Definitions #2: Affect

Second entry in a series where I collect influential definitions of a famous concept

There are theories that argue for and theories that argue against. Affect theory seems to be one of the theories that argues against and takes pleasure/ derives its strength in tearing something down though how good the thing it posits in place of the things it wants to destabilize is debatable.

1) In the diagram above, New Caldonia is seen to be more advanced/ than aboriginal (indigenous) Australians. Darwinian evolution provided a model wherein traits were seen to be naturally selected. The environment shaped human evolution and so an explanation was found for why black people were inferior to white people or why women were weaker and less capable than men - the outcome of millenia of evolution - geographic and climactic presuures and so on. It was with the discovery of Darwinian evolution that erstwhile savage people came to be called primitive - whereas savage implied someone who was outside civilization - primitive implied someone who was in the early stages of civilization.

2) A number of social and political movements in the 20th century found this argument repulsive. If black people were "naturally" inferior to white people or if women were "naturally" inferior to men, then there was little sense or scope in demanding equality. An alternative was needed.

3) Language came to be seen as the alternative. It was argued that what made humans special or unique from other animals was the fact that they used language. Maybe biological determinism made sense for other animals. But it didn't make sense when applied to humans because humans were unlike other animals - we were special by virtue of our use of language. The job of explaining human social behaviour fell to the newly minted fields of social science - sociologists, historians, anthropologists etc (none of these fields existed prior to the 19th century) and their preferred model gradually became language especially as it allowed them to undermine and distance themselves from biological claims.

4) Race and gender - two things which had previously been taken as naturally occurring traits in the human population were shown to be socially and culturally constructed which was crucial in launching movements to end racial supremacy and patriarchy.With language, what was increasingly and repeatedly emphasized about humans was the way they constructed meaning and made sense of the world. Where biology had seen stimulus and response (environmental constraints shaping human evolution so that some races could be said to be more evolved than others and men particularly well suited for some activities and women for others etc), language and meaning making theories granted far more agency and latitude to people.

5) But how can race and gender be socially constructed rather than naturally occuring? Let us look at how language works. In language words are the basic units of meaning but words in and of themselves mean very little. Door. That didn't make much sense did it? Thats because we don't have a sentence that tells us something about the door. Karim's house has a green front door. The word door itself has a very limited meaning. What gives meaning is the context in which the word door is used. It is context that imparts meaning to things.

6) We soon found that there was no particular way in which things were done. Some tribes and cultures had only 7-8 colours, while others had 100s. Those people who didn't have a word for something also weren't able to see the thing in question (eg. colours). Some cultures divided their genders in 5 different ways, some in 3 different ways, some in 2. The Greeks did not seem to classify people by the pigmentation of their skin. Thus the bare biological facts became something like the word door - limited in meaning. It is culture/ society that cooked these facts and gave them a context which imparted specific, concrete meanings that allowed a Mongolian man to be different from an Englishman and so on. In this way language gained an upper hand over biology.

7) Language had shown that humans were not slaves of biological determinism but now a new question - were they slaves of the language that they used? With language, social theory inherited a particular thorny problem. Like all things in the world - rocks are hard, giraffes are tall - language too has properties that you can't get rid off. Language seems to be built on binaries - Dark/ light, subject/ object, masculine/ feminine, life/ death, black/ white etc. All words in. alanguage seem to exist by being opposed to some other word. We can gloss the problem with binaries under the heading self/ other. So the self was defined in opposition to the other. If white men claimed superiority it was by showing black men to be inferior, if Men claimed strength , it was by showing women to be weak. It didn't make sense to have the concept of something as strong or superior unless you had its opposite as well i,e. language always seemed to require at least 2 terms in opposition to each other to operate.... Dismantling binary oppositions thus became a pre-dominant pre-occupation of much social theory.

8) This is roughly the scene when affects seeks to make an intervention in the mid 1990s. What does affect barge in and say? Affect wags its finger and says - "all you theorists you were so enchanted with language that you seem to have forgotten how recently language came to become a part of human history and human life. There was human life much, much even before there was language - remember millions of trillions of years ago how we used to be eyeball less slime molds in the ocean floor? That was also us and those are not only parts of our history, they are parts of us.

9) You talk about language, intelligence and meaning making. But aren't you forgetting another animalistic part of us that also plays a part in every aspect of our life? You guys talk about the brain, intelligence and intellect. We will talk about the nervous system.

10) We are not just a big brain....we are a nervous system too - that could be a 1 line slogan for affect theory.

11) Affect theory posits that there are things that your nervous system picks up/ registers and forces you to act even before your thoughts have had the time to catch up. Your brain is always half a second too late and a lot has happened in that half a second already.

12) So in this way by stressing the primacy of the nervous system, affect theory also asserts the primacy of the acting body over the thinking brain and by highlighting behaviour, perception and action over thinking once again puts the ball in biology's court.

13) Affect claims to be pre-linguistic, pre-rational, pre-intentional: language, ideas, intentions all show up only after an affect has already registered its presence.

Flannery O' Connor wrote " The truth does not change depending on your ability to stomach it". Affect theory would say that there are truths that do depend on your stomach and we call such truths a "gut feeling"

14) What are some examples of affect in daily life? Deep booming bass music affects us physically and makes us want to move, groove etc. Affect could be a horror movie jump scare or maybe the sensation of something unexpected brushing against your foot.....Michael Fisch is puzzled in his ethnography of Tokyo commuter trains how many commuters fall asleep on the train and yet somehow, miraculously, when their stations arrives - they snap to attention, awake from their slumber and rush out. The whole process from comatose sleeping passenger to exiting the train takes only a few seconds and Fisch suspects the body is somehow aware of its surrounding and aware of what it must do even while the mind is busy dreaming or dozing off. My favourite explication of affect theory I've encountered comes from Ben Highmore:

I really like this example because it shows up the contrast with the thinking/ rational part dramatically. The children make every conscious effort to remain in control yet there is a a part of them that they are never in control of and when this part gains the upper hand - the plane of affect - thats when you lose the game.

All that is well and good but how does one speak of a thing that exists prior to language, meaning and even intention? It is here the I find affect theory gets murky. Perhaps we should be getting affect theatre and affect music and affect movies and affect art instead. Speaking about affect seems really difficult but its not entirely impossible.

I quite enjoyed Brian Massumi's use of this concept. You can watch a short 5 minute clip to see how Massumi deploys affect to study Bush era American politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elUHsA4H15U&t=177s

For a critique of both Massumi and the general turn to affect across the social sciences, consider Ruth Leys piece - "The turn to affect: a critique" - https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659353?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

I will also leave here an essay I wrote for one of my classes called Illness and Subjectivity. I leave it here not because its a good essay but simply so its easier for me to locate this stuff. My laptop is a mess. - it took me about 20 minutes to find this just now....The essay is on what Henri Bergson's notion of time can tell us about affect.

What is Affect (according to my understa

Download • 99KB