“Through a close reading of [Brian] Massumi’s work, consideration of alternate affect theories, and discussion of Aristotle’s systematic theory of emotions, I illustrate how inseparable affects are from emotions. I examine the affects and emotions at work in a contemporary example of pedagogic violence—police brutality toward African Americans—and suggest new media not just contributes to but also disrupts violent rhetorics, damaging emotional educations, and negative affective relations, which I explore through a brief analysis of Twitter” (abstract).
***One of the interesting terms she employs is “in tandem”: “Theorizing affects and emotions in tandem elucidates how these violent rhetorics circulate and reproduce. After reviewing how affect has been defined in rhetoric and composition and conducting a close reading of Massumi’s writing on affect, I consider additional renderings of affect that make its rhetorical work more visible, including its cyclical relationship with emotion” (para. 3). ***I wonder how “tandem” stacks up against “simultaneity.”
“Starting in the ‘80s and extending to the turn of the century, many rhetoric and composition scholars used “affect” and “emotion” in tandem or interchangeably (Brand; McLeod; Fulkerson; Hariman and Lucaites; Johnson)” (para. 4).
“Many scholars (Albrecht-Crane; Holding; Falzetti; Edbauer Rice; Hawk) who introduced our field to the “affective turn”{5} used Massumi’s definition, especially leaning on affect’s distinction from emotion, since “emotion and affect follow different logics and pertain to different orders” (27)” (para. 5). **I wonder why our field in particular would feel attracted to this distinction? What are these “different logics” and “different orders”?
“According to Massumi, emotion is qualified affect; emotion is stuck in the realm of signification while affect—most simply understood as intensity—exceeds it” (para. 5).
“In those passages, Massumi makes one of the most direct and urgent claims to come out of his often circuitous writing: “It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion. If some have the impression that affect has waned, it is because affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable and thus resistant to critique” (28). Referencing Jameson’s claim about the “waning of affect” in our time, Massumi points out the paradox inherent in theorizing affect{7}: We ought to study affect, but when we bring it into consciousness and language, we qualify it, and through this process, affect is brought into the realm of emotion” (para. 5). ***Bringing into consciousness and language… This is not the same thing, right? Not all “bringing into language” is reflective…. “merely reflexive” is a thing… even with language. Awareness can be discerned in language that is not merely reflexive?
(aside: This is one of the best (clearest) paragraphs of “lit review” I’ve seen in a while:) ““It is crucial to theorize the difference” is often read and applied as a claim that we should theorize affect over or against—or at least in addition to but separately from—emotion. We can see this reflected in most recent scholarship on affect in our field, which either almost solely pursues “affect” or, after making the theoretical distinction between the concepts, discontinues discussion of “emotion” (Edbauer Rice; Smith; Reidner; Pruchnic; Pruchnic and Lacey; Chaput). Similarly, those currently studying emotion in rhetoric and composition are often careful to distance themselves from affect theory (Jacobs and Micciche; Micciche; Gross). However, a closer look at Massumi’s writing reveals that he sees the difference between affect and emotion as one of degree and not value. While affect exceeds symbolic structures of emotion that are already laden with meaning, “[e]motion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture” (28). Thus, we are dependent to some extent on emotion’s vocabulary and qualification to explicate affect” (para. 6).
**summarizes Masumi’s understanding of the “stop-beat,” the moment when reaction becomes response, a distinction between bodily replies to stimuli (reaction) and those bodily responses put to language and thus processed (response): “But emotion quickly becomes distinct, when the immediate bodily action stops and reflection takes place. In this moment, fear turns from intensity to magnitude, and it is no longer lived just through a body but is now compared to other experiences with fear” (para 7). **But if emotion is languaged affect (a kind of affect), it too can be reflexive, uncritical. So there is another state, a different state (and this is Freirean)… conscientization… a state of critical awareness, which is always a matter of language/signification.
