Noir Affect

PREFACE

This book had its genesis in death. It was supposed to be about death and negation, but in the abstract. Unfortunately, the abstraction did not hold. Death and its negativity became all too real during its writing. Elizabeth Hatmaker was my spouse, intellectual interlocutor, friendly femme fatale, and partner in crime. She was also a brilliant poet, an astute theorist, a sometimes critic, a thinker of the first order, and an all-around funny and beautiful person. We conceived of this book in 2012 or so. I think the germ of the idea was hers, but it came out of our dialogue which had been going on continuously since we first met in 2000. We contacted possible contributors to the collection in 2013. She was diagnosed with ALS in 2015, just when the work on the collection was really swinging into gear. Unfortunately, the disease proceeded swiftly and she passed away two years later. We started out to write about noir and suddenly we were living it. Like a noir novel, the proximity of death produced all kinds of complicated affects in both of us and between us. One imagines that one will be heroic in such situations, but noir tells us otherwise. You get through. And that’s what we both did in different ways, me as her primary caregiver and she facing a disease worse than any mere description can convey. If there is an ethics to noir, it is to face such affects head on. It is to recognize death and the anxiety it produces and not look away. We both already believed this for different reasons and to this ethic we were true.

Due to Elizabeth’s disease and passing, I have of necessity done much of the writing in the introduction. I also have edited and reworked her essay, which is a different contribution than she initially planned; it is an amazing essay and I am very happy that we can include it here. Make no mistake, though: this book is predicated as much on Elizabeth’s vision as it is mine; the kernel of the book, that noir is about negative affect, is hers. Moreover, the ideas in the introduction are as much hers as mine, even as I did the writing. There were times when I would be stuck and she would provide me with a solution from her sick bed. Our collaboration continued almost to the very end. It was her idea too to make this an edited collection. I had an idea of writing a jointly composed monograph, but she rightly asserted that this would be much better as an edited collection, where we could bring together so many of the brilliant people we know who work on noir. She was, of course, right and the book is their book as much as ours.

Accordingly, I first want to thank Elizabeth for her brilliance, her knowledge of everything noir, her bravery, and her wisdom. This book is dedicated to her. I also want to thank all of our brilliant contributors. You have turned this book into a sum much greater than its parts. I love the way in which the different essays in the book speak to each other and challenge each other. My thanks to Paula Rabinowitz for agreeing to write the powerful afterword for the book. As fans of Paula’s work, we were ecstatic to have her agree to write the afterword.

I also want to thank Richard Morrison, editorial director of Fordham University Press. I have worked with Richard on three books now and none was more meaningful and important than this one. I already knew Richard was a fantastic editor and one of the true professionals. While I was undergoing the illness and loss of a partner, Richard was doing the same. We were already close but this made us much closer. So I would like to acknowledge his partner, Tim Hough. I also want to thank all of the editorial staff at Fordham. All of you have made working on this project a pleasure.

There are too many people who play a central role in my intellectual and affective life to list here, but I want to thank a few different communities. First, I want to thank my peeps at my home institution, Illinois State University: colleagues, graduate students, and undergraduates. Somehow you still put up with me even after twenty years. I also want to thank the community of scholars that have formed around the Society for Critical Exchange and the journal symplokē, all the participants in the Facebook Comparative Theory Group, my friends and interlocutors from Germany, all my pulp and popular literature peeps, all of those from the University of California at Santa Cruz diaspora, Elizabeth’s family, and my sweet, supportive family.

I want to thank the two anonymous readers for Fordham University Press (one of whom I found out later is Kate Nickerson) for providing the best and most supportive feedback a scholar could ask for. What is good about this book is due in no small part to you.

There are a few folks who have been core intellectual interlocutors in recent years and I want to thank them individually: Stacy Alaimo, Carlos Amador, Renée Bergland, Kaitlin Blanchard, Levi Paul Bryant, Jeffrey Di Leo, Carla Freccero, Sean Grattan, Christian Haines, Peter Hitchcock, Caren Irr, Aaron Jaffe, Anna Kornbluh, Sophia McClennen, José Saldívar, David Schmid (whose insight about all things crime fiction related was crucial in the early conception of this project), Julietta Singh, Nathan Snaza, and Phillip Wegner.

