Sentient Subjects

Post-humanist Perspectives on Affect

Gerda Roelvink, Magdalena Zolkos, Gerda Roelvink, Magdalena Zolkos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000333374
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

Non-cognitive expressions of the life of the subject – feeling, motion, tactility, instinct, automatism, and sentience – have transformed how scholars understand subjectivity, agency and identity. This collection investigates the critical purchase of the idiom of affect in this 'post-humanist' thinking of the subject. It also explores political and ethical questions raised by the deployment of affect as a theoretical and artistic category.

Together the contributors to this collection map the theoretically heterogeneous field of post-humanist scholarship on affect, making inspiring, and at times surprising, connections between Spinoza's and Tomkins's theories of affect, the concept of affect and psychoanalysis, and affect and animal studies in art and literature. As a result, the concepts, vocabulary, compatibility, and attribution of affect are challenged and extended.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

INTRODUCTION

gerda roelvink

magdalena zolkos

POSTHUMANIST PERSPECTIVES ON AFFECT

framing the field

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.

The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue (sensation, subjectivity, sociality, and politics) in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing.

I Affect and posthumanism

Non-cognitive and non-volitional expressions of life, including feeling, animation, tactility, and habituation, have come into focus with the turn to “post” humanism.¹ Yet the pertinence of this “affective” focus for the posthumanist project and its concerns will depend on how we define posthumanism. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question an anthropocentric belief in the human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life (cf. Nayar; Weitzenfeld and Joy). Such questioning has arisen in part from a critique of the (humanistic) assumption of human separateness from nature and of the supremacy of human knowledge and collective learning over non-human forms of sentience and organization. Posthumanist scholars have linked the tenets of human exceptionalism to a politics of speciesism, thus interrogating the “compulsory humanity of the human, [that is] the construction of the ‘normal’ human with specific biological features and abilities, sex, form and functions” that has been tied to the mechanics of marginalization and expendability of life forms designated as non-human, inhuman or infrahuman (Nayar 2, 4; emphasis added). This critical reflection is in turn underwritten by the premise that techno-biological advances and knowledge about non-human species are changing what “human” means and what its relationship with the world is.²

Drawing upon literary and cultural examples of “corporeal-physiological fluidity, ontological liminality and identity-morphing,” as well as of the bio-technological sciences, Pramod Nayar (2) sees posthumanism as the “radical decentring of the traditional sovereign, coherent and autonomous human in order to demonstrate how the human is always already evolving with, constituted by and constitutive of multiple forms of life.” This delineation has two dimensions – ontological and critical. In the latter iteration, the posthumanist lens opens up perspectives on the emergence of a “new conceptualization of the human,” one that moves away from the traditional humanist idea of the “autonomous, self-willed individual agent,” and towards the notion of the human as “an assemblage, co-evolving with other forms of life, enmeshed with the environment and technology” (3–4; emphasis in original). Rethinking the human beyond the fantasy of humanity's separateness from nature opens vistas for recognizing ecological vulnerability and resilience that is shared across species, where the human is seen as an “instantiation of a network of connections, exchanges, linkages and crossings with all forms of life” (5).

Making a distinction between, on the one hand, transhumanism, or “cyborg posthumanism,” focused on the technologization of the human species and on human enhancement and perfectibility through mutational processes, and, on the other, critical interrogation of the “human” as a social norm, Cary Wolfe (xiv–xv) characterizes the latter in terms that illuminate the relevance of posthumanism for theorizing affect. Drawing from Étienne Balibar's point about the humanity/animality figure underpinning nationalist discourses of the subject in “Racism and Nationalism” (57), Wolfe (xv) critiques the paradigmatic humanist distinction between humanity and animality, and stipulates that in modernity “‘the human’ is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature, the biological, and the evolutionary, but more generally by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether.” In contrast, the posthumanist reimagining of the human as deeply embedded in its biological and technological worlds requires – put in system-theoretical language – a form of “openness to the environment,” which originates in self-referential autopoiesis (xxi). This calls for the recognition of social phenomena of language and consciousness (and – we would like to add – affect) that “require an interplay of bodies as a generative structure but do not take place in any of them” (Maturana qtd in Wolfe xxiii; emphasis added). By implication, Wolfe (xxiii; emphasis in original) argues that “we can no longer talk of the body or even, for that matter, of a body in the traditional sense” but, rather, should be focusing on “a kind of virtuality, [ … ] a virtual, multidimensional space produced and stabilized by the recursive enactions and structural couplings of autopoietic beings.” From this insistence on corporeal virtuality, materiality and environmental connectivity, diverse modes of human experience and affectivity are “recontextualized [ … ] in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings” (xxv).