“‘The separation between direct activation and controlled ideation [where is ‘uncontrolled ideation’?], or affect in its bodily dimension and emotion as rationalizable subjective content [does this mean ‘language’? or ‘signified’?], is a reflective wonderland that does not work this side of the mirror’ (40). While many have interpreted Massumi’s call to “theorize the difference between affect and emotion” as a call to separate and pull those concepts apart, we could read it as a call to theorize the point of difference itself” (para. 7). ***Oh hell. Well, to “theorize the point of difference” rather than “the difference” is grossly academic, I think. But really just another way of saying “theorize the purpose of the differentiation in the first place.” Why are we making a distinction between affect and emotion? What good will it do if we put it that way? What’s dangerous about the way language is used here is the implication that affect and emotion “are” different in the first place. That there is a true state ‘out there’ to which language is referring here as “affect,” and another one to which language is referring as “emotion.” No doubt these are different words, different concepts, and their meanings are different. What happens when we talk about meanings and the way we form and use them in this scenario?
Okay… I’m going to do something unpopular here, but let me say this out loud: I really really like this article, and I’m so interested in the ideas here, likely very useful ideas, and I can say this about affect theory, etc. I appreciate affect theory and the scholars who pursue it. But… Berthoff and the intellectual heritage she represents, they do something different from the philosophers enrolled in affect theory. THEY TEACH. Okay, this isn’t to say that Massumi isn’t a teacher. What I’m saying is that Richards and Berthoff (and Montessori and Freire, etc.) come to understand “process philosophy” through the process of pedagogy. The classroom—not the art museum, not the city, not the village—the classroom is their “laboratory.” The particular “relations” emerging in the pedagogical environment is the stuff of Richards/Berthoff. To embrace the teaching mandate of comp/rhet means comp/rhet would do very very well to embrace the intellectual heritage of Berthoff. How is this heritage different from the philosophical explorations (via Peirce, Whitehead, Gombrich, etc.) of Massumi, Deleuze, etc…? I wonder how Hawk percieves the relationship between Berthoff and affect theorists.
But… is positivism at work here? ***and if it’s not… If Massumi embraces a Peircean triadic semiotics and yet doesn’t really operate from the logical consequence of allatoncesness…. Is it a logical consequence of Peircean triadic semiotics?
“To study the relationship between affect and emotion rhetorically [dialogically?], it is important to understand their unique characteristics and their interrelation. With ‘irreducibly bodily and autonomic’ qualities and ‘no cultural-theoretical vocabulary,’ [what is cultural-theoretical vocabulary? what isn’t it?] affect is difficult to analyze (Parables 27-8)” (para. 8). **Okay, this is Massumi, I realize. Notice the artificial cleaving of body from signification in the first place. Where Affect theory differs from Peircean triadic understanding of semiotics—and Richards’/Berthoff’s—operationalizing of that theory for the teaching of writing is in the simultaneity of signification and experience. The first/then understanding of the signification process (first experience, then signification) renders the theory—at least on a fundamental level—false. Because that’s not how the experience/signification/language relationship works. How does this influence our reading of the rest of this paragraph?
“However, Massumi suggests that while “it is not entirely containable in knowledge,” affect is “analyzable in effect, as effect” (Parables 260). Massumi defines affect not just as a bodily intensity but also a capacity or effect (highlighting Spinoza’s distinction between affectio and affectus, which I discuss in the following section). In contrast, emotions are the “sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal” (Parables 28). Emotions are cognitive and social phenomena that carry meaning and reflect investment. According to Massumi, emotion begins with the perception of affect, after which emotion is processed through reflection [language? image? signification?] and eventually becomes a part of memory” (para. 8). **Hmmm. This is interesting. Here we have the language of rhet/comp: “personal,” “cognitive,” “social,” “meaning,” “reflection.” But “emotion begins with perception of affect, after…” What might happen to this theorizing if we acknowledge the allatonceness of perception and thought? What does allatonceness do to our general understanding of affect theory?
“But emotions are not just the result of affect; they can have affects themselves—unqualified [unqualified means not-put-to-language? if so… this is positivistic? ***The description of the language-body relationship here seems a positivistic one, I think, one in which emotions are “felt” and then “put to language”… If we decide that there is a “level” on which we operate totally free from language, from signification, do we then enter the arena of positivism?] bodily intensities and effects. In describing our contemporary culture of fear, Massumi claims fear becomes its own “quasicause.” Beyond responding to a “fear sign,” [whoa… back up… sign? the bear is a thing. is Massumi tapping allatonceness by calling it a ‘fear sign’? The bear perceived comes attached to it meanings, socially and experientially informed. Interpreted…] like a bear, the body also responds to “thought-signs” which are simply ideas [simply? also reflects positivistic theory of language]. Like awareness of the color-coded alert level, the idea of being fearful is enough to evoke fear, making a “self-propelling” cycle, which creates an “affective tone or mood.” The body can react just in anticipation of experiencing an emotion: “Now, fear can potentially self-cause even in the absence of an external sign to trigger it” (“Fear” 41). In this self-propelling cycle, affects and emotions fuel each other” (para. 8). ***Okay… But this is saying something about the nature of language and signs. I wonder if the erasure of allatonceness, the artificiality of cleaving the concepts “bodily responses” from ’emotional, qualified responses’ is useful. Seems it is. But what happens when we embrace allatonceness?
