Maria Hynes

Unveiling seductions beyond societies of control: affect, security, and humour in spaces of aeromobility

Taking the bare bodies that starred in the recent Air New Zealand in-flight safety demonstration and advertising campaign as its starting point, this paper stages an encounter between bareness and security in order to think about how affective atmospheres might be engineered and manipulated within spaces of aeromobility. From a representational perspective the bare bodies appeal to a particular economy of truth through the unveiling of the corporation, parodying the bareness that is a central technique associated with airport securitisation. But the bareness in the in-flight safety demonstration generates a different kind of intimacy between the corporation and the passenger that facilitates the emergence of affective atmospheres which hinge around fun and lightness. In light of theorisations that invoke the corporation as a model of the control society we finish by drawing out some of the tensions that hinge around figures of veiling and unveiling to demonstrate how affect necessarily exceeds its capture and engineering.

Laughing with the Yes Men: the Politics of Affirmation

It is symptomatic of a culture addicted to novelty that culture jamming has already been subject to pronouncements of its redundancy as a political strategy. For academic and artist Steve Mann, for example, the political and counter-cultural strategies of culture jammers have had their day. In a somewhat Baudrillardian analysis, Mann (2003) argues that culture and counter-culture are barely distinguishable in an allpervasive, global culture too ready to incorporate the anti-gesture. Culture jamming, according to Mann, then, is rapidly losing political force and the capacity to generate new cultural images and values. The idea of the novelty of culture jamming might be rescued from the status of oxymoron if the specifically political character of culture jamming is reassessed. Yet it is not primarily a defence of ‘culture jamming’, understood as a category of action, which is pursued here. Rather, the paper seeks to demonstrate how the singularity of a particular event enacted under the trope of culture jamming forces us to reconsider the very meaning of political action. Taking a specific culture jamming event as an instance of something singular having taken place, we point to the capacity for novelty and initiation that is deserving of the name of politics. And we suggest that the event enables us to think something new—as opposed to merely fashionable—precisely because it is irreducible to a counteror antigesture. As Christine Harold (2004, p. 194) suggests, the force of the media prankster’s comedy lies in the fact that it rises above the ascetic moment of critique

Yea-Saying Laughter

Today, it seems, everyone is a comedian. While wit has long had a place in the politician’s arsenal, would-be leaders are now pushed to new lengths to show that they can pass the comic test, as the most recent US elections demonstrated well. From Tina Fey’s highly publicized caricatures of Sarah Palin or Letterman’s relentless jibes at JohnMcCain, to the candidates’ own attempts at carefully tailored self-mockery – all the evidence indicated a close relationship between persuasive power and laughter. Yet, the demand for comedians extends well beyond the political arena. Teachers are increasingly urged by educationalists to enliven their delivery with jocularity. Social protestors train newcomers in the use of humour for non-violent resistance. Teams of doctors dressed as clowns deliver an optimal dose of laughter in children’s wards. Psychologists advise organisations on how to use humour to enhance workplace wellness, while negotiating the thorny issue of ‘political correctness’. When work pursuits are over, laughter clubs offer a means of relieving stress, and personal column editors supply acronyms to assist in the search for a mate with a G(ood) S(ense) O(f) H(umour). It is little wonder that humour is becoming an increasingly important theme in scholarship, as not only humorologists but analysts of social life more generally seek to understand the peculiar and transformative powers of laughter.

