immanence

Steven Shaviro has posted his response to my and three other “curators’ notes” on his Post-Cinematic Affect.

The twists and turns of the discussions that have followed each of the daily commentaries have been fascinating. Somehow we’ve gone from a discussion of recent cinema to theorizing about affect and the limitations of recent affect theory (under the sign of Spinoza, Deleuze, and Silvan Tomkins), metabolism and panpsychism, magic (homeopathic and other kinds), fashion, “cinesensuality” and allure, Lady Gaga, YouTube and its “free labor,” and back again to capital and the possibilities for resistance, liberation, and alternative logics.

Shaviro’s acknowledgment that he is never quite sure “how to partition the world between aesthetics and political economy, or when they are absolutely incompatible with one another, and when they are able to partially coincide,” echoes a critique I had made in my original post on his book. This is, needless to say, something we all must struggle with, and I’ll be posting more about it.

The best way to navigate the conversation is by going to the main page for the theme week and then clicking on the daily curatorial notes. And make sure to watch the short videos that go with the discussions.

Just a couple of choice quotes:

“Like an expired body that blends with the dirt to form new molecules and living organisms, the body of cinema continues to blend with other image/sound technologies in processes of composition/decomposition that breed images with new speeds and new distributions of intensities.” (Elena del Rio, day 1)

 “For we do not live in a world in which the forces of affective vitality are battling against the blandness and exhaustion of capitalist commodification. Rather, we live in a world in which everything is affective. What politics is more virulently affective and vital than that of the American Tea Party? Where is intensive metamorphosis more at work than in the “hyper-chaos” (as Elie Ayache characterizes it, following Quentin Meillassoux) of the global financial markets? It is not a question of a fight between affect and its “waning” or exhaustion (whether the latter is conceived as the actual negation of the former, or just as its zero degree). Rather than being on one side of a battle, affect is the terrain itself: the very battlefield on which all conflicts are played out. All economic and aesthetic events today are necessarily aesthetic ones, both for good and for ill.” (Shaviro, day 5)