Pate Duncan’s Reviews > The Forms of the Affects > Status Update

The Greenaway chapter is the standout for me so far. I find it impossible to buy the displaced and deferred agency of the affect to itself via passive constructions that work to elide and disavow the embodied human subject as at the very least co-constructing the affect alongside the form (a far less radical but far more probably argument). Despite my qualms, it’s a dazzling thing to read.

The brief pages on “neo-formalism” [sic] and the extension of an all too literal and mimetic indexicality argument (attesting to the materiality of light while denying the materiality—and, crucially, mediating effect—of film stock, gauge, grain, color, etc.) with Barthes have me basically blacking out some of the margins in my copy with question marks and quibbles.

An engaging read, though!