Silvan Tomkins

In this article, I explore the way that the creation and presentation of Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988) confronted the choreographer, performers, and audience with questions about the ethics of sex and romance and the treatment of gay men during the AIDS crisis. To analyze the complex affective relationships within and around the piece, I follow Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical theory of the face in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s related theory of faciality, which I interpret as referring to a disciplinary situation in which subjects are created through a process of terrorizing and shaming.

My concern in this paper is with how Silvan Tomkins’ theory of affects might help us to think about the affective response to art. For my purposes, there are two aspects of his account of affects that are particularly useful. First, he does not presume that there is a proper object of affect; hence the love of art is not automatically or necessarily about the diversion of libido or the investment of libidinal energy. The second significant factor in Tomkins' account of affects is the way in which he separates and yet entwines the drives, affects and cognition. It is this model of the embodied, feeling, thinking subject which promises to reach what most people seek or expect from the experience of art.

According to Polarity Theory, all ideologies are fundamentally polarized by a conflict between Humanism, which idealizes and glorifies humanity, and Normativism, which portrays human goodness and worth as contingent upon conformity and achievement. Humanism and Normativism have, however, turned out to be distinct worldviews rather than opposite ends of a single bipolar continuum. Introducing a hierarchical model of their structure and developing scales to measure each facet, I previously showed that they are negatively related across views of human nature, interpersonal attitudes, and attitudes to affect, but not across epistemologies and political values. This report presents the eight-item facet scales and fifteen-item short-measures of humanism and normativism, along with descriptive statistics for each item in US and Swedish samples.

Taking as its starting point Christine Nystrom's definition of media ecology as the study of the interactions between communications media, technologies, techniques and processes, and human thought, feeling, value and behaviour, this article argues that media ecologists have inadequately developed the field's consideration of the phenomenon we understand as 'feeling'. With this in mind, I maintain that the affect-script theory of the personality theorist Silvan Tomkins has much to contribute to the media ecology perspective, not only in bringing to bear a nuanced understanding of emotional phenomena, but in what Tomkins' ideas might contribute to our understanding of focal areas of media ecological concern, such as literacy, the accelerated rate of technological change and forms of violence.

The aim of this article is to identify characteristics of presentation of artificial intelligence in the films "Ex Machina" (2015) and "Uncanny" (2015), and the analysis of ideas about possible romantic relationships between humans and artificial intelligence agents in the context of post‑human and affect theories. The key categories used in the analysis are: "witnessing", used in the context of the Turing test, and "affect" as understood by Silvan Tomkins. The article tries to show that contemporary film presentations of artificial intelligence are part of a broader posthuman research, pointing to the equal roles of human and non‑human entities, as well as to the essence of the category of affect in the creation and understanding of artificial intelligence.

Catherine Hoffmann's Free Lunch with the Stench Wench is a performance of abjection and self-abjection through poverty with an apotropaic aspiration: to shed the shame through sharing, and to create opportunities for a common social subjectivity that refuses to be silent about the struggle of its own creation and maintenance. Despite its title, Free Lunch does not come with a free lunch for the audience but creates an olfactory situation, through the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat, which complements Hoffmann's narration and stage presence into a synaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychosocial fallout. Drawing on the psychological foundations of shame studies, sociological approaches and social-theoretical responses to austerity and social division, I propose to examine the gendered embodiment of shame and its exorcism in Hoffmann's performance, focusing on its physical codification in and beyond the visual. I explore the potential of shame to be re-weaponized against those who originally inflict it, and consider the shame that haunts every creative act, especially those with high political stakes: the failure to make a connection, the fear of being misunderstood.

Al examinar la representación de formas de castigo populares e inquisitoriales en las obras de Cervantes, este ensayo busca recuperar la vergüenza como registro emocional de la experiencia vivida en el Mediterráneo de la temprana edad moderna y revaluar lo que la antropología del siglo XX denominó los ‘valores’ de la sociedad mediterránea.

A short introduction to affect theory and its implications for politics published on the Duke U Press website, Feb 15, 2016.

Citable version available here: https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2016/02/15/its-not-what-you-think-affect-theory-and-power-take-to-the-stage/

»Im Anfang, im Prinzip war die Post, und darüber werde ich niemals hinwegkommen.«

Die Postkarte gilt als eines der schwierigen Werke von Jacques Derrida: Unter der Oberfläche einer fragmentarischen Korrespondenz verschränkt der Text Liebesdiskurs, Medientheorie und dekonstruktive Epistemologie. Das Ergebnis ist eine Theorie der »Sendungen«, deren schier uneinholbare Fülle hier, erstmalig seit ihrem Erscheinen vor 35 Jahren, systematisch untersucht wird.

Die 32 Beiträge erhellen zentrale Motive, Wendungen und Figuren des Textes, im Sinne eines »unmöglichen« Glossars: von A wie Adresse, bis Z wie Zeitverschiebung. Mit Beiträgen von: Alexander García Düttmann, Jochen Hörisch, Hans-Joachim Metzger u.v.w.m.«

By examining the representation of popular and inquisitorial forms of punishment in the works of Cervantes, this essay seeks to recover shame as an emotional register of lived experience in the early modern Mediterranean, an affect which has hitherto remained overshadowed by the abundance of critical literature on honor as well as by large-scale Mediterraneanizing studies.  The identification of an inquisitorial discourse of shaming in the episodes of Don Quijote’s encagement suggests the need, on the one hand, to reevaluate what twentieth-century anthropology denominated the “values” of Mediterranean society and, on the other, to rehabilitate local (hi)stories that are all marked by blood: the blood of shame’s blush; that which was shed through violent conflicts; and that which governed the politics of blood purity.

