Affect Theory as Pedagogy of the ‘Non-’

What is the relationship of affect to the non- of non-philosophy? And how might asking this question also go some distance toward answering (or raising) questions about the continuing relevance of disciplinarity itself? By first taking up minor remarks made by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in What is Philosophy? – especially around the work of Francois Laurelle – this essay will explore how some of the implications of affect’s relation to the ‘non-‘ intersect with matters of immanence, pedagogy, and, finally, with the resoluteness of disciplinary boundaries

Bodies Moving and Being Moved: Mapping affect in Christian Nold's Bio Mapping

In A History of Spaces (2004), John Pickles observes that one of the less well-known representational norms of mapping is its focus on ‘natural and physical objects rather than developing universal conventions dealing with symbol, affect and movement.’ New media artist Christian Nold's work has dealt explicitly with two of these cartographic blindspots, grafting new and old technologies that both, in different ways, create bodily traces – the GPS trace of movement and the GSR (galvanic skin response) trace of arousal, often taken as an index of emotional response. Although Nold's socially engaged practice can be placed within the ‘locative media’ genre it also taps into the technological imaginaries around physiological sensors and intimate data. This paper considers Nold's Bio Mapping (2004-) projects in the context of his longstanding concern with social collectives and public space as a field of social relations. Looking at particular maps from Nold's Bio Mapping project, it considers the implications of blending the traces of the body's internal states with the traces produced by locomotive movement, and the relationship between the individuals thus traced and the collectives that Nold seeks to represent. Concurrent with Nold's practice there has been a wave of interest in affect and emotion (and the distinction between them) within the humanities. This paper brings Nold's work into contact with the Deleuzian/Spinozan concept of affect employed in one strand of this writing, drawing in particular on the work of Brian Massumi. Rather than using theory to simply illustrate Nold's practice, it follows the implications of Deleuze's cartographic model of individuation, the logic of which ultimately problematises the very distinction between the two bodily phenomena traced by Nold's device

'There is no direct evidence of anything'

In this essay, we track back and forth between Lauren Berlant’s and Raymond Williams’ work to assemble a purposefully compact genealogy of mediation that also pays attention to how mediation intersects with and often redraws many taken-for-granted understandings of affect, ideology, aesthetics and materialism. We explore how, for Berlant and Williams, mediation requires a suspension or dislodging of direct cause and effect relations in favour of an intuitive (and conjectural) analytics of the ongoing overdeterminations that circulate through and about any particular affective/historical conjuncture. Reckoning with mediation has a profound impact too on our practices of writing and theorising – as critical-creative impulses, drawn from the intertwining rhythms of experience/experiment, emerge from the changing yet precise situations of the ordinary day-to-day. We argue that such a conceptualisation of mediation offers a productive means for attuning to and transforming the capacities of intellectual work, media/digital culture, and everyday life from within the midst of a continua of transformation