Grossberg & Affect: The Simpler (hopefully) No Nonsense Version

1. Grossberg & Affect: The Simpler (hopefully) No Nonsense Version

2. Analysis of the text (for its semiotic meanings, representations, messages, etc.) is short-sighted, a preference of the analyzer’s values, and missing so much about what makes a text valuable or pleasurable to actual audiences.

3. There is no homogenous mainstream of consumption where everyone is consuming a text in the same way or for the same reasons. Such an opinion is elitist snobbery at best and intellectually lazy at worst. The mainstream is marked by differences.

4. Even fandom studies falters for privileging a specific form of active/creative engagement over any other kind of pleasure. By praising the subcultural or these super-producers, there is an implication that their “resistant” behaviors are somehow more politically worthy than other consumption practices of popular culture.

5. “That it is a commodity does not deny that it still may be others things as well . . . There is a tendency to treat the commodity as a simple and transparent, ahistorical concept” (“Postmodernity” 155)

6. Being a fan, liking something, hating something, etc., are all subject positions made capable by thinking of a text as a cultural formation enveloped and supported by practices, effects, and social groups. People form alliances with self-selected elements of that formation, but no one person ever has access (or interest in) every possible element.

7. These alliances to the broader contexts that make pop culture texts possible, emergent, and capable of (dis)identifying with are not based on formal elements of the text; rather, they happen on the affective plane of existence.

8. Affect is a bodily energy that: • Is preconscious and unownable • Once it’s owned or qualified it is emotion or action • Gives us a sense that something matters • Motivates or moves us/ volition • To take action, to feel an emotion, to take a position • Transferable between human bodies • Something that adds (or not) intensity to the body to prepare it for action or emotion based on the context(s) surrounding the person’s life

9. Affect is the “feeling of life,” or the sense that something matters. Who cares what a text means? Who cares exactly what people are doing with it? What’s more interesting is why they interpret the way they do or why they decide to make it a part of their daily lives. And the preconscious aspect of affect suggests we may not have as much control over this as we’d like to think.

10. Grossberg is interested in what makes a particular formation (mainly rock music in his case) historically available to engage/identify with in different ways, by different people, at different times.

11. “How do we account for Springsteen’s popularity and the specific forms it has taken? How do we understand its political possibilities? Obviously, an adequate response would require a complex, multidimensional analysis that would locate Springsteen in a variety of historical registers: his relation to rock and roll, to other forms of popular culture, and to historical events, and his appeal to different social fractions, and so forth.” (“Putting” 183)

12. Postmodernity itself as an expression of affect • The world just feels different • “Within the conditions of affectvity it doesn’t matter what matters. What does matter is precisely the quality and quantity of the mattering (the mood, the passion) itself” (“Postmodernity” 163). • This can be problematic . . .

13. “Affect can only construct difference [mattering] from indifference . . . The [postmodern] crisis can be described in terms of the need to make something matter (to care, to make a commitment) without the possibility of connecting the various economies of difference [such as ideological or moral difference]. Affect itself . . . Becomes suspect . . . Caring about anything is always either too easy (to be significant) or too difficult (to be possible)” (“Postmodernity” 163)