Today’s Plan:
- Andrew Murphie’s “Affect– Basic Summary of Approaches”
- Homework
What is Affect?
Today we will try to work out what is “affect,” working through Murphie’s overview of the term and some of its different/major meanings.
Affect is…
- the continual creation of heterogeneous durations of being
- Affect make up the relations with the temporary worlds we are constantly creating, and by which we are constantly being created. Affect involves the moment to moment question of being in the world, in all its constant change
- Affect arises in the the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon
- Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained set of relations as well as the passages of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, non-human, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves.
- Affect is often assumed to be crucial to our sense of self and simultaneously to question it. It is crucial to our relations, conscious, unconscious or non-conscious, as well as our sense of place, our own and other bodies… and to larger questions (such as the way the economic market works, business works, questions about the way we affect the world at large ecologically, etc).
- The main division in affect theory is between those who are interested primarily in feeling and emotion and those interested in the general way that forces affect each other
- In any case, a general list of the many ways in which affect has been defined might include the following: Simply affecting or being affected. Affectation. Emotion. Feeling. Background. Mood. Affective Tone. Motivation. Interest.
- Affects motivate others as they are “communicated rapidly through facial expression” etc. If someone is angry, it motivates them, us, and our relationship, at a basic biological level.
- For Freud, lots of problems emerged as affect tussled with the psychic/ideational/representational. Ideational representatives could be repressed without too much transformation, but for affects, it was a different story. What happens to them in repression, and how do they return?
- [Affect in terms of power and politics] links the shifting play of capacities and capabilities to the individual tolerance (or not) of intensities on the one hand, and to an interlinked general world on the other
- For Deleuze and Guattari, affects, as becomings and mutual contagions, can operate independent of emotion or feeling. “…there are no feelings in Bacon: there are nothing but affects; that is, “sensations” and “instincts,” according to the formula of naturalism.
- Although the approach to affect as emotion, feeling, or pleasure has value, Deleuze above suggests something very different–a possible politics that takes into account instinct, in the sense of filling the flesh
- This intensity is not only a matter of what affect means (that is, “affect means intensity”), but what it does (that is, afect works intensity, or is the work of intensity). Affect is intensities coming together, moving each other, transforming and translating under or beyond meaning, beyond semantic of simply fixed systems, or cognitions, even emotions
- Impersonal affect is the connecting thread of experience. It is the invisible glue that holds the world together. In event.
- Affect is then immersed in the way in which the changing world constantly trades its forces, with us always immersed in this trade, whatever story we tell ourselves about it, however we “feel” about it, and whatever disciplines or concepts we form to talk about it, or with which we try to tweak this trade.
- In short, affect is the emergence of actual relations on the one hand, and their falling back in to virtual relations (relational potential) on the other
- Actually existing, structured things live in and through that with escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect
- This autonomy is not, as some people interpret it, to say that affect runs around by itself, independent of us and everything we do. It is rather to say that the shifting relations that are affect–simply put, the world as it “worlds”–make up the ocean in which everything we do swims (and in which “swimming arises,” ultimately, from which “we” arise). Affect is therefore more than “important”–in many ways it is the world in motion, in emergence and disappearance. Affect is central, before and after our assumptions of stability, subject, or object.
- Even perception comes after affect.
- For Massumi affect is all about the changing capacity of the body as it engages with the world (and with its own complexity).