“When affect is studied only as an unnamable force or ungraspable excess, it is useful only in demarcating a dimension we can never access, except very indirectly or after the fact. Invoking just these definitions of affect prevents us from studying it rhetorically, continuing what Edbauer Rice has called a “persistent misunderstanding among certain rhetoric and composition scholars” which “creates a false binary between signification and affect, wrongfully claiming that these theories advocate affect ‘over’ discourse and meaning” (“(Meta)Physical” 135)” (para. 9). ***YES! What isn’t stated here refers to a theory of language. The “false binary between signification and affect” results from a particular lack of theorizing. Are affect theorists in our field “theorizing” bodies and emotions, relations between people in rhetorical situations, but leaving language and signification itself untheorized?
“This false binary has contributed to almost exclusive bodies of affect and emotion scholarship in rhetoric and composition. While it makes rhetorical sense that scholars used a familiar concept like “emotion” as a foil to introduce affect theory to the field, the unintended consequence may be our disciplinary reluctance to engage with both concepts or to use affect theory to extend studies of emotion or pathos” (para. 9). ***And what about writing? What about writing pedagogy?
“In the introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg assert there is no unified theory of affect and “[i]f anything, it is more tempting to imagine that there can only ever be infinitely multiple iterations of affect and theories of affect” (3-4). The very nature of affect invites diversity in describing the more visceral, embodied, and sensorial aspects of life” (para. 10). **Great. Here is the pluralism that continues to hassle our field? Is it not possible for a theory to “invite diversity” as described here and yet be defined? No wonder people hate the humanities.
After Deleuze and Guattari, “We can see, then, why affect has often been discussed in our field most closely in relation to the rhetorical canon of invention” (para. 9). ***Just as Berthoff’s. Actually, I think this is one of the curses plaguing her work. People cannot imagine how the instruction of FTW leads to recognizable texts. Pedagogy stuck in invention needs discourse communities. And here the old boxes sort ideas into much less than their potential. We must burn these boxes.
“The most significant contribution of affect theory to our field is its focus on change, movement, and relation but also, I want to suggest, in pushing us toward a more complex understanding of emotion or pathos. Despite excellent work by scholars like Laura Micciche, who emphasizes the doing of emotion, emotion is still often discussed in terms of singular, or at least momentarily fixed, states represented in texts, discourses, or audience” (para. 11). **But isn’t it discussed in “fixed” terms so far in this article, too? What’s the theory of language upon which this article, and its understanding of theory rests?
“Three metaphors in particular offer renderings of affect useful for rhetorical study in new media: accumulation, contagion, and rearticulation. While these metaphors show affect working beyond its manifestation as bodily intensity, they also reveal how closely related affect is to emotion” (para 11). **The scale of Nelson’s interest is, as is typical with contemporary new media conversations in comp/rhet, big: cultures, societies, assemblages between many bodies and/or over much time. It is tempting to avoid consideration of a theory of language, but close examination suggests there is a great risk when doing that. Why is it that when we talk about new media, we talk about scale and speed?
