Elizabeth Wilson

Ruth Leys raises a number of important questions about the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of the affect theories that have emerged in the critical humanities, sciences, and social sciences in the last decade. There are a variety of frameworks for thinking about what constitutes the affective realm, and there are different preferences for how such frameworks could be deployed. We would like to engage with just one part of that debate: the contributions of Silvan Tomkins's affect theory. We take issue with Leys's formulation that Tomkins's work along with that of Brian Massumi, William Connolly, and Paul Ekman form a group of like-minded theorists. We do not believe this represents an accurate account of the conceptual and empirical commitments of these various authors. By bundling their work together, Leys misses much of what is compellingly critical in each of these writers, and she overlooks what is most invigorating in the debates amongst them. In addition, the specificities of Tomkins's work have been badly served in Leys's essay. In four volumes stretching from 1962 to 1992 Tomkins laid out a complex and captivating theory of the human affect system, in which mechanisms of neurological feedback, social scripts, and facial behavior coassemble as affective events. Our response to Leys's essay is motivated by a wish to see more detailed engagements with this theory—the distinctiveness of which we believe has yet to be fully explored in this new affective turn.

This essay argues that Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967), usually considered a treatise on gender, can also be read as a theory of mind. The SCUM Manifesto has become a well-regarded and widely circulated text in anglophone feminist literatures. Now mostly an object of veneration, it is not gnawing away at the world with the intensity that Solanas wished for. Returning to Solanas’s corrosive ambitions for the manifesto, I will read for what might still be disruptive about Solanas’s text: How are the conventions of feminist scholarship and politics razed by this incendiary document? Solanas’s interest in, and facility with, psychological states is significant for two reasons. First, her writing introduces the problem of minded states that are violent and destructive (an internal, interminable negativity) to feminist literatures that often default to rationalist or benignly cognitive configurations of mind. Second, the clear differences between her writings and those of the liberal and radical feminisms that were emerging around her in the US in the 1960s and 1970s reveal how uninterested those feminists were in engaging with the vicissitudes of mentalization. Reading for mindedness in Solanas will make it impossible to think of the SCUM Manifesto as a feminist text and it will raise the possibility that many feminisms find their footing conceptually and politically by manifesting a lack of interest in the minds of others beyond what can be ascertained consciously or behaviorally.

This paper makes an argument for greater consideration of negativity in queer engagements with biological or natural systems. Focusing on one particular paper by Karen Barad – “Nature’s Queer Performativity (The Authorized Version)” – I argue that this work tends to under-read the negativity and confusion that queer entails, and so it renders nature, and the politics we might extract from it, more palatable than perhaps they should be. What interests me is that Barad’s argument about nature’s queer performativity begins and ends with sodomy (“acts against nature”). While it has been a highly cathected site of analysis for some early and influential work in queer theory, sodomy has been little discussed in feminist and queer science studies where Barad’s work has been so influential. I argue that sodomy (a menace that cannot be erased from the political or conceptual landscape) spoils any identitarian queer politics that attempt to depathologize or reaffirm the natural world.

ABSTRACT The science of artificial intelligence (AI) is not as unemotional as it might first appear. Not only are researchers in the field now taking an interest in how to program affective capacities into artificial agents; there is also plenty of historical evidence that concerns about affect have been present in AI from the earliest years. Examination of archival materials from the 1940s and 1950s shows that affects (particularly as they circulate between men) have been a significant part of innovation in AI from the beginning. This essay looks at one fragment of that history: the currents of affective and sexual interests in and around Walter Pitts, one of the important, eccentric, and little‐written‐about founders of AI.

In this book, one of the most accomplished and thoughtful cultural commentators of the day, considers the contradictory nature of cultural relations. Elizabeth Wilson explores these themes through an examination of fashion, feminism, consumer culture, representation and postmodernism. Debates within feminism on the nature and effects of pornography are used to illustrate a particular kind of cultural contradiction. Wilson recognizes that postmodernism permitted the reappropriation of subjects that were not previously considered worthy of attention, or opposed to the idea of emancipation, chief among these was fashion. She shows that the association of an interest in this culturally significant subject with a revisionist project raises doubt.

The rise of a bohemian subculture in the early 19th century drew on the Romantic beliefs in genius on the one hand and erotic passion on the other. Romantic love was a tragic, often forbidden passion and thus could include the most transgressive form: homosexuality. In the German bohemias of Munich and Berlin at the turn of the century, however, the influence of psychoanalysis as a radical new theory of human desire influenced the `erotic revolution' of the period; this moved bohemian love from an understanding of desire as a fatal passion to a celebration of it as a liberating and ecstatic force, albeit with sometimes disastrous consequences. The migration of psychoanalysis to the American bohemia of Greenwich Village inaugurated a further change as popularized versions of Freudian theory advocated the importance of sexual fulfilment in life, yet also became normative and prescriptive. The ironic conclusion drawn is that `bohemian love' has become the norm in a consumer society, yet shorn of its subversive and transgressive elements.