I also want to thank those special folks who helped bring me back to the force and beauty of this impermanent, profoundly messed up, but living world: Robin Baldridge, Tom Banks, Layla Bodet, Scott Davis, Megan Lewis, Erick Longfellow, Josette Lorig, Brian Rejack, Max Rovner, and Gina Stinnett. (Many of these folks are also intellectual interlocutors).

Finally, I want to thank Kirsti Sandy on behalf of Elizabeth. They were best friends, movie lovers, and co-conspirators. I know Elizabeth would be annoyed with me from the beyond (if there is one) if I forgot to mention her.

C. B.

NOIR AFFECT

Introduction: Dark Passages

Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker

A married couple is haunted by the fact that one of them killed a blackmailer. The woman, through whose perspective the scene is focalized, doesn’t remember killing the blackmailer and suspects her husband of doing the deed. Although we never get the husband’s perspective, it appears to be strictly parallel. Both love each other and yet neither can trust nor forgive each other.

—CORNELL WOOLRICH, I Married a Dead Man¹

Noir is elusive. While all critical categories are characterized by debate and disagreement, noir as a category seems particularly prone to fractiousness, dissension, and divisiveness. Almost from the moment Nino Frank first named it and Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton produced their first book-length study of the noir series of films, critics debated the term and what it designated.² Is noir a genre? Is the term itself a valuable descriptor? Why not use more stable and precise genre descriptions such as detective fiction and film or crime fiction and film? Why use a category that is, as Marc Vernet has argued, more of a retrospective critical construction than a description used by the filmmakers and writers themselves?³ Of course, all critical categories are, in part, retrospective constructions. Yet something about noir seems particularly belated and arbitrary.

Part of the problem is that it is hard to locate what constitutes noir in relationship to positive qualities. Film theorists have talked about certain kinds of lighting (chiaroscuro, low-key) and cinematographic techniques (the use of the canted frame, expressionism) while film and literature scholars have talked about certain kinds of plots (the psychological crime thriller) or characters (the criminal antihero, the hard-boiled protagonist, the femme fatale, the homme fatale) as definitional. Scholars have even attempted to fix the surface features of the noir plot. Writing in the late 1970s and under the influence of Northrop Frye, James Damico essays the following structuralist account of the noir plot (one that may have contradictions or variations but ostensibly represents the deep structure of the form):

Either he is fated to do so or by chance, or because he has been hired for a job specifically associated with her, a man whose experience of life has left him sanguine and often bitter meets a not-innocent woman of similar outlook to whom he is sexually and fatally attracted. Through this attraction, either because the woman induces him to it or because it is the natural result of their relationship, the man comes to cheat, attempt to murder, or actually murder a second man to whom the woman is unhappily or unwillingly attached (generally he is her husband or lover), an act which often leads to the woman’s betrayal of the protagonist, but which in any event brings about the sometimes metaphoric, but usually literal destruction of the woman, the man to whom she is attached, and frequently the protagonist himself.⁴

While this description certainly fits some noir plots (such as the novel and film versions of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, or Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past) there are many noir narratives that do not fit this description (whether it is the film and novel versions of Mildred Pierce, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, or Koreyoshi Kurahara’s I am Waiting).⁵ And even as Damico names a number of important noir elements (including chance, death, fatal attractions of various sorts), his description doesn’t feel like it gets to the heart of the noirs that it effectively describes. In a more thematic vein, American studies, cultural studies, and film studies scholars such as E. Ann Kaplan, Paula Rabinowitz, Frank Krutnik, Robert Corber, Elizabeth Cowie, Christopher Breu, and others have also argued that noir, whatever the surface features of the text or film in question, is about social antagonisms and struggles around gender, class, and race.⁶ These scholars are not wrong. Indeed, we will draw on their work in elaborating our own account of racial, class, gender, and sexual antagonism as it is structured by noir affect, but it is hard to situate these features as distinctively noir, since these thematics are also present in other twentieth- and twenty-first-century genres. Similarly, Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland argue in their excellent Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization that noir is an ambivalent response to different manifestations of global modernity.⁷ This is no doubt true. Drawing, in part, on Fay and Nieland, we too will situate noir as an engagement with modernity. The problem is, though, that the same could be said about a number of forms of cultural production, including the novels and films that are grouped under the banner of modernism. The elusive noir element vanishes yet again, resisting positivization.

