4. Affect

Abstract

Chapter Four ("Affect"): Every year the Modern Language Association of America (MLA), which gives (or denies) legitimacy to ideas and practices in the teaching of the humanities in the United States (which is then followed in most other institutions abroad), publishes a book titled Profession. Profession 2008 is no exception: it is a collection of essays that, in the name of debating various modes of teaching, produces what is in effect a coerced consensus—a consensus that, for example, inhibits critique and contestations of ideas (Rita Felski, Gerald Graff, Peter Brooks), limits experimental modes of knowledge ("Stopping Cultural Studies"), and offers empty talk about humanities and human rights without ever offering a critique that would make it clear that "human rights" are essentially rights to own and trade in the "free" market. In this chapter I focus on the structure which shapes the different discourses that explains what is behind the consensus—what I will call the pedagogy of affect. The pedagogy of affect represents itself as an open space attuned to difference that is positioned as a retreat from which to assess what does and does not work in the university so as to manage the contradictions that have arisen there from the conflict between capital and labor. It represents itself above all therefore as a place where these conflicts can be considered "reasonably," with all its associations of nonpartisan neutrality, and relegates to an "ideological" past the university as site of commitment to theory for social transformation. Keywords: affect; pedagogy; Rita Felski, Gerald Graff, Peter Brooks; queer; academe; Modern Language Association of America (MLA).