Transcript Grossberg & Affect

Grossberg & Affect
{
A totally biased (but don’t let that think you have
to agree with me in your papers) account of the
only man writing intelligently about popular
culture today or in the past 100 years, which is not
to say there still aren’t problems but whatev.
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Currently Morris Davis Distinguished
Faculty at UNC Chapel Hill
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Degrees in Cultural Studies, Media
Studies, and Anthropology
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Did Post-Doc work at Birmingham
School of Cultural Studies (worked
under Stuart Hall)
Background
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Popular (poaching, contradictory, pleasurable)
versus Legitimate (authentic, hierarchical,
intellectual)
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Popular (stylized, artificial, marginal, resisting)
versus Mainstream (naturalized, incorporated,
homogenous)
Rejecting Binaries
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“My work has always involved a defense of the
mainstream . . . Or at least an unwillingness to
begin by subdividing popular culture into
politically resonant categories. I want to defend
pop culture not only against those who are
hostile to any of its forms . . . [and] against
those who are hostile to the largest part of
popular culture because they champion
marginal trends or appropriations, as in
subcultural theories [and fandom studies, I
would add]” (“Intro” 4).
Defensive Stance
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No such thing as a homogenous mainstream.
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Pop culture is a social pastiche of structured
practices, codes, and effects
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If there is it’s marked by differences not sameness
Like B-Ham, but G’s emphasis is on the social
(versus textual) and is against predetermined,
dominant meanings
A “description of a relationship between cultural
practices and their contexts” (“Intro” 4).
Popular Practices
In other words
, Embrace Taylor
We are both:
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Empowered & disempowered
Active & passive
Relating to others & disengaging with others
Resisting & incorporating
Being logical and contradictory
When engaging with
popular culture
Incorporation & Excorporation
Incorporation & Excorporation
Incorporation & Excorporation
Incorporation & Excorporation
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By breaking culture down to the interplay of
producers, texts, and audiences (conceived of
as existing in separate places), “the
'meaningfulness' of culture is reduced to the
interpretation of meaning in its simplest and
narrowest sense, to that which is easiest to talk
about within the codes of Western academic
theories: semantic content, cognitive
significance, narrative meaning, and
representation” (Grossberg, Dancing 272).
Away from Meaning
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Not an attribution or formal element of a text
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Rather, what is the relationship formed
between the person and the text
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What are the complex relationships and
investments that inform that person/text
relation?
“What does it mean for something
to be ‘popular’”
A box of jigsaw pieces that belong
to multiple puzzles.
The original boxes are gone. You
have no idea what the finished
pieces should look like.
The pieces could fit in different
puzzle formations.
“Thus, the identity of each piece is only the set of its possible places in the
as yet undefined contexts. It is its possible functions. Thus you can not
name a piece or describe its contribution before the puzzle itself is
assembled, but of course you can not know ahead of time what is being
assembled” (“Intro” 11).
The Jigsaw Puzzle Metaphor
Signifying Practices (Frankfurts,
Birmingham, analysis for semantic
meaning) take a puzzle piece and insist
it relates to another specific piece . . .
But any meaning is narrow, shortsighted, a shot in the dark, and most
shows the puzzle assembler’s
preferences.
However, every piece is
marked (marred) by its
shape and appearance as
seeming to go somewhere.
That’s why this type of
analysis is so easy and
unsurprising.
I.e., a Miley Cyrus (one piece) can be
linked to racial appropriation (another
piece) or the “proper” expression of
female sexuality (another piece) but that
insists upon one possible puzzle
formation at the extent of all others.
Give that box to someone else and they
will build in a completely different way.
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“Read alternatively as a function
that allows and is allowed by
particular connections, analysis is
more a process of mapping the
vectors of effects that traverse and
encircle any piece as a possible
practice” (“Intro” 11).
Instead . . .
The possible practices of
loving, hating, being
outraged by Miley Cyrus
are dependent on countless
connections that make those
positions emergently possible
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“A cultural formation describes the lines that
distribute, place, and connect cultural practices,
effects, and social groups.
