affective affinities of a different order

Music: The Byrds: Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968)

Yesterday, UT professor Sam Gosling gave a masterful talk on one of his many research programs: Snoop. Basically, Gosling is exploring the ways in which the environments in which we live tell others about our personality (as measured by the five factor model). Although Gosling is mostly interested in finding statistically significant correlations between how a stranger rates, for example, the personality traits of a dorm room and how the actual occupant (and his or her friends) rates himself, I was interested in how much of this "information" we normally pick up unconsciously: having recently become an HGTV addict, it is clear how much we invest in organizing space to project a persona (or to absent one). In a sense, Snoop is Gosling's more grounded version of Blink---there's evidence to show a degree of accuracy in snap judgments; although there is no way to measure it, I suspect there is a mountain of information processed about other people's stuff that we aren't consciously aware of.

It's job hunting season, and friends are interviewing hither and yon. If I can count the times I said to someone, "trust your gut," I guarantee I'd have to use other people's fingers and toes.

Recently, I've had opportunities to share and discuss my most recent work with scholars and teachers in very different disciplines. As I was talking to students about Sam's presentation yesterday, I starting thinking about the similarities between the hostility folks have for the unconscious and the affective. I was giving a presentation last semester that touched on a Lacanian habit: one reason I am interested in the object of speech is because it is the meeting place of the signifier and affect, the reasoned and the irrational, and so on. Speech can speak the unconscious, and often without our consent. A couple of people objected: "how can one have an affect without the signifier?"

"Well, I define affect as the body in feeling, and I think we can have the body in feeling without its being meaningful."

"But, how can you know about this affect, then?"

"You signify it."

"So, you're saying that you can only have affect with the signifier."

"No," I said. "If you deliver affect to the signifer, then you've made it meaningful and it becomes a feeling."

"But [insert rant here]."

"Well, professor X, I think we'll have to agree to disagree."

And so we did, and do. Still, the mood or character of this scholars objection feels very similar to the protests against psychoanalysis. Both my position on affect and the unconscious hold tenaciously to the belief that there are things and experiences and events and moments outside of language that happen and exert an influence on my so-called languaged life. There is, in other words, an outside.

Thinking about this last night, I was reminded of Brian Massumi's powerful opening to Parables of the Virtual. After noting that "cultural scholarship" for the last twenty years is afraid of radical realism, he suggests variations of mediation, such as Althusser's interpellation model, staved off the realist phobia. But what of "the body?"

The body was seen to be centrally involved in these everyday practices of resistance. But this thoroughly mediated body could only be a 'discursive' body: one with its signifying gestures. Signifying gestures make sense. If properly 'performed,' they may also unmake sense by scrambling significations already in place. Make an unmake sense as they might, they don't sense. Sensation is utterly redundant to their description. Or worse, it is destructive to it, because it appeals to unmediated experience. Unmediated experience signals a danger that is worse, if anything can be, of naived realism, its polar opposite, naïve subjectivism.

Here is where a certain version of Deleuze and a preferred reading of Lacan seem to met: there are more things in experience, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your theory. Lacan attempts to set this truism into a certain ethical disposition---and we might say, in a sense, all posty thinkers do.

So I've just been thinking: is resistance to the work my colleagues and I would like to do a sort of drive to mastery for which the object is really interchangeable? Whether it be affect outside the signifier or the unconscious (worse, the symbolic outside the clutches of the comprehensible), is this dis-ease of a dispositional---and therefore, affective---character? Why is asserting that there are experiences which elude the machinations of meaning troublesome to so many scholars?

The stupidity of atheism is its faith in the absolute denial.