On the intercultural:  affect, meaning and other fantasies of art appreciation

This paper explores the relationship between culture, affect and the art object. The common place assumption that art is ‘universal’ in form, language, meaning — translinguistic, transcultural — is here un-picked. Drawing on a culturally specific analysis of the affective dimensions of recent Central Desert Aboriginal art, claims to universality are found to be spurious, both theoretically and politically.

Developing synergies between Zizek’s cum-Deluzian notion of ‘organ’s without bodies’ and a Kleinain/Bollas notion of ‘attachment’, the indebted ambiguity of the subject/object relation in the cross cultural encounter is explored. In so far as affect is crucial to the experience of Central Desert art, as this paper argues, it is an affective appreciation culturally determined and culturally harnessed to address the particularities of the colonial encounter; affect itself is understood as generative in and to this encounter.  That is, affect itself needs to be theorised outside of strictly individualistic and psychogenetic models which locate it as prelinguistic, precultural and thus, as potentially universal. Affect must instead be understood as the very fabric of the coming into being that relations between cultures incites and demands. In the sense, this paper argues against a generic theory of affect and culture and for a more nuanced and contextualised appreciation of its workings. 

 Jennifer Biddle, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University.