Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect, Nigel Thrift (2004)
Thrift (2004) highlights four approaches or 'translations' in order to define the affect, although they are closely interconnected. All of them understand affect as a form of thinking and not as the irrational or the sublime.
The first one (embodied knowledge) comes out of the phenomenological tradition and aims to "develop descriptions of how emotions occur in everyday life" by bodily states and processes, bypassing the problem of decontextualization and the problem of representation. This strand of work affirms receptivity for a good judgment (e.g.Varela).
The second translation of affect (affect theory) is related to psychoanalytic frames and based on the notion of drive. However, in order to eliminate the reduction of affect into drive, affect is considered to have greater freedom than drive with respect to time, function and objects. Thrift defines it as an attempt to go beyond the adaptive structure of the repressive hypothesis and to continue the Foucauldian project.
The third translation (Spinozan-Deleuzian) is naturalistic and associated with Spinoza and Deleuze. In the monist philosophy of Spinoza, there is only one substance in the universe and there is no Cartesian body-mind duality. Emotion (affectus) is the modification of the body after an encounter, which increases (euphoric) or decreases (dysphoric) the power of action of the body. The encounter takes place between manifold beings of different sorts. (Thrift mentions also the terms 'neuropolitics' and 'microbiopolitics' for a recognition of the realm between thinking and affects, cognition and action.). The Spinozan-Deleuzian notion of affect is best described by Massumi:
"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, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion. If some have the impression that affect has waned, it is because affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique." (Massumi, 2002:28)
Massumi (2002)'s distinction between autonomous affect (which is pre-cognitive and -linguistic) and subjected emotion (the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience) created an affect-emotion gap, especially in cultural anthropology, which is criticized recently by scholars like Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Emily Martin, and many others because of being useless (White, 2017:177-178). Navaro (2017) also emphasizes the repetitiveness and inefficiency of the affect-emotion gap and reminds of the critics of feminist geographers.
The fourth translation (neo-Darwinian) considers affect as a deep physiological change manifesting itself on the human or animal face. Thrift is mostly interested in it because of the intense relationship between new media technologies (screens) and the human face (the primary place of affect in human bodies).
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the affect of the graves of the martyrs is filtered through [7P (collective memory+individual memory+subconscious] according to each dividual (or person) and produce emotions which might tolerate, criticize, support, oppose etc. the concept of martyrdom. this first step (the production of emotions out of affects) is unconscious. the second step is the conscious one: the emotions are transformed/reflected by the graves again as an interpellation and subjectivization process. these steps may repeat several times during a confrontation. each confrontation starts the process again and repetitions reinforce the subjectivization, differences create new ones.
If the filter is totally closed (no collective or individual memory [which includes information, emotion and subconscious material] or blase situation (affects are blocked by the nervous system to protect the body) the person is not affected at all. no emotion arises. ---> important point: being open and not open (art work)!!--> the filter might be closed in the second step: a feeling of distress or fear might block the affect: being afraid of remembering, fear of not understanding or wasting time or more complex feelings produced by the subconscious.
possible interpellations:
1. the image of concrete truth: dead bodies of martyrs are lying there. they are creators and protectors of the independent nation-state. we are living peacefully in an independent state thanks to those who fought the enemy and lost their lives. we will need new martyrs if we have new enemies. we always have enemies, so we always need martyrs. this is normal and a fact.
2. the image of indebtedness and guilt: the concept of martyrdom might not be negated, because we owe to the martyrs. the emotion here is guilt. being against the war and against the martyrdom means being unappreciative. when someone dies in order to protect you, you are indebted. you are indebted when you were born. therefore, if you criticize or negate martyrdom you feel guilty.
3. the image of becoming something out of nothing: you might be poor, you might be a loser in the society but if you sacrifice your body (the only thing you have) you will be immortal. immortal in a religious sense, whose source is the Holy Quran and immortal in a mundane sense, whose source is the collective memory. you (your family) will also gain economically thanks to the state. by sacrificing yourself, you become something. (Gölz, 2019)'den alıntı:
https://www.academia.edu/39112997/G%C3%B6lz_Martyrdom_and_the_Struggle_for_Power_Interdisciplinary_Perspectives_on_Martyrdom_in_the_Modern_Middle_East._Editorial_Behemoth_12_no._1_2019_2_13
4. the image of freedom: to find a true cause eliminate the boredom of freedom. you give up the endless struggle to find the meaning of life, to plan a future, to take care of yourself. you leave all the ontological obligations of life behind, you can finally forget and eliminate yourself and reach the ultimate reason of life: death. (this is nihilism: find the text about nihilism types related to terrorism). and you can't say yourself that it's the easy way because you pay the highest price. so the circuit of the emotional economy is closed.
