Feminist Affect theory, a primer.
A lot of philosophy has been written about agency, identity, and power, but less attention has been paid to what underlies all three: affect. Affect (feelings, for now) is hard to pin down or define. In everyday speech, “affect” is a verb that means to influence something. As an adjective, it means to put on or fake, as an affectation. Neither gets you anywhere near what feminists and philosophers mean by the “affective turn.” In the theoretical context, affect names the body’s capacity to be moved, and to move others. It comes before, and lies underneath the feelings we consciously interpret. A friend asks you why you are angry because they sense you are upset, and in that moment you realize what you haven’t registered before — that yes, maybe you are angry. Before you’ve named the anger, something in your body has already registered the shift. Affect is that registering. Emotion and feelings, in most but not all accounts, are what happens afterwards: feelings that follow, emotions that are a social, narrated label we put on the shift once we’ve caught up to it. Once we name it as anger, then we can talk about it, and it enters into social discourse.
In Marianne Liljeström’s entry on “Affect” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, she traces the so-called “affective turn” to the meeting of two important bodies of work: Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s elaboration of Silvan Tomkins’ idea that we are hard-wired with a small set of affective “programs”: shame, joy, disgust, etc. And Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza on the idea that the body’s power is best understood as a capacity to affect and be affected by other bodies. When you put those two readings together, you get contemporary affect theory: half psychobiology and half seventeenth-century metaphysics. These converge in the 1990s and displace purely linguistic, constructivist accounts of the subject dominant in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic feminist theory.
When critics mistake Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity for a purely constructivist and linguistic theory, what they miss is the influence of Eve Sedgwick on Butler — Sedgwick was a mentor and friend, and to her Butler credits the very language of performativity. One of the most interesting directions this theory goes is into performance art theory.
Feminist theory in the late 1980s and 1990s was heavily influenced by poststructuralism, and unpacked how gender, desire, and identity are socially constructed through discourse, language, and repetition. Affect theory arrives to make an important adjustment: yes, and also, something is happening in and through bodies that discourse (language) cannot capture. There is a non-representational underbelly to meaning and our meaning-making; or a “non-semantic residue” (to use Lawrence Grossberg’s phrase) there, even after we name something, that language doesn’t capture. As feminist philosophy turns towards embodiment, the role of the gendered body in sense-making becomes more salient.
Liljeström argues clearly that feminist affect theorists don’t always agree with each other. The divisions seem to align as follows: one camp believes affect is radically autonomous: it is pre-personal, intensive, and resistant to linguistic capture or interpretation. Félix Guattari (who is in this camp) puts it well where he writes that “affect is all there is,” meaning that affect is this undifferentiated blob-field that everything else, including meaning, gets carved out of.
Sara Ahmed pushes back against this, and I find her take is much more useful for thinking about gendered life. For Ahmed, affect is sticky rather than free-floating and autonomous. Emotions circulate between bodies and objects, accumulating values and associations as they move. Certain bodies get “stuck” with certain feelings, like the “angry Black woman” or the “hysterical woman.” Through repeated, affective association, the immigrant, for example, is coded as other, and that otherness can then become naturalized as it is attributed to some pre-social, biological given. The stickiness of affect that Ahmed theorizes explains how power is disseminated without having to announce itself as power.
Teresa Brennan offers a third alternative: affect for her is physiological and embodied, and also, it can be transmitted between people. Mood can become contagious, social in origin even if the effect is biological. Think of being in a movie theater, concert, or political rally, and being caught up in feelings that seem to be shared and held collectively. Where the line is drawn between the physical and the social varies, and some reserve the term “emotion” for the social manifestation, while reserving “affect” for the underlying biological or physiological experience (e.g., Elspeth Probyn). But the broader point is that affect theory works against this mind/body dualism that so much philosophy enforces.
The political stakes become clear when we get to Lauren Berlant’s work. Berlant treats affect as fundamentally collective (not private or reducible to the personal), and uses the phrase “structures of feeling” to describe how a whole historical moment can be inhabited affectively before anyone even has the vocabulary to describe it, well before the histories are written. That feeling of being on the cusp of something but not being able to say what, shared across groups and populations, is the core phenomenology of affect. We are in one such moment now, although I sometimes fear that feeling we now have that a blue wave is upon us as we ready to celebrate the midterm elections in the United States, well, I hope it doesn’t lull us into complacency. The experience of having affect run straight into a wall of an opposite reality can be traumatizing and destabilizing. What happens when we can no longer trust our feelings?
In any case, I find that Berlant’s affect theory can do some real work for us. It can explain how a decade’s diffuse anxiety like the Reagan years during which I grew up, or a movement like #BlackLivesMatter’s collective rage, or an entire culture’s low-grade despair, moves through people. This happens before it is named, commented on, theorized, or written about; affect seems to be there prior to experience or its interpretation. Along these same lines is some of my favorite work in affect theory by Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (2012). Cvetkovich’s archive of trauma, taken together with Ahmed’s promise of happiness on the imperative to be happy, and Butler’s work on which lives come to matter as publicly grievable, tell the story of who gets to feel what. Because if you are not allowed to feel certain feelings, like rage or joy, your resistance is cut off at the prelinguistic stage. What happens to a person when they are not able or allowed to share in human empathy?
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004.
---. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013.
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell UP, 2004.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009.
---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
---. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.
Clough, Patricia Ticineto. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 25, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–22.
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke UP, 2003.
---. Depression: A Public Feeling. Duke UP, 2012.
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley, City Lights Books, 1988.
Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, editors. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke UP, 2010.
Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. Routledge, 1992.
Guattari, Félix. The Guattari Reader. Edited by Gary Genosko, Blackwell, 1996.
Liljeström, Marianne. “Affect.” The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 16–38.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP, 2002.
Probyn, Elspeth. Blush: Faces of Shame. U of Minnesota P, 2005.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank, editors. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Duke UP, 1995.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1977.