We are delighted to announce that Lauren Berlant will give the 2015 Society and Space Lecture at the AAG in Chicago. The talk is entitled:
Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin
This is a talk about how to read atmospheres propped not by melodrama and heightened impact but by recessive action and flat affect. The concept of a “structure of feeling” offered by Raymond Williams points to atmospheres shared among strangers but circulating beneath the surface of explicit life. How do we access that material when the shared affects are manifested in styles of being that occlude expressivity? Just as the Great Depression was thought to express and induce the affective state, are we now in a recession? “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin” works with Scott Heim’s novel and Gregg Araki’s film to think about how scenes of “underperformed” encounter shift social norms of trust and aesthetic norms of the event: to do this, it implicates a history of aesthetic movements from twentieth century avant-gardes and theories of traumatic dissociation to the inside knowledges of sexual culture and the DIY aesthetics of punk and mumblecore.
Read David Seitz’s 2013 interview on the Open Site with Professor Berlant here.
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Lauren Berlant to give the Society and Space lecture at the Chicago AAG meeting.
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Having recently assigned Berlant’s excellent chapter “Cruel Optimism,” from The Affect Theory Reader, I’m really excited that she will be at the AAG, and talking about Scott Heim, no less! Heim is a friend of a friend and several years ago I was lucky enough to see him read at the old Elliott Bay Book Company and to have a few beers with him afterward.