DOING THINGS: EMOTION, AFFECT, AND MATERIALITY

This paper considers some implications of the recent ‘‘affective turn’’ in cultural studies, focusing on the ways in which it may help us explore the entanglement of the human with the material. This latter aspect has synergies with Georgina DopicoBlack’s exploration in this issue of the limits of the human. The overall drift of my paper, as should become clear at the end, is to try to find ways of thinking beyond, or outside of, representation. My discussion draws on the work of scholars in the humanities and the social sciences (anthropology, communications); if the social sciences underwent a ‘‘cultural turn’’ in the 1970s, the humanities can profit today from culturally-oriented research in the social sciences. The paper is entirely exploratory. It is intended as a stimulus to new forms of research which, to my knowledge, have not been tried in Spanish studies*at least, not with explicit reflection on the issues involved. My title ‘‘Doing Things’’ is intended in two senses: that of ‘‘doing things’’ and that of ‘‘doing things’’. The first sense*‘‘doing things’’*raises the question of what it might mean to think of emotions as practices, rather than as states that exist inside the self and are often regarded as properties of the self. Thus, following Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I want to consider not what emotions are but what they do (4). Here I am influenced by anthropology as a discipline which studies the symbolic systems constituted by social practices. ‘‘Subjectivity’’*a term used regularly by literary and cultural critics*is not a word used by anthropologists, since they are concerned with the behavior of groups, and since the methodology of participant observation allows access to what individuals are feeling only insofar as it is externalized through social practice. I do not propose that we abandon the study of subjectivity, but would like to argue for a concept of subjectivity that is based on relationality with others and with things. That means paying attention to feelings as well as ideas, and viewing feelings, not as properties of the self, but as produced through the interaction between self and world. And it means seeing that interaction, not as the coming together of two separate entities, but as a process of entanglement in which boundaries do not hold. It also means taking into account not only conscious feelings, but also what is felt at the level of the body, questioning the body/mind divide. The other sense of my title*‘‘Doing things’’*is concerned with how we might, as cultural scholars, study materiality, with reference not just to bodily processes, but also to the material world outside. The aim would be to get beyond thinking about our relationship to things in terms of a subject/object divide, which puts agency on one side of the divide (our side) and supposes that things exist solely as ‘‘objects’’ to be ‘‘mastered’’. In this respect, I am again influenced by anthropology, in which material culture has become an important field; it is a topic which has also been taken on board by historians. A question here is whether it is only possible to study things in terms of what people do with them*much work in material culture is concerned