Affect - an ethnocentric encounter

Tolia-Kelly, Divya P (2006) ‘Affect – an ethnocentric encounter? Exploring the 'universalist' imperative of emotional/affectual geographies’, Area 38(2):213-217

This is a short but complex commentary by Divya Tolia-Kelly referring to Thrift's article. Again situated within the discipline of geography, much of the argument is specific to the debates in that field, so it's immediately interesting to think about the differences from the dominant discourses in the visual arts...

Tolia-Kelly charts a political, material, division between two strands of geographical research - ‘affectual’ and ‘emodied’ geographies - both concerned with attending to 'the intractable silencing of emotions in social research and public life'.

On the one hand, ‘affectual’ geographies (including Thrift's work) demonstrate a concern with affect as transpersonal embodied experience. ‘Affectual economies’, Tolia-Kelly writes: ‘are defined and circulate through and within historical notions of the political, social and cultural capacities of various bodies as signified rather than those specifically encountered, felt, loved, loathed and sensed.’ As feminist and postcolonial critiques have demonstrated more generally, however, there is a danger in the lack of historicity in much of this work, of a tendency towards universalism; so preventing any sensitivity to difference and to power geometries - to the idea that the affective capacities of bodies are signified unequally within social spaces, and that the registers of affect and emotion are multiple rather than singular.

On the other hand, Tolia-Kelly suggests, the ‘emotional’ geographies (of say Kay Anderson, Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi), focusing on embodied experience, have ‘embedded’ a memory of social theories of difference, ‘emodied in a feminist critique of modernity and its legacy'. The emotional geographies project is a successful one, she suggests, in ‘its attempts to retain a sense of plurality and continually presenced are issues of power’. However, what is missing is ‘historical contextualizing towards a non-universalist understanding of emotional registers'. Hate and love, for example, need to be understood in ways that are sensitive not only to gender but to other differences (such as race).

Through a brief discussion of current research in the field, Tolia-Kelly proposes an ‘alternative conjoining of ‘‘affectual/emotional’’ geographies and power geometries [with] a political orientation that is historicist, and thus wise to the pitfalls of modernist ideology (feminism included) and thus is not sold on a universalist scale of measurement and encounter with emotions and geographies of affect’.

Perhaps the significance of such a project isn't immediately obvious to those familiar with the privileging of individual (artists') experience within much visual arts discourse, but it is worth remembering that this privileged body is still typically blind to all but a limited view of difference - de-historicized and de-politicized - and all too ready to adopt the universalist, deracinated, dehistoricized knowledge of other authoritative disciplines concerning the individual body, perception and affect.