Perhaps the reason for this resistance lies in the very negativity of this thing we call noir. In trying to define noir, we encounter the same forms of negativity that characterize the work of the form itself. Noir itself foregrounds fractiousness, divisiveness, conflict, and dissension. Moreover, it is preoccupied with belatedness, retrospection, fatality, inadequacy, and intransigence. It also marks the elusiveness of subjects to definition and even to self-knowledge. As Slavoj Žižek argues, the critics and practitioners of noir (not to mention the characters featured in noir texts) exist in a noir relationship with noir itself.⁸

Noir Affect, Space, and Time

A middle-class woman has been kicked out of a car and left on the side of a deserted mountain pass by a rich date, because he finds her annoying. A working-class man who she dated a couple of times after meeting him on the internet and who has been stalking her offers her a ride back to town. She refuses his offer, rejecting him in much the same language that she was just rejected. They struggle and the man kills her. The camera works through a complicated set of shots reverse shots indicating the multiple, incompatible points of view.

LEE SANG-IL, Villain⁹

An understanding of noir as characterized by negative affect is the central premise of this book. As affect often does, noir affect works virally to inflect (or infect) not only the characters and situations dramatized by the noir text, but also its formal dimensions and the cultural and critical discourses about noir. Noir figures space and time in distinctive ways. Moreover, these figurations are necessarily intertwined. Noir has a specific historical genesis that overlaps with various moments of modernization. As Fay and Nieland, Andrew Spicer, James Naremore, and David Schmid and Andrew Pepper persuasively demonstrate, it is also a transnational and even global phenomenon.¹⁰ Noir may have had its initial genesis in the writings of James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, and Horace McCoy in the 1930s as well as in the classic cycle of Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s. However, these films were not only produced by European refugees and received filmic and critical homages in French New Wave and Japanese postwar cinema, they also often engaged in a dialogue with continental movements such as existentialism, psychoanalysis, and certain strains of twentieth-century Marxism. As Naremore points out, Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice share both a writing style and a set of themes.

In defining noir in terms of negative affect, then, we are not abjuring historical or spatial context. Indeed, part of the ambit of this project is to situate noir in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century globe. While Noir Affect does not present essays on all the different spaces of noir’s global efflorescence (the recent explosion of Scandinavian noir and the recent resurgence of noir television in the United States being but two examples), the book does collect a range of essays addressing an array of global locations, from the United States to Mexico, Japan, Italy, and France. We also read noir as an always evolving and self-aware practice. Rather than emerging as discrete practices in different locations, the practice of noir in different national, regional, and global contexts is a self-conscious one that is always in dialogue with what has come before. Moreover, it is a constantly mutating or evolving practice. Like many popular forms, noir can be gloriously promiscuous in its travels, mixing with a range of different genres to produce hybrid creations. Thus, we probably can’t consider Italian gialli or Japanese cinema derived from manga pure noir, but neither should we refuse the noir affects and borrowings that structure some of these films.