This special issue seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the denunciation of the unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Without trying to exhaust the possible ways in which posthumanism has intersected with, magnified and mobilized the categories of affect, in this opening essay we suggest that one entry into the exploration of their mutual connectedness is the idea of aliveness, or animation. The question of aliveness has been central to the contemporary thinking about affect (see, for example, Thacker; Chen). As Lisa Blackman (“Affect, Relationality” 30) stipulates, drawing on William James's theory of affective sociality, the organismic “capacity to live” has become ontologically and normatively equated with affectivity. Characteristic of this conceptual move is the following statement by Ben Anderson (736–37, 740; emphasis in original): “[t]he emergence and movement of affect, and its corporeal expression in bodily feelings, create the transpersonal life that animates or dampens space-times of experiences,” and “[ … ] the movement, and qualification, of affect is intimate with the multiplication of life: an animation of space-time that follows the vitalist demand to be sensitive to the indeterminacy, and complexity, of life.” In this perspective, affect emerges as a key part of the “interplay of bodies,” highlighted in Wolfe's understanding of posthumanism, that animates life.

Influenced by Gilles Deleuze's characterization of “life” in terms of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities in The Logic of Sense (1990), and elsewhere, much of the recent affective scholarship has used the category of “the animate” not in the sense of a singular and bounded life unit but as synonymous with a certain force of aliveness and of a potential for becoming (see, for example, Spinks; Thrift; Shouse; Papoulias and Callard; Brinkema; Posteraro; Boljkovac). As such, the category of “life” is taken to be distinctive from, and to precede, processes of socialization, individuation and subjectivation. In this context, Manning (“Always More” 124) writes about the “welling” and the “transductive potentials” of life, while also seeking to retrieve the idea of aliveness from its associations with organismic singularity. Manning's project is to develop a counter-imaginary of life by invoking visuals of liquid bodies and flowing connection and transmissions between them.

The word “animate” comes from the Latin term animus (“soul, mind, life”) and anima (“living being, disposition, passion, courage, spirit, feeling”), with the Proto-Indo-European root ane- meaning “breath” (Online Etymology Dictionary). The process of breathing is essential to sustaining life of aerobic organisms through the provision of oxygen, but is not exclusive to them; for example, processes of carbon dioxide absorption by chlorophyll in tree leaves have also been called “breathing.” In this wider sense, breathing is not only a feature of life forms equipped with lungs or gills but can simply mean airflow across cutaneous boundaries, including non-animal species (see, for example, Škof and Holmes; see also Górska). In the texts of Eastern philosophy one encounters a concept of breath as a life force, for example in the energetic notion of praṇā vāyu in the Vedas, or the “lung” in Tibetan Buddhism. Yogic philosophy localizes energy channels called nadis within the body (anatomically, nadis correspond to the nervous system rather than the respiratory system), through which the flow of praṇā vāyu intensifies or subsides (Feuerstein). While more in-depth work would need to be done to explore the connection between the Eastern philosophic conceptions of breath as life force and the history of vitalist materialism in the West (see, for example, Ahonen), here we seek to gesture at the nexus of aliveness, affective transmissions and ecological connections encompassed within this breath-centred imaginary.

