Affective Modernism:

An important point of reference for me—but also for many other ‘affectised’ researchers—are two ‘schools’ in particular—the first, currently dominant in the humanities, derives primarily from Deleuze’s readings of Spinoza and Bergson, and later commented on by Brian Massumi, among others. The second—(neuro)psychological, psychobiological, sociological and anthropological/ethnographic model––is represented especially well by Silvan Tomkins, Jonathan Turner, Paul Ekman, António Damásio, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Jan Stets, Carol and Peter Stearns, William Reddy, and John Leavitt.⁵ Researchers working in this vein—rather than using the concept of affect—are more likely to use categories of feeling and emotion, exploring the role of cultural conditioning in defining, evaluating and experiencing the emotional. They analyse the ‘biology of emotion’, consider the functionality of sensation in cognitive and communal processes, describing these processes through the impact of primary and secondary emotions, inquiring into the mechanisms of socio-emotional behavioural scenarios, and so on. I draw on these theories in particular when I write about the typology of primary emotions and the complementarity and inseparability of embodied feeling and thinking, as well as when I present the differentiated (micro)phases of the perceptual process responsible for the emergence of both felt meaning and conceptual meaning, which are fundamental to my proposed model of relational interpretation.

Nonetheless, my primary source of inspiration is philosophical and cultural studies (mainly Anglo-Saxon) represented by such scholars as Brian Massumi, Jill Bennett, Isabel Armstrong, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Mieke Bal, Reia Terada, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ernst van Alphen, Frederic Jameson, Charles Altieri, Martha Nussbaum, and others. While it is difficult to argue that there is a single or homogeneous theory of affect, these numerous authorial conceptions, rooted in different disciplines and traditions, tend to have at least a common denominator, which draws on Deleuze’s reflections—especially from the books Cinema. 1: The Movement Image, Cinema 2: The Time Image, What is Philosophy? (co-authored with Félix Gauattari), and Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.

In view of the large number of studies and the breadth of potential research scopes, I make no attempt to outline this panorama of positions, a review of which could serve as the subject of a separate book. However, there are certain general regularities within this diversity of approaches, reflecting the disciplinary and methodological orientations of the researchers concerned and the various objects of description, as these research projects are usually rooted in analyses of specific works or cultural phenomena. Since the assumptions, inspirations and concepts used vary, the results of these studies are rarely perfectly aligned, though they are often in dialogue with one another. Recurring issues include: the (un)representability of impressions in artistic works, the methodologies of affective aesthetics, the intentionality and agency of affecting, and the dependence of affect on the traumatic, the material, the coporeal, the sensual, and the intellectual (Altieri, Armstrong, Hogan, Terada, Jameson, Brinkema⁶). The main fields of research in terms of affect are intimacy and sexuality (Illouz, Butler, Nieland⁷), everyday life (Berlant, Bertelsen, Murphie⁸), altered states of consciousness (Cvetković, Brennan, Bal, Mitchell⁹), memory, genocide and conflict (Leys, Margalit, Rothberg, Bennett, Hirsch, van Alphen¹⁰), (post)colonial relations and migration (Gandhi, Erll, Bennett, Ahmed¹¹), politics and class relations (Illouz, Jameson, Massumi, Jacquet¹²), inequalities and social antagonisms (Ahmed, Kosofsky Sedgwick, Moisi, Taylor¹³), the functioning of historical communities (Rosenwein¹⁴), violence (Bennett, Abel, Hoogland¹⁵), non-human social actors (Ahmed, Grosz, Rives¹⁶) and many others. It is not difficult to see how ‘egalitarian’, ‘connective’ or ‘trendy’ affect has become as a cultural, aesthetic, and literary category. This is because inventive uses of the concept have not only broadened the interpretative vocabulary, but also the spectrum of addressed issues, and––as a result––has often led to shifts in the focus of scholarly research. All of this has contributed to the popularity of the affect as a concept, textual evidence of which traces back to the 1990s in British and American publications, and generally to the 2010s in the Polish academic press.¹⁷ A separate issue to consider is the potential exhaustion of this category, or rather, its becoming oversatured or potentially falling out of methodological fashion. However, it seems—somewhat paradoxically—that the shift from a phase of intensive ‘budding’ and rapid multiplication of conceptual approaches, followed by new comparisons and uses in ever-changing contexts has had a positive effect and has led to a strengthening of the position of affective theories in humanities discourse.

Understood in this way, affect studies fulfils a need strongly felt today to turn away from a single theory, and, more generally, from ordered systems, comprehensive narratives, and generalising conclusions. Affect is contextualised, localised, diverse, and dynamic, and oftentimes peripheral or multivalent in its interpretive approaches. Among the basic principles generally shared in affect studies are attentive reading, openly situating the research position, taking into account sensations, intuitions and reflexes of perception (others’, but also one’s own) in the course of interpretation, and a vigilance in regard to—although this is sometimes difficult to rationalise—what predetermines the initial assessment of a given representation, what is it that evokes a sense of strangeness or irritates, tires, delights or moves us in some way.