Noir has long been associated with different temporal formations within modernity as well. As Vivian Sobchack has argued, the temporality of noir is what she calls lounge time.¹¹ It is a temporality that forms itself in the in-between spaces of modernity, such as the bar, the lounge, the gas station, the bus station, and the diner. Such a temporality is modern yet displaced. It is not defined by the nostalgia of anti-modernism, but rather by the displaced, anonymous time of the shabbily or slightly shopworn modern. It is a non-time (or nonsynchronous time) that echoes Mark Augé’s concept of non-place.¹² Such places, like those detailed by Sobchack are recursive, evasive, and out of sync with the systems of meaning that traditionally define identity, space, and temporality. As Fredric Jameson has noted, they are anonymous and often slightly degraded places, ones associated with travelers, drifters, laborers, the down and out, the criminal, and the multiethnic.¹³ While the spaces of noir, as Edward Dimendberg describes them, are preoccupied with the transformations of the modern city, even when the noir itself is not located in the city, these are also neglected spaces, whether urban, suburban, or exurban.¹⁴ They are spatialities and temporalities that are themselves saturated with noir affect.

The emphasis on nonplace and nontime suggests a different form of historicism and spatialization than is common in most forms of literary, film, and cultural studies. Our sense of spatialization is about (to rework Gaston Bachelard) the poetics of nonspace as much as it is about situating texts in specific geopolitical, national, and local contexts. Such spaces are often neglected, serialized, or ordinary and are located in the neglected parts of cities and towns or on their outskirts. One thinks of the bars or diners that Sobchack details or the absolutely unmemorable Musashi-Mirayama district of greater Tokyo in which Natsuo Kirino’s Out is set. Even the shift in film noir from sets to on-location filming in the late forties does little to disrupt the feeling of non-place in noir. While we know that Jules Dassin’s The Naked City is filmed on location in New York City, many of the spaces it details feel as anonymous as the down and out sets that usually mark space in noir. In both cases, the nondescript and serializable quality of place lends noir its dream logic. The repetition of spaces that is fundamental to noir echoes the repetition of actions, fantasies, and desires in the genre.

Noir Historicism

A former concert pianist attempts to find solace from the suicide of his wife, which he feels he caused, by eking out a living as a performer in a cocktail bar. He falls in love with a waitress, accidentally kills a man in a fight over her, and is in debt to gangsters. The pianist and the waitress flee to the countryside to evade their troubles. In an ensuing gunfight with the gangsters, the woman is killed by a stray bullet. Now feeling responsible for the deaths of the two women he loved, the piano player returns to the oblivion of playing piano in the bar.

FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT, Shoot the Piano Player¹⁵

Similarly, our conception of the distinct temporality of noir is inflected by what we have elsewhere called noir historicism.¹⁶ Drawing on the dream-logic that animates the noir text, noir historicism recasts history as uneven, repetitious, and disjunctive, even as it also emphasizes the uneven, disjunctive, and necessarily phantasmatic relationships between imaginative text and material context.¹⁷ From within noir historicism we suggest a set of crucial shifts in the fantasy staged by noir, even as the negativity of the fantasy remains constant. The period of noir’s first emergence forms as a reaction to the boosterish and collectivist rhetoric of Fordist liberalism, pitting the disaffected or excluded individual against the affirmative nationalist, market-based, familial, and producerist rhetoric of the era. Under neoliberal capitalism, two distinct phases or generic mutations are notable: first, a nostalgic and postmodern neo-noir emerges, as has been theorized by Richard T. Jameson, Foster Hirsch, and Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck among others; second, we have a return to noir as a present-oriented form, one that has become truly international, open to hybridizations with other forms, and represents an active and negative response to neoliberalism.¹⁸ We call this new development neoliberal noir, as distinguished from neo-noir. In nostalgic neo-noir, either the protagonist embodies the seemingly outmoded discourse of liberal individualism or the text itself becomes an ironic reworking of the genre to emphasize the difference between the historical world of noir and that of the postmodern moment. In this sense, there is a positivity to neo-noir, but one that can only be located in an imaginative past and is contrasted to a negatively figured present. If lounge time, in Fordist noir, was precisely about resisting anti-modernist nostalgia, ironically neo-noir becomes inflected by just such a nostalgia, although this time a nostalgia for the modern itself.