5. the image of militarism: modern conscription system is part of thanatopolitics. individuals are obliged to kill and die in order to become a citizen. a bloody (and gendered) contract with the state. it makes us question whether this is a biopolitical regime or a thanatopolitical one. the feeling is sadness and anger, despair.
6. the image of political Islam: Islam becomes a state apparatus in order to manufacture consent for internal and external wars. the feeling is anger.
7. no image
8...
these three emotive images are reproduced daily by military, governmental, religious, educational and mediatic institutions. there is no escape since cognitive analysis through criticism is blocked by emotions. Practices and discourses around monuments, graves, flags, commemorations reproduce these emotive images.
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public transportation: the repetition of everyday life, the repetition of the urban landscape. through BRT, EMC becomes a place of repetition rather than a place of experience. This repetition also renders death and martyrdom normal and even necessary in patriotic and religious terms. however, it is also possible to become a place of experience because of the unusual encounter for the newcomers. p.12, cultural politics of emotion (başka yerden alıntı yapmıştı ahmed...bakılacak)
----
EMC cemetery is, in fact, an intersection of two infrastructures: one of them is D-100 Highway, which is, first of all, an urban transportation infrastructure including a public BRT line pumping in and out thousands of people every day; and the other one is a mnemonic/affective infrastructure made of monuments, graves, flags, and ceremonies reproducing and transforming the collective memory every day.
According to Knox (2017) an infrastructure becomes visible only after its rupture and this breakdown of the service (which supposed to continue in repetition and became invisible like the flag of banal nationalism) creates the conditions for an embodied or affective relationship, which at the end produces an experience of politics culminating with the reimagination of political entities.
So, parallel to Robert Musil (1927)'s famous remark on the invisibility of monuments, how does a mnemonic/affective infrastructure break down? When do people start to question and criticize religious, social or cultural norms?
----
White, D. (2017) "Affect: An Introduction", Cultural Anthropology, 32 (2), pp.175-80.
Navaro, Y. (2017) "Diversifying Affect", Cultural Anthropology, 32 (2), pp.209-214.
Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press.
Knox, H. (2017) Affective Infrastructures and the Political Imagination, Public Culture, 29:2, pp.376-379.
The first one (embodied knowledge) comes out of the phenomenological tradition and aims to "develop descriptions of how emotions occur in everyday life" by bodily states and processes, bypassing the problem of decontextualization and the problem of representation. This strand of work affirms receptivity for a good judgment (e.g.Varela).
The second translation of affect (affect theory) is related to psychoanalytic frames and based on the notion of drive. However, in order to eliminate the reduction of affect into drive, affect is considered to have greater freedom than drive with respect to time, function and objects. Thrift defines it as an attempt to go beyond the adaptive structure of the repressive hypothesis and to continue the Foucauldian project.
The third translation (Spinozan-Deleuzian) is naturalistic and associated with Spinoza and Deleuze. In the monist philosophy of Spinoza, there is only one substance in the universe and there is no Cartesian body-mind duality. Emotion (affectus) is the modification of the body after an encounter, which increases (euphoric) or decreases (dysphoric) the power of action of the body. The encounter takes place between manifold beings of different sorts. (Thrift mentions also the terms 'neuropolitics' and 'microbiopolitics' for a recognition of the realm between thinking and affects, cognition and action.). The Spinozan-Deleuzian notion of affect is best described by Massumi:
"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, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion. If some have the impression that affect has waned, it is because affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique." (Massumi, 2002:28)
The fourth translation (neo-Darwinian) considers affect as a deep physiological change manifesting itself on the human or animal face. Thrift is mostly interested in it because of the intense relationship between new media technologies (screens) and the human face (the primary place of affect in human bodies).
-------
the affect of the graves of the martyrs is filtered through [7P (collective memory+individual memory+subconscious] according to each dividual (or person) and produce emotions which might tolerate, criticize, support, oppose etc. the concept of martyrdom. this first step (the production of emotions out of affects) is unconscious. the second step is the conscious one: the emotions are transformed/reflected by the graves again as an interpellation and subjectivization process. these steps may repeat several times during a confrontation. each confrontation starts the process again and repetitions reinforce the subjectivization, differences create new ones.
