Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin

Abstract

To talk about affective tendencies is almost always to talk about intensities, and behind that linkage is a relation to melodrama, that modality of performance that attaches feeling states to their gestural inflation in bodily performance. In contrast, Raymond Williams’ model of the structure of feeling places the historical present and the affective present in a space of affective residue that constitutes what is shared among strangers beneath the surface of manifested life. “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin” reads with Scott Heim’s novel and Gregg Araki's film to think about how to think about the structural, historical, and affective overdeterminations of underperformed emotion, tracking the emergence of a cultural style that appears as reticent action, a spatialized suspension of relational clarity that signifies a subtracted response to the urgencies of the moment (the historical moment, the sexual moment, the intimate moment, the moment where survival time is being apprehended, absorbed, and encountered).