In contrast, the resurgence of noir proper in neoliberal noir (as opposed to neo-noir), which is something that has taken place in film, fiction, television, and video games, is organized around a new, present form of negativity, one that challenges the affirmative moral and commodified rhetoric of self-reinvention, self-investment, and self-maintenance as well as deserving winners and losers that is central to contemporary neoliberalism. It highlights the ideological contradiction between the commodified rhetoric of individual uniqueness and responsibility and the material disposability and precarity of workers and populations under neoliberalism. What happens when Sobchack’s lounge becomes almost fully emptied by neoliberal spaces of disaggregated labor, self-actualization, financialization, automation, and privatized consumption? Neoliberal noir, which is addressed by many of the essays in this collection, tends to be critical of the individualist (and often white male) protagonist that was celebrated by classic noir and its neo-noir brethren. This opens up the form to even more negative work around race, class, gender, sexuality, and economics.

Understanding Noir Affect

Four downwardly mobile women do backbreaking work at a bento factory in what is politely called the Tokyo suburbs. They actually work in the Mushashi-Murayama district, a nonspace where nobody, not even sex tourists and sex workers, would choose to go. It is, as much of the world is, an interlinking set of highways, factories, houses, and dingy malls. This space produces a fantasy of escape (of getting out at all costs) even as it invites the female workers to give into their death drives and exit the world as such.

NATSUO KIRINO, Out¹⁹

Noir Affect proposes a new understanding of noir in a range of media (fiction, film, television, and video games). This new understanding emphasizes that noir is, first and foremost, an affective disposition rather than a specific cycle of films or novels associated with a given time period (the mid-twentieth century) or national tradition (the United States). The forms of affect associated with noir are resolutely negative: these are texts centered on rage (including murderous rage), loss, sadness, shame, guilt, regret, anxiety, humiliation, resentment, resistance, and refusal. Moreover, they often ask us to identify with those on the losing end of capitalist cultural narratives, especially the criminal, the lost, the compromised, the haunted, the unlucky, the cast aside, and the erotically perverse, including those whose greatest erotic attachment is to death.

Our argument is that only by tarrying with these negative affects as they appear in the stories of two-time losers, violent criminals, and death-haunted subjects can a truly transformational politics become possible. If capitalism (especially in its present, neoliberal form) alternates between boosterish self-help narratives and the negative rhetoric of social condemnation and exclusion, noir works in an inverse way to both model empathy with the down-trodden, excluded, and abandoned, and demand that we engage and value the negativity of their affects. Ironically, however, such noir affects are only available to us through the production of a surreptitious form of positive affect, one that asks us to identify with the abject, the criminal, and the loser. From this we get noir’s famous series of antiheroes, such as Tom Ripley, Mildred Pierce, Charlie Kohler, and Amy Dunne. Noir does its darkest work by insisting that you identify with the antisocial affects of its protagonist. A truly transformational politics has to take stock of these negative affects, what we describe as noir affects.

Of course, in arguing that noir is characterized by negative affect, we ironically run the danger of once again trying to positivize the negative, attempting to fix (in the double meaning of to locate and to cure it) noir. While such a move is perhaps inevitable—How does one begin to account for the negative except by positivizing it?—we define our project in ways that limit the epistemological damage done by an overly positive framework. We do this, firstly, by emphasizing the negativity of noir itself. Noir is not only characterized by negative affect but also establishes a negative, indeed resistant if not oppositional, relationship to any attempt to fix or define it. Secondly, by theorizing noir as affect, we employ a particularly elusive, ambient, and fluid category with which to think about noir, one that matches the elusiveness of noir itself. As a number of the essays to follow demonstrate, many of the most interesting noirs are generically hybrid. Indeed, rather than a genre, noir is perhaps best understood as deformation (a willful darkening or perversion) of other genres, such as the detective, crime, proletarian, or adventure narrative. Thirdly, we leave open-ended and cumulative the various objects that can be defined as noir. Rather than saying that all forms of noir need to be characterized by negative affect, we allow our essayists to demonstrate the range of objects (diverse in terms of media, place, and time of production) that can be elucidated using the frame of noir affect. Some noir may not be characterized by noir affect and some noir affect may be associated with texts typically characterized as noir. Fourthly, we see noir affect as a mode of reading as much as a description of the characteristics of a certain set of objects. While we are very interested in the objects we investigate in Noir Affect, we are much less interested in fixing them as part of a noir canon. Moreover, if our thesis about the negativity of noir is correct, such an attempt would be a failure. Then again, noir teaches us that failure can be beautiful.²⁰

