Politics of Emotion/Power of Affect (2017/18)

“[P]olitics is always emotional”, as Lauren Berlant emphasizes. According to the American literary scholar and queer theorist, it is “a scene where structural antagonisms — genuinely conflicting interests — are described in rhetoric that intensifies fantasy”, or that attaches people to dreams of a better life. The relevance of affect and emotions in the realm of realpolitik, but also in societal power relations in general, has increasingly become the focus of scientific and artistic disciplines.

Approaches influenced by the field of affective neurosciences, for example, understand emotions no longer as the opposite of cognition; instead they seem to go ineluctably and necessarily hand in hand.

Particularly in recent political events emotions seem to be on the rise as a currency — in restitutive and reactionary efforts towards exclusion and isolation, for example. The cx centre for interdisciplinary studies takes this as a cue to once again address the theme of affect and emotions as a meaningful category for analyzing the social — almost two decades after the first proclamation of the “Affective Turn”. The sixth lecture series of the cx focuses on the contemporary relations of power and emotions, as in the emotionally saturated technologies of power that promise happiness, or in evocative scenarios of fear and rage, but also in the more positively evaluated power of empathy and move-ments of solidarity. The series investigates the influence of mediated emotions and affective attunements, potential new balances of power through the mechanization of affect, as well as current artistic and design-based reflections and deconstructions of emotional regimes. Following prominent voices of affect theory, like Brian Massumi, this lecture series differentiates between affect as a change of a body’s agency created by the encounter with other bodies, and emotion as a social phenomenon and psychological capture of affect. However, as these terms are multi-faceted and are interpreted and applied differently depending on discipline and theorist, each panel will define and discuss their dissimilarities and transitions anew.