#affect theory reader

Affect, as it is understood here, is not viewed as simply transient in quality. These states of being are not only momentary. Through the iteration of similar experiences, and therefore similar affects, they accumulate in the form of what could be considered dispositions that predispose one to act and react in particular ways. In much of the quite diverse literature on affect, from psychology and philosophy to cultural studies and literary theory, this ability of affect to accumulate is either denied or rarely made explicit. Affect, as a bodily phenomenon, is typically conceived as fleeting, whereas emotion, with its cognitive dimension, is viewed as long-lasting, triggered on an ongoing basis throughout one's life. Massumi, for example, sees emotion as the capture of affect given that the latter ‘escapes confinement’ (2002, 35). Nathanson similarly explains that ‘affect lasts but a few seconds’ (1992, 51). From his perspective ‘affect is biology whereas emotion is biography’ (Nathanson 1992, 50). In making this distinction Nathanson does point out that ‘an Organism’ has the ability to retain and store information, but this storage capacity seems almost exclusively a mindful phenomenon, namely as memories that produce emotion. Affect, as such, is viewed as the biological component of emotion. While this may be the case, affect also operates independently, accumulating as bodily memory that, while both aiding cognition and inducing behavior, may evade consciousness altogether.

In studies of affect much is made of the ways in which it is distinct from emotion. Against the more social expression of emotion, affect is often viewed as a preliminal, preconscious phenomenon. A consequence of this is that affect is often conceived as autonomous and ephemeral. Its immediate impact is highlighted: the ways in which affect can arouse individuals or groups in some way but then seems to dissipate quickly leaving little effect. While this distinction is a productive one for dealing with particular types of affective experience, it doesn't account for the distinction Spinoza makes between affectus and affectio, the force of an affecting body and the impact it leaves on the one affected. Affectio may be fleeting but it may also leave a residue, a lasting impression that produces particular kinds of bodily capacities. As Spinoza explains, ‘the body can undergo many changes and nevertheless retain impressions or traces ...’ (1959, ill, Post. 2). It is this capacity of affect to be retained, to accumulate, to form dispositions and thus shape subjectivities that is of interest to me.

The linking of control and political command with the risk factors of statistically produced populations is a form of power that Michel Foucault called biopolitics. In contrast to disciplining, biopolitics turns power's grasp from the individual subject to ‘life itself:' As Foucault put it: ‘So after a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing, but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species’ (2003, 243). But biopolitics is not without any interest in the individual; biopolitics individualizes as it massifies. In linking biopolitics to biomedia, Thacker argues that 'biopolitics accounts for 'each and every' element of the population, the individual and the group, and the groups within the group (the poor, the unemployed, the resident alien, the chronically ill)' (Thacker 2005b, 25). However, if populations, in this gradated approach, ‘can exist in a variety of contexts, defined by territory, economic class groupings, ethnic groupings, gender based divisions, or social factors: they do so ‘all within a framework analyzing the flux of biological activity characteristic of the population’ (25). What makes the biopolitics of the biomediated body a political economy, then, is the break into biology or 'life itself' by carving out various populations in order to estimate the value of their capacities for life, or more precisely, their capacities to provide life for capital. Foucault described this deployment of populations as racism (see Mbembe 2003).

Biopolitical control is not the production of subjects whose behaviors express internalized social norms; rather, biopolitical control is an effect and cause of the ‘normative’ undergoing ‘rapid inflation, as classificatory and regulative mechanisms are elaborated for every socially recognizable state of being. ... 'Normal' is now free-standing, no longer the opposite and necessary complement of 'abnormal: 'deviant: or 'dysfunctional: as it was under disciplinary power, except in limit cases’ (57). For Massumi, control transforms the subject of discipline into 'generic figures of affective capture' that provide a ‘gravitational pull around which competing orbits of affect and thought are organized’ (54). These figures are not individual subjects but rather what Deleuze referred to as ‘dividuals’ (1995, 180), statistically configured in populations that surface as profiles of bodily capacities, indicating what a body can do now and in the future. The affective capacity of bodies, statistically simulated as risk factors, can be apprehended as such without the subject, even without the individual subject's body, bringing forth competing bureaucratic procedures of control and political command in terms of securing the life of populations.

There have, of course, long been attempts to regulate the force of affect. Think only of the careful cultivation of specific virtues that have an affective basis (from political affects such as fraternity, military affects such as glory or honor, or scientific affects such as wonder). What is argued by theorists of the present conjuncture is that the excess of affect is now not so much regulated as induced, not so much prohibited as solicited. Modulation replaces constraint In short, power works through what Massumi (2002) terms the ‘unownable’ or ‘trans-situational’ dimensions of affect.

attention to affect in cultural theory is not only necessary but contemporaneous. It occurs in parallel to a set of economic and cultural developments that aim to invest and harness the productive powers of life. The turn to affect is therefore legitimized as timely because it provides a way of understanding and engaging with a set of broader changes in societal (re)production in the context of mutations in capitalism. These changes include the advent of new forms of value and labor centered around information and images; the emergence and consolidation of biopolitical networks of discipline, surveillance, and control; and the development of the molecular and digital sciences (Clough 2007, Parisi and Goodman 2005). From within this context, affect is taken to be one, but not the only, object of forms of power that invest in the production and modulation of 'life itself' (Thrift 2005). Augmentations and diminutions of the body's capacity to affect are modulated through multiple techniques of power and known through multiple forms of knowledge (including neuroscience, the various psy-disciplines, the molecular sciences, and systems theory). This contemporary power formation has been given the name 'control' to denote the shift Foucault anticipated from the molding of individual subjects in mass formations (disciplinary power) to the modulation of what Deleuze (1995) terms 'dividuals' – sub- and trans-individual arrangements of intensities at the level of bodies-in-formation (see Hardt and Negri 2004, Massumi and Zoumazi 2002). Here categories of the biological and cultural are mixed and scrambled in the invention of new material/immaterial hybrids. What Foucault (2003. 242) termed 'Man-as-living-being' is not simply addressed and ordered in terms of biology (or the ratio of births to deaths, fertility, reproduction, and so on). Instead, in what could be understood as an extension of Foucault's (2007) discussion of the public as the affective pole of population,' attention is focused on the emergence, distribution, circulation, and mutation of pre- and post-individual capacities to affect and be affected (Massumi 2002, Hardt and Negri 2004).

If the emergence of an affective cultural politics is promissory it is simultaneously an imperative that emerges from a nascent recognition that affect is modulated and transmitted in forms of power addressed to 'life' (Hardt and Negri 2004; Thrift 2005). A range of work has mapped the imbrication of different affects in power formations that modulate the circulation and distribution of affects by intervening and directing ongoing processes -- rather than exclusively through the prescriptive normalizations of forms of disciplinary power (Deleuze 1992). Here it is precisely the transmission of affect, its movements, disruptions, and resonances, that forms of vital or life power can come to harness. These forms of power do not prevent and prescribe but work in conjunction with the force of affect, intensifying, multiplying, and saturating the material-affective processes through which bodies come in and out of formation.

Affects are understood as impersonal intensities that do not belong to a subject or an object, nor do they reside in the mediating space between a subject and an object. So the key political and ethical task for a cultural politics of affect is to disclose and thereafter open up points of potential on the 'very edge of semantic availability' (Williams 1977, 134) by comprehending the genealogies, conditionalities, performativities, and potentialities of different affects.