I just read the following two articles:
Langstraat, Lisa. “The Point Is There Is No Point: Miasmic Cynicism and Cultural Studies Composition.” JAC 22.2 (2002): 293-325.
Crawford, Ilene. “Building a Theory of Affect in Cultural Studies Composition Pedagogy.” JAC 22.3 (2003): 678-684.
Which really helped me understand the affective stance of postmodern society, what Langstraat calls “miasmic cynicism,” which is similar to Arnett and Arneson’s “routine cynicism”: “a banal, unreflective, and ‘uncesing attitude of negativity,’… characterized by rejecting (an an incapacity for recognizing) distinctions between what is important and what is trivial” (300, quoting Arnett and Anerson). Langstraat is partially concerned with the emphasis on criticism that lacks access to action, which brings up Vitanza’s question, “whether cultural-studies theorists and pedagogues are socially liberating students or producing but cynics or, worse, producing liberated students who are but incipient cynics” (303, quoting Vitanza). Therefore, we need to “demystify conceptions of emotions as those hardwired features of life that are somehow beyond the social and analyzing the ways that affect is imbricated in power relations. It means asking who is allowed to feel, what emotional investments are acceptable in a given context, and how ‘appropriate’ emotional expression reflects power relations in that context” (306). So, emotions are rhetorical, not just something to be appealed to (like the traditional view of pathos); emotions must be recognized “as technologies of persuasion very much shaped by historical and material conditions” (308).
There are lots of ideas in these essays to play with and to think about, and I’ll definitely have to check out their works cited. Such exciting stuff!
