xvii. Shohat and Stam seem oddly oblivious to the necessary interpellative failure that forms the enabling mechanism of a politics of affect, despite their full awareness of what the primacy affect enjoys in the domain of media culture:
Within postmodern culture, the media not only set agendas and frame debates but also inflect desire, memory, fantasy. By controlling popular memory, they can contain or stimulate popular dynamism. The challenge, then, is to develop a media practice by which subjectivities may be lived and analyzed as part of a transformative, emancipatory praxis. The question of the political “correctness" of texts is ultimately less important than the question of mobilizing desire in empowering directions. The question then becomes: How can we transform existing media so as to mobilize adversary subjectivity? Given the libidinal economy of media reception, how do we crystallize individual and collective desire for emancipatory purposes? (166, emphasis added)
This passage echoes the argument developed by Lawrence Grossberg in We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture.
xviii. It is in this sense that we must reject Emily Apter's rejection of affect. Specifically, we must refrain from conceptualizing affect as a residue or simulation of a lost essence or identity, as Apter does. Although she is quite right to claim that affect takes up “where the critique of performativity leaves off: that is, at the point where antiessentialism has become a given and the market in identityproduction is oversaturated," she is far too quick to condemn this upsurge of affect "as a return to easy[,]' to feelings washing about in a depoliticized space of the transnational commodity."As she sees it, affects can be nothing more than “the residue of the real; ghostly afterimages of attitudes, performances of human-ness, and attempts to simulate being a subject.... As the leftovers of instincts, as the residues of mythic' behaviors that haunt the staging of the subject, affects become crucial to sustaining the illusion of identity, however dismantled." "Affect," in short, "is about miming the human when the human has come increasingly to be embodied in posthuman constructions": "the aesthetics of affect clearly participate[s] in the identity politics of performative mimicry" (20).
By thus confining the analysis of affects to a representationalsimulational framework, Apter fails to appreciate their fundamental tie to the body and their potential to open an entirely
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