A NG E L A K I journal of the theoretical humanities volume6 number 3 december 2001 Art is thus confused with a cultural object and may give rise to any of the discourses to which anthropological data in general lend them- selves. One could do a history, sociology, or political economy of it, to mention just those few. One can easily show that its destination, anthropologically speaking, undergoes consid- erable modification depending on whether the artwork ÒbelongsÓ to a culture that is tribal, imperial, republican, monarchical, theocratic, mercantile, autocratic, capitalist, and so on, and that it is a determining feature of the contemporary work that it is obviously simon o’sullivan destined for the museum (collection, conserva- tion, exhibition) and for the museum audience. This approach is implied in any ÒtheoryÓ of art, for the theory is made only of objects, in THE AESTHETICS OF order to determine them. But the work is not merely a cultural object, although it is that too. AFFECT It harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the thinking art beyond determinations of its ÒreceptionÓ and Òproduc- representation tion.Ó Jean-Franois Lyotard, ÒCritical ReflectionsÓ 93 ity over and above its existence as a cultural object. I want to claim that this excess need not ow could it happen that in thinking about be theorised as transcendent; we can think the Hart, in reading the art object, we missed aesthetic power of art in an immanent sense Ð what art does best? In fact we missed that which through recourse to the notion of affect. defines art: the aesthetic Ð because art is not an Before moving on, however, a backward object amongst others, at least not an object of glance. What happened? What caused this knowledge (or not only an object of knowledge). aesthetic blindness? In the discipline of art Rather, art does something else. Indeed, art is history there were, are (at least) two factors in precisely antithetical to knowledge; it works play. First, Marxism (or ÒThe Social History of against what Lyotard once called the Òfantasies of ArtÓ) and the propensity to explain art histori- realismÓ (The Postmodern Condition 93). Which cally, through recourse to its moment of produc- is to say that art might well be a part of the world tion. Second, deconstruction (or ÒThe New Art (after all it is a made thing), but at the same time HistoryÓ) and the propensity to stymie (histori- it is apart from the world. And this apartness, cal) interpretations, whilst still inhabiting their however it is theorised, is what constitutes artÕs general explanatory framework. Marxism and importance. deconstruction: understanding art as representa- In this paper I want to think a little about this tion, and then understanding art as being in the apartness; this ÒexcessÓ or ÒraptureÓ which, as crisis in representation; appealing to origins as Lyotard remarks above, constitutes artÕs effectiv- final explanation, and then putting the notion of ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/01/030125-11 © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/09697250120087987 1 2 5 aesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of no denying, or deferring, affects. They are what Marxism. A disinterested beauty? A transcendent make up life, and art. 8 For there is a sense in aesthetic? Ideological! 1 Then it fell foul of decon- which art itself is made up of affects. Affects struction. The apparatus of capture that is decon- frozen in time and space. Affects are, then, to use struction: Derrida neatly reconfiguring the Deleuzo-Guattarian terms Ð and to move the discourse of aesthetics as a discourse of/on repre- register away from deconstruction and away from sentation. Aesthetics is deconstructed, and art representation Ð the molecular ÒbeneathÓ the becomes a broken promise. 2 Both Marxism and molar. The molecular understood here as lifeÕs, deconstruction were, still are, powerful critiques. and artÕs, intensive quality, as the stuff that goes However, deconstruction especially is negative on beneath, beyond, even parallel to significa- critique par excellence; indeed, it is implicitly a tion.9 critique of Marxism (so that Marx and Derrida But what can one say about affects? Indeed, will always be troublesome bed mates, at least in what needs to be said about them? Certainly, this sense). 3 in a space such as art history where deconstruc- Deconstructive reading is not itself a bad tive Ð let alone semiotic Ð approaches to art are thing; indeed, it might be strategically important becoming, indeed have become, hegemonic, the to employ deconstruction precisely to counteract existence of affects, and their central role in art, the effects of, to disable, a certain kind of needs asserting. For this is what art is: a bundle aesthetic discourse (deconstruction as a kind of of affects or, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, expanded ideological critique). However, after a bloc of sensations , waiting to be reactivated by the deconstructive reading, the art object a spectator or participant. 