Title: Affective Criticism of Literature: Recasting Social in a New Key of Affects
Abstract: My aim in this editorial is to prove that only an affective criticism of literature and society, unlike Jamesonian political reading, can broadly correspond to social facts' relation to human subjectivity. And such criticism of literature recasts our interpretation of social in a new key of affects in order to confute any readings that impair deep aesthetic conditions of affect underneath social. I argue that social/political is a manifestation/'symptom' of affects, and therefore, to understand any social phenomena or 'political unconscious' of literature and society, incorporation of affect under discussion is imperative. I claim that every social is already an aestheticized social. There is no social which is not aesthetically conditioned. So when we interpret social, we always need to weigh underlying affective aesthetic dimension of social. My use of term 'aesthetic' here refers to body and its affective engagement with world, and 'social' to political, economic and ideological representations. And also, my sense of affective criticism refers to body, affectivity and affects rather than language, text and emotion. I would first like to begin with my surgery of social. A common question: What does it mean to 'think' social? If social constitutes economic and political practices of a given society and relationship of its members of a particular time, what forces constitute fundamental substance of such practices and relationships? In other words, what constitute a socialized self (and even cognitive apparatus) in which are made manifest our economic and political practices, as well as sets of relationships between social members manifest? My answer to these questions is that it is affects and affective relations of bodies that constitute very phenomenon of a social self. The social-the content of subjectivity-is mere a surface effect or a 'symptom' of affects. Every social representation is a codified affect. As Nietzsche says, the relation of representation and power [affect] is so close that all power is represented and every representation is of power. (1) The latent content of every social code is affect. If we remove rubble of social, we reach out to bottom of human existence, where aesthetic processes are active in formation of socialized self. In an attempt to reread nature of social, we find its underpinnings in creativity and affirmation within [human] body. The body is a power house of auto-affects, which impose becoming in social realities and its semiotics, and thus create socialized self. One example for such imposition of auto-affects to social reality, as Foucault refers to, is constitution of gay community in San Francisco in 1980s which was formed, not from top down (state to society to individual), but from of men who constituted themselves as gay, and eventually formed a community and added up new semiotics of sextuality in very social. The individual group's act of self-affectivity is axiomatized as a social field-self-affectivity, I consider here, as an aesthetic phenomenon. So any attempt to understand a de-aestheticized social is blatantly ignoring fundamental aesthetic principles in which human bodies work in production of social. All domains of human subjectivity are social to extent that these living organisms, languages and societies are all expressions of particular structure (2) of affects our bodies produce. Without this structure, neither social nor mental would exist. This understanding of social breaks from representationalist account, assuming social phenomenon as mode of affects (3). This demands to envision a society undivided but works with complex surface of relations, connections and interactions of one body with other body. Each of this social body is not just a unit but a mode of affects. …
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
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