Postmodernism and the Affective Turn

Abstract

Over past decade growing body of criticism has emerged out of social sciences and media studies that suggests that affects are socially transmissible. Critics associated with what Patricia Clough has defined as the affective argue that preconscious feelings and impulses are altered by smells, hormones, gestures, and images, and that these affective incitements change depending upon qualitative conditions of social relations. This understanding of suggests that what we imagine to be individual and specific--impulses, attitudes, emotions, and feelings in fact have social, historical, and therefore shared dimension. Neither biologically deterministic nor humanistic, this approach allows for bodily experience to be understood as dynamic registration of environmental change. The understanding of as culturally instigated and biologically registered is now seen as having relevance for study of cultural production, aesthetics, and literature specifically. But such an approach would seem at odds with study of postmodernist literature in particular, given resilience of Fredric Jameson's assertion that postmodernism entails a waning of affect (10) and general critical consensus that postmodernist literature tends to be tonally--and therefore affectively--cold: if we are looking for production of affect, postmodernist literature, which seems to lack material, bodies, and people, seems to be most unlikely place to find it. (1) We might call this commonly held cluster of beliefs affective hypothesis. The affective hypothesis posits that postmodernist literature is characterized by an absence of tonal warmth and that absence of tonal warmth in given work signals an absence of affective charge inherent to work. Crucially, while scholars now widely agree that wave of high postmodernist fiction has crested, prevalence of affective hypothesis, particularly as expressed in popular literary press, has not. As critics increasingly turn their attention. toward younger generation of writers, affective hypothesis is often employed in order to emphasize degree to which work of these writers leaves behind postmodernist aesthetic techniques. (2) To extent that prose these writers create is read as possessing greater tonal warmth than that of their postmodernist predecessors, their work tends to be celebrated as indicating general return to realism as dominant narrative mode of literary fiction and with it renewed commitment to representing emotional lives of real people. (3) Yet this cluster of assumptions that stems from affective hypothesis diminishes degree to which contemporary fiction continues to take up postmodernist formal characteristics, albeit unevenly, provisionally, and tactically. This erasure of postmodernist experimentalism is particularly noteworthy when it occurs in response to works by authors like Richard Powers who demonstrate clear conceptual and formal inheritance from postmodernism and who, as I will show through reading of one of Powers's recent novels, The Echo Maker (2006), produce realist narratives in part to demonstrate their artificiality and fragility. Reading works like The Echo Maker as simply marking return to realism, I will argue, neglects how affective work they do is reliant upon precisely those postmodernist tactics that affective hypothesis would suggest obstructs affective transmission: metafictional strategies, skepticism toward subjective consistency, and deferral of narrative closure. Focusing on critique of humanist subject at core of Powers's work, I will argue that affective turn, which chronologically coincides with end of postmodernism debates and therefore is easily read as corrective or counter to postmodernist suspicion toward subjective emotion, can instead be understood to provide tools for better understanding of how postmodernist aesthetic strategies in contemporary fiction complicate relationship between feeling and individual; embodiment and subjectivity. …