Notes towards a theory of affect-itself

2016

Theory, Culture & Society, 2010

How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects, who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own oppression? To address this question I trace the dissonance between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza’s affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the social body. This dissonance reveals a divergence in their projects, the way these political projects emerge as counter-actualizations, the means by which they are expressed, and the necessity (or not) of a particular kind of historical subject to their realization. Most significantly, it speaks to how we might engage difference and alterity within our own political projects, our collective creations. I conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze’s writin...

Affect is what hits us when we walk into a room and inexplicably sense an atmosphere, an ineffable aura, tone or spirit that elicits particular sensations. It is what is evoked by bodily experiences as they pass from person to person, in a way that is contagious but remains unspoken. A yawn or a smile can travel between subjects, often increasing in its intensity as it does so . Hence affect is a force that places people in a co-subjective circuit of feeling and sensation, rather than standing alone and independent; affect highlights our interdependencies .

Affective Societies: Key Concepts, 2019

We finally say what 'affect' is. In this initial entry of the Affective Societies: Key Concepts volume we outline a basic understanding of affect circumscribing a general tendency that we deem fruitful as an analytical perspective. This understanding builds on a notion of affect as relational dynamics between evolving bodies in a setting, thus contrasting with approaches to affect as inner states, feelings or emotions. This conception of affect – mainly developed from materials found in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, read through Gilles Deleuze – is generative of further working concepts apt to illuminate the nexus between affect, power and subjectivity.

Informática na educação: teoria & prática, 2013

The concept of affectivity has assumed central importance in much recent scholarship, and many in the social sciences and humanities now talk of an ‘affective turn’. The concept of affectivity at play in this ‘turn’ remains, however, somewhat vague and slippery. Starting with Silvan Tomkins’ influential theory of affect, this paper will explore the relevance of the general assumptions (or ‘utmost abstractions’) that inform thinking about affectivity. The technological and instrumentalist character of Tomkins’ basic assumption will be traced through four socio-historical-technological configurations in the context of which thinking about affectivity is shaped. The political relevance of this instrumentalist utmost abstraction concerning affectivity is articulated by reference to Hobbes’ development of political science. In this way, through a critique of the instrumentalism informing Tomkins’ mode of thought, a way is opened for a revised general assumption concerning affectivity, ba...

2019

The concept of affective economy emphasizes that a political community negotiates its terms of agreement and its conventions through mediatized processes of affecting and being affected, regarded as forms of exchange and circulation. The term has attracted interest in affect studies over recent years, especially following the writings of Sara Ahmed. This chapter proposes a reconceptualization towards media theory and aesthetics, building on Marx’ distinction between exchange-value and use-value. Taking the example of Philip Scheffner’s film Havarie, we investigate how audiovisual images and other works of art intervene into the political economies of affective societies.

Philosophy of Education Archive, 2014

Theory, Culture & Society, 29(6): 27-46., 2012

In the Sociology of Emotion and Affect Studies, affects are usually regarded as an aspect of human beings alone, or of impersonal or collective atmospheres. However, feelings and emotions are only specific cases of affectivity that require subjective inner selves, while the concept of 'atmospheres' fails to explain the singularity of each individual case. This article develops a theory of social affect that does not reduce affect to either personal feelings or collective emotions. First, I use a Spinozist understanding of the 'body' to conceptualize the receptivity and mutual constitution of bodies, to show how affects do not 'belong' to anybody; they are not solely attributable either to the human or to any kind of body alone, but emerge in situations of the encounter and interaction (between bodies). Next I build upon Jean-Marie Guyau's concept of transmissions to show how we can theorize affect as an emerging transmission between and among bodies. Finally, I demonstrate how we now have a complete conceptual frame for theorizing affect in relation to all bodies in any given social scene, the grand composition of which I call affectif.

A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, 2017

This chapter historicizes four divergent but historically contemporaneous genres of affect theory – romantic, realist, speculative, and materialist. While critics credited with the turn to affect in the 1990s wrote largely in the wake of poststructuralism from the perspective of gender and queer theory, a second wave of affect theory has exposed some of the potentially inconsistent assumptions and ambitions of the field. Neurological and economic investments in affect have generated as much anxiety about the category as enthusiasm (Tompkis, Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato, Massumi). This chapter's claim is that affect in this second wave has been stripped of its critical materialism in order to make it immediate with matter, or more specifically neurological and economic raw material. In response to this critical tendency, we reconnect affect theory with the politicization of bodies through a materialist critique of immediacy. To do so, we catalogue key interventions and divergences amongst the four genres of affect theory named above before returning finally to the problem of affect's material history.