In this book, I draw on a constellation of theoretical approaches, but I make the greatest practical use in my interpretative work of Gilles Deleuze’s logic of sensation, which makes it possible to analyse the numerous metamorphoses present in Bruno Schulz’s writing, which I treat as a form of ‘embodiment’, i.e. as the materialisation of affects, and as a progressive—like in Bacon’s paintings—‘deformation’ of Figures. The concepts of realism developed by Frederic Jameson, Michael Rothberg, Hal Foster and Lauren Berlant are also highly relevant to my understanding and presentation of affective realism, but also work well as a groundwork for analysing Miron Białoszewski’s oeuvre. Similarly, Sarah Ahmed’s notion of affective economies are important when examining the prose of Leo Lipski, who used the conceptual category of an ‘economy’ of affect to describe life in the camps and after liberation—from the suppression of sensations during the war to the postwar debauchery, the uncontrolled ‘outpouring’ of accumulated feelings and ‘showering’ them on random people. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of periperformativity is used, in turn, to analyse Gombrowicz’s works in terms of how mechanisms and phenomena interact with traditionally understood performative acts and disrupt their felicity. Barbara Rosenwein’s notion of emotional communities is the starting point for my description of the bodily and affective community of the Warsaw Uprising, which Anna Świrszczyńska presents in Building a Barricade [Budowałam barykadę].

I am inclined to think of the composition of this book as a constellation or star system, where the effects of the mutual illumination of texts, reading practices and the categories I propose interact. My priority is to carefully consider individual literary and artistic phenomena and to ground theoretical concepts in the resulting analyses. For this reason, in the first nine chapters, I present a series of readings of modernist literature, starting with a specific case study each time and then moving on to problematise it, thereby enabling broader conclusions to be drawn and new research concepts to be proposed. In the following sections, the discussion takes an opposite turn: gaining inspiration from my earlier analyses, I attempt to construct clearly contextualised (micro)theories—drawing on both twentieth-century concepts and contemporary thought—applicable in efforts to properly identify the culture(s) of modernism. Ultimately, I once again ‘test’ these theoretical propositions by using them in ‘minor’ analyses through additional literary and aesthetic case studies.

My research is based on the practice of theory. The direction of this research is clear: its broader recognitions and approaches did not arise in a vacuum, but as a result of contact with concrete artistic material, which from more universal diagnoses are derived. It all begins with texts that demand a response. Had it not been for these readings and their influence, I would probably never have considered researching the affective face of modernism. In a word, this resulted from the workings of affect.

In the first chapter, ‘Affective Avant-Gardism’, I reflect on the textual and cultural consequences of the tension between avant-garde authors’ manifestly declared demands to ‘restrain feelings’ and artistic attempts to express what is situated on the side of experience and affect. One of my tasks, therefore, is to ‘track down’ and carefully analyse the techniques used to literarily ‘filter’ or ‘catalyse’ (T.S. Eliot) that which is most personal, the formal tools and devices that were aimed at ‘depersonalising’ or ‘defamiliarising’ literature. I put forward the thesis that the avant-garde (which, following Ástráður Eysteinsson, I understand as the most radical, experimental manifestation of modernism) was not so much ‘cleansed’ of emotion and affect as it became a site of friction between, complementation and equivalence between what was considered rational or objective and what was affective or traumatic. Therefore, more important than the removal of experiences from art was an inventive elaboration of them. Using my proposed method of reading—affective criticism—I offer an analysis of Witold Gombrowicz’s short story ‘A Premeditated Crime’ and Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture Suspended Ball.

In the next chapter, I describe the affective poetics of Bruno Schulz, who developed and consistently applied his own method of transmissive influence on the reader, making an pact of sorts with them and testing certain literary devices on them. I examine the methods used by Schulz to present affective states in his writing by rendering them in concrete, material form. I show how intra-textual events depend directly on the level of intensity and moods generated. I also analyse the numerous metamorphoses of Schulz’s characters through the category of Figure proposed by Deleuze in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. I conclude by addressing the ways in which Schulz provokes the readers to actualise the affective community.

In the third chapter, I propose reading Witold Gombrowicz’s writing through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of periperformivity. I analyse two works in particular: the short story ‘Virginity’ and the play Princess Ivona. Looking for gestures, words and behaviours that function in Gombrowicz’s work as periperformatives, I consider how he employs the agency of these acts and what the textual consequences of this are. Correspondences between the ideas of Gombrowicz and Kosofsky Sedgwick provide an opportunity not only to redefine and expand the concept of periperformativity, but also to rediscover anew the subversive and affective potential of Gombrowicz’s work, draw attention to the scale of his social criticism and assert the periperformativity at the heart of his works, which is evoked as a means for suggesting new solutions and possibilities in terms of the wider community.

In the chapter ‘Carrier of Memory: Leo Lipski’s Economy of Affect’, I discuss the reasons why Lipski’s writing was considered scandalous and why his readers claimed they could ‘experience it more than understand it’. I read texts that have often been considered ‘incoherent’ and ‘disgusting’ as literature organised according to the economy of affect, something intended to touch, move, and hurt the readers, to ‘infect’ them with the author’s wartime experiences in order to provoke their attentive reading, reflection and remembrance of the victims of Soviet and Nazi violence.