How To Do Things With Affects

Shifting the focus from human interiority toward the agency of cultural objects, social arrangements and aesthetic matter, How to Do Things with Affects examines the affective operations and transmissions triggered by various aesthetic forms, media events and cultural practices.

This book explores the various manifestations of affects in British theatre of the 21st century. The introduction gives a concise survey of existing and emerging theoretical and research trends and argues in favour of a capacious understanding of affects that mediates between more autonomous and more social approaches. The twelve chapters in the collection investigate major works in Britain by playwrights and theatre makers including Mojisola Adebayo, Mike Bartlett, Alice Birch, Caryl Churchill, Tim Crouch and Andy Smith, Rachel De-lahay, Reginald Edmund, James Fritz, David Greig, Idris Goodwin, Zinnie Harris, Kieran Hurley, Lucy Kirkwood, Anders Lustgarten, Yolanda Mercy, Anthony Neilson, Lucy Prebble, Sh!t Theatre, Penelope Skinner, Stef Smith, Kae Tempest and debbie tucker green. The interpretations identify significant areas of tension as they relate affects to the fields of cognition, politics and hope. In this, the chapters uncover interrelations of thought, intention and empathy; they reveal the nexus between identities, institutions and ideology; and, finally, they explore how theatre can accomplish the transition from a sense of crisis to utopian visions.

In Religious Affects Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the notion that religion is inextricably linked to language and belief, proposing instead that it is primarily driven by affects. Drawing on affect theory, evolutionary biology, and poststructuralist theory, Schaefer builds on the recent materialist shift in religious studies to relocate religious practices in the affective realm—an insight that helps us better understand how religion is lived in conjunction with systems of power. To demonstrate religion's animality and how it works affectively, Schaefer turns to a series of case studies, including the documentary Jesus Camp and contemporary American Islamophobia. Placing affect theory in conversation with post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Schaefer explores the extent to which nonhuman animals have the capacity to practice religion, linking human forms of religion and power through a new analysis of the chimpanzee waterfall dance as observed by Jane Goodall. In this compelling case for the use of affect theory in religious studies, Schaefer provides a new model for mapping relations between religion, politics, species, globalization, secularism, race, and ethics.

This innovative volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of the relationship between language and cognition with a focus on bilinguals. It brings together contributions from international leading figures in various disciplines and showcases contemporary research on the emerging area of bilingual cognition. The first part of the volume discusses the relationship between language and cognition as studied in various disciplines, from psychology to philosophy to anthropology to linguistics, with chapters written by some of the major thinkers in each discipline. The second part concerns language and cognition in bilinguals. Following an introductory overview and contributions from established figures in the field, bilingual cognition researchers provide examples of their latest research on topics including time, space, motion, colors, and emotion. The third part discusses practical applications of the idea of bilingual cognition, such as marketing and translation. The volume is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students with an interest in language and cognition, or in bilingualism and second languages.

DIVA creatively written ethnography tracking between intimate, everyday feeling and larger collective cultural forces in the contemporary U.S./div

In this readable meditation on the nature of emotional experience, Joseph Jones takes the reader on a fascinating walking-tour of current research findings bearing on emotional development. Beginning with a nuanced reappraisal of Freud's philosophical premises, he argues that Freud's reliance on "primary process" as the means of linking body and mind inadvertantly stripped affects of their process role. Further, the resulting emphasis on fantasy left the problem of conceptualizing the mental life of the prerepresentational infant in a theoretical limbo. Affects as Process offers an elegantly simple way out of this impasse. Drawing in the literatures of child development, ethology, and neuroscience, Jones argues that, in their simplest form, affects are best understood as the presymbolic representatives and governors of motivational systems. So conceptualized, affects, and not primary process, constitute the initial processing system of the prerepresentational infant. It then becomes possible to re-vision early development as the sequential maturation of different motivational systems, each governed by a specific presymbolic affect. More complex emotional states, which emerge when the toddler begins to think symbolically, represent the integration of motivational systems and thought as maturation plunges the child into a world of loves and hates that cannot be escaped simply through behavior. Jones' reappraisal of emotional development in early childhood and beyond clarifies the strengths and weaknesses of such traditional concepts as infantile sexuality, object relations, internalization, splitting, and the emergence of the dynamic unconscious. The surprising terminus of his excursion, moreover, is the novel perspective on the self as an emergent phenomenon reflecting the integration of affective and symbolic processing systems.

Tectonics is an old, ontological concept which simultaneously claims to cover the aesthetics/meaning and the technological/technical in architecture. However, since the advent of ‘modernity’, the relationship between architecture and building technology has been problematic. Some of these problems, which are reflected in the theories of architecture and tectonics, relate to the separation of the technology/technical dimension from the aesthetic/artistic, rendering one of them dominant over the other. This book explores the tectonic affects in architecture because these do not separate building technology and aesthetics or meaning. Affects are preconscious aesthetic feelings which can cause meanings if we start thinking about these affects. The book claims that tectonic affects can generate aesthetic value and meaning. It adopts a practical position towards architectural aesthetics and meaning, and concentrates on tectonic affects.

Performance Affects explores performance projects in disaster and war zones to argue that joy, beauty and celebration should be the inspiration for the politics of community-based or participatory performance practice, seeking to realign the field of Applied Theatre away from effects towards an affective role, connected to sensations of pleasure.