Affect Culture
ISBN
978-3-8376-4509-5
Type
book section
Date Issued
2018-10-09
Author(s)
Abstract (De)
Over the course of its first seven chapters, The Invention of Creativity summarizes a large amount of scholarship and develops many lucid insights, moving toward a somewhat grand thesis, at the start of the eighth and final chapter, in a section on “Affect Deficiency in Modernity.” At the end of the book, Andreas Reckwitz’s main thesis is even broader than that of ubiquitous *aestheticization: “What urgent problem is the creativity dispositif responding to? It is precisely the lack of affect in classical, especially organized, modernity. Modernity systematically supressed [sic] the affects which would otherwise have furnished those it socialized with motivation and fulfilment. The aestheticization processes embodied by the creativity dispositif are the attempt to overcome this suppression” (2017: 202). According to Reckwitz, this “suppression of affect within modernity” was not complete, since the establishment of aesthetic, religious and political “zones of affective concentration” (ibid: 204) made available alternative sites for creating social bonds out of emotional energies. However, modernity nonetheless itself created the need to react to this deprivation in the sense of Foucault’s concept of ‘urgency’. The notion of an “affect culture” therefore speaks to one – if not the – pivotal element of the creativity complex, which demands further critical reflection (*Atmosphere, *Color). I would like to develop this critical reflection by attempting to conceive of the “zones of affective concentration” as evaluative processes of understanding, which in the creativity dispositif remain insufficiently or even fully undefined. The point of departure for this investigation is a question of terminology.
Language
English
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area
SHSS - Kulturen, Institutionen, Maerkte (KIM)
Book title
The Creativity Complex: A Companion to Contemporary Culture
Publisher
transcript
Publisher place
Bielefeld
Volume
Cultures of Society
Number
36
Start page
31
End page
36
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
268851