Special issue call for papers: Thinking Critically about Affect

This Retrospectives collection offers a look at what the concept of affect has contributed to anthropology in the recent past and where it might take us in the near future. Although the practice of retrospection suggests its own affective character of being a bit pensive and passive, a bit slow and solemn, I hope to dial up the intensity some. Why? Because lately I get the sense that affect is escaping our theoretical grasp. Sure, this was one of the fundamental points of the affective turn (Clough and Halley 2007): if anthropologists of emotion throughout the 1970s and 1980s had shown how feelings variously fix and stick through different compositions of language and discourse, anthropologists of affect shortly thereafter sought to show how some feelings slip, evade, and overflow capture. This proved incredibly stimulating for scholars who took this distinction between emotion and affect seriously, as it meant finding creative methods to collect evidence of environments making and shaping bodies in ways more complex than and ontologically distinct from the poetics on hand to describe it. This held especially true for those working in and sometimes against the wake of the Writing Culture moment who understood that while poetics may quite possibly be all that we have,

2007

2012

Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy, Vol. 15, pp. 10-19, 2024

Despite being a relatively popular subject of enquiry among the social sciences and humanities in recent decades, ‘affect’ remains an elusive phenomenon. This paper, rather than trace the development of affect theory in order to pick apart the work of previous scholars, instead explores research that has – implicitly or explicitly – tied affect(s) to relations and relationality. Engaging with anthropological theories of affect and relationships as a form of ‘empirical philosophy,’ as well as with ethnographic data from my own fieldwork, this work seeks to provide that which has eluded previous theorists of affect: a definition of the phenomenon that is broad enough to cover its many aspects, while remaining concise enough for practical application. In doing so, I come to define affect as no more or less than, the experiential aspect of relationality.

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

International Enciclopedia of Anthropology: Anthropology Beyond Text. Cox, R. and H. Callan (eds.), pp. 1-8. New York: John Wiley & Sons. , 2019

A notion originally developed in social and cultural theory rather than in anthropology, affect has recently started being taken into consideration by various disciplines, as part of the broader project of investigating the entanglements involving the social, the biological, the material, and the cultural. Generally speaking, affect theory points at bodily capacities to affect and to be affected. According to Massumi, such capacities are conceived as originally prepersonal “intensities,” which are strongly linked with perception and movement, and which become socialized and eventually embedded into the realm of the sociocultural. Affects differ from emotions, seen as “captures” of affect within sociocultural structures of meaning, which cannot give a complete account of the experienced affects. This strong dichotomy between affect and discourse has been criticized as problematic. In order to respond to such criticisms, recent research has proposed ideas of “affective practices” or broader “skills of feeling with the world,” as novel ways to approach fieldwork and to ground theory in empirical data.

Affective Turn." The publisher cut this portion of the paper because it was already covered in the anthology. (I obviously need a new introduction, but I wanted to get some feedback. I have not looked at this is months.) The Contemporary Affective Turn: Vitalist and Evolutionary Affect. If we can think of the moral interpretation of affect as arguing for the primacy of representation and the supplementary status of affect and the romantic interpretation as striving to synthesize the two into a harmonious whole through art, then we can think of the contemporary interpretation of affect as arguing for the primacy of affect and the secondary or supplemental status of representation. Of course, this characterization may be an oversimplification since for many theorists who adopt this orientation the relationship between affect and symbolic activity is quite complex; nonetheless, it is a useful heuristic for situating the contemporary interpretation of affect, which argues that affect somehow conditions our ways of thinking, reasoning and judging the world. If affect potentially distorted reason inside of rationalist morality and if it needed to be recovered beneath the wreckage of civilization in its romantic interpretation, then affect, in its contemporary interpretation takes center stage, becoming both logically and temporally prior to any form of conscious symbolic activity. In this section, I will focus on two main theoretical approaches which take this contemporary position: the vitalist and the evolutionary notions of affect. One of the major figures of the vitalist interpretation is Brian Massumi. While Marcuse insisted that every authentic work of art would stimulate a form of affective cognition which would be subversive of understanding and perception, an indictment of the established reality principle, Massumi locates affect "between perception and language," arguing that affective experience involves the ongoing production of different modalities of thought and perception (Massumi

Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology, 2017