cider fest

October 05, 2014Megan Betz

During classes this week, I had my students read Hayden & Buck's "Doing community supported agriculture: Tactile space, affect and effects of membership". It was their introduction to non-representational theory. We used the opportunity to discuss how all five senses build the landscape & enhance our relationship to place. As Haden & Buck write, following Deleuze & Guattari, "...affect is transversal force that is always being created, becoming. Affect emerges from spatially constrained mutable webs of associations and actions." Merriam-Webster defines affect as "the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes" and "a set of observable manifestations of a subjectively experienced emotion." It was these two things I kept in mind while watching bodies move through the orchard, sipping cider & bending into downward-facing dog.