“Affects play an important role in creating dispositions and, relatedly, ways of seeing and interacting with the world. Because, as Megan Watkins asserts, scholars have focused almost exclusively on affect as a short-lived, ephemeral force, we overlook the “capacity of affect to be retained, to accumulate, to form dispositions and thus shape subjectivities” (269). Scholars, Watkins suggests, have often conflated the distinction Spinoza makes between affectus and affectio, defining affect primarily as a force (affectus) rather than a capacity (affectio). While affectus describes the fleeting, ephemeral nature of affect, affectio acknowledges affect’s residual effects and ability to accumulate into dispositions. For example, Watkins claims that when students have repeated experiences of recognition from teachers (explicit and implicit), these experiences accumulate in creating self-worth. Thus, the teacher’s available affects to recognize a student (through language, gesture, facial expression, etc.) create feelings and sensations that accumulate into a way of being that “predispose one to act and react in particular ways” (278). The repeated experience with similar affects grow together to create an underlying disposition and, in turn, our own affective capacities. Repetition, then, is a way to create expectations and patterns of response, [repetition as method… children do this all the time] to help people learn and unlearn affective dispositions that work for or against them and their goals. Rhetorically, through style and arrangement, repetition can be used to maintain or disrupt dispositions toward ideas, objects, events, etc.” (para. 12). ***OH I love this. This speaks to method, as I’ve discussed it in my diss. And I love the way affect theory is here applied to pedagogical situations. However, what remains under-theorized in this thinking is language and signification. Notice communication happening here. The subject (student) receives signs (“through language, gesture, facial expression, etc.”). Stop. But if we think with Berthoff, the student receiving signs INTERPRETS THESE via the meanings delimiting the student at the time in the first place, the meanings with which he forms emotions and responses and thoughts. Isn’t it a gross distortion to say that “these experiences accumulate in creating self-worth”? How the hell do we know? How many teachers have wondered why their “repeated” encouragement never translates (seemingly) into changed dispositions in the classroom? It isn’t as simple as “be nice,” “be encouraging,” right? And of course Nelson isn’t asserting that here. She’s reducing to make a point about relationships, emotional responses, and dispositions. But the triadic notion of signs suggests the situation is much more complicated. I would argue that an understanding of what lies outside of the control of the teacher in the situation modeled here matters profoundly, and is essential to designing a classroom in which any notion of affect (to counter pedagogical violence or otherwise) might be useful.
“Internet memes and their subsequent replication and extension of particular feelings, ideas, or arguments work in a similar way. Memes, retweets, and re-posts are not random duplications but a form of identification, a way of using someone’s language ‘by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his, as Kenneth Burke describes (55)” (para 12). ***Okay. So how does “identification” work? What is matched? who/what does the matching? Where does it occur? How can it be broken? by whom? where? when? What does this kind of mass identification say about triadicity? Meaning? About sameness and difference? Relationships? About education and critical thinking?
“To consciously identify is an emotional move [emotion = ‘put to language’?], since it reflects a valuation of, investment in, or empathy for some one or thing. Yet identification can also occur in the realm of the affective [not/yet ‘put to language’?], when the body responds to affect before or without conscious qualification [no language involved] (e.g., involuntary mimicking of facial expressions, yawning, following crowd behavior, etc.). We identify affectively and emotionally, and contagion works on both levels. While “affect contagion” sounds like a phenomenon beyond our control, we can (re)produce advantageous affects and emotions through mimesis in our bodies or media” (para 12). **So the claim here is that understanding the ineinandersein of affect and emotion can help us assert some control over the dispositions we attune to and amplify? Great! Love this. Now, where does language fit in? and Teaching?
“Through mimesis, we express value in what we affect and are affected by. As Sara Ahmed suggests, ‘[t]o be affected by something is to evaluate that thing. Evaluations are expressed in how bodies turn toward things. To give value to things is to shape what is near us’ (31)” (para. 13). **Does value = meaning here? What does “meaningfulness” do to this scenario if we swap it with evaluation? If our bodies do something in response to something else, without the mediation of signs or thought, can we call it “evaluation”? There is no ‘process’ happening, apparently. Or is there and that’s Ahmed’s point? I need to read about that. … Hold up… What’s with that word, ‘express’? Maybe that’s the problem. Would “form” be more to the point?
“Through mimesis, we express value in what we affect and are affected by. As Sara Ahmed suggests, “[t]o be affected by something is to evaluate that thing. Evaluations are expressed in how bodies turn toward things. To give value to things is to shape what is near us” (31). Evaluation recognizes a kind of agency in our turning toward and against. We turn to things that give us pleasure or to avoid pain. And so a pattern emerges among bodies, a process that Ahmed describes as stickiness: “Feelings can get stuck to certain bodies in the very way we describe spaces, situations, dramas. And bodies can get stuck depending on what feelings they get associated with” (39). What is important to note about this rhetorically is the ability to “unstick” these feelings. Edbauer Rice has called this a process of “disarticulation” and “rearticulation”—“a new way of linking together images and representations that is less oppressive” (“The New” 210). She writes about how AIDS activists changed the public discourse surrounding AIDS away from death and disgust toward life and celebration through campaigns and advertisements. This process of rearticulating (in this case, making images of happy, lively people with AIDS the focal point of public discourse) creates new affects for AIDS rhetoric, changing the public’s evaluation of people with AIDS. Through connecting new or counter relationships among feelings, images, and representations, we can actively respond to harmful discourses and pedagogies of violence” (par.13). ***AIDS quilt!!
