“Cultural Studies And Deleuze-Guattari, Part 2: From Affect To Conjunctures” by Lawrence Grossberg & Bryan G. Behrenshausen: Summary and Critique

🧭 Introduction: Reframing Affect in Cultural Studies

• Grossberg’s Intellectual Motivation:
  • Reflects on 40 years of work with affect to better understand the political potentials of culture and popular movements.
  • Highlights dissatisfaction with existing theories like semiotics and ideology to explain students’ engagement with music.
  • “I came to ‘affect’, then, not in the context of a theoretical debate… but rather as a tool in the service of a political–analytic problem.”
• The ‘Wrong Algebra’ of Politics:
  • Draws from What a Way to Run a Railroad (1988): “Could it be that we cannot solve the political questions we’re puzzling over because we’re using the wrong kind of algebra?”
  • Developed an eclectic framework from thinkers like Williams, Heidegger, Freud, Ricoeur, and Deleuze and Guattari.

🎵 Affect and Popular Culture

• Music as a Political Assemblage:
  • Popular music functioned as a space for affective and political intensities during the 1960s.
  • “Affect was that which provided the sense of coherence… that essays to give life a sense of being a lived totality.”
• Beyond Signification:
  • Argues affect should not be separated from cultural formations but understood as part of a complex multiplicity.
  • “The point was not to separate affect out… but to add… always to see the complexity.”

📚 Critique of the Field of Affect Studies

• Fragmentation and Fetishization:
  • Notes that affect has become a “magical signifier” lacking consensus or conceptual rigor.
  • “There does not appear to be a common project… instead, we are faced with a field organized into ‘camps’…”
• Multiplicity Without Conceptualization:
  • Warns against sliding across different dimensions of affect (ontological, corporeal, subjective) without clear articulation.

🧪 Towards an Analytics of Affect

• Guattari’s Mixed Semiotics:
  • Uses Guattari’s schema to map “sign behaviours” including:
    • Signifying semiotics: Circulate meaning through representation.
    • A-signifying semiotics: Modulate material conditions directly, “flush with the material.”
    • A-semiotic encodings: E.g., genetic codes that function without meaning.
• Diagrammatic Production of Reality:
  • Uses Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of milieu, territory, and semiotic substance to explain layered realities:
    • Milieu: Organized material space.
    • Territory: Lived experience.
    • Semiotic Substance: Cultural or discursive formations.

🌍 Mapping Expression: Hybrid Enunciative Assemblages

• Plateaus of Enunciation:
  • Culture operates across nested plateaus:
    • From unorganized matter to organized cultural expressions.
  • Assemblages include refrains (organizing rhythms), signals (triggers), and semiotic regimes (meaning systems).
• Multiplicity of Semiotic Regimes:
  • Opposes binary of signifying vs. a-signifying regimes.
  • Embraces a spectrum: “We would seriously multiply the forms… regimes of passion, mood, feeling, and attachment.”

🌐 Affective Topographies and Conjunctures

• Comparing 1960s and 2010s:
  • 1960s: “Organization of optimism”
  • 2010s: “Organization of pessimism”
  • “An affective topography is like a ‘pea soup’ fog… specific modes of living ‘feel’ natural and inescapable.”
• Three Key Pressure Zones:

• Difference: From celebrated diversity to cynical relativism.
• Judgment: From totalizing alienation to fundamentalist certainty.
• Temporality: From hopeful futurism to anxious, immobilized present.

📌 Conclusion: Toward Political Reassembly

• Calls for a rigorous and relational framework to understand affect in context.
• Advocates for “conjunctural analysis” rather than simplistic emotional categories.
• “The task of the left is not to tell people what they should feel, but… to figure out how such feelings do change and can be changed.”

1. Structuralism and Poststructuralism

• Contribution: Challenges the limits of signification-based models (e.g., Saussurean and Lacanian semiotics).
• Reference: The authors argue that “semiological signs interpose themselves between material conditions and consciousness,” leading to a self-referential system that cannot account for affect (p. 7).
• Innovation: Introduces a-signifying semiotics as modalities beyond linguistic sign systems, disrupting structuralist models.

2. Marxist Literary Theory

• Contribution: Reframes Marxist ideas of ideology and cultural production through affect and conjunctural analysis.
• Reference: The article insists that “conjunctures are not reducible to ideology or economy alone but are produced through complex affective and discursive assemblages” (p. 3, 5).
• Innovation: Offers a nuanced reading of power and hegemony that includes structures of feeling and affective topographies, expanding classical Marxist base-superstructure models.

3. Psychoanalytic Theory

• Contribution: Moves beyond Freudian/Lacanian models by including bodily intensities and rhythms unaccounted for by subject-based psychoanalysis.
• Reference: Grossberg critiques how affect is “not necessarily, not immediately or directly… about matters of signification, representation and subjectification” (p. 2).
• Innovation: Draws from Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal framework, challenging repression-based models of the psyche.

4. Feminist and Queer Theories

• Contribution: Acknowledges feminist, queer, and anti-racist traditions as vital genealogies of affect theory.
• Reference: Grossberg states, “Feminist and queer theory, Black, anti-racist, diasporic and de/post-colonial writings… have produced vital genealogies that… interrupt dominant traditions” (p. 2).
• Innovation: Calls for an intersectional and situated theorization of affect that attends to embodiment, sensation, and power.

5. Postcolonial Theory

• Contribution: Suggests that affective mappings can highlight the residual, emergent, and dominant elements of postcolonial conjunctures.
• Reference: The article connects affective topographies to “anticolonial struggles” and insists they must be read within their genealogical complexity (p. 2–3).
• Innovation: Opens up space for analyzing the affective dimensions of colonial histories and postcolonial agency beyond textual representation.

6. Cultural Materialism / New Historicism

• Contribution: Deepens historical analysis by integrating affect as constitutive of cultural production and experience.
• Reference: Emphasizes the “affective conditions of the possibility of social change” across different historical moments (e.g., 1960s vs. 2010s) (p. 23).
• Innovation: Advances a conjunctural methodology that combines discourse, affect, and historical specificity.

7. Reader-Response / Reception Theory

• Contribution: Challenges the privileging of interpretation by focusing on embodied, non-representational responses to cultural texts and practices.
• Reference: Grossberg observes that students’ experiences of music “did not find any of the tools in my critical and theoretical toolbox… very satisfying” (p. 1).
• Innovation: Calls for theories that can account for intensity, sensation, and affective engagement in reading/listening practices.