The Feeling of Freedom, Planetary Affect, and Feminist Emotion

Abstract

Video artist Cecelia Condit’s recent work offers a rich visual and sonic poetics of feeling, engaging multiple varieties of sensation, affect, and emotion. Drawing on Erin Manning’s theory of preacceleration, this essay provides a close reading of Condit’s beguiling Within a Stone’s Throw (2012) as an environmental piece and in the context of her other work and her life. It argues that Condit’s solitary video work in Ireland’s rocky region resulted in a feeling of freedom that not only enabled her to create Within a Stone’s Throw—part environmental artwork, part performance piece, part impersonal self-portrait—but also served as a catalyst for feminist emotion that explodes in triumph in I’ve Been Afraid (2020). Paradoxically, then, in Within a Stone’s Throw we find the emergence of “planetary affect,” a mode of being on Earth that doesn’t center human subjectivity in forceful psychological and social emotions, but does enable them.