10 Indeed, you cannot remains. Life goes on. Art, whether we will it or read affects, you can only experience them. not, continues producing affects. What is the Which brings us to the crux of the matter: expe- ÒnatureÓ of affects, and can they be decon- rience. Paul de Man, as a more or less typical structed? Affects can be described as extra- spokesperson for that melancholy science that is discursive and extra-textual. 4 Affects are deconstruction, writes: ÒIt is a temporal experi- moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the body ence of human mutability, historical in the deep- at the level of matter. 5 We might even say that est sense of the term in that it implies the affects are immanent to matter. They are necessary experience of any present as a passing certainly immanent to experience. (Following experience, that makes the past irrevocable and Spinoza, we might define affect as the effect unforgettable, because it is inseparable from any another body, for example an art object, has present or futureÓ (148Ð 49). upon my own body and my bodyÕs duration.6) As As with Derrida, so with de Man: present expe- such, affects are not to do with knowledge or rience Ð the moment, the event Ð is inaccessible meaning; indeed, they occur on a different, asig- to consciousness. All we ever have is its trace (we nifying register.7 In fact this is what differenti- experience ÒpassingÓ moments). If the affect ÒisÓ ates art from language Ð although language, too, precisely present experience, it could be said, can and does have an affective register; indeed, following de Man et al., that all we ever have is a signification itself might be understood as just a kind of echo, the representation of affect. Now complex affective function (meaning would be this is a clever and beguiling story, giving the the effect of affects). affect a logocentric spin. But, I wonder, is the Of course, from a certain perspective, affects affect really of this type? Is the affect transcen- are only meaningful within language. Indeed the dent in this sense (beyond experience)? Or, affect can be Òunderstood,Ó can be figured, as rather, is it not the case, as I have already always already a representation of what we might suggested, that the affect is immanent to experi- call the Ur or originary affect Ð the latter posi- ence11 and that all this writing about the affect is tioned as an unreachable (and unsayable) origin; really just that: writing. Writing which produces again, so much for deconstruction. And yet an effect of representation. (Parodying Derrida a affects are also, and primarily, affective. There is little, we might say that by asking the question 1 2 6 o’sullivan Òwhat is an affect?Ó we are already presupposing an object as such, or not only an object, but that there is an answer (an answer which must be rather a space, a zone 14 or what Alain Badiou given in language). We have in fact placed the might call an Òevent siteÓ: Òa point of exile where affect in a conceptual opposition that always and it is possible that something, finally, might everywhere promises and then frustrates mean- happenÓ (84, n. 5). At any rate art is a place ing.) where one might encounter the affect. So much for writing, and for art as a kind of Such an accessing of the event might involve writing. In fact the affect is something else what Henri Bergson calls attention: a suspension entirely: precisely an event or happening. Indeed, of normal motor activity which in itself allows this is what defines the affect. It is not that de other ÒplanesÓ of reality to be perceivable (an Man (or Derrida for that matter) is wrong. As opening up to the world beyond utilitarian inter- subjects we can certainly be positioned, and posi- ests) (101Ð02). Following Bergson we might say tion ourselves, in de ManÕs temporal predicament that as beings in the world we are caught on a (a name for which is representation). This has certain spatio-temporal register: we see only what often been the way in the West Ð in modernism we have already seen (we see only what we are and in postmodernism. Indeed, we might say, interested in). At stake with art, then, might be following Michael Fried and his detractors, that an altering, a switching, of this register. New this oscillation between aesthetics and its decon- (prosthetic) technologies can do this. Switching struction has animated the discourse of art temporal registers: time-lapse photography history up to today.