CRC 1171 "Affective Societies: Dynamics of social coexistence in mobile worlds"

Berlin's topographies were already shaped by migration, flight and immigration in the early days of the city's history. Berlin's development into a major city since the end of the 18th century is also inconceivable without migratory movements.1 Immigration and emigration characterise the spatial development and history of the city in many respects in the 20th century and extend into current discussions about Berlin as an urban centre of the post-migrant society and social coexistence.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone portrays Berlin, the highly present city in the author’s work, as a city filled with histories and memories, which make up the city’s physical and mental (visible and invisible) layers. Analyses of this novel have so far centered on memory aspects, which implies a certain notion of permanence. This article turns towards the motif of impermanence and shows its predominance in Erpen-beck’s work. By scrutinizing the texture of the specific places in Berlin, this topographical reading aims to show how the places’ structure is shaped by a permanent impermanence. As these continuous transformations can be observed on different levels, the article unfolds a multilayered impermanence of Berlin.

This article traces different literary ways of engaging with Berlin’s historical topographies in works by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Aras Ören and Tomer Gardi. It regards their texts as being an integral part of the city in an on-going dialogic process. This process is deeply interwoven with the poetics of each of the authors. The concept of affective topographies proposes to think of this relation as a dynamic of affect-ing and being-affected. In this view, affective topographies are explicitly including historical layers, temporalities as well as ›memory gaps‹. Reading Özdamar, Ören and Gardi alongside each other, the article lines out how the texts are linked and overlap, especially with regard to Berlin time-spaces. This dialogical reading is underscoring that Berlin’s topographies as well as Berlin’s literature are social phenomena constitutively shaped and formed by processes of (post-)migration. It sets out to provide a first sketch of what could be a literary history of Berlin within the horizon of postmigrant society.

Proceeding from discussions within a multidisciplinary working group, this text outlines key dimensions and identifies affective registers with regard to the notion of belonging. It presents case studies from two research projects: an ethnographic account of a Vietnamese migrant community in Berlin and a literary analysis of writings of the contemporary German-language author Herta Müller. The cases highlight the simultaneously cohesive and disruptive forces at play in relational processes of belonging, bring into view the heterogeneously constituted settings where such processes unfold, and finally, effectively disturb the causal logic that belonging necessarily stems from conditions of mobility.

To understand the profound changes in the modes of public political debate over the past decade, this volume develops a new conception of public spheres as spaces of resonance emerging from the power of language to affect and to ascribe and instill collective emotion. Political discourse is no longer confined to traditional media, but increasingly takes place in fragmented and digital public spheres. At the same time, the modes of political engagement have changed: discourse is said to increasingly rely on strategies of emotionalization and to be deeply affective at its core. This book meticulously shows how public spheres are rooted in the emotional, bodily, and affective dimensions of language, and how language - in its capacity to affect and to be affected - produces those dynamics of affective resonance that characterize contemporary forms of political debate. It brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences and focuses on two fields of inquiry: publics, politics, and media in Part I, and language and artistic inquiry in Part II. The thirteen chapters provide a balanced composition of theoretical and methodological considerations, focusing on highly illustrative case studies and on different artistic practices. The volume is an indispensable source for researchers and postgraduate students in cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, and political science. It likewise appeals to practitioners seeking to develop an in-depth understanding of affect in contemporary political debate.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book extends and further develops traditional conceptions of public spheres in that it emphasizes the non-deliberative and non-argumentative dimension of public debate. It develops the figure of the sentimental contract in order to identify crucial affective moments of politics and publics and their powerful repercussions. The book focuses on public debates about the status and recognition of religious minorities in contemporary Western societies and also focuses on those publics that are generated and maintained by different artistic practices like literary writing, performances, music, or theater plays. It proposes a syncretic model that allows investigating the multifaceted productivity of affects in the literary communication circuit. The book discusses the productivity of such literary worldmaking – as a reconfiguration of the sensible in Jacques Rancière’s sense – within a broader public sphere conceptualized as a realm of affective circulations.

Affect is of central importance in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities: A prominent element of the novel’s many discourses and reflections, it is at the same time at the heart of the text’s essayistic movement. However, studies of the text have long neglected this trajectory. This appears to be somewhat symptomatic for the relationship of literature and the study of affect; set out as a fruitful critique of the predominance of theories of signification and representation, some influential strands in the “turn to affect” have also presented themselves as a turn away from the study of literary texts. In this chapter, we argue for an integrative approach towards language and affect via an interpretation of the essayistic quality of Musil’s text. Drawing on theories of performativity and social practices, we understand the text’s affective dynamics to be closely related to the practices of the modern life-world, especially those of modern sports. We develop the thesis that by way of integrating affect and language the on-going practice of Musil’s essayism performs a critical inquiry into modernity’s polyphonic and agonistic complexity.

This chapter argues that writing as an affective practice unfolds between writer and written text, more specifically, between the writer’s body and the highly complex norms and rules of written language. If affect is always a matter of “affecting and being affected,” then writing affect is about writing and being written. The relational conceptualization of affect developed in this volume counters the strong notion of representation in literary studies: affect is not simply a result of writing, but a key part of the writing process itself. Moreover, affect is not only an element in the dynamic process of writing; affect might even change and transgress it in moments of flow in which corresponding words find each other. By analyzing “writing” as a key concept of affective societies, this chapter also emphasizes its entanglement in a number of fields, ranging from schooling, bodily techniques, and conceptions of spoken and written language to the invention of monolingualism and other processes of standardization.

Many considerations and theories on the relationship between the political and the public are based upon the notion of a public dialogue: different voices and opinions as well as their institutionalized places lie at the heart of modern democracy. Often, as in the influential theory of Jürgen Habermas, this dialogue is understood to be an encounter of partners with equal rights relying on the democratic rationality of consensus-oriented discussion. In our article, we want to challenge this notion and, drawing upon both Yoko Tawada’s writing and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, try to rethink the role and status of the relationship of language and affect in this context. In her essay on “Akzent” (2016), Tawada develops a perspective that goes beyond the limited notions of affect-free rationality and “un-accentuated” voice. Following Tawada and Bakhtin, language, in literature as well as in the public, is at least twofold: words, in their affective relational entanglement, respond to other words and become themselves part of the responses that follow their articulation. This dialogical engagement is never free of affect, dissonance, and polemic.

In this chapter I will discuss how to explore the affective dimensions of contemporary literature and language, especially in translingual writing, and to search for possibilities to analyze these aspects. As affect is much more than only a result of writing, but rather part of the writing process itself, I will ask for the performativity of language in different types of texts by well-known German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Many of her texts deal intensively with questions of language, especially those of moving in and between languages. Word by word, they form a stage for translingualism and for the writing process itself. Özdamar’s literary reflections demonstrate first, that moving between languages is driven by affect as an encounter between bodies and words, thus creating the affective relationality of language and between languages, and second, that the affective and performative production of translingualism is closely linked to her concept of authorship.