Resonance, dissonance, and things that get under one’s skin
Susanna Paasonen
research: Seminar
Resonance, dissonance, and things that get under one’s skin
Susanna Paasonen
Working on the affective and somatic aspects of experience regularly results in dilemmas concerning language and expression: how to translate the sensory into the textual? What kind of terminology and vocabulary are available for making sense of the sensory, and what are its limits? How to find a balance between the particular and the general enough? This presentation addresses the affordances of one pair of concepts – resonance and dissonance – in accounting for the ways in which we become impressed in encounters with networked media (and, arguably, beyond). This conceptual pair is suggested less as a binary than as a dynamic wherein we become grabbed, possibly in ambiguous ways so that positive and negative affect cannot quite be decoupled from one another.
Biography
Susanna Paasonen
Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland. With an interest in studies of sexuality, media and affect, she is the PI of the consortium “Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture” (Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland. 2019-2025) and author of e.g., Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press 2011), Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018), Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MITP 2021), Technopharmacology (with Joshua Neves, Aleena Chia and Ravi Sundaram, Minnesota 2022) and Yul Brynner: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism and Screen Masculinity (Edinburgh University Press 2023).
research: seminar
Resonance, dissonance, and things that get under one’s skin
Susanna Paasonen
Working on the affective and somatic aspects of experience regularly results in dilemmas concerning language and expression: how to translate the sensory into the textual? What kind of terminology and vocabulary are available for making sense of the sensory, and what are its limits? How to find a balance between the particular and the general enough? This presentation addresses the affordances of one pair of concepts – resonance and dissonance – in accounting for the ways in which we become impressed in encounters with networked media (and, arguably, beyond). This conceptual pair is suggested less as a binary than as a dynamic wherein we become grabbed, possibly in ambiguous ways so that positive and negative affect cannot quite be decoupled from one another.