Affect—or feeling (after Leys)

2018

A veritable torrent of academic activity has recently identified itself as being part of a turn to affect. However, the concept of affect at play in this work is neither singular nor clear. This confusion is acknowledged by key figures within the affective turn. Seigworth and Gregg, for example, state that “first encounters with theories of affect might feel like a momentary (sometimes more permanent) methodological and conceptual free fall.” The main section of this chapter will provide an overview of three key sources of the affective turn, each of which presents a different concept of affect (affect as autonomous virtual intensity, as drive amplification, and as unconscious psychic energy). Through a critique of Massumi’s affect/emotion distinction, I will then question perhaps the one thing that scholars of the affective turn appear to agree about: that affect and emotion are two very different things.

History of the Human Sciences , 2020

Despite what its title, blurb and editorial endorsements might suggest, Ruth Leys' The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique is not a genealogy of the 'turn to affect' or a critical account of the emergence of affect theory across the humanities, social sciences and life sciences. It is, rather, a postwar history of the 'science of emotion' focusing on mainstream, American, largely male, psychologists and philosophers investigating the relationship between feelings and facial expressions in human and non-human animals. In its pursuit of the latter, it is rigorous, incisive and illuminating. In its claim to the former, it is partial, dismissive and, at times, misguided-though not without critical food for thought for interdisciplinary affect and emotion studies. In what follows, I summarise Leys' important arguments and insights before offering a more detailed consideration of her critique of affect theory.

2017

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...

SATS, 2010

Two main theories of emotional affectivity exist in the modern philosophy of emotion: sensationalism and 'cognitivism'. The fundamental dispute between these theories concerns the question of whether feeling merely accompanies the evaluative content of emotion or is directed toward it. I reject both sensationalism and cognitivism as general theories of emotional affectivity. Instead, I propose a two-level account of emotional affectivity that allows both theories their proper due. We must distinguish between feelings with primitive and full-fledged intentionality. Both involve a sense and a reference to an object, but only the latter exhibit experiential directedness toward an object. Primitively intentional first-order feelings emerge as analog representations of changes in one's organismic and/or attitudinal mental state. They amount to a hedonically valenced experience of one's own state, as the sensationalist view suggests. Secondorder feelings with full-fledged intentionality emerge when a 'pure' feeling is interpreted and categorized in terms of the evaluative content of one's present emotion. They are feelings toward the object of one's emotion, as the cognitivist theory holds.

There has been an uptick of interest in affectivity among philosophers in a variety of camps recently, not only in analytic areas like the philosophy of mind and epistemology, where work has increasingly focused on the epistemic roles of the body and emotion, but also in scholarship in feminist philosophy and literary theory, which has focused on affect as a site of change and of oppression centered on gendered and sexed bodies, or the body as a site of "the cultural politics of emotion." 1 Across these diverse domains of inquiry, phenomenology has played a central role.

Final paper for Posthuman Affect Theory, taught by Kate Singer at Mount Holyoke College, MA.

2015

The proliferation and impact of theories of affect in the humanities can hardly be understated. Affect has reignited and augmented writings on the body, the everyday , relationality, cognition, and emotion in relation to, but also attempting to go beyond the dominant epistemological parameters of the linguistic turn. It has transformed scholarship on subject-object dichotomies, ontology, psychoanalysis , (post)structuralism, and the relationship between the social sciences and the biosciences, particularly the neurosciences. However, even with clear connections and relevance to the political, ethical, and cultural dimensions of everyday social life, the theorisation of affect has made slower progress as a node of analysis within the social sciences. This is not due to a lack of interest, rather, affect presents multiple, and especially methodological challenges for social scientists. Many of these difficulties in working with affect, which has provided for such a rich discourse in o...

2007