Review: How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices, edited by Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa

Abstract

Book Review| June 01 2020 Review: How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices, edited by Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices, edited by Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa. Brill Rodolphi, 2019. 279 pp./$96.00 (hb). Stephanie Amon Stephanie Amon Stephanie Amon is the associate editor of In the In-Between: Journal of New and New Media Photography. For more information visit www.stephanieamon.com. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2020) 47 (2): 93–96. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2020.472017 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stephanie Amon; Review: How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices, edited by Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa. Afterimage 1 June 2020; 47 (2): 93–96. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2020.472017 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search In their introduction to this useful essay collection, Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa schematize affect as “a stage in a process of triggering” (4). They understand affect as an ontologically unstable potentiality that can be formally provoked through artistic, literary, and social forms. Form sparks affect—this is the claim made in Eugenie Brinkema's influential formalist polemic, The Forms of the Affects (2014). When affect is activated by form, it unfolds and operates; it does things. Affect begets cognitive outcomes such as thoughts, emotions, ideology, and identity. It can therefore do ethically and politically consequential things. Thirteen scholarly contributions are organized into sections corresponding to these three stages: form, affect, effect. As contributor Jan Slaby points out, this basic yet sturdy framework accords with the view of affect in cultural theory as a “forceful processuality” that territorializes in social arrangements and cultural practices (61). Bernd Herzogenrath harkens back to... You do not currently have access to this content.