Viva Mexico!

J.L. Norman || Twitter, Instagram, Facebook

It's been three years today that I came home from my last big adventure.

MORE CAUSE AND AFFECT

J.L. Norman || Twitter, Instagram, Google+

         
The Affective turn was an important movement in writing studies.  It made people remember the pleasure that can be gained from writing and reading.  For so long the focus had been purely on the “meaning” of what was being written, anything beyond that was superfluous.  The affective turn wasn’t something necessarily new, but a return to that pleasure found in the sound of words and in the way a certain phrase or scene “strikes a chord” with us.  Jenny Edbauer, in her article Big Time Sensuality states that it is “important for us to recognize the pleasures that already exist for our students and all textual users. More specifically, we should begin to investigate how things matter to textual users, and what that process means for a literacy pedagogy”(Edbauer 25). The meaning behind a text isn’t the only thing that makes it significant for a reader.  In fact, in my own reading, if there is no pleasure, if the phrasing is monotonous to read or there is no emotional attachment to a given piece, I have little motivation to keep reading, even if the “meaning” of the piece is important.  

Cause and Affect

              People often discount the power of affect.  The way we think, the way we feel, all this is defined by affect.  We describe feelings as emotions, and put names to these emotions.  "I feel happy, sad, angry, stressed, etc".  But these emotions are merely the way that we try to describe the reactions we have by the way that something affects us.  For example, you may see a certain movie and a scene in that movie affects you in a certain way.  You feel it, and in an attempt to understand this affect you are feeling, you attach a name, an emotion to that affect.  Although this physical response happens to each of us, each day, for a long time in writing studies there was little importance placed on affect, more important was the meaning of something.  

             The “affective turn” a phrase coined by Patricia Clough in the book The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social occurred during the mid 1990s.  At this time people in writing studies began to look at the way things affect us and to give value to this affect in its own right, regardless of meaning.  The way that words sound to us when read aloud, the affect a certain scene in a movie can have on us, all these things have some value regardless of the meaning that may or may not be attached to them.  

Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice on Prezi

Changing the Face of Utah

For years when people thought of Utah it was a synonym with skiing, conservatives Mormons, and what many thought of as the lack of any real entertainment value (besides the skiing anyway).  Well, that image is changing, now when people think of Utah, other things come to mind; it's not as "backward" now as it once was.  But many Utahans have to wonder if all that change is really a good thing.

Utah is a unique place. As the rest of the United States has seen drastic changes in everything from moral views to fashion since the 1960’s, Utah has for the most part remained unchanged, as if some giant bell jar has been placed over the entire state. But that bell jar is beginning to crack as more diversity comes to Utah. Much of that diversity is thanks to things such as the Sundance Film Festival. One of the things you can’t help but notice at Sundance is just how many people are there. You go to any one of the venues and you will see tons of people; famous people, sort of famous people, but most of all, tons of everyday people from all over the country.

There are many people who are less than thrilled with this new diversity. Some people in Park City and other parts of Utah “suffer through” the festival because of the money it brings and because, let’s face it, there’s not much they can do about it anyway. But that doesn't mean they are happy about it. Many Utahans are proud of their conservative moral views, and proud that Utah has stayed true to those views despite the drastic changes seen in the rest of the world. They don’t want Utah to change. This doesn’t mean that they hate “outsiders”, they just don’t want other people coming and changing the Utah they've always known.

It is true that Sundance shows a different side to Utah. The festival strives for diversity of all forms and it is seen in the movies shown there. There are movies ranging from documentaries to science fiction by professional directors and hopeful upstarts alike. The subject matter for these movies is just as diverse, and some would say that it is also sometimes questionable in nature. This “questionable content”, along with the more modern ideals has caused friction between the festival and the local population for a long time, but that is slowly starting to change.

Now more than ever Sundance has been working to involve local residence in the festival. They work hard to provide incentives for local people to act in the role of volunteers, helping to organize and manage the events as they happen. There are also many perks given to locals wanting to attend the festival. For example, local residents can buy their tickets earlier than everyone else to guarantee that they can receive the best seats.

