The Politics of Affect: Berlant on Affect and Austerity

What are the politics of affect? And is this a well-posed question in the first place? Why affect now? In what sense is a given politics affective? As discourses of shame sweep across dominant media in the UK, what are the implications of naming this discursive coding an affective politics? Is such an affect being [...]

Deleuze and Foucault on Marketing as Control

Gilles Deleuze never to my knowledge wrote extensively on marketing, but he had some choice words for it in “Postscript on Societies of Control.” I quote them below. I lectured today, minutes ago actually, on Foucault’s panopticism and Deleuze’s modulated control to my first year marketing and communication course at QMUL. I tried to make [...]

Sense, Value, Force in Indian Mobile Phone Cultures

According to Deleuze, Nietzsche’s favorite method is to consider a thing’s plurality of senses depending on the many forces that can take possession of it (N+P 143). Thus there are many types of religions depending on the forces dominant and minor in it. This method is particularly useful in considering media today. There are many [...]

Memory, Sensation, Duration in Contemporary Media Assemblages in India

I am attempting to think through the implications for media assmeblage analysis of the connection that Bergson makes between the body and duration. This is an excerpt from an article I recently wrote. It may appear in South Asian Culture and History. The main point here for the purposes of this paper, is that Office [...]

On the Work of Art Today: Benjamin and the Machinic Phylum

We will begin here with Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (Second Version of 1936). (I’m not going to justify using this version except to say that there are aspects to it that exceed Adorno’s policing of Walter!) W.J.T. Mitchell has clarified the genealogy that ties Benjamin’s “Artwork” [...]