Indifferent by nature: A post-humanist reframing of the problem of indifference

Much recent scholarship in the social sciences has recognised the importance of grasping the significance of non-human forces in both social and natural life. Still, we remain faced with the task of reconceptualising some of our more classically humanist problems in other than human terms. This paper undertakes to refigure one such problem, an issue that in moral and political discourse in particular has presented itself as a pressing, and sometimes intractable, problem; namely, what does it mean to be indifferent? The idea of political indifference, for example, evokes an attitude of neutrality or apathy deemed inappropriate to the sphere of political action. The assumption here is that indifference is a subjective quality, a characteristic inhering in those individuals or groups who are insufficiently motivated to exercise their capacity for free and deliberative action. This paper re-examines the common sense understanding of indifference, which, I argue, is bound to a moral purview and rests on an essentially confused view of human freedom. I suggest that rethinking the problem of indifference requires an ‘ontological renaturalisation’, in order to better understand the forces that condition human action. In pursuing this argument, I contribute to a growing body of scholarship that recognises the role of the aesthetic in opening our frameworks of thinking beyond their more humanist limitations. I argue that an aesthetic, as opposed to moral, framework, can re-conceptualise indifference as an ambiguous and potentially productive process, rather than a deficient state or subjective failing.

Black-faced, red faces: the potentials of humour for anti-racist action

ABSTRACT Among incidences of everyday racism, offensive jokes are writ large as a way of establishing and maintaining social norms and policing the boundaries of the social body. Yet humours possible deployment toward anti-racist ends constitutes an under-researched problem. This paper examines an incident of supposedly humorous blackface performance on an Australian family variety television show. The incident was notable as an occasion where humour was used with racist effects but also to anti-racist ends. Literature on anti-racist action commonly assumes that responses to racism should have the gravity commensurate to the problem. We argue that humour enables actors to take a ‘decommitted’ relationship to their actions, creating the perception of distance between themselves and the action. While this capacity to decommit enables racist actions to masquerade as ‘just a joke’, it may also form the basis of a less confrontational, but potentially powerful, form of anti-racist action.

The Minute Interventions of Stewart Lee: The affirmative conditions of possibility in comedy, repetition and affect

The popular performer speaks in an already recognizable tongue, producing pleasure by an affirmation of what the audience already knows and feels. Yet affirmation is, at its best, much more than this, involving an openness into the coming into being of something that is genuinely new. In this article we explore the way that humour – and specifically the stand-up comedy of Stewart Lee – can cultivate an audiences bodily receptivity to novel modes of thinking and being which are never recognisable in any immediate sense. Affirmation, if it is to be more than a mere confirmation of what is already given, necessarily eschews reactivity. Certainly, Lees comedy operates through a form of critique that goes beyond the negativity that we would associate with conventional modes of critical thinking and practice. Most obvious in Lees lampooning of the popularity of the representationally-laden form of observational comedy, ‘critique’ here works affectively at least as much as it does cognitively. Through his attention to the form rather than the content of humour, and through his use of repetition and the creation and maintenance of tension, Lee provides a slow motion capture of those habitual modes of anticipation that foreclose other possibilities for thought and action. In examining the comedic and performative affects of Lees comedy, we give a sense of the conditions in and through which new modes of attention, new dispositions and forms of bodily attunement might be produced. Drawing on more recent affect theory focused on the minute perceptions of the body, we argue that wit has a special relation to the new, less because it effects an irruptive change in the existing state of affairs, than because it exposes us to the affective conditions of possibility for the production of novelty.

Worshipping Bodies: Affective Labour in the Hillsong Church

The Australian megachurch, Hillsong, is as well known for its music and spectacle as it is for the content of its religious ideas. This is largely due, as Connell argues in his geography of Hillsong, to the peculiar mix of the theological and the modern that a highly globalised and mediatised context can today produce. This paper re-examines the phenomenon of Hillsong through the theory of affect, which has gained notable analytical purchase in geography in recent years. More specifically, it uses the concept of ‘affective labour’ to analyse the specific ways in which bodies are put to work in the spaces of Hillsong worship. We demonstrate the way that Hillsong produces and mobilises affect in order to attain the collective experience of the spectacle, which is so crucial to Hillsongs visibility as a social phenomenon and also to its recruitment of the individual member into the logic and ethos of the church as a whole. We indicate the importance for the success of Hillsong of producing particular kinds of subject, namely, subjects who are at once comfortable, enthusiastic and loyal. By recruiting its followers as affective labourers towards a shared evangelical cause, the embodied and vaguely felt sense of potential of members is mobilised towards the spectacular phenomenon that is the Hillsong church.