This ambient quality of the thing that we call noir suggests that it is qualitative rather than quantitative, organized by perception and feeling rather than a purely rational amalgam of characteristics. It is for this reason that we describe noir in terms of affect. It is both a name for specific kinds of affect (loss, sadness, rage, guilt, shame, regret, resentment, humiliation, and refusal) and the name of a specific practice of narrative that works to dramatize such affects (often via narratives of the criminal, the lost, the melancholic, the haunted, the unlucky, the cast aside, and the erotically perverse).

Drawing on foundational and recent work in affect theory by writers as diverse as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lawrence Grossberg, Brian Massumi, Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Kathleen Stewart, Teresa Brennan, Patricia Ticineto Clough, John Protevi, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as well as psychoanalytic and psychological accounts of affect by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Silvan Tomkins, Noir Affect argues that the category of noir is best understood as designating a written or filmic narrative that chronicles negative affective dispositions.²¹ In the recent work of affect theory, affect is understood to be both transpersonal and personal, social and subjective, conscious as well as unconscious. Yet in much affect theory, affects, even negative ones, are cast in the language of becoming, possibility, virtuality, and incipience. This language of possibility and becoming is derived from the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (writing both together and separately) on affect theory.²² Deleuze’s and Guattari’s contributions to affect theory are crucial. It is they who translate the psychoanalytic notion of affect that is largely intrasubjective into a register that is more political, transpersonal, and even impersonal. We will draw on this transpersonal understanding of affect even as we emphasize its negativity. Yet the emphasis on possibility and becoming, while important for theorizing agency within various economic, biopolitical, and discursive forms of power, also has the effect of minimizing the negative power of affect to constrain, decompose, and delimit.

The thing that we call noir excels at staging the negative power of affect. If positive affects are about possibility, becoming, and affirmation (both as possibility and as forms of biopolitical control) then the noir affects are about repetition, delimitation, fixity, retrospection, and decay as well as resistance and refusal. In theorizing noir affect, then, we draw upon theorists of negative affect such as Lauren Berlant, Teresa Brennan, Sianne Ngai, and Sylvan Tomkins as well as on psychoanalytic theory’s engagement with repetition and negation (both of self and other), to explore more fully the negative affects staged by noir. How can noir be rethought in terms of negative affect? What is the value of staging negative affect? What kind of cultural and political work is enabled or disenabled by reading noir’s affective negativity?

Affect is, of course, not only a way of theorizing the relationship of subjectivity to the social, but it, like all theories of the social, is also tied to a specific historiographical framework. In the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as well as Patricia T. Clough, affect is tied to the larger shift from Fordism to post-Fordism and from industrial production to biopolitical production (and the forms of affective, service, and intellectual labor associated with it) as dominant organizations of global capitalism. Thus, noir offers us one way to think through these economic shifts with special attention to those global subjects who resist or who are cast aside in the name of economic progress. In exploring noir affect, we want to situate it, in part, in response to this history of labor and economic transformation, marking it as a site of refusal, resistance, and negation.

We explore the forms of affect that accrue around both industrial labor and the forms of biopolitical (specifically affective) labor privileged by neoliberalism. Affect in the Fordist era was managed through a rhetoric of being a team player or a company man (which opened up, of course, to collectivist resistance via unionization and political-economic struggle) and the classic figure of refusal in this context was the solitary noir protagonist who often resisted integration into the collective. In our own neoliberal era affect is a direct product of the labor and thus is not merely a management practice but immanent to the laboring subject at such. It is, like neoliberal and post-Fordist production more generally, segmented and individualized. Rather than collectivist, the management of affect in neoliberalism is about producing individual subjects. The figures of refusal in neoliberal noir, not only represent the contemporary working class in their racial, gender, and sexual diversity (which was always there but deemphasized in the Fordist era), but also often try to haltingly rebuild connections to other subjects in this atomized context. We note how these forms of affect play out around sites of social antagonism, collectivity, subjectification, and embodiment. The negativity of noir uncovers sites of social and interpersonal antagonism, refusing to cover over or narrate them away. Thus, noir becomes a way of staging various forms of social antagonism, including those associated with racial, gendered, sexual, and economic inequality.

