『맨해튼 트랜스퍼』에 나타난 도시 사물성과 살아있음의 윤리

Abstract

This essay aims to read the urban spaces in John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer through affect theory. Affect theory concerns the pre-conscious aspect of ordinary urban events and comprises of two dimensions: the physical, in which there are skyscrapers, streets, advertising signs, and so on; another is the non-physical, which includes intermediate things such as smells and sounds, the surface effect that rain or electric light creates on urban spaces, and the ineffable after effects of these, caught in urban dwellers’ interior monologues. While physical things in urban spaces reveal that socio-linguistic structures might be stuck in a binary oppositional grid, non-physical things refer to those middle spaces beyond the dichotomy of things and consciousness. These spaces are a realm of potential where “futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsiders are infolded, and sadness is happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life)”(Massumi, “Autonomy” 91). Intangible and ineffable urban things mark the indeterminate and eventual nature of concrete action and material facade, that is, those forces behind the actual phenomena of New York City, in which looms the virtuality of continuous variation and passage. In these domains, what is also real is the alignment of individuals with others and the permeable mode of selfhood, generated by means of affective transmission. For many scholars, this so-called affective turn is ethical because it demands that we accept not only the unknowability of the other but also the otherness of the self which, once accepted, makes possible for any human subject the capacity for being alive as possible.