Common Banality –The Affective Character of Sharing

Photos Online and Moblogging

Søren Mørk Petersen, PhD, MAManager of Development at Albertslund Public

Libraries,Researcher (gendannelse.nu), blog in danish aboutreconfiguring educational and cultural institutions.

Affect + Media

Ask not what something is, but what it can do

Being meaning slide

Moblogging (MObile+BLOGGING) and photo sharing

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Research done among Flickr users in Copenhagen

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Flickr præsentation slide

• Husk mo+blogging forklares

(title: The day Stig was bunking off)

Henri Lefebvre

3 concepts of everyday life:

Daily life: the concrete material aspects of living

The everyday: modernity>>>consumer culture, bureaucracy, representation and mass media

Everydayness: the affective character of everyday life”a pure process in excess”Gregory Seigworth

Title: I dare not press

Title: Inner-city uniform: blond ponytail, black jacket

Title: Beetroot mouse

Title: Rusty stick

Title: Coffee

What connects daily life, the everyday and everydayness is the effects of a sensation, , which is

affective in its character.sensation

Picture mean slide

A sensation “is what passes

from one “order” to

another, from one “level” to

another, from one “area” to

another”

(Deleuze: Francis Bacon –

the Logic of Sensation, 32)

“there are not sensations of

different orders, but different

orders of one and the same

sensation”

(Deleuze: Francis Bacon –

the Logic of Sensation, 33)

(Title: Egg)

“Being-in-the-world, as the

phenomenologists say: at one and the same

time I become in the sensation and

something happens through sensation, one

through the other, one in the other….As a

spectator, I experience the sensation only by

entering the painting, by reaching the unity

of the sensing and the sensed”

(Deleuze: Francis Bacon –

the Logic of Sensation, 31, italics in original)

Moblogging and photo sharing

is a way of becoming banal, a

way of enjoying the

everydayness that we all share

but cannot fully explain and

represent.

Title: Coffee

Should we look for meaning or affect/sensation?

Or both?

AFFECT

• Not meaning or signyfying practices

• Enables focus on other aspects of

practices (desire, affect, material)

• Affect entails focusing on the material and

the body

• Not being, but becoming

• Focus on relations and process‟

• Affect makes bodies act (without

intentions)

AFFECT

Affect in Spinoza‟s terminology is divided

into affectio: the ability of a mode or body to

affect other bodies, that is, power in its

active mode, and affectus: a continual

variation in the bodies affected upon, that

is, affect as a process of continuation

through different experiences.

The Affectio refers to a state of the

affected body and implies the presence

of the affecting body, whereas the

affectus refers to the passage from one

state to another, taking into account the

correlative variation of the affecting

bodies.

(Deleuze: Spinoza – Practical Philosophy,

49, italics in original)

Event

Vegetable + moblogger „produces‟ picture

Affectio

Uploading + Flickr album

Affectus

Vegetable + moblogger + flickr album + contacts

Affective character of sensation

“Affect broadly refers to states of

being, rather than to their manifestation

or interpretation as emotions”.

(Clara Hemmings: Invoking Affect – Cultural Theory and the

Ontological Turn, 551)

“An emotion is a subjective content, the

sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an

experience which is from that point

onward defined as personal”

(Brian Massumi: Parables for the Virtual –

Movement, Affect, Sensation, 28)

AFFECT

• Affect cannot be represented

• Affect is pre-individual

• Because affect is pre-individual, it can be

„transmitted‟, that is: it can make us act in

different contexts/practices

• Affect can explain actions not based on

feelings, emotions or intentions