Noir Affect explores how the forms of negative affect we call noir appear not only in midcentury novels and films typically associated with the genre but also in late twentieth century and contemporary noir. What is the relationship between economic inequality and noir affect? How does noir narrate economic transformations, contradictions, and forms of exploitation? How does noir affect intersect, or place limits on other forms of political and social affect? How does noir affect, and the antagonisms attached to it, intersect with issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class? These are some of the questions Noir Affect explores.

Contextualizing Affect

A female detective interviews re-interviews the wife of a suspected serial rapist and killer, who has relied on his wife as an alibi. The detective finally figures out the right question to ask: she asks the woman if her husband has ever made her do things she didn’t want to do in bed. The wife’s composure crumbles. She finally tells the detective the forms of violence that she endured at the hands of her husband and that the alibi is false. While the scene might suggest one of female solidarity, the detective is more concerned with solving the case and fighting the sexism of the department than attending to the wife.

CHRISTOPHER MENAUL, Prime Suspect (SEASON 1, EPISODE 2)

Affect has become a key category in contemporary theory. Focused on what affects the body and emotions, the concept can be situated as part of what Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman name the material turn and what Diana Coole and Samantha Frost name the new materialisms.²³ These new materialist approaches move beyond the privileging of language and culture that were central to postmodernism, attending instead to the ways in which materiality interpenetrates with, sets limits upon, and permeates the social. Central to such an undertaking is moving beyond social constructivism, with its assumption of language as unidirectionally productive or inscriptive, and toward a deconstruction of the material/discursive dichotomy that retains both elements without privileging either.²⁴ While there are other dimensions of the work undertaken in the material turn that may emphasize the resistance of the material to the discursive, this move toward the deconstruction of the discursive and material, or at least an account of their interpenetration, is a crucial dimension of the new materialisms and is central to the work affect does as a conceptual term. Affect is a key ligature between perception and cognition, representation and emotion, sensation and action, and as such it becomes central to reconceptualizing the subject in a more materialist register. It becomes a way of moving beyond the category of the subject as it has been conceptualized in a Cartesian framework, in which the mind and the body are imagined as fully separate, and the former is privileged over the latter. For all of its investment in decentering of the subject, postmodernism and social construction tended to privilege a linguistic, and thus essentially Cartesian, conception of it. These approaches may have decentered this subject, but it was this Cartesian version of the subject that was being decentered. Affect, as an account of bodily responses that are linked both to the mind and to sensation, posits an understanding of embodiment that moves beyond the mind/body duality.

Yet, while it is important to situate the affective turn as a central part of the larger material turn, it is also necessary to recognize that, like materialism itself, the concept of affect has a much longer history than is often recognized by accounts of it that merely situate it as a body of theory associated with the present. Much contemporary discourse around affect in the present moment tends to emphasize it as a space of possibility and becoming, producing what Lawrence Grossberg describes as an ontology that escapes.²⁵ This conception of affect, which can probably be described as its dominant formulation in the present, derives from an intellectual trajectory that begins with Baruch Spinoza’s account of affect in his Ethics, and is picked up by Deleuze and Guattari in a number of their jointly authored works and becomes reformulated and canonized for the present by Brian Massumi in his Parables for the Virtual.²⁶ Yet, although there is much that is valuable about this version of affect including an emphasis on the affective as transpersonal and importantly impersonal, it also presents only one face of the affective, one that tends to emphasize its positive, enabling, and transformative features.

Noir affect, however, emphasizes its negative, constraining, and conflictual dimensions. These too