this is a personal research blog of andy (L), tracking my engagements with the digital and the affective. i’m interested in questions of interaction and mediation with varieties of material most notable of our contemporary digitized landscape, but certainly not only. i also run in circuits of rhythm and music, albeit in an oblique way.
I’m interested in tracking ordinary life as mediated by the digital. I want to bring together questions of digitality and aesthetics with affect and materiality to ask: What effort does it take to make attachments work? How do we let go in/of relation? My aim is to inevitably politicize questions of intensity and interaction, particularly as I begin to think about larger projects of thought, affect, habitus, and sensoriums in an increasingly digitalized noosphere.
This project entails close engagement with current inflows of Deleuzian/neo-Deleuzian thought, affect theory as we understand it, and digital theory as a burgeoning field of inquiry extendable into the cybernetic moment. Nonetheless my commitments are less treatise-like and more about quotidian encounters with the affluence and poverty of our historical present. I’m brought to this with an initial interest in queer and postcolonial studies, and it’s no coincidence (there is no such thing as coincidence!) that Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia was my very first serious engagement with critical inquiry. Instead of trying to narrate a coherent total body of work, I believe it might be interesting to break down moments of thought that I hope I’ll get to:
• Extending from Lauren Berlant’s work on humor and humorlessness, thinking about seriousness and tightness in these moments: the post-irony internet; modding/mapping/content creation; activism and leftist “infighting”; classroom “performativity”, bootlicking, the “satki”; [queer][alt] sex, or the bearable; letting go and letting god, etc.
• Postcolonial mourning vs. postcolonial melancholia (Gilory); thinking about masculinity, machismo (Valencia) and transnational circuits of value, desire, postcolonial melancholia also describes a latent wish that a certain we were never “un”-colonized. The focus is on Singapore as a case of this affective tension and convolution that unravels itself in its intimate publics (of, say, the import of looksmaxxing, or a study of national service, or of contemporary dating cultures).
• There is no such thing as bad publicity is equivalent to the medium is the message.
• Are there any affects, thinking structurally and not through Deleuze, that are completely orthogonal to each other? In other words, are there intensities that can never be aligned? If not, what does that tell us?
• There’s a point where when a chart or a rhythm game gets too difficult and people start mashing. In some way that is what genre flailing can look like – but more than that, the problem is a lack of structure and grounding that occurs when intensities start to look more like a blur and less discretizable. The mistake is to think that this is a problem of lack of speed or stamina; most of the time it’s a problem of reading and the weakness of the muscles for taxonomizing and structuring things. This is what top players mean when they say read, don’t mash – it’s encouraging this very same muscle to grow. There’s also a familiarity here with what Freud identifies as “inattentive attentiveness”; not being too close but also not being too far, open to change and disorder as much as order and structure. There’s also a difference between this sort of flailing and the flailing that occurs when, say, I play mercy and junkrat tires.
Some interests: affect, sexuality, cybernetics, digital theory, race, transnationalisms, psychoanalytics, historical materialism, postcolonialism, semiotics, critique, so on. mostly a scholar of media studies and 20th century american literature. i also work on other textural mediums sometimes..
i am currently a phd student in english/comparative literature at columbia university
contact: a.lisheng[at]columbia.edu