141-145.
But I want to suggest that these themes, the objective message of the text, are offset, juxtaposed, against the earnest joy of the everyday and the idiosyncratic. See especially page 78.
In short, I want to suggest that Jenkins and Kalman provide us with methods for tracing the affective resonances of objects. How they compose us. How they resonate with us. Reflecting on objects and our investment in them, their histories, our histories, becomes a electrate method of introspection and invention.
