affect

Point of difference: The lost premise of creativity in ‘creative work’

Introduction: The emotional truth

To reveal the eco-system of feeling that produces the contemporary organisational paradox — where divergence and creativity are baked-into products while their premise often denied in organisational design — this note applies a Spinozian framework of affect. Here, affects are the, often unconscious, feelings that stick during encounters between bodies and other bodies and objects, informing the direction one moves in thereafter, and in their broadest sense represent ‘a sense of push in the world’ (Thrift, 2004: 64; Spinoza, 1996).

Pandemic times. A conversation with Lisa Baraitser about the temporal politics of COVID-19

Introduction

Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. In her research, she combines psychoanalytic and social theories to address the temporal, ethical and affective dimensions of care. In this interview, Prof. Baraitser helps us think through the temporal politics of COVID-19 and the ways in which pandemic conditions transform the affective dimensions of care work in Europe and US-America.

Standby: Organizing modes of in|activity

Introduction

In the technical sense, standby refers to an operating state in which energy continues to flow despite an apparent shutdown, thus allowing for sudden reactivation. However, the term ‘standby’ extends to realms beyond electronic devices, and it has long since shaped the work environments of people such as medical practitioners, military troops, or airplane staff. Following up on this observation, this special issue of ephemera explores how standby acts as an ordinary mode of organizing sociomaterial lifeworlds.

Feminism is dead? Long live feminism! A reflexive note on the FAW! workshop

Feminism is dead? Long live feminism!

Is it feasible to explore, dissect and live feminism within academia, a system that contributes and feeds into the very discrimination and violence denounced by feminism itself? And if so, what are the tools necessary to dismantle the master’s house to paraphrase Lorde (1984)? What is the role of activism and writing, and how can we incorporate these practices in feminism?

A pre-individual perspective to organizational action

Introduction

A newspaper headline reads ‘Canadian army heading for Africa’, but the photograph that accompanies it shows that it is men and women who are being deployed, leaving their families behind. The slip from individual to organizational action is common, and has preoccupied organization studies and sociology alike. Both disciplines have kept busy attempting to connect the two levels and understand the passage from individual to organizational action ‒ and the other way around (Eisenhardt, 1989; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998).

Somatic pedagogies: Critiquing and resisting the affective discourse of the neoliberal state from an embodied anarchist perspective

Introduction[1]

This paper emerges from the ‘turn to affect’ in the humanities and social sciences. Explicit use of the terminology of ‘affect’ generally comes from critical paradigms, yet I argue that this response is situated within a wider context of neoliberal state discourse that harnesses affect to produce compliant subjects.

Wearing the world like a debt garment: Interface, affect, and gesture

…how to elaborate debt as embodied; i.e. what could be called, for the lack of a better word, “affective capitalism”, where the affect bit refers to the bodily and often non-cognitive states and excitations; of desires and impulsions; whether in the brain or in the gut. Could this be connected to the wider interest in brain sciences in the context of digital culture (interface design)? (Parikka, 2011: blogpost)

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