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Different social groups have differential access to
specific clusters of practices and those relations are
themselves part of the determination or articulation
of the formation.
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Such articulations create a series of ‘alliances’ each
representing a particular selective appropriation of
the formulation itself; no alliance includes every
element of the formulation” (“Mapping” 71)
Mattering Maps
“The visual and
legible [semiotic
meaning] ends
up foregrounding the
distinction
between high
and low
culture”
Affect: The Neuro/Bio Turn
An “energetic
phenomenon”
involving an agitation
of the central nervous
system that
manifested itself in
symptoms.
Once the agitation
could be released, the
symptoms would
disappear.
Freud
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“The name we give to forces beneath,
alongside, or generally other than conscious
knowing, vital forces insisting beyond
emotion– that can serve to drive us toward
movement, toward thought and extension, that
can likewise suspend us across a barely
registering accretion of force-relations, or that
can leave us overwhelmed by the world’s
apparent intractability.” (Seigworth & Gregg 1)
A Fine Definition
Studying the texts of
fandom/participatory culture
merely recasts the fans as a “text”
to be traditionally analyzed.
Affect theory finds it much more
interesting to study what
motivates these people, causes
them to act, and makes their
investments so deep, makes their
investment manifest in one way
in contrast to others (or other
people’s)
Fandom Studies is not wrong but . . .
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“An emotion is a subjective content, the
sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an
experience which is from that point onward
defined as personal. Emotion is qualified
intensity . . . it is intensity owned and
recognized . . . affect is unqualified. As such, it
is not ownable or recognizable” (Massumi,
Parables 28).
“Other than conscious
knowing”
Neuro-Rhetorics! Soon to be a Course
Offering @ UVU!
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Humans don’t decide to act or feel by putting their
intentions in motion, the body prepares us for
action and feeling by adding a level of intensity to
the situations/contexts the mind and body find
themselves enveloped within.
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This intensity is “the beginning of a selection” (30),
the “turning point at which a physical system
paradoxically embodies multiple and normally
mutually exclusive potentials, only one of which is
selected” (Parables, Massumi 32-33).
Schrodinger’s Body
Do you really
control
whether or not
you go see
Noah?
Intensity: Back
to Mattering Maps
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We are not as consciously in control of our
tastes as we’d like to think
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We paradoxically have potentially liked
everything we hate (and vice versa)
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Affective responses often trump any
assessment of formal textual qualities/quality
Implications
Affect . . . [becomes] a
palimpsest of force
encounters traversing
the ebbs and swells of
intensities that pass
between bodies”
(Siegworth 2).
This is why my
Freshman class sucks.
Transfer of Affect
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Volitional power
Mood
Investment
Energization
Mattering
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The ability to effect and be effected
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Affect is the very possibility of agency
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Grossberg’s Key Terms on
Affect
“Affect is the term I use to describe
the observable differences in how
practices matter to, or are taken up
by, different configurations of
popular discourse and practices”
(“Intro” 13)
“Popular culture is constantly
enacting and enabling specific forms
and trajectories of movement
(change) and stability (agency). It
defines certain formations of
practices as the possible sites of
investment” (14).
Affect and Pop Culture
“Understanding this
formation [of rock
music] involves trying
to map the conditions
and effects of its
emergence,
understanding why
this particular popular
formation appeared
rather than another”
(“Intro” 17).
What to Do With It?
• Doesn’t write his own
songs
• Appropriates black
culture and musical
structures
• Has a funny hair-do
that’s stupid
• Gets in trouble with the
law
• Is widely listened to by
millions of people
• Songs show little relative
difference– mainly
repetitive
• Image and Style often
trump musical abilities
• Doesn’t write his own
songs
• Appropriates black
culture and musical
structures
• Has a funny hair-do
that’s stupid
• Gets in trouble with the
law
• Is widely listened to by
millions of people
• Songs show little relative
difference– mainly
repetitive
• Image and Style often
trump musical abilities
Republican Party and
Conservatism in
general have tapped
into affective logic
more than liberals
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Politics
Climate Change
Pro-Life
Gay Marriage
“You didn’t build
that.”