I’m new to the idea of Affect, and it seems to be a tricky subject to breach. However, I think it could be useful when looking at the fictionalised physics of cartoon imagery and some of the other things I’m trying to understand within my work.
Below are a few branches of the theory, as summarised by Sean Owczarek. (This is for initial personal reference only: I will look into these further before accepting these brief explanations as accurate.)
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Brian Massumi: Affect is a visceral, raw pre-feeling. Feelings are socially constructed distortions of affect. Affect is the manifestation of the body’s internalisation of an intensity. It cannot be rendered by language or any other kind of transmittable information. Affect is perpetually undulating and reforming. It is more bodily than cognitive. The body is integral to the understanding of affect. (***This is something else I’m looking into, with essays such as those in Carnal Thoughts exploring this***) Massumi describes the “walls” of the body as sensory receptors which allow for the intensity of an experience to be transmitted and internalised. The transmission of affect is not the exchange of affect from thing to body or body to body, it is the infolding and unfolding of intensities between the two bodies, which can be virtual or flesh. These intensities resonate apart from intended meaning of context.
Theresa Brennan: Teresa Brennan defines affect partially as, “any evaluative (positive or negative) orientation towards an object.” This idea identifies affect as a judgement rather than an emotion or an expression of an emotion. The parts of affect that can evaluate and judge will distinguish the physiological responses it evokes from those associated with influxes of passion or emotion. Brennan surmises that this is the important distinction between affect and emotion, as what one feels with and what one feels are two separate phenomena. She affirms that emotions correlate to pre-existing affective connections. However, she maintains that affects are physiological things. Emotions are forceful projections which are deposited or “dumped” after they are expressed, whereas affects can move more freely. Affects have the ability to intensify or weaken. Brennan defines the transmission of affect as the idea that our energies are not exclusively ours and that there is no distinction between the individual and their surroundings. Affects are continuously flowing in and out of both.
Patricia Clough (commenting on Massumi): Clough begins with Brian Massumi’s definition of affect as bodily responses which are removed from consciousness and arise instead from “visceral perception.” Massumi’s affect is about identifying the body as a hub of indeterminate responses. Affect is in a virtual space containing infinite potential. Massumi preserves the unconscious quality of affect by affirming that there is always a virtual “remainder” after emotion, language, and conscious perception. Consciousness is mundane in comparison as it reduces the complexity of affect. Massumi points to the emergence and potential of affect as it moves through a loop between virtual and actual. Clough specifies that Massumi’s idea of the body’s indeterminacy is not looking to the “pre-social” body. Massumi clarifies that affect is “open-endedly social.” In other words, that affect comes before the formation of distinctions between individuals. Affect exists in the temporality of emergence. This virtual temporality is the force that gives affect its autonomy from language, sensation, and emotion.
Sarah Ahmed: In contrast with Massumi, Ahmed doesn’t believe affect to be autonomous. Affect is a corresponding element of a preexisting object. She observes affect through how it relates to the experiential, and how our surrounding worlds effect us. Ahmed states, “Happiness remains about the contingency of what happens, but this ‘what’ becomes something good.” Happiness connects us to the objects we find pleasing, and we form profound bonds with these things. This pleasurable affect sustains itself through the comings and goings of the objects themselves. The ways in which our bodies relate to the things we find enjoyable also changes over time, as our impressions change as our bodies change. Affect arises through the evaluation of thing.
Megan Watkins: Affect has the ability to rouse people in one moment, and then move quickly away from the minds of the affected. Watkins questions whether or not there are residual effects of affect. She notes Spinoza’s distinction between affectus (the force of the object catalyzing affect), and affectio (the impact of affectus). Affect has the ability to leave residual pieces behind which can then influence an individuals’ subjectivities and perceptions. This differs from Massumi, who believes affect to be a fleeting escape from confinement. The accumulation of information is seemingly reserved for phenomena such as memories, which then cause emotion. However, Watkins understands affect as having the capacity to collect over time as a bodily memory that can both effect cognition and move outside the parameters of one’s consciousness.
Gregory J. Seigworth & Melissa Gregg: Seigworth and Gregg begin An Inventory of Shimmers by identifying affect’s “in-betweenness” (in this case, the in-between-ness to act and be acted upon). Their theory describes affect as both a movement within a state of relation between different things or people, and the exchange of intensities (as well as the duration of the movements between these intensities). Seigworth and Gregg view affects as forces that: exist on a guttural, Ur level; are removed from cognitive “knowingness”; and move beyond emotion. Affect spurs people to move, think, extend, and intensify. Seigworth and Gregg also note the problem with interchanging the word “force” with “affect,” considering affect is not necessarily forceful in every case. Affect is more of an event which occurs during exchanges and movements between intensities. Affect is created within an in-between space. This space exists between two or more intensities. Affect is the state that exists between the utterance of a word and the meaning of the word. It rises from in-between-ness and lives in a state of beside-ness.
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I’ve started reading ‘Ordinary Affects’ by Kathleen Stewart, and there’s a section within the first chapter that seems to allude to Seigworth, Gregg, Ahmed and Massumi’s lines of thinking. This idea of Affect as something accumulating and moving between bodies, objects and places, never quite reachable through language or emotion, and, as described “at once abstract and concrete”. It’s this kind of constant shifting that I was to explore in relation to the imagery and ideas I’m looking at, as stated above.
Books and Essays still to read:
Jill Bennett – Practical Aesthetics
RARA Series
Kathleen Stewart – Ordinary Affect
Simon O’Sullivan – The Aesthetics of Affect
