PIPER CURTIS - THE FEELING OF FEELING A FEELING: MEMES ON AFFECT


The Feeling of Feeling a Feeling is a series of memes created in response to various texts on affect, in an attempt to remediate some of the theories encountered into more readily accessible forms. Through this selection of memes, I aim to portray snippets from the affect theories of Brian Massumi, Lauren Berlant, and Eugenie Brinkema that have grabbed me. It is my hope that these memes grab you through their affective resonance, whether you have read the texts or not.


Brian Massumi considers consciousness as subtractive. In The Autonomy of Affect, he examines how consciousness reduces the overwhelming complexity of the present moment into what can be functionally perceived by the body-mind (Massumi 90). This is illustrated by the image of Totoro holding an umbrella to stay dry in the rain (figure 3). The rain here represents the present moment, while the umbrella is consciousness, subtracting the rain from directly overhead to allow the subject (Totoro) to perceive only that which can be processed. Totoro is not drenched by the rain (the present moment) and is instead protected by his umbrella (subtractive consciousness) to take in the rainy scene around him (that which can functionally be perceived). [Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique, no. 31, 1995, p. 83. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.2307/1354446.] Lauren Berlant examines how homosexuality - and sex in particular - “disorganizes the subject” through abjection in an effort towards affirmation and survival, rather than of self-annihilation (261, 266). Berlant quotes Halperin in stating that, “we can ‘think of abjection… as a strategic response to a specific social predicament - as a socially constituted affect that can intensify the determination to survive’” (266). The social predicament in this case is heteronormativity and the neo-liberal fantasy “that disciplines the imaginary about what the good life is, and how good people act,” which typically (sometimes violently) excludes homosexuality (Berlant 263). This counters the narrative that queerness is a death drive, and recognizes instead the complexity of a drive to survive and queer optimism in living differently outside of oppressive norms (Berlant 264). This is illustrated in the image of the Sailor Moon character Haruka Tenoh, representing the queer subject, with an overlayed semi-transparent double of themself rising up out of their body (figure 4). This escaping double represents abjection from the heteronormative social condition that surrounds the queer subject. [Berlant, Lauren. “Neither Monstrous nor Pastoral, but Scary and Sweet: Some Thoughts on Sex and Emotional Performance in Intimacies and What Do Gay Men Want ?” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 19, no. 2, July 2009, pp. 261–73. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1080/07407700903034212.] In Eugenie Brinkema’s text, “A Tear that Does not Drop, but Folds” from The Forms of the Affects, she considers the traditional tear as the bodily legibility of the interior against the modern view of tear as exterior to the subject, favouring “its exteriority in textual form as something that commands a [close] reading” (4). Brinkema argues this by drawing on David Hume and Aristotle to point to the murkiness of pleasure-pain as it undoes “the clear emotional legibility of the tear”; tears are not reducible to immediate physical manifestation from a singular affective cause (6). I feel something therefore I cry. Brinkema is not content to settle for this understanding of the tear as, however illegibly, expressing a preceding internal state. She contrasts this with William James’ argument that the tear “is the bodily manifestation whose perception produces a subsequent feeling” (Brinkema 10). I cry therefore I feel something. [Brinkema, Eugenie. “A Tear that Does not Drop, but Folds.” The Forms of the Affects. Duke University Press, 2014.]