Affect Theory
Tweet of the week: affect and discourse are the two sides of a post structural struggle against capital and power
Meta theme of this week - thinking, feeling and doing as 'labour'.
Ordinary Affect - an experiment into feeling, and embodied affect and a step away from discursive, thinking, representations. As the nature of labour is changing, affect theory ties into emotional labour and sex work as forms of labour distinct and less visible than the physical labour described in 'Capital'.
This week we read:
Ordinary Affects by Kathleen Stewart - pg 4-10
The Managed Heart by Arlie Russell Hoschild (Professor at Cal), Ch. 1
Sex Work for the Middle Class by Elizabeth Bernstein- entire article (fieldwork in SF!)
Temporarily Yours by Elizabeth Bernstein: Peruse the tables on these pages: 170, 173
Background - How discourse analysis led to affect theory
- Phase 1 is Relations of Production
- Phase 2 Relations of Reproduction, how capitalism maintains itself. This is done through ideology. Althusser - the mode of production determines people's ideology. Foucault said, no, there are discourses which is how power operates. Affect Theory says there is an additional side to the story which is how you are affected.
"Models of thinking [e.g. discourse] that slide over the live surface of difference at work in the ordinary to bottom line arguments about “bigger” structures and underlying causes obscure the ways in which a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and non-coherent singularities. They miss how someone’s ordinary can endure, or sag, defeated. How it can shift in the face of events like a shift in the kid’s school schedule or the police at your door. How it can become a vague but compelling sense that something is happening or harden into little mythic kernels. How it can be carefully maintained as a prized possession or left to rot. How it can morph into a cold, dark edge, or give way to something unexpectedly hopeful." <
In sum, affect and discourse are the two sides of a post structural struggle against capital and power
Theory based of field research:
Ordinary Affects: “public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of,” they are “a drifting immersion that watches and waits for something to pop up” They “do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures”. This reading is an experiential drive through affect, and a resistance to the extraction of meaning or 'discourse'.
Emotional Labor
(Taken from wikipedia) - While emotion work happens within the private sphere, emotional labor is emotion management within the workplace according to employer expectations. According to Hochschild (1983), the emotion management by employers creates a situation in which this emotion management can be exchanged in the marketplace. According to Hochschild (1983), jobs involving emotional labor are defined as those that:
- require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public.
- require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person.
- allow the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of employees.
Hochschild (1983) argues that within this commodification process, service workers are estranged from their own feelings in the workplace.[1]