Madame B (the film, various installations)

Doris Salcedo: Palimpsesto

Introduction: The Point of Affect

This chapter scrutinises a concept that suspends the centrality of representation, and foregrounds, instead, art's solicitation of viewers’ engagement through affect. It focuses analysis on the resulting interactivity between artworks and their viewers. Instead of taking what is there to be seen, affect analysis establishes a relationship between that sight and what it does to the people looking at it and, precisely, being affected by it. While detailed affect-oriented analysis of artworks may seem more difficult to achieve than, say, a form-based analysis of the artwork only, such analysis is called for to account for the cultural processes in which art functions.

Whether or not the term ‘affect’ is explicitly used, the affect-oriented perspective is not new. Here are three long-term recognisable examples. Discussions of pornography have always been focused on what pornographic images might do to its audience. Does porn entice people to act upon the desires aroused by the images? Such a question already presupposes that the image has the function to arouse; it is performative. The sexual arousal is not ‘in’ the image but happens in the wake of someone seeing it. Second, censorship responds to the image or text ‘accused’ of corrupting its receivers. If, soon after the publication and smashing success of his 1856 novel Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert was taken to court, the prosecution was motivated by the sense that the novel was doing something to the culture of the day – it was addressing the present. They seemed to panic about the welfare of that culture. The sentence that reversed the generally accepted morality, and became a key target of the prosecution, was considered dangerous because it was taken to entice people, especially women, to indulge in adultery.

This sentence in FID, ‘Oh yes, if only … before the filth of marriage and the disillusions of adultery’ (II, 15; emphasis added) uttered by the narrator and clearly – but perhaps, dangerously, not exclusively – focalised by Emma, hurt the prosecution's sense of propriety. That discomfort is the affective consequence of a performative sentence. The ‘danger’ is literature's performative power.