Hi Chris,
Thanks for the interesting post, and, yes, I do think that last quote
particularly does resonate with the preceding threads on
nostalgia and pastoral among others.
I went to this link you gave and couldn't find the Anna Gibbs
paper on anguish, I may be blind since I have a headache,
though I did find an article by her in the archives
Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology
of Affect which was interesting too, with its discussion
of affective contagion.
I copied out these two quotes:
We might say, then, that the media act as vectors in affective epidemics in which something else is also smuggled along: the attitudes and even the specific ideas which tend to accompany affect in any given situation.
In the context of affect contagion,
Hanson's very inarticulacy was efficacious, at least insofar as it functioned as an immediate manifestation of distress rather than simply as a sign for it.
which seem apt to other political situations than the one discussed.
Especially that idea of inarticulacy as efficacious and I would guess,
via media, acting as a kind of vector for an affective epidemic, and
how what is conveyed is that sense of "having had enough" which
is communicated all the more affectively/effectively byvirtue
of being inarticulate.
Anyway, if you could give me a hint as to finding the article on
anguish, I'd be glad to read it!
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Dec 9, 2003 12:45 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Media and control
On Mon, 2003-12-08 at 20:51, Christine Murray wrote:
> I find your comments on this and the referral to Tomkins intriguing. I will
> look into this further.
Chris,
There is a research group doing this research called:
Affect-Image-Media Research Group, School of Communication, Design and
Media, University of Western Sydney, run by Dr Anna Gibbs and Dr
Virginia Nightingale. Anna has a paper on anguish available online at
Australian Humanities Review:
http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/
Anna introduced me to Tomkins and I am thinking of doing a research
doctorate affiliated with the research group. Anna is currently madly
writing a paper on horror and media images and Virginia is working on
something along these lines as well, both which I look forward to
reading since horror and media images and Gothic fiction is my area. I
started out working on a series of popular Gothic novels just to make
money since I wanted to get out of working full time and working in the
HIV/AIDS area with injecting drug users is also a good way to destroy a
career treadmill in publishing. But this project became something else
again so I decided to link the novels with post-grad research degrees so
I could avail myself of the wonderful resources universities offer.
Other then that I am also left completely alone to do what I wish
without interference which is a dream run so far as I am concerned. (I
think of the extra letters which get added to the letters after my name
as part of the royalty payments for the novels, as well.) A strange time
be a poet and the things we do to get around this, like become novelists
as well and then willingly immerse ourselves in an academic institutional
setting in order to survive and write when popular myth would have the
academy as enemy of the poet.
Anyway, I don't want to draw you into a discussion, it is just you were
the unfortunate one who pressed the right button. A few additions to my
last post which may be of interest to the list.
* * *
The only Tomkins I have at the moment is _Shame and its sisters_ (ed
Sedgwick and Frank, Duke 1995.) I am trying to save up for the four
volume edition of Tomkins but may need a rich benefactor for this.
A quote: ...shame is an experience of the self by the self. At that
moment when the self feels ashamed, it is felt as a sickness within the
self. Shame is the most reflexive of affects in that the
phenomenological distinction between the subject and object of shame is
lost. Why is shame so close to the experienced self? It is because the
self lives in the face, and within the face the self burns brightest in
the eyes. Shame turns the attention of the self and others away from
other objects to this most visible residence of self, increases its
visibility, and thereby generates the torment of self consciousness.
(Page 136 of above citation.)
There is so much just in this short quote I don't know where to start.
There is an obvious Kantian resonance to begin with which if followed
through reconfigures the Kantian Sublime and breaks Kantian logic so
that it appears that rather then the Kantian empty form of time, time is
a broken form. A question of form is posed. More interestingly is the
break with the Cartesian cognito. The "I think therefore I am" is itself
lost as the dualism is torn apart from the inside. No longer is there an
horizon which directs the self as subject but a flat Earth on the
absolute horizon where the impossible becomes possible. Transitives are
broken... so much for Aristotle. This is a completely new type of
statement which appears at the same time, the 1960s, as Foucault is able
to make the new kind of statement about statements in the _Archeology of
Knowledge_. These are not statements made by individuals at different
times but a collective non-human agency in which the statement itself is
produced immanently. To give Tomkins a transcendental reading is to read
a chillingly anti-human Tomkins and I think of Dante's Hell. Yet Tomkins
is profoundly human. Two narratives, an anti-human narrative and a human
narrative and in between a fundamental appearing of novelty. The face is
also a landscape. A moment is an angular (torsional) force vector outside
the space of the landscape yet inside landscape which is created as space
as a landscape event where the event does not occur in space but creates
space in time so that the landscape comes with space as a face...
I won't go on... should be doing other things.
Another quick quote: Self-consciousness is heightened by virtue of the
unwillingness of the self to renounce the object. In this respect it is
not unlike mourning, in which I become exquisitely aware of the self
just because I will not surrender the love object which must be
surrendered. (Page 138.)
Does this resonate with the past discussion on nostalgia and pastoral?
best wishes
Chris Jones.
--
Common sense tells us that that poetry and philosophy are modes of
discourse that should be kept distinct: to couple such power of
seduction with such authority is to tempt fate itself. Hence the urge
to protect, as the most pressing of moral imperatives, this borderline
between both modes of discourse. Paul deMann
