Grossberg & Affect

1. Grossberg & Affect A totally biased (but don’t let that think you have to agree with me in your papers) account of the only man writing intelligently about popular culture today or in the past 100 years, which is not to say there still aren’t problems but whatev.

2. Currently Morris Davis Distinguished Faculty at UNC Chapel Hill • Degrees in Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and Anthropology • Did Post-Doc work at Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (worked under Stuart Hall) Background

3. Popular (poaching, contradictory, pleasurable) versus Legitimate (authentic, hierarchical, intellectual) • Popular (stylized, artificial, marginal, resisting) versus Mainstream (naturalized, incorporated, homogenous) Rejecting Binaries

4. “My work has always involved a defense of the mainstream . . . Or at least an unwillingness to begin by subdividing popular culture into politically resonant categories. I want to defend pop culture not only against those who are hostile to any of its forms . . . [and] against those who are hostile to the largest part of popular culture because they champion marginal trends or appropriations, as in subcultural theories [and fandom studies, I would add]” (“Intro” 4). Defensive Stance

5. No such thing as a homogenous mainstream. • If there is it’s marked by differences not sameness • Pop culture is a social pastiche of structured practices, codes, and effects • Like B-Ham, but G’s emphasis is on the social (versus textual) and is against predetermined, dominant meanings • A “description of a relationship between cultural practices and their contexts” (“Intro” 4). Popular Practices

6. In other words, Embrace Taylor

7. Empowered & disempowered • Active & passive • Relating to others & disengaging with others • Resisting & incorporating • Being logical and contradictory When engaging with popular culture We are both:

8. Incorporation & Excorporation

9. Incorporation & Excorporation

10. Incorporation & Excorporation

11. Incorporation & Excorporation

12. By breaking culture down to the interplay of producers, texts, and audiences (conceived of as existing in separate places), “the 'meaningfulness' of culture is reduced to the interpretation of meaning in its simplest and narrowest sense, to that which is easiest to talk about within the codes of Western academic theories: semantic content, cognitive significance, narrative meaning, and representation” (Grossberg, Dancing 272). Away from Meaning

13. Not an attribution or formal element of a text • Rather, what is the relationship formed between the person and the text • What are the complex relationships and investments that inform that person/text relation? “What does it mean for something to be ‘popular’”

14. A box of jigsaw pieces that belong to multiple puzzles. The original boxes are gone. You have no idea what the finished pieces should look like. The pieces could fit in different puzzle formations. “Thus, the identity of each piece is only the set of its possible places in the as yet undefined contexts. It is its possible functions. Thus you can not name a piece or describe its contribution before the puzzle itself is assembled, but of course you can not know ahead of time what is being assembled” (“Intro” 11). The Jigsaw Puzzle Metaphor

15. Signifying Practices (Frankfurts, Birmingham, analysis for semantic meaning) take a puzzle piece and insist it relates to another specific piece . . . But any meaning is narrow, short-sighted, a shot in the dark, and most shows the puzzle assembler’s preferences. I.e., a Miley Cyrus (one piece) can be linked to racial appropriation (another piece) or the “proper” expression of female sexuality (another piece) but that insists upon one possible puzzle formation at the extent of all others. Give that box to someone else and they will build in a completely different way. However, every piece is marked (marred) by its shape and appearance as seeming to go somewhere. That’s why this type of analysis is so easy and unsurprising.

16. “Read alternatively as a function that allows and is allowed by particular connections, analysis is more a process of mapping the vectors of effects that traverse and encircle any piece as a possible practice” (“Intro” 11). Instead . . .

17. The possible practices of loving, hating, being outraged by Miley Cyrus are dependent on countless connections that make those positions emergently possible

18. “A cultural formation describes the lines that distribute, place, and connect cultural practices, effects, and social groups. • Different social groups have differential access to specific clusters of practices and those relations are themselves part of the determination or articulation of the formation. • Such articulations create a series of ‘alliances’ each representing a particular selective appropriation of the formulation itself; no alliance includes every element of the formulation” (“Mapping” 71) Mattering Maps

20. “The visual and legible [semiotic meaning] ends up fore-grounding the distinction between high and low culture” Affect: The Neuro/Bio Turn

21. An “energetic phenomenon” involving an agitation of the central nervous system that manifested itself in symptoms. Once the agitation could be released, the symptoms would disappear. Freud

22. “The name we give to forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion– that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability.” (Seigworth & Gregg 1) A Fine Definition

23. Studying the texts of fandom/participatory culture merely recasts the fans as a “text” to be traditionally analyzed. Affect theory finds it much more interesting to study what motivates these people, causes them to act, and makes their investments so deep, makes their investment manifest in one way in contrast to others (or other people’s) Fandom Studies is not wrong but . . .

24. “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 . . . it is intensity owned and recognized . . . affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable” (Massumi, Parables28). “Other than conscious knowing”

25. Neuro-Rhetorics! Soon to be a Course Offering @ UVU!

26. Humans don’t decide to act or feel by putting their intentions in motion, the body prepares us for action and feeling by adding a level of intensity to the situations/contexts the mind and body find themselves enveloped within. • This intensity is “the beginning of a selection” (30), the “turning point at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually exclusive potentials, only one of which is selected” (Parables, Massumi 32-33). Schrodinger’s Body

27. Do you really control whether or not you go see Noah? Intensity: Backto Mattering Maps

28. We are not as consciously in control of our tastes as we’d like to think • We paradoxically have potentially liked everything we hate (and vice versa) • Affective responses often trump any assessment of formal textual qualities/quality Implications

31. Affect . . . [becomes] a palimpsest of force encounters traversing the ebbs and swells of intensities that pass between bodies” (Siegworth 2). This is why my Freshman class sucks. Transfer of Affect

32. Volitional power • Mood • Investment • Energization • Mattering • The ability to effect and be effected • Affect is the very possibility of agency Grossberg’s Key Terms on Affect

33. “Affect is the term I use to describe the observable differences in how practices matter to, or are taken up by, different configurations of popular discourse and practices” (“Intro” 13) “Popular culture is constantly enacting and enabling specific forms and trajectories of movement (change) and stability (agency). It defines certain formations of practices as the possible sites of investment” (14). Affect and Pop Culture

34. “Understanding this formation [of rock music] involves trying to map the conditions and effects of its emergence, understanding why this particular popular formation appeared rather than another” (“Intro” 17). What to Do With It?

35. Doesn’t write his own songs • Appropriates black culture and musical structures • Has a funny hair-do that’s stupid • Gets in trouble with the law • Is widely listened to by millions of people • Songs show little relative difference– mainly repetitive • Image and Style often trump musical abilities

36. Doesn’t write his own songs • Appropriates black culture and musical structures • Has a funny hair-do that’s stupid • Gets in trouble with the law • Is widely listened to by millions of people • Songs show little relative difference– mainly repetitive • Image and Style often trump musical abilities

37. Republican Party and Conservatism in general have tapped into affective logic more than liberals • Climate Change • Pro-Life • Gay Marriage • “You didn’t build that.” Politics