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Quintero There is an undeniable power in the visual. It is a mode of sensation that is arguably the dominant way in which the human experience is a mediated one. This is the approach behind the common claim that images are more visceral than words, or that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. As early as 1884, William James argued that perceptions like sight and sound have more direct connections to the subject via emotional responses than either perception or emotion have to rationality. 1 The idea that perception of the visual somehow carries more or different meaning than is possible through words has been a widely accepted view in most disciplines but notably in art, philosophy, media studies, marketing, psychology, and neurobiology, to name a few. Recent literature has attempted to lay out various approaches to understanding this privileged position that the visual has vis-à-vis feeling and meaning. The approach I will explore, and the one that is the most promising, is the investigation of how our e xperiences of sights and images are linked to affect. I hope to evaluate and extend the claims made by Sarah Ahmed in Affective Economies by applying her ideas about the circulation of affect to images in the media coverage of the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, March 2011. I will argue that the analysis of the visual in this context strengthens and contributes to the political relevance of Ahmed’s conceptual treatment of affect.  Affective Economies 2  Ahmed proposes an economic metaphor for the way affect circulates. Adapting the Marxian position on the logic of capital, Ahmed claims that signs are not the source of the 1  James, William. “What is an emotion?”, Mind vol.9, No.34, pp. 188-205. Apr., 1884 2  Ahmed, Sarah. “Affective Economies” in Social Text 79, Vol. 22, No. 2,. Duke: 2004

Affective Economies of the Visual - Images in the Coverage of Japan

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