Marie-Luise Angerer: It’s Not Easy to Deal Scientifically with AffectVideomitschnitt der Veranstaltung "Affect and its Methods"
5. April 2016
It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings, wrote Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). In spite of this, psychoanalysis has dealt more thoroughly than any other scientific discipline with feelings and affects, and with their repression and displacement. Today, however, they are also being dealt with by a huge range of disciplines in the humanities and sciences. Affect has become the buzz word for those moments in human life which are spontaneous, impulsively, physical, bodily: beyond control and (self-)consciousness. Against a long and complex tradition of defining affect (pathos, emotions, etc.) and various experimental fields of producing affect artificially/technically (film, media, games) I will discuss the methodological challenges of /for affect studies.
Marie-Luise Angerer is professor of Media Studies at the Department for Art and Media, University of Potsdam. Visiting fellowships in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. The focus of her research is on media technology, affect and neuroscientific reformulations of desire, sexuality, and the ‘moving’ body. Her most recent publications include Desire After Affect (2014), Timing of Affect (with Bernd Bösel and Michaela Ott, 2014), Choreography, Media, Gender (with Yvonne Hardt and Anna-Carolin Weber, 2013), numerous articles in books and journals on the topic of affect, art, and media theory