Recently, I’ve been reading sound-related materials, including patents, from the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th. And I keep asking: What did it sound like then? What was New York noise like in the 1920s? What did it feel like to be lured into a store by a phonograph?
When I wrote only about literature, I didn’t tend to think about these kind of questions. For one, I wasn’t very “feely.” Finding something like affect or emotion in the novel was far too subjective of an enterprise. It was too reader-oriented. It would only enable the possibility of—egad—”identifying” with characters. Yet more generally, sense perception never really occurred to me as relevant to how I studied lit. Or if it did, then it was just a theme or trope—a paper on “the eye in [enter modernist author's name here]‘s [enter title of literary impressionist novel here].” Before New York noise and phonographs, my source material was visual. On the page. In hand.
It’s Saturday. And, yes yes yes, true, I’m a bit late in the game to write about election nite; nevertheless, I can’t resist talking about swarms.
In the past, I’ve been prone to unpack such collective movements through zombie films, especially the fast zombie variety. At that juncture, I was using words like “hyper-animate” and “affect” and “intensity” to articulate where recent films are going with the ever-emergent zombie, computer-generated imagery, and the politics of code. What was subtending all of these impulses was the desire—my desire—to talk about technology and organization through a model that isn’t hinged to consciousness. Something perhaps comparable to a smart mob without the premeditation or cell phones. For instance, in Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart writes the following in a section called “Swarming”:
We will follow any hint of energy, at least for a little while.
When something happens, we swarm toward it, gaze at it, sniff it, absorb its force, pour over its details, make fun of it, hide from it, spit it out, or develop a taste for it. We complain about the compulsion to participate. We deny its pull. We blame it on the suburbs and TV and ourselves. But we desire it too, and the cure is usually another kind of swarming, this time under the sign of redemption: a mobilization for justice . . . some way of keeping our collective eyes open. (70)
A collective politics of ordinary affects. A getting caught up in something before you realize what’s happening. Not unconsciousness, but not necessarily about consciousness, either. Consciousness occurs after-the-affected-fact.
And after Tuesday nite, I realized that I didn’t need something like zombie films, or zombies, to make this argument anymore. There’s a rich history of such swarming—quite similar to Agamben’s “coming community,” or his “politics of whatever singularity” (85), or a community that affirms no identity—that arguably occurred on Tuesday.
However, to situate Tuesday in a history of swarmings isn’t to call it any less intense or overwhelming. For example, consider this footage from the University of Washington:
Or from Broadway and Pike:
Quite difficult to deny such a pull.
Elsewhere, in “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Lauren Berlant writes of “collective attachment” and the feel tank, “Feminism Unleashed.” There she describes how people who are politically depressed and detached from participation in the political sphere might actually become attached to each other through negative emotions (e.g., apathy and discontent). In a fantastic line, she asks how negativity might be imagined as “a way of being critical without consciousness.”
I can’t help but think that, for some, Tuesday nite’s swarms were another way of being critical without consciousness and mobilizing negativity in affective directions. These might be the same people who don’t need zombie films anymore.
About my preparation for the dissertation, one thing is for certain: I came to Mark Hansen’s work far too late in my graduate career. I’m in the process of reading both New Philosophy for New Media and Bodies in Code, and the returns I’m getting by the page are incredibly high. Ridiculously high.
For one, in New Philosophy for New Media, Hansen gives us the term, “affectivity,” which is “the capacity of the body to experience itself as ‘more than itself’ and thus to deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new” (7). This term later intersects quite productively with the digital image, about which Hansen writes: “the image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience” (10). Both of these moves have basically given me more precise terminology for talking about affect, interfaces, and digital media.
At least for my project, chapters four and six of New Philosophy particularly provide concrete concepts for mobilization. I especially like what Hansen does with Brian Massumi’s work, not to mention how he picks up Deleuze’s Cinema books and rethinks how “movement-vision” is articulated. For instance, there’s a moment in chapter six (“The Affective Topology of New Media Art”) where Hansen parses out movement-vision from proprioception: “movement-vision names the bodily ‘underside’ of vision, a form of proprioception oriented toward external perception, whereas proprioception proper designates the body’s nonvisual, tactile experience of itself, a form directed toward the bodily production of affection (affectivity)” (230). That’s just brill. And so useful.
Predictably, when talking about sound technologies, I want to start unfolding how sound corresponds with the body folding in on itself. Obviously, when you are working with literature as your primary material, locating such experiences in a text is quite difficult. Nevertheless, in Hansen’s eloquent account of affectivity and proprioception, I think there’s a space that can be opened up through a genealogy of (to borrow from Hansen) affect as an interface—a genealogy that emerges by tracing and historicizing sonic technocultures. Where this approach might differ from others is in its emphasis on bodily awareness (as opposed to projections of the body). An emphasis on how a body hears itself and relates to space (including the space of the body itself), not how others hear a body and situate it in space. The trick, it seems, is how to speak of a politics here. Locational approaches to embodiment have always—it seems—been the most productive vehicles for technocultural politics. Then again, I have a feeling that Bodies in Code might force me to reconsider those vehicles.
More on that soon. For now, it’s been a good day for clarifying something as nebulous as affect.
Work Cited:
Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.
Over the course of the last few days, I’ve been reading up on various notions of overload—information overload, cognitive overload, and sensory overload, in particular—and their intersections with technology. This search began, in part, because I just finished re-reading Shaping Things, which attends to the importance of cognitive load in technocultural practices. Cognitive overload was also mentioned at the Born Digital talk I attended last nite, and the Digital Natives wiki has a section dedicated to digital information overload.
It’s all pretty overwhelming, really.
But the most engaging thing I came across is about sensory overload, and—surprise!—it’s on YouTube. It’s a stunning video entitled, “Sensory Overload Simulation.” Not only does it perform a persuasive argument from sensory experience, as well as a critique of normative embodiment; it also uses digital storytelling to mobilize Transformers in a way that forces the audience to briefly inhabit several sense positions. In fact, through “sensory simulation,” it actually alienates the audience, thereby demonstrating how distinct is empathy for someone’s thoughts, or even their memories, from empathy for someone’s lived experiences and perceptions. Or, a distinction between empathizing with information and what it means and empathizing with how that information is embodied and how it means. Of course, parsing out these two is forever tricky. Still, after watching this video, we have to (re)consider whether the latter’s even possible.
I am an autistic adult who is sick of so-called “experts” trying to explain what they think an autistic person is going through. They think they can “fix” autistic children by forcing them to act normal.
Watch this video and see how normal you think ANYBODY can act when they’re going through what I simulate for you all.
Here's my vita (in PDF). It is also available, in sections, at the top of this portfolio. Below are lists of projects unraveling and habits developing.
