Reading the Affective Contours of the Río de la Plata: Aira, Levrero, Strafacce, and Umpi

Abstract

Reading the Affective Contours of the Río de la Plata:Aira, Levrero, Strafacce, and Umpi Matthew Bush What are affects and what do they do? These two seemingly straightforward questions have spawned a proliferating number of works of social and aesthetic critique over the last twenty years. If indeed we may speak of a generalized recognition in critical theory of the presence of affect in our everyday interactions and as a mediating factor in our perception of the social, the ramifications of that affect, its potentialities, its limitations, and its relation to a broader emotional experience are analyzed in widely differing ways by scholars from a host of fields. Collaborative volumes such as The Affective Turn (2007) edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough or The Affect Theory Reader (2010) edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth offer a glimpse of the variety extant in Affect Studies, and this only within a primarily Anglophone academic setting. The rhizomatic flows of affect make any attempt to delimit its study a frustrating exercise, though we may be able to track broad theoretical tendencies that aid in mapping the general contours of affect theory. In their aforementioned study, Seigworth and Gregg outline eight different trajectories of the study of affect that display points of contact among themselves, spanning political, psychological, scientific, and cultural analysis (6–8). More succinctly, Brian L. Ott condenses a multiplicity of approaches into two primary lines of affect theory: 1) that influenced by the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza, later revisited in the works of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Brian Massumi; and 2) the [End Page 411] psychologically-based analyses of Silvan Tomkins and their adaptations in the works of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Teresa Brennan (1–8).1 The first of these two approaches, based in Spinoza's consideration of the body's capacity to affect and to be affected, regards affect as an intensity that mediates between bodies as they come into contact; such a comprehension of affect is also patent in Massumi's reading of Deleuze (Parables 27, 32–34).2 The second formulation understands affect as a set of responses, recognizable cognitive states that, differing from Freud's conceptualization of drives, appear as reactions to external stimuli. Tomkins proposed eight such states that while not directly acting as feelings per se, may be recognized in the outward manifestation of emotion; Brennan, for example, regards feelings "as sensations that have found the right match in words" (5). From this brief distillation of a vast theoretical field, we may ask what these distinct approaches to affect offer by way of aesthetic analysis? What does affect provide as a hermeneutic tool to examine text? If, as Sedgwick writes, "Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects" (19), how can these gaseous intensities be engaged to sharpen our modes of reading? A fortuitous example of affective reading may be found in Sianne Ngai's understanding of the "tone" of a given work, taken as a "cultural artifact's feeling tone: its global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation toward its audience and the world"; such a category renders "affective values meaningful with regard to how one understands the text as a totality within an equally holistic matrix of social relations" (28).3 In this way, we come to better understand [End Page 412] how aesthetic objects, and specifically the written word, may be read as sites of the confluence of codified affects—"archives of feelings" to borrow from Anne Cvetkovich's terminology—and of an intensity that passes through that object, thus placing the work of art in contact with the body.4 Following Massumi's Deleuzian designation of affect as a "prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act" (Notes xvii), I would propose here a bridge between the Spinoza and Tomkins paradigms of affect to consider the text as a space where latent intensities are activated through readerly interaction with the text.5 An affective transaction occurs when the...