The Forms of the Affects

By Stephanie Amon. 2015

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Forms of the Affects BY EUGENIE BRINKEMA DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014 347 PP./125.95 (SB) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] On the turn to affect theory in the humanities, Eugenie Brinkema notes that affect "has been deployed almost exclusively in the singular, as the capacity for movement or disturbance in general" (xiii). If affect has functioned as a conceptual trapdoor out of textual analysis, gripped by a "not that, but this" rhetorical model, The Forms of the Affects is organized around the contention that "we do not yet know all it is that form can do" (261). Brinkema argues that affect theory has not activated the potentialities that inaugurated it, employing New Criticism's "affective fallacy" to push against the idea that theoretical work is being done when inaccessible, irrefutable "intensities" become the site of theory (33-34). In this refreshing resistance, the formal constitution of affective achievement in film is asserted as the path into critical revelation. Brinkema argues that attention to film form can create a safeguard against the vagueness and wistful recalcitrance that characterizes much work in affect theory, making the useful if medicinal argument that theorists must not be let off the hook of close reading. The permission to renounce textuality was collectively granted in the same move that brought theoretical camps together over suspicion of 1970s psychoanalytic and poststructuralist film theory's perceived omission of materiality, embodiment, and sensation (26-31). Brinkema holds that affective force stems from the slow, careful reading of formal properties rather than any immediate or universal apprehension. The Forms of the Affects offers important new strategies for discerning the structure of affect in the time-based medium of film, positing that duration and transformation are more generative loci of analysis than symbolism or narrative. The project of this book responds to anti-poststructuralist claims about affectivity, made by such thinkers as Steven Shaviro and Brian Massumi, that "intensities are necessarily and utterly divorced from all that signifies" (28). While on the face of it formal analysis is nothing new, Brinkema takes a cold, hard look in the mirror at affect theory's continued resistance to visual semiotics and the replacement of poststructuralism/psychoanalysis with a blank of refusal--the "negative ontology of the humanities" (31). The Forms of the Affects calls for film theory's reorientation toward formalism to challenge the assumption that film exists to, or for, the spectator; that affect is primarily conveyed to viewers through narrative and expressive drama rather than through formal properties; and therefore that visceral "immediacy" is a theoretically valuable lens through which to consider affectivity in film (and beyond). Given Brinkema's interest in wrenching affect from the realm of the unsayable or insurmountably subjective, her treatment of disgust is a highwire act. She cautions against defining an affect by merely enumerating its objects or symbols, advising that "theory should resist the urge to align so squarely with [disgust's] insistence on an iconography of its own" (130). She links the horror (and pleasure) of disgust to the "promise of worsening" (130), as "a structure of generative negation" (137), in which aesthetic boundaries are enmeshed into "a desirable element of the revolting" (165). While there are other meditations on this doubleness of disgust, like that of the uncanny, one strength of Brinkema's interpretative example is structural: her explorations of philosophical history consistently open up surprising and invigorating formal insights into the very nature of affectivity. The foundational exclusion from aesthetics that has historically marked the notion of disgust is tracked chromatically and gastronomically in Brinkema's lucid reading of Peter Greenaway's film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989). …

Subfields: Communication, Cultural Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7cda08fb1613178ae1c29ee0e16e129f2aed86dc