Afterword: Affective histories and class transmission

Abstract

It is 2018 and I am sitting in a former Miners' Institute in a small community in the south Wales Valleys.I had been asked to be there by a project i working on social haunting in order to record the affect in the room and to use that to develop an artistic response.I am caught up in a potent atmosphere of anger, pride and pain that it helps not to have to name but rather to experience.When the aim is to produce an artwork, there is no particular focus on a faithful recording and more on what the febrile atmosphere stirs up in me to enable me to produce a response that attempts to capture what transmits itself to me and then passes through my own affective processes into a visual form.In a way, this is not unlike the process of evenly suspended attention ii that asks therapists, analysts and counsellors to pay careful attention to affective transmission to reflect it back again.I am describing this here because I want to convey something about the importance of what is gained from an understanding of personal, collective and political histories via an engagement with affect.What happened to the people in this particular community through its history of mining and deindustrialisation is well -enough known, but just as important is the well of affects generated and transmitted into the present in this meeting -potent, painful, angry, fierce, proud.In the meeting these are retold in personal stories and memories, in the manner of responses, in tears and anger, in laughter (cf Copestake, this volume) and silence, in bodily dispositions and imaginative choices.My feeling over many years has been that this ephemeral realm, conveyed through atmospheres and bodily dispositions, across historical periods, generations and geographical locations, is as potent for understanding class as any more obvious historical or social facts.

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