If the filter is totally closed (no collective or individual memory [which includes information, emotion and subconscious material] or blase situation (affects are blocked by the nervous system to protect the body) the person is not affected at all. no emotion arises. ---> important point: being open and not open (art work)!!--> the filter might be closed in the second step: a feeling of distress or fear might block the affect: being afraid of remembering, fear of not understanding or wasting time or more complex feelings produced by the subconscious.
possible interpellations:
1. the image of concrete truth: dead bodies of martyrs are lying there. they are creators and protectors of the independent nation-state. we are living peacefully in an independent state thanks to those who fought the enemy and lost their lives. we will need new martyrs if we have new enemies. we always have enemies, so we always need martyrs. this is normal and a fact.
2. the image of indebtedness and guilt: the concept of martyrdom might not be negated, because we owe to the martyrs. the emotion here is guilt. being against the war and against the martyrdom means being unappreciative. when someone dies in order to protect you, you are indebted. you are indebted when you were born. therefore, if you criticize or negate martyrdom you feel guilty.
3. the image of becoming something out of nothing: you might be poor, you might be a loser in the society but if you sacrifice your body (the only thing you have) you will be immortal. immortal in a religious sense, whose source is the Holy Quran and immortal in a mundane sense, whose source is the collective memory. you (your family) will also gain economically thanks to the state. by sacrificing yourself, you become something. (Gölz, 2019)'den alıntı:
https://www.academia.edu/39112997/G%C3%B6lz_Martyrdom_and_the_Struggle_for_Power_Interdisciplinary_Perspectives_on_Martyrdom_in_the_Modern_Middle_East._Editorial_Behemoth_12_no._1_2019_2_13
4. the image of freedom: to find a true cause eliminate the boredom of freedom. you give up the endless struggle to find the meaning of life, to plan a future, to take care of yourself. you leave all the ontological obligations of life behind, you can finally forget and eliminate yourself and reach the ultimate reason of life: death. (this is nihilism: find the text about nihilism types related to terrorism). and you can't say yourself that it's the easy way because you pay the highest price. so the circuit of the emotional economy is closed.
5. the image of militarism: modern conscription system is part of thanatopolitics. individuals are obliged to kill and die in order to become a citizen. a bloody (and gendered) contract with the state. it makes us question whether this is a biopolitical regime or a thanatopolitical one. the feeling is sadness and anger, despair.
6. the image of political Islam: Islam becomes a state apparatus in order to manufacture consent for internal and external wars. the feeling is anger.
7. no image
8...
these three emotive images are reproduced daily by military, governmental, religious, educational and mediatic institutions. there is no escape since cognitive analysis through criticism is blocked by emotions. Practices and discourses around monuments, graves, flags, commemorations reproduce these emotive images.
--------------
public transportation: the repetition of everyday life, the repetition of the urban landscape. through BRT, EMC becomes a place of repetition rather than a place of experience. This repetition also renders death and martyrdom normal and even necessary in patriotic and religious terms. however, it is also possible to become a place of experience because of the unusual encounter for the newcomers. p.12, cultural politics of emotion (başka yerden alıntı yapmıştı ahmed...bakılacak)
----
EMC cemetery is, in fact, an intersection of two infrastructures: one of them is D-100 Highway, which is, first of all, an urban transportation infrastructure including a public BRT line pumping in and out thousands of people every day; and the other one is a mnemonic/affective infrastructure made of monuments, graves, flags, and ceremonies reproducing and transforming the collective memory every day.
According to Knox (2017) an infrastructure becomes visible only after its rupture and this breakdown of the service (which supposed to continue in repetition and became invisible like the flag of banal nationalism) creates the conditions for an embodied or affective relationship, which at the end produces an experience of politics culminating with the reimagination of political entities.
So, parallel to Robert Musil (1927)'s famous remark on the invisibility of monuments, how does a mnemonic/affective infrastructure break down? When do people start to question and criticize religious, social or cultural norms?
----
White, D. (2017) "Affect: An Introduction", Cultural Anthropology, 32 (2), pp.175-80.
Navaro, Y. (2017) "Diversifying Affect", Cultural Anthropology, 32 (2), pp.209-214.
Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press.
Knox, H. (2017) Affective Infrastructures and the Political Imagination, Public Culture, 29:2, pp.376-379.
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