The role of breath in our affective connection to others is also brought to the fore by David Abram who uses the image of breath to explore the implications of the extension of agency from the human to the more-than-human world (via Gaia theory) for our own agentic or animated relationships to life in general. Abram (221, 222 respectively) illustrates the human connection to (and participation in) the breathing animate life of planet Earth through lived experiences of the atmospheres of place. He links the experience of sentience or awareness to the experience of atmosphere, which surrounds human subjects and sustains their life, but which cannot quite be seen or grasped: “to acknowledge this affinity between air and awareness [ … ] is to allow this curious possibility: that the awareness that stirs within each of us is continuous with the wider awareness that moves around us, bending the grasses and lofting the clouds” (223). Here, the idea of life force (a combination of awareness and breath) reflects both how human subjects are connected to ecological others and also forms part of their own unique bodily response to the world.

Among posthumanist scholars, Rosi Braidotti (The Posthuman) has been perhaps the most deliberate in her attempts to register affectivity on the map of a posthumanist theory of the subject. Using the term “zoe-egalitarianism” to refer to the vitalist-materialist force of the “aliveness” of all species in order to explore the prospects of non-anthropocentric community and solidarity, she (103, 193) enlists affect – together with memory and imagination – in the project of creating “transversal, relational nomadic assemblages” of different beings and life forms. Importantly, for Braidotti affect is not reducible to the widespread melancholic sentiments that accompany the recognition of shared human and non-human vulnerability in the face of climate change and species extinction, such as feelings of hopelessness and depression that the problem is just too big and all-encompassing for any effective action alone or in concert. Rather, affective attachment acquires a more affirmative expression of forming connections to “non-anthropomorphic organic others, [as well as the] technologically mediated, newly patented creatures we are sharing our planet with” (103). While not reducing the affective register in this issue to affirmative sentiments, we take up the challenge of Braidotti's project of redefining subjectivity and community away from human-centric notions of the self, and towards affective and experiential bio-centric connections and sensibilities.

In this introductory essay we frame some of the key registers of affect addressed in this issue – sensation, subjectivity, sociality, and politics. We begin with sensation, a common starting point for scholarship on affect. As shown in the essays by Anna Gibbs and by Stephen Loo and Undine Sellbach in this issue, sensation both reflects how we know and understand affect and is a way in which we sense and are moved by affective processes. Inspired in particular by the essay by Karyn Ball in this issue, we then move to consider the subject and how attention to the processes and forces of affect reframe the point at which we approach the question of subject. Some of our contributors suggest that the aliveness approach to affect calls attention to a radical corporal connectivity and relationality prior to subjectification, while others offer a critique of the pre-individual and anti-intentionalist notions of subjectivity, and embrace a more psychoanalytic idea of affect as the subject's energetic register of unconscious motivation and identity. These different ways of affective reframing of the subject are closely linked to an understanding of sociality in terms of energetic intensification and energetic abatement, which are part of the processes of subjective becoming. This idea is made more concrete in the essays by Ada Smailbegović, Jennifer Biddle, and Emma Waterton and Steve Watson in this issue, who, in distinct ways, are concerned with the formation of hybrid (human/non-human) socialities and communities. Finally, we turn to consider some of the political questions and challenges thrown up by posthumanist concerns, particularly in the essay by Maria Hynes and Scott Sharpe, and ponder affect as aliveness as a way to think about these challenges. With the contributors to this special issue we hope to demonstrate that the inquiry into affect is of high relevance for posthumanist projects.

II Registering affect through sensation

It has become common for contemporary affective scholarship to locate affect within the perceptual and sensory registers of knowledge (see, for example, Colombetti; Paasonen, Hillis, and Petit). As such, the interest in affect is often interpreted as a recognition and validation of embodied and emotive forms of knowledge production. This is taken to stand in direct co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Posthumanist Perspectives on Affect: Framing the Field
• 2 Affective Ethologies: Monk Parakeets and Non-Human Inflections in Affect Theory
• 3 Mimesis as a Mode of Knowing: Vision and Movement in the Aesthetic Practice of Jean Painlevé
• 4 Losing Steam After Marx and Freud: On Entropy as the Horizon of the Community
• 5 Insect Affects: The Big and Small of the Entomological Imagination in Childhood
• 6 A War Long Forgotten: Feeling the Past in an English Country Village
• 7 “My Name Is Danny”: Indigenous Animation as Hyper-Realism
• 8 Affect: An Unworkable Concept
• Index