The ethico-aesthetics of life: Guattari and the problem of bioethics

The work of Deleuze and Guattari has inspired social scientists for some decades, yet it is only of late that Guattaris sole-authored work has emerged as a unique force in its own right. This paper explores what Guattaris work has to offer to the analysis of the problematic of ‘life’ and, more specifically, to the idea of bioethics. While much of the critical discourse on biopower in recent years has worked from the perspective of reflecting on the truth claims of the life sciences, Guattaris schematisation of ‘assemblages of enunciation’ in Chaosmosis offers an opening to the more ethico-aesthetic potentials of this thing we call life. I argue that the discourse of bioethics can begin to work productively once it is taken outside the scientific paradigm to which it currently remains bound. Rather than seeking to reflect on its object—life—bioethical thinking might aspire to become more experimental as a mode of thinking more sensitive to lifes creative evolution.

AFFECT: an unworkable concept

Abstract Somewhere between use and mere whim there is a place for the expressivity of affect as a concept. This paper raises the question of how the concept of affect might be mobilized without reducing its expressions to the logic of work. We suggest that the very attempt to put affect to work in order to solve pressing problems may be symptomatic of an anxiety to master the events of the world. With this in mind, we make a case for the importance of Georges Batailles critique of an instrumentalist form of thinking, which reduces events to objects of human sensemaking. Batailles “general economy” opens onto all that the restricted economy of use negates; namely, that which exceeds our efforts as humans to make sense of, and thus appropriate, events. Ultimately, Batailles antihumanist thought limits the potential of the gift economy, by rendering it the negative of the social order. We argue that a more posthumanist thought can realize the immanent potential of affect and apprehend its gift to thinking.Somewhere between use and mere whim there is a place for the expressivity of affect as a concept. This paper raises the question of how the concept of affect might be mobilized without reducing its expressions to the logic of work. We suggest that the very attempt to put affect to work in order to solve pressing problems may be symptomatic of an anxiety to master the events of the world. With this in mind, we make a case for the importance of Georges Batailles critique of an instrumentalist form of thinking, which reduces events to objects of human sensemaking. Batailles “general economy” opens onto all that the restricted economy of use negates; namely, that which exceeds our efforts as humans to make sense of, and thus appropriate, events. Ultimately, Batailles antihumanist thought limits the potential of the gift economy, by rendering it the negative of the social order. We argue that a more posthumanist thought can realize the immanent potential of affect and apprehend its gift to thinking.

The Contemporary and Eccentric Position of "The Winnebago Man"

In a dated and grainy YouTube clip a tall, middle-aged American swears frustratedly and profusely into the camera as he takes and retakes several scenes of an industrial film intended to sell the latest Winnebago mobile home unit. The performance is more or less downhill from his opening line on: ‘The Winnebago Concepts and Engineering Department have developed a multi-functional bathroom, privacy . . . ah, I don’t know what the fuck I’m reading!’ The videos had been produced in 1989 and an outtake VHS video of his outbursts was passed from enthusiast to enthusiast until 2005. In that year, the year that YouTube was launched, the rantingWinnebagoMan, otherwise known as ‘the angriest man in the world’, suddenly became a phenomenon. Going viral, the swearing, ranting Jack Rebney achieved a sort of cult notoriety. In 2010 the documentary,Winnebago Man, depicting the life of this recreational vehicle salesman, was released. Directed by Ben Steinbauer and starring Jack Rebney, the documentary is a classic allegorical tale. Plucked from obscurity by a twist of (ill-)fate, Rebney has retreated from the world to a forest hide-away. Then, after a long search by a devotee, he is persuaded to descend back into society, where he receives some redemption. A response to the viral video of ‘The Angriest Man in the World’, the documentary follows the tracking down and outing of Rebney from his hermitage in the mountains of Northern California, chronicling his cult celebrity status in San Francisco and beyond.