Wild Choreography of Affect and Ecstasy: Contentious Pleasure (Joussiance) in the Academy

Abstract

Higher education institutions comprise entangled assemblages of bodies, material objects, discourses, spaces and diverse technologies. These entanglements are affective intensities that manifest embodied prepersonal relationality. As a prepersonal construct, affect is the social, physical and emotion change, or variation that is co-produced when assemblages of bodies and objects contact (see Coleman, 2005). The corpus of the academy is a constantly changing phenomenon "intermingling with other human and non-human entities and forces in dynamic collective assemblages" (Mayes, 2016, p. 106). Affective assemblages produce a kind of existential agitation (Massumi, 2015) that comprise sensations of time/motion, speed and heat (Ringrose, 2014). This existential agitation is captured in Keats' poem (above) where melancholy and joy ravel together. The poem highlights the embodiment of pleasure, leveraged from knowledge of melancholy and flows of affect.