In Defense of the Affective Fallacy

Page 7 September–October 2008 through color therapy, support groups, and exercise regimes. In this America, “becoming a winner or a loser” are the “only two choices now.” As such generalization attests, Stewart’s anecdotes slide too easily into exemplarity. One short vignette considers RV culture, concluding that all of its participants “say social inequality is a fact of life.” Stewart finds the other side of American life in truck stops and trailer parks, in hand-written signs, conspiracy theories, and the moral dilemmas presented by America’s Most Wanted. Poor folk, in her account, seem to feel more intensely, their desires less colonized and clichéd. At times, Ordinary Affects seems like a scattershot ethnography of American eccentricity. A neighbor drops off a porn video without explanation.All manner of cranks appear: perverts, paranoids, racists, collectors, drunks, Christian extremists, gamblers, cat-lovers, criminals. Las Vegas is surely the capital of Stewart’s America, although its business is conducted at Wal-Mart. Even normalcy, in this account, seems inescapably odd. While Stewart observes numerous instances of “corruption, catastrophe, isolation, and crime,” her scrutiny of American cultural life is more dialectical than judgmental. Each day, she reminds us, we confront progress and decay, alienation and affiliation , ossification and elasticity, difference and repetition. Culture is not all-determining but rather is a “zone of indeterminacy,” where individuals produce themselves, pell-mell, within the weave of a many-threaded fabric. Fantasy both sustains and interrupts the circuitry of cultural imagination. Our belief in the order of things may be a form of paranoia, a precondition of hope, or an effect of propaganda. Participation in public life engenders optimism and anxiety. Communities emerge from the ground up, surprising both in their tenacity and their tenuousness. Public feeling materializes in minute incidents of racism and homophobia, in encounters with strangers who startle us, in habitual affiliations and novel intimacies. The omnipresent pressures of economic, physical, and ideological constraint are countered by acts of resistance and self-fashioning. And yet volition itself is a product of emotional compulsion and unforeseen accident. Ordinary Affects seems like a scattershot ethnography of American eccentricity. Ordinary Affects is a contribution to the study of the cultural life of feeling and a theorization of the everyday. Everyday emotion inhabits us and surprises us. It is experienced as a “drifting immersion ,” always incomplete, the wellspring of agency and fantasy, attention and distraction. And while it may appear self-indulgent and haphazard, Stewart’s kaleidoscopic presentation of information and ideas—the weave of stories, of the sort that could sustain a season of the Oprah Winfrey Show, and abstract theoretical formulations—does reveal something significant about the ordinary and the affective, something that would be missed by more conventional scholarship. A cultural theorist, for instance, might write a sustained study on the phenomenon of boredom in contemporary culture. Yet, for actual individuals boredom is intertwined with a multitude of other affective states. It may be experienced as amusing or self-affirming or terrifying ; it waxes and wanes. Affects, in other words, are all tangled up, a “moving target,” as Stewart puts it. We fail to fully perceive our social world not because we become habituated to it, but because affect, which is the primary conduit of cultural participation and the source of our social perception, is at once absorbing and erratic. Ordinary emotions are difficult to study not because they are buried deep within the self but because they are ephemeral and rhizomatic, indiscriminate and contingent, at once singular and reproducible. The ordinary is that which we cannot easily see because we are immersed in it, occupied by its abundant possibilities, wary of its potential surprises. Affect supplies the foundations of our vision , the motives underlying our attention. Ordinary Affects offers a collection of stories and meditations that speak to such experience and attention, data from everyday existence, as it is lived, that would evade more systemic analysis. Tobias Menely teaches English at Willamette University . He is completing a book titled “Sympathy’s Kingdom: Sentimental Culture and the Birth of Animal Rights.” Menely continued from previous page in Defense of the Affective Fallacy elizabeth Duquette aFFeCTing FiCTions: mind, Body, and emoTion in ameriCan...