Affect Theory
Discussion
Giacomo Poderi:
"Affect Theory covers a sound and rich body of knowledge that consolidated since the early ‘90s in the social science and humanities and that increasingly extended beyond those disciplines (Clough, 2010; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Lawler, 2001; Tomkins, 1984). In short, the ‘affect turn’ testifies the will to overcome, ontologically and epistemologically, the centrality of the human subject in relation to agency and to move beyond the nature/culture, body/emotions, social/material dichotomies (Clough and Halley, 2007). It is beyond the scope of this paper to attempt a comprehensive and detailed outline of affect and affect theory. However, it is helpful to provide clarifications on how this construct is understood and used within this paper.
Approaches to affect range from the ones reflecting a psychobiological orientation (Tomkins, 1984) to those having social (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010), cultural (Massumi, 1995), or organizational orientations (Gherardi, 2019). In continuity with these latter ones, affect is understood here in the Spinozian-Deleuzian sense of a force that is relational, moves among bodies, and enhances or diminishes their ability to act (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). To this extent it is a non-subjective and anti-representational force: it does not resolve in emotions or other subjective states, although it links to them; it cannot be captured, described, and explained in its entirety, and therefore leaves us with a sense of wonder.
In Brian Massumi’s words:
- The reason to say “affect” rather than “emotion” is that affect carries a bodily connotation. Affect, coming out of Spinoza, is defined very basically as the ability to affect and be affected. But you have to think of the affect and being affected together as a complex, as two sides of the same phenomenon that cuts across subject positions. (2017: 109)"