In a recent meeting with my lovely advisor, Celeste Condit, she told me that the one glaring thing missing on my prospectus outline was a sense of how I was going to identify the things I was going to analyze. In other words--how could someone ELSE pick up on this project and productively continue it? That's a tough question in alot of ways. With the Sanger paper, I just sort of "knew" it was angry rhetoric and then justified it after the fact.
Unfortunately, Celeste didn't exactly buy that as a productive strategy for guiding a large "aircraft carrier" that I call my dissertation. Who could really blame her?! There has to be a guiding structure there that lets everyone know how it's moving so that they, too, can join the conversation. I'm all about many forms of participation. So--time to make that happen.
Lisa Slawter Volkening's dissertation has been really helpful for me because she really took alot of this stuff on for herself... so let's see some of the things she says about analyzing affect. This is all in her dissertation that can be located by searching the University of Georgia's Dissertation database (FYI).
Beginning on page 26 of her diss, Lisa wants to "foreground" affect.
She talks about affect as:
- A Capacity: "Equal, if not more significant...is the affective capacity...to make consumers FEEL" various ways (27).
- "always at work in cultural products and political positions" (28) [Cites Misha Kavka]
- "Implicated in a discussion about relations" (29)
- (Citing Gunn and Edbauer Rice) the place where speech can function as a place of human body and language interaction--both feeling and meaning.
- really significant for rhetorical studies insofar as Teresa Brennan identifies Aristotle as an "ancient" forerunner of the study of it.
- Material, extra-linguistic, social feeling that may impact or be impacted by rhetorical events (37)
- Affect as materially embodied:
- Physical feeling that accompanies communication (38)
- Clough--bodily capacities to affect and be affected.
- Brennan--physiological aspect that accompanies judgment/action
- Massumi: Affect as intensies as embodied in autonomic reactions.
- Grossberg: Strength of investment that achors people into experiences, practices, identities and pleasures (direct quote)
- Nigel Thrift: Sense of Push
- Affect as extra-linguistic: operating in excess of language/representation/signification.
- uncapturable intensity (Massumi)
- Grossberg: Not necessarily structured narratively.
- Kavka: a mattering that is not just meaning.
- Also INSEPARABLE from language--texts not only have meaning effects but affective movement effects.
- Hariman: Cultivating Compassion as a way of seeing::: GREAT for the HBB chapter.
- Affect as social: (insofar as it can influence social relations)
- Brennan: Energies moving between people (and I would add THINGS)
- Social Investments
- Kavka: cusp of collective and individual psyche.
- Structure of Feeling (Williams)
AWESOME! Thanks for that, Lisa! Mega helpful, mega awesome.
Now, back to that original question that Celeste gave me to undertake this weekend--how do I know it? How do I analyze it? How can someone reproduce my initial sense that "You know it when you see it"? Here's more of Lisa:
- It's REALLY challenging! (And basically everyone identified above speaks to that--so PHEW, I'm not alone on this one.)
- Here's what Lisa does:
- Because she is dealing with effectivity (she talks about this in her introduction), she's looking at how messages AROUSE an affective response. [Acknowledges that this is similar to conventional rhetorical analyses that are examining message' content' and meaning.] [But, HEY it's a start!]
- Discursive appeals to pathos. What types of responses does it seem like it's evoking? This helps us with effects beyond meaning transfer.
- Meta-discursive responses. Public Reactions )See Edbauer, Gunn, Pezzullo.
- Gunn: Renewed attention to the cannon of delivery--think about the bodies in space! (On Speech and Public Release!)
In the next post, I intend to provide a rough sketch of my own affective and emotional reading strategy!!