“Affect is a precursor to the emergence of and potentials for emotion; affective dispositions prime us for particular emotions; and emotions, too, spread through bodily and mediated mimesis. If we take the difference between affect and emotion to be cognition, we can see how affect accumulation, contagion, and rearticulation lead right up to and spill over into the realm of emotion. Because evaluation is cognitive, Ahmed’s discussion of the evaluative qualities of affect closely mirrors theories of emotion.{12} The disarticulation and rearticulation of affects similarly require conscious awareness and qualification. While these affect theories work largely on the level of bodily intensity, when scholars discuss human agency in shaping affects they often (if even only implicitly) work in the realm of emotion [language]” (para 14). ***Emotion = language/signification here, but language can happen without reflection. That language we call affective? or “merely affective”? What can be said here about the relationship between language and emotion and agency and conscientization?
“‘Affect’ and ’emotion’ were first conceptually divorced in psychoanalysis to distinguish between first-person and third-person feelings; the patient has emotions and the analyst describes the patient’s affects (Ngai 24).” (para 15). **Interesting. “Has” not “forms.” cause and effect. two-way. not ‘mediated.’ Of course the analysts’ descriptions mediate. The language used to describe mediates. Nothing objective about this. And yet, I read in this, too, the ethnographic practice of recording obeservations. And the ethnographic pedagogical practice of teachers recording observations of students.
““Affect” and “emotion” were first conceptually divorced in psychoanalysis to distinguish between first-person and third-person feelings; the patient has emotions and the analyst describes the patient’s affects (Ngai 24). Massumi and Lawrence Grossberg extended this distinction, suggesting that while emotion is the narrativized feeling of the subject, affect exceeds the subject’s cognition. Sianna Ngai claims this “subjective-objective problematic” has been the “uber-question of recent theoretical writing on feeling in particular” (24). In her work, Ngai avoids choosing one concept over the other and recognizes their relationship as a “modal difference of intensity or degree” instead of a “formal difference of quality and kind” (27). So while emotions are more structured and formed, affects do not lack structure and form entirely. Focusing on this modal difference allows “an analysis of the transitions from one pole to the other: the passages whereby affects acquire the semantic density and narrative complexity of emotions, and emotions conversely denature into affects” (27). In this way, we can imagine affect and emotion on a continuum, with a (sliding) point of cognition, acknowledgment, or articulation marking their difference. This continuum aligns with Massumi’s description of emotion emerging from affect; however, too often in application, we begin with affect and move linearly to emotion—overlooking a cyclical relationship between the two. If we begin, instead, with emotion, we can theorize affect both as the bodily intensity that precedes it and the affective capacities and potentials that grow out of it” (para. 15). ***YES! This is the ineinandersein of affect and emotion. A very useful concept in harmony with the notion of triadicity and its logical implications valuing dialogical movement that both forms and in-forms.
“To consider emotions’ affective capacities and potentials, we must study emotion as both cognitive and social” (para. 16). ***cognitive = personal here.
“The advantage of studying emotions is that they always have directions and objects, and understanding these reveals the affects available to respond to damaging emotional pedagogies. For example, the direction of an emotion can focus at one person (anger), extend broadly outward (anxiety), or turn inward toward oneself (embarrassment). These directions and objects also reflect social relationships; for example, spite reflects inferiority, pride shows superiority, and love expresses equality. An often overlooked aspect of Aristotle’s work on emotions, which Smith and Hyde emphasize, is that he describes them in terms of seven sets of continua: anger-calm, friendship-enmity, fear-confidence, shame-shamelessness, kindness-cruelty, pity-indignation, and envy-emulation. A median state of rest or unaffectedness sits in the middle of each continuum [really? why necessarily?], and the rhetor’s job is to move audiences along various continua (often simultaneously). In order to do this, a rhetor must understand how each set of emotions is structured but also how each is interrelated to other sets. Emotions, according to Aristotle, intensify and dissipate based on spatial and temporal proximity. Thus, the closer the object of our fear (in terms of its imminence or physical closeness to us or those we care for), the more scared we feel. A pedagogy of violence relies on keeping the objects of particular emotions present—if not tangibly, at least as viable threats in our imaginations” (para 17). ***This is awesome. What it doesn’t articulate, but does imply, is the bases of shared meanings. Our individual meanings (tendencies, evaluations, language patterns) come from social/cultural resources but are amplified/recognized/reformed in individual cognitions. This happens simultaneously. All at once. So what, then might pedagogy teach this ‘rhetor’ above? How can we “understand how each set of emotions is structured” when that structure is only partially socially-informed? and that socially-formed ‘set of emotions’ is complex?
