Page 180 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

168 LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

people have chosen a particular site of struggle, or how to mobilize them
around such a site.
The postmodernist’s recognition of the multiple planes of effectivity,
‘wild realism’, allows the recognition that discursive fields are organized
affectively (‘mattering maps’) as well as ideologically (Grossberg, 1984b).
Particular sites are differentially invested with energies and intensities that
define the resources which can be mobilized into forms of popular struggle.
Affect points to the (relatively autonomous) production of what is
normally experienced as moods and emotions by an asignifying effectivity. 5
It refers to a dimension or plane of our lives that involves the enabling
distribution of energies. While it is easy to conceptualize it as the originary
(causal) libidinal economy postulated by psychoanalysis, one must avoid the
temptation to go beyond its existence as a plane of effectivity. Moreover,
affect is not the Freudian notion of disruptive (or repressed) pulsions of
pleasure breaking through the organized surfaces of power; rather, it is an
articulated plane whose organization defines its own relations of power
and sites of struggle. And as such, like the ideological plane, it has its own
principles which constrain the possibilities of struggle. And while it is true
that the most powerfully visible moments of affective formations are often
located in cultural activities (for example, leisure, romance), affect is
neither limited to nor isolatable within such relations. All affective
relations are shaped by the materiality (and negativity) of everyday life.
That is, we should not confuse affect with the positivity of enablement (for
example, pleasure and excitement) for it includes as well boredom and
compulsion. Even the most obvious moments of pleasure are shaped to
some extent by the continuing affectivity of particular institutions (for
example, home, work, etc.). Finally we cannot ignore the
interdeterminations between different levels of effects: thus, the affective
power of many cultural activities depends in part on the ideological
articulations both of the activities in general (for example, of leisure or fun)
and of the specific activities in question.
Nevertheless, the recognition of an articulated plane of affect points to
the existence of another politics, a politics of feeling…(good, bad or
indifferent), a politics that Benjamin had acknowledged. Again this is not
to deny that such an affective politics is constantly being articulated to
ideological, economic and state politics, but it does not follow that it can
be explained solely within the terms of such traditional political sites.
Affective struggles cannot be conceptualized within the terms of theories of
resistance for their oppositional quality is constituted, not in a negative
dialectics, but by a project of or struggle over empowerment, an
empowerment which energizes and connects specific social moments,
practices and subject-positions. Thus, if we want to understand particular
cultural practices, we need to ask how they empower their audiences and
how the audiences empower the practices; that is, how the very materiality