ABSTRACT
Begin with the messy middling of experience always already going on. That is: begin with the primacy of relation. This is also the common ground that both theories of affect and phenomenologies of atmosphere share. In philosophies of affect and atmosphere, however, the subject always already finds itself in processes of mutual inclusion with other occasions of experience; it emerges out of a much larger and more-than-human worldly activity, always surpassing and always changing the subject. Instead, a pedagogy of the event is much closer to what Erin Manning and Brian Massumi call an affirmative or immanent critique. Affirmative critique is not about rejecting certain aspects of reality by simply declaring them to be “wrong,” but much more about a radical-empirical care for the event in all its complex relationality. The lack of a sovereign subject of critique does in no way mean that the process would simply be chaotic or without direction.
