Objects of Affection: Comference Program

[Elena Gapova]

 Conference Program: Objects of Affection: Towards a Materiology of
Emotions (May 4-6, 2012, Princeton University)

Princeton University
* Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies *  Program in
Russian and Eurasian Studies *

OBJECTS OF AFFECTION: TOWARDS A MATERIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS Interdisciplinary
Conference

MAY 4-6, 2O12

219 AARON BURR HALL
(Princeton University)

http://objectsofaffection.wordpress.com/

In the first issue of the journal Veshch-Objet-Gegenstand, which appeared
90 years ago in Berlin, the avant-gardist El Lissitsky placed the object at
the center of the artistic and social concerns of the day: “We have called
our review Object because for us art means the creation of new ‘objects.’ …
Every organized work—be it a house, a poem or a picture—is an object with a
purpose; it is not meant to lead people away from life but to help them to
organize it. … Abandon declarations and refutations as soon as possible,
make objects!”

Ultimately, only three issues of Veshch-Objet-Gegenstand would be
published, but the journal’s project to cultivate object as a primary tool
of social organization clearly touched upon broader concerns of its time.
At the end of the 1920s, Sergei Tret’iakov, a leading theorist of Russian
production art, similarly insisted on abandoning the traditional
fascination with individual trials and tribulations and to concentrate
instead on the biography of the object that proceeds “through the system of
people.” Only such a biography, Tret’iakov maintained, can teach us about
“the social significance of an emotion by considering its effect on the
object being made.”

Taking the Russian avant-garde’s concern with the material life of emotions
as our starting point, the conference brings together an international,
interdisciplinary group of scholars working at the intersection between
studies of affect and studies of material culture. In the last decade,
these two crucial strands of social inquiry have shifted the focus of
analytic attention away from the individual or collective subject towards
emotional states and material substances. These interests in the affective
and the tangible as such have helped to foreground processes, conditions,
and phenomena that are relatively autonomous from the individuals or social
groups that originally produced them. Thus interrogating traditional
notions of subjective agency, various scholars have drawn our attention to
“a conative nature” of things (Jane Bennet), to “affective intensities”
(Brian Massumi), or to textural perception (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) – to
name just a few of these interventions – in order to pose questions that
fall outside of dominant frameworks for understanding the epistemology of
power.

Despite their growing importance, however, these diverse methods and
concepts for mapping the emotive biographies of things have not yet been in
a direct dialogue with one another. By focusing on the material dimensions
of affect and, conversely, the emotional components of object formation,
this conference aims to bridge this gap.

Program Committee:
Serguei Oushakine, Anna Katsnelson, David Leheny, Anson Rabinbach, Gayle
Salamon

MAY 4, 2012

1.30pm – 3.15pm  PANEL 1:   AFFECTIVE POLITICS
Chair: Anson Rabinbach (Princeton University)

Sabine Kriebel (University College Cork)  Left Wing Laughter: John
Heartfield’s Mischievous Communist Subject

Natalia Skradol (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Joy in Numbers: Measuring
/ Making Subjects and Objects in Labor Camps

Nadia Guessous (New York University)  Visceral Politics and Sartorial
Rifts: Feminism in the Age of the Hijab in Morocco

Discussant: Arzoo Osanloo (University of Washington/Law and Public Affairs
Program, Princeton)


3.30 pm – 5.15pm   PANEL 2:   POWERFUL THINGS
Chair: David Leheny (Princeton University)

Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton University) Constitutional Awe:  Hungary’s
Holy Crown of St. Stephen

Julia Chadaga (Macalester College)  Embracing Stars: On the Corporeal
Qualities of Russian Glass

May Chew (Queen’s University, Canada)  Colonial Archives and Affective
Residues

Discussant:  Robert Geraci (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)


5.30pm   PERFORMANCE PANEL
ECONOMIES OF DIFFERENCE: DENIAL, DESIRE, AND A GENEALOGY OF THE OBJECT

By Jessica Jacobson-Konefall (Queen’s University at Kingston, Canada),
Jaimie Isaac(University of British Columbia), Leah Decter (Winnipeg, Canada)

MAY 5, 2012


9.30am – 11.15am   PANEL 3:   STONE FEELINGS
Chair: Serguei Oushakine (Princeton University)