Style to the idea is li\e enamel to the tooth.-Victor Hugo, quoted by Edgar Allan Poe, "Critical Notices," Southern Literary Messenger (1835)1[RJeally valuable ideas can only be had at the price of close attention.-Charles Sanders Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1992)2There is no indifference to material reality in Edgar Allan Poe's writing, despite an older critical tradition that took his well-known opposition to "the heresy of The Didactic" to suggest otherwise.3 Poe's protagonists-his lovers, his criminals, his cadavers and near-cadavers-almost always suffer from a variation of the "nervous intensity of interest" that leads Egaeus to fixate with ultimately disastrous consequences on the teeth of his eponymous beloved in "Berenice," the tale at the center of my analysis in this essay.4 In his cosmological essays and his tales of mesmerism, Poe's narrators and dialogists evince what Agathos, in "The Power of Words," describes as a "deep interest" in the dizzying connectedness of the material universe.5 In his critical essays and reviews, too, Poe displays an abiding concern with the ways that readers invest, sustain, and are rewarded for their interest in reading, the material response to which he names "the poetic effect." In all these instances of "interest" in Poe's work, the foundations of disinterested aesthetic contemplation are being unsettled. But, as I will argue in this essay, Poe's critique of disinterested contemplation should be read as a conformation or adaptation of the category of the aesthetic rather than a rejection of it. If, as Friedrich Schlegel observed near the end of the eighteenth century, the aesthetic turn toward das Interessante was coeval with the historical emergence of the novel, Poe goes a step further by celebrating, in his own analyses of the psychological implications of Modernity on literary form, the forceful brevity and "unity or totality of effect" associated with the "short prose tale":6 "During the hour of perusal," he explains in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's tales, "the soul of the reader is at the writer's control."7 Readerly interest-and not disinterest, the more famous prerequisite of aesthetic judgment- turns out to be the key term for engaging Poe's aesthetics of the literary commodity.Some Poe scholars, including Meredith McGill and Terence Whalen, have minimized the significance and originality of Poe's aesthetic theories, focusing instead on the ways his work responded to market instabilities, the cultures of piracy and reprinting, and other contingencies of antebellum authorship, as a kind of corrective to the long-running (and mostly Continental) trend of viewing Poe as an aesthete and an "isolato" (to borrow Herman Melville's descriptor of himself and Hawthorne).8 Without contesting any of these historicizations, however, I'd like to suggest that Poe's most enduring and innovative responses to what Jonathan Elmer calls the "figure" of mass print culture are aesthetic ones-that is, responses that treat the aesthetic as a field for experimentation with the new circumstances of authorship in the antebellum United States.9 This essay argues that Poe's theory of interest-which he develops through a pattern of counterpoints to Kantian disinterest-constitutes one such significant structure of response to the bewildering state of aesthetic contemplation in mass culture. Poe's writing can be figured, then, at the nexus of eighteenth-century aesthetic discourses that are grounded through Immanuel Kant's disinterested and subjectively universal power of judgment and an emergent nineteenth-century aesthetics of interest that is antifoundational and more differentiable in its effects than the Kantian scheme.A surprising consequence of Poe's aesthetic adaptations, which I also examine, is that his theory of interest ends up resonating with some of the later-nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in American thought that have come to be grouped as Pragmatism; the pragmatists' recurring attention to interest, in this sense, can be understood as continuous-both conceptually and historically-with Poe's own interested manipulations of the eighteenth-century category of the aesthetic. …

Catherine Hoffmann's Free Lunch with the Stench Wench is a performance of abjection and self‐abjection through poverty with an apotropaic aspiration: to shed the shame through sharing, and to create opportunities for a common social subjectivity that refuses to be silent about the struggle of its own creation and maintenance. Despite its title, Free Lunch does not come with a free lunch for the audience but creates an olfactory situation, through the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat, which complements Hoffmann's narration and stage presence into a synaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychosocial fallout. Drawing on the psychological foundations of shame studies, sociological approaches and social‐theoretical responses to austerity and social division, I propose to examine the gendered embodiment of shame and its exorcism in Hoffmann's performance, focusing on its physical codification in and beyond the visual. I explore the potential o...

In this episode, we're joined one of the most prolific and accomplished scholars in the field of pornography studies, Susanna Paasonen. She is a professor of media studies at the University of Turku in Finland and has written and edited over eight books covering pornography, sex, internet studies, feminism, and affect. Her newest book is Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (MIT Press, 2018), where she explores sex, bodily capacities, appetites, orientations, and connections in terms of play and playfulness. Susanna is one of the most innovative porn scholars working today. Her accounting of the affective resonance of pornography moves us beyond the boundaries of traditional scholarship and leads us into the exciting realms of the unknown!