“Knowing how a particular emotion works helps produce and share emotional discourses (and thereby exercise our affective capacities) that counteract harmful pedagogies, especially as new media offer opportunities for global communication and (re)education. In the following section, I analyze a contemporary example of pedagogic violence using the language of affect and emotion theories discussed thus far. My explication aims to show the distinct but interrelated work of affect and emotion as we attempt to better understand and dismantle pedagogies of violence” (para. 18). **”emotional discourses” THAT’s an interesting use of the concept of “discourse community”. I like it. What I don’t understand is that there is no direction discussion of semiotics. Emotions = language/thought, but not “mere language/thought,” there is something conscious, agentive in the concept of ’emotion’ here. And I’m wondering how much of Berthoff’s ‘geist’ speaks to this conception of media and emotionality?
“Because affects and emotions work together in pedagogies of fear, one of our challenges is to figure out their interrelated personal and cultural impacts—namely, how the lived bodily intensity of fear interacts with its cultural manifestations. While some affect and emotion theories focus on subjective, momentary states (e.g., Massumi; James; Aristotle), others consider the state of an era or culture (e.g., Williams; Jameson; Kenway and Fahey); it is the interaction between the instantaneous feeling of fear and the underlying sense of fear in our culture that makes it such a complicated pedagogy. To begin analyzing this interaction in pedagogies of fear related to police brutality, I consider (1) the transition from affect to fear, (2) the structure of fear as an emotion, and (3) the perpetuation of fear on the cultural level, through affect contagion, accumulation, and the social construction of fear. Though I just begin to consider a few facets of this pedagogy, I hope to elucidate some examples of how fear emerges and what it feels like in the body; how it reflects and is determined by social position and cultural context; and how it is increasingly perpetuated through media” (para 19). ***Wow this is so cool. I love how this thinking handles complexity. I wonder about the use of “pedagogy” here. The implication in its use is that society/culture purposes to teach fear to AA?
“…precognitive bodily intensity that fuels action before emotion is recognized” (para. 20). **Recognized/re-cognized, languaged. Body action without language/thought. Language is in here. My body does things that are not cognized (breathes, heartbeats, blinks, types). Languaged doing is something else. But language can happen (and often happens) unreflectively, uncritically. I like how she articulates the relationship here between affect/emotion. Emotion is ‘recognized’ means it was present in the ‘bodily intensity’? Is it the cognition that makes it accessible, not the emotion itself?
“As the affective intensity builds, bodies act before conscious awareness. In the stop-beat, when action ceases, fear is named, owned, and recognized as an emotion, but it may be too late” (para. 20). ***Conscious awareness = languaged? Is the action/emotion meaningful before the naming? or is it something else? And if it is meaningful, is it meaningful because it is constructed, formed, “conditioned” by all sorts of meanings? Fear, even unnamed, is formed by meaning.
“Thus, our challenge in opposing pedagogies of fear is to tap into the urge to build investments and relations, a task that may be facilitated through new media” (para 21). **Thus BLM? By calling the social cultivation of fear a pedagogy, Nelson seems to identify the underlying structural force of white supremacy. Interesting languaging.
“News and mass media supplement this curriculum with the welldocumented dissemination of negative representations of African Americans, which work both as a warning to African Americans and a general education in fear, mistrust, and dislike. African Americans become both the subjects and objects of fear in this pedagogy” (para. 22). ***Yep. So true re: local news, too.
