Two Affect Notes
1.
There’s almost nothing false that you can say about the tone of ‘Twin Peaks’: sentimental, cruel, naïve, ironic, placid, nervous, earnest, knowing, icy, sensual, libertine, moralizing, urgent, playful, skeptical, excited, desperate… It runs the full gamut of human feelings-about-feelings.
2.
Kate Bush’s aesthetic is entirely dependent on romantic irony as a cognitive structure, but somehow without any of the affective tensions that normally go with it. In other words, her work is always, in some abstract sense, half-parody, but usually not even half-funny in even an abstract sense. Instead it’s the sublation or whatever of the rom-irony contradiction.