Estelle Platini
Estelle Platini
TrendyWebAltar#LaurenBerlant on Intimacy as World-Making
by Hans Demeyer
https://extraextramagazine.com/talk/lauren-berlant-on-intimacy-as-world-making
Hans: What drew you to affect #theory?
Lauren: Part of my interest in affect is about how people get attached to concepts in the way they get attached to lovers: how people take abstractions extremely personally and how they throw themselves into things without a plan or ideology – sometimes it’s ideological in the sense that people throw themselves into things they have learned they should throw themselves into, but often it’s inventive. And that’s why you have to know about affect because something makes you do something while not knowing why you did it. My interest was in discovering how we register affect as a kind of belated experience. That’s why I also work on genre because genres are spaces where problems of causality are also reflected on and disturbed.
Hans: One of the genres that is very attractive to people is the enrapturing #musicvideo, a genre that is rather lacking in causality and narrativity and is foremost an affective atmosphere in which people wish to stay – ‘I want my entire life to be this #music #video.’ It’s not dissimilar to the end of a romantic #film where the #love interests recognise that they belong together after which the film stops and the hardest part of building a life together is not shown. But as with the music video, that scene installs a longing for recognition to stay as an affective intensity.
Lauren: That’s how people live, right? When they find some happiness, they just want it to go on like that forever. That’s how Freud defines pleasure: it’s the state you want to be in. But this affective state doesn’t have to feel positive the way ‘pleasure’ suggests: it could feel like affective comfort food, sometimes provided by the return of shame, or loneliness, or asceticism, or ennui, any state where people get to coast the way they want. Media that offer ecstatic atmospherics – the music video, but also #TikTok, mumblecore or lo-fi – are very powerful because they fold an alternative world of #fantasy and fascination from where people live. José Muñoz would talk about this as a kind of utopianism. You create utopianism not because you are getting a future, but because you experience affectively a world you want to live in before there is an infrastructure for it. In the DIY and professional music video, #artists usually find ways to demonstrate pleasure without making viewers feel small, modelling a freedom someone might want to imitate or be proximate to, as in fan or stan #culture. I’m a little bit more sceptical because I wonder: does the aesthetic pastoral matter or is it mainly a ruse of alternativity? The question is how we take up a position in our pleasures and attachments.
by Hans Demeyer
https://extraextramagazine.com/talk/lauren-berlant-on-intimacy-as-world-making
Hans: What drew you to affect #theory?
Lauren: Part of my interest in affect is about how people get attached to concepts in the way they get attached to lovers: how people take abstractions extremely personally and how they throw themselves into things without a plan or ideology – sometimes it’s ideological in the sense that people throw themselves into things they have learned they should throw themselves into, but often it’s inventive. And that’s why you have to know about affect because something makes you do something while not knowing why you did it. My interest was in discovering how we register affect as a kind of belated experience. That’s why I also work on genre because genres are spaces where problems of causality are also reflected on and disturbed.
Hans: One of the genres that is very attractive to people is the enrapturing #musicvideo, a genre that is rather lacking in causality and narrativity and is foremost an affective atmosphere in which people wish to stay – ‘I want my entire life to be this #music #video.’ It’s not dissimilar to the end of a romantic #film where the #love interests recognise that they belong together after which the film stops and the hardest part of building a life together is not shown. But as with the music video, that scene installs a longing for recognition to stay as an affective intensity.
Lauren: That’s how people live, right? When they find some happiness, they just want it to go on like that forever. That’s how Freud defines pleasure: it’s the state you want to be in. But this affective state doesn’t have to feel positive the way ‘pleasure’ suggests: it could feel like affective comfort food, sometimes provided by the return of shame, or loneliness, or asceticism, or ennui, any state where people get to coast the way they want. Media that offer ecstatic atmospherics – the music video, but also #TikTok, mumblecore or lo-fi – are very powerful because they fold an alternative world of #fantasy and fascination from where people live. José Muñoz would talk about this as a kind of utopianism. You create utopianism not because you are getting a future, but because you experience affectively a world you want to live in before there is an infrastructure for it. In the DIY and professional music video, #artists usually find ways to demonstrate pleasure without making viewers feel small, modelling a freedom someone might want to imitate or be proximate to, as in fan or stan #culture. I’m a little bit more sceptical because I wonder: does the aesthetic pastoral matter or is it mainly a ruse of alternativity? The question is how we take up a position in our pleasures and attachments.
Lauren Berlant on Intimacy as World-Making - Extra Extra Magazine
Intimacy builds worlds, says Lauren Berlant. Their work tracks how people have come to identify life with intimacy, and how the latter came to be privatised in stories of the romantic heteronormative couple as an...
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