This effort has not gone without effect. More than 3000 local people took advantage of the early ticket sales. In addition, many college students (even from BYU, a school recognized for its “old fashioned values”) go to the festival every year.

It’s really not hard to see why it’s become so popular. Sundance has a palpable energy surrounding everything that happens there. Even in the middle of a white out blizzard people line up to see the movies and the stars. The energy and excitement turns the cold, ugly weather into swirling particles of crystalline beauty as the crowds bustle to each venue. Sundance is much the same as the snow, some look and only see something damaging and cold, changing the world they know, while others see something else entirely, something more beautiful and magical.

Sensual Significance

     We live in the age of information. Theories, hypothesis, discussions, opinions, logic, and reason, these things are the ruling factors of our education. In this well ordered colaberation of thought, there seems to be little room (or importance for that matter) of what we feel. In her article “Big Time Sensuality” Jenny Edbaur begs to differ. She argues that our “affect”, or what we feel when reading, watching, or even writing something can be just as importance as the ideology of the thing. She doesn't discount the importance of the ideology, or the “meaning” of what we read or see, but she states that the emotional connection (the affect) that people have with something gives it a meaning that cannot be expressed solely by the ideology. As an example she uses rock music. She relates the account of professor by the name of Grossberg, who tried to show the ideological meaning of rock music to his students. The students, however, were unimpressed, as Edbaur states, “the music mattered to students in spite of (or beyond) any ideological meaning either given to them or from them.”

      We don't appreciate the importance of affect. We are embarrassed of pleasure, of sensations. Often when we read or watch something solely because of the way it makes us feel we call it a “guilty pleasure”. If it's not intellectual or productive it is inherently “bad”. But that is what we crave, and why not? We are meant to experience this life, not just think our way through it; and just as we can't go through life based on passions and emotions alone, we cannot go through life being only a logical being. Some things can only be understood through the way it affects us, and in fact, almost all of the most memorable experiences of our lives are remembered, not because of what we thought during the experience, but of how we felt during the experience, the sensations we had. The most powerful movies or books we read are powerful for the same reasons. This can be seen as well in Edbaur's article. She described a student she had named Paul, who wrote papers and blog posts in a very sensual way, (not sexual, sensual, they are different things even if we don't always think of them as different). He put feeling into his writing and it made all the difference. Everyone loved what he wrote and wanted to write more like him.

     As Edbaur stated, if we really want our compositions an writing to make an impact, we get away from the “tyranny of ideological meaning alone” and focus more on how we feel. 

About "Place"

   Our experience with "place" is an inherently emotional one.  The places we remember most or that affect us most are the places that gave us an emotional reaction.  I've been in various gas stations, but I don't remember any of them because there was no emotional connection.  I was there, gassed up my car, and left.  One gas station though, I do remember vividly.  I remember that one because I got into a car accident there when I was a teenager and there was a definite emotional response.  Maybe this could be one of the differences between a "place" and a "non-place".  Places give us more of an emotional response, while non-places don't.

    Because of this emotional connection between the person and the place, it is important when viewing and describing a certain place to do so, as Marc Auge said "[in] his 'here' of the moment".  How we feel when we are in a place can change drastically depending on when we are there.  If a person were to visit a place like Disneyland as a child, and then return when grown, the emotional experience would be very different because of the difference in time.  That difference affects not only the person, but the place itself, making the experience different for each person as time goes on.  Thus we cannot visit and analyze a place based on memories of the past because both the observer and the place have changed since then, changing the experience.

   In the same way we cannot experience a place based upon the experience of others.  I can't expect to have the exact same experience visiting a place as someone else, because even though we could be both in the same place at the same time, the emotional response we have from that place could be very different.  For example if two people go to a popular sports game perhaps one person is thrilled by the energy of the crowd and the exciting pace of the event, while the other person only thinks of how cold and cramped they are in the stadium.  So for the observer it isn't just the "'here' of the moment"  but "his 'here' of the moment".  Observing and experiencing a place is very personal.  Each person that visits a place has a connection to it, that connection is formed by emotions. And the emotions that each person has in a given place are unique, not only to the person, but to the moment in which that person is there.