Jeehee Hong (Syracuse University)  Grieving through Stone and Clay:
Mourning Images of Middle-Period China (10th-14th Centuries)

Brigit Ferguson (UC, Santa Barbara)  Judging Affect: Smiles in the
Thirteenth-Century Sculpture of Bamberg Cathedral

Diego Cagueñas (Universidad Icesi, The New School for Social Research)  The
Impassivity of Stones and the Heart of Disaster

Discussant: Christopher Nygren (University of Pennsylvania)


11.30am – 1.15pm   PANEL 4:   ARCHITECTURES OF EMOTIONS
Chair: Rachael Z. DeLue (Princeton University)

Yogesh Chandrani (Columbia University)   In the Asylum of Truth: Planning,
Heritage, and Violence in Ahmedabad

Lois Weinthal (University of Texas)  Embedded Emotions in Objects of the
Architectural Interior

Krisztina Fehervary (University of Michigan) From Socialist Modern to Super
Natural Organicism: Political Affect and the Materialities of the Home

Discussant: Spyros Papapetros (Princeton University)


2.00pm – 3.45pm   PANEL 5: REGIMES OF SENSES
Chair: Ekaterina Pravilova (Princeton University)

Christina Kiaer (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)  Feeling
Socialism in the 1930s: A Haptic Aesthetics of Socialist Realist Painting

Emma Widdis (University of Cambridge)  Socialist Senses: Film and the
Creation of Soviet Subjectivity

Cheng-Guang Zhao (University of Chicago)   Sentimental Objects: a Cultural
Analysis of some Romantic Things and Spaces in Tianjin, China

Discussant: Anna Katsnelson (Princeton University)


4.00pm – 5.45pm   PANEL 6:  TECHNOLOGIES OF ADDICTION
Chair: Gayle Salamon (Princeton University)

Nicole Vitellone (University of Liverpool)  Syringe Sociology: Addicts,
Objects, Emotions

Jason Pine (Purchase College)  The Demiurge of the Methamphetamine Economy

Diana Mincyte (New York University) Commodity-As-Comrade: The Making of
Consumer Society in Brezhnev’s Lithuania

Discussant: Devin Fore (Princeton University)


MAY 5, 2012
6.00pm
KEYNOTE ADDRESS:

PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH

THE NEW AESTHETIC: OBJECTS THAT MATTER

Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at
the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York.
She is author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of
Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic
Discourse  (1994)  and The End(s)  of Ethnography: From Realism to Social
Criticism (1998).  She is editor of The Affective Turn:  Theorizing the
Social, (2007) and with Craig Willse, editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays
on the Governance of Life and Death (2011). She is currently working on
Ecstatic Corona: Philosophy and Family Violence, an ethnographic
historically researched experimental writing project about where she grew
up in Queens New York.  Clough’s work has drawn on theoretical traditions
concerned with technology, affect, unconscious processes, timespace and
political economy.

MAY 6, 2012

9.30am-11.15am   PANEL 7:  OBJECT RELATIONS
Chair: Edyta Bojanowska (Rutgers University)

Judith Goldstein (Vassar College)   Witness Objects

Joan Neuberger (University of Texas, Austin)  Eisenstein’s Feeling-Thinking
Things

Victor Vakhshtayn (Moscow School for Social and Economic Sciences) “Toys
are Us” or How to Do Emotions with Things

Discussant: Dragan Kujundzic (University of Florida)


11.30am – 1.15pm   PANEL 8: ACOUSTIC PASSIONS
Chair: Joshua Kotin (Princeton University)

Anna Fishzon (Williams College) Sound Affects: Love, Hate, and the
Gramophone in Prerevolutionary Russia

Olya Zikrata (Concordia University)  Intangible Objects: Mapping Sonic
Forces of the Russian Avant-garde

Lilya Kaganovsky (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) The
Materiality of Sound: Esfir Shub’s Haptic Cinema

Discussant: Natasha Kurchanova (Independent Scholar)

the conference is sponsored by:
* Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies * Davis Center
for Historical Studies * Eberhard L. Faber Fund of the Humanities Council *
University Center for Human Values in honor of James A. Moffett ‘29 *
Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies*

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