“As an individual interacts with a multi-layered education in what and how to fear, implicit and explicit opportunities for response emerge (for some individuals more than others, depending on one’s education, cultural capital, race, etc.)” (para. 23). ***Okay. Now we are squarely in the realm of meaning making. And there seems an allatonceness here that’s quite satisfying (despite the subject). Meanings are formed by individuals from meanings received and interpreted in contexts.
“If affect is recognized as an emotion, bodies have a number of possible affects, what Ahmed might call “turning toward or against,” giving or refusing value. Though we all encounter a deluge of fear inspiring discourses, once acknowledged, choices for response (affects) become available. As rhetoricians and composition teachers, our work is to make these choices more apparent for ourselves and for our students” (para 24). **Meaning resources. What is the role of language in all of this? How does a theory of language inform our understanding of the situation and interventions?
“The many facets of pedagogies of fear—personal, systemic, bodily, cognitive, affective, emotional—simultaneously teach one how to interact with the world and determine her affective capacities, given her social positions and identities. It may seem we have little control over the bodily intensities that fuel incidents of police brutality, but these intensities arise from our contexts and emotional educations. To address these educations, we must consider their origins and how they spread, especially through new media” (para. 25). ***Simultaneity. Isn’t control entirely dependent upon signification? on language, meaning? on understanding interpretation as the central act of mind?
“To scrutinize how pedagogic violence moves through new media, it is best to theorize affects and emotions in tandem— given their cyclical nature—to illustrate how bodily intensities grow into significant ways of being and living in the world. While affect theories account for how intensities feel and move, emotion theories place those intensities into constellations of feeling, an accumulation of one’s sensations, emotional experiences, and memories. As these constellations become more robust, expectations for oneself and others merge into a way of seeing the world. But it is important to remember that these ways of seeing are not just imposed onto us by external forces. Through seizing the often-overlooked definition of affect as capacity, we have available potentials to, for example, take what we know about contagion and accumulation to counter and rearticulate violent rhetorics. Just as digital media platforms circulate violent rhetorics, they also offer opportunities to respond to them” (para 25). ***affect/emotion dialogic… We have and make choices… our “ways of seeing” are constructs, by us from social/personal interpretations of meaning. Thus the pragmatic: what happens if we put it this way?
“She may retweet the video immediately before those feelings emerge into emotions; affect moves” (para 26). ***Super interesting that she analyzes twitter here. Totally confirms my experience, my emotional/affective experience with Twitter. Bringing consciousness to my use of twitter has been vital, especially given my social status (as a graduate student needing a job in future, and as a teacher). That consciousness comes and goes, let me tell ya… I’m also struck by how Twitter confirms there’s been a move toward the ultimate globalism, where there is no distinct “country” or national identity anymore. I mean, if a Russian government hacker becomes an American citizen, organizes protests and counter-protests…If American Trump supporters are hailing Russia and Putin… wearing t-shirts that say I’d rather be Russian than a Democrat… Is this the “real” cultural manifestation of globalism? Ironically producing the very effect those who fear globalism often articulate? Loss of power identified with (their) particular group?
‘We share content that makes us feel—even if that feeling is precognitive’ (para 26)… **Okay, but is there really such a thing? “precognitive”… The “precognitive” here is a conditioned state, never pure/free from meanings. It may be unconscious, but it’s never preconscious.
“When defining what constitutes Black Twitter, Sanjay Sharma makes an important distinction: It is not constituted by the race of people contributing to it but rather the “digital materialization of race” in online manifestations of African American identities and experiences. Through hashtags or so-called “Blacktags,”{18} users and topics connect and grow. Blacktags aggregate African American experience, so much so that they “have the capacity to interrupt the whiteness of the Twitter network” (48)” (para 27). ***Super interesting
“More than fear, rhetorics of pedagogic violence thrive on enmity, which often circulates covertly. Aristotle asserts, “the greatest evils—injustice and thoughtlessness—are least perceived; for the presence of evil causes no pain” (1382a31). Whereas many emotions are directed at a specific person, Aristotle claims, hate is directed at “types” of people, and thus, it is especially productive in racist pedagogies. In contrast to angry people who want the object of their anger to suffer, hateful people just want the object of their hatred not to exist” (para 28). ***whoa. yup.
This is a cool article. Really is. The Twitter example feels underdeveloped, like the editors told her to wrap it up or something, but… I want to teach with this. I wonder what my students would think about it.
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