Maps of Affect
Steven Shaviro’s Post-cinematic Affect and Jonathan Flatley’s Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism provide a useful framework and glossary to work with as I attempt to infiltrate the obscure abstraction that is affect theory. Shaviro’s and Flatley’s applications and articulations of affective mapping as both practice and concept assist the reader to envision the affective world which they contemplate.
I have long subscribed to the notion that the imagery of maps and mapping can assist us to make the abstract more concrete–not fully as “concrete” as the substance which forms into buildings and roads, but more solidified concepts in our minds. In Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi writes, “In every piece we write, we contemplate a world; and as that world would not otherwise exist, we create it even as we discover it.” I find this quote helpful to share with my students for us to not lose sight of the fact that when we write, we are creating–even as we are discovering–new intellectual territory which others might have mapped before, but which is new to us, and therefore the experience we mold with it is that which we create. This both demystifies and mystifies writing and the writing process.
Shaviro’s and Flatley’s notions/definitions for the terms affect, affective map, and the self (as one that operates/projects onto the affective maps) provide a helpful framework for me in “mapping” affect theory. They assist, for me, in jointly telling the story of affective mapping through the journalist’s questions of Who-What-Where-When-Why-How: Where (and when) might affective mapping take us? Why/to what end ought we to use/practice affective mapping? What is a self (as it operates/charts/projects onto the affective map)? How does a self situate itself in/on, and use, an affective map? To this end, I am pasting quotes below which start to answer these questions, which I can return back to at anytime to refresh my memory as to their notions of and uses for affect theory.
What is affect?
“… Affect is primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying, unqualified, and intensive; while emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified, and meaningful, a “content” that can be attributed to an already-constituted subject. Emotion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and reduced dto the extent that it becomes commensurate with that subject. Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess t heir own emotions” (Shaviro 3).
What is an affective map?
“A map does not just replicate the shape of a territory; rather, it actively inflects and works over that territory. … Affective maps … do not just passively trace or represent, but actively construct and perform, the social relations, flows, and feelings that they are ostensibly ‘about’” (Shaviro 6).
I value this qualification, this framing Shaviro crafts around his affective mapping notion in terms of maps as we already know them. In thinking about “affective mapping” it constructs an ethereal world of affect–and the emotions it boils over into–for the reader to sense. In Shaviro’s methodology here, he is guiding the reader into the emotions-as-spilled-over-affect (as he puts it later in the essay/intro) themselves–not merely using those emotions/affect (theory) to point to what those emotions are “about.” In other words, the affective map tells us the locale of the emotions emanating from the affect rather than using affect as a pathway toward “meaning.”
Where (and when) might affective mapping take us?
“‘Affective mapping’ is the name I am giving to the aesthetic technology … that represents the historicity of one’s affective experience. … Transformation can take place … because the affective map gives one a new sense of one’s relationship to broad historical forces but also inasmuch as it shows one how one’s situation is experienced collectively by a community …” (Flatley 4).
Why/to what end ought we to use/practice affective mapping?
The affective map is “about providing a feeling of orientation and facilitating mobility”; “it is a technology for the representation to oneself of one’s own historically conditioned and changing affective life”; it “not only gives us a view of a terrain shared with others in the present but also traces the paths, resting places, dead ends, and detours we might share with those who came before us (Flatley 7).
The textual practice of affective mapping provides “a portable map, a kind of global positioning device that tells you where you are at this particular moment, giving you a satellite view of your life” (Flatley 93).
What is a self (as it operates/charts/projects onto the affective map) ?
“Today, in the regime of neoliberal capitalism, we see ourselves as subjects precisely to the extent that we are autonomous economic units. As Foucault puts it, neoliberalism defines [us] as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself in his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings” (Shaviro 3).
How does a self situate itself in/on, and use, an affective map?
“Relational space varies from moment to moment, along with the forces that generate and invest it. It continually alters the forces that generate and invest it. It continually alters its curvature and its dimensions; it does not persist as a stable, enduring container for objects that would be situated solidly within it” (Shaviro 16).
For Flatley, an affective map’s “representation works in the following way”: a physical emanation of an emotion such as a shudder serves as a “dropped pin” on, say, Google Maps–one that “opens up the space of self-estrangement that is necessary to get a distance on one’s affects. It also puts one into contact with others, a contact that is imaginary in one sense. But inasmuch as it is based on the shared historicity of that affective life, it is quite real” (Flatley 93).
Notes
1 Particularly useful for me is Flatley’s framing of his argument by staking posts around what it is not: a book about influence (Flatley 9). In situating his argument outside influence, Flatley communicates that time and causality do not matter in this examination, this type of mapping; appropriately for the examination of modernism, this is no linear argument grounded in “clock time (Flatley 28-29).
Works Cited
Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Harvard University Press: 2008.
Shaviro, Steven. Post-cinematic Affect. O-Books: 2010.
Turchi, Peter. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.
