Affect 1

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

Affect in Critical Studies

Brian L. Ott
Subject: Critical/Cultural Studies Online Publication Date: July 2017
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.56

Summary and Keywords

Affect has historically been conceptualized in one of two dominant ways. The first
perspective, which has its roots in psychology and neuroscience, tends to view affect as
an elemental state. This tradition is reflected in Silvan S. Tomkins’s theory of primary
affects and Antonio Damasio’s theory of basic emotions. Recent extensions of this
tradition include the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lisa Cartwright, and Teresa
Brennan. The second perspective, which is typically associated with developments in
philosophy and the humanities, treats affect as an intensive force. This tradition, whose
most famous proponent is Gilles Deleuze, is evident in Brian Massumi’s theory of
autonomous affect and Nigel Thrift’s non-representational theory. Recent extensions of
this tradition tend to emphasize the importance of materiality, or what Jane Bennett
has called “thing-power.” A number of scholars working in communication and cultural
studies have created a third, hybrid tradition that attempts to bridge or mediate the two
dominant historical accounts. This third perspective includes Lawrence Grossberg’s
notion of affective investments, Christian Lundberg’s Lacanian-inspired view of affect,
Sara Ahmed’s work on the sociality of emotion, and Gernot Böhme’s theory of
atmospheres.

Keywords: affect, emotion, Silvan Tomkins, Antonio Damasio, intensity, sensation,

materiality, bodies, Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, aesthetics, atmospheres

Approaching Affect
Affect is a complex and often contentious concept. So much so that one is likely
to encounter nearly as many conceptions and uses of affect as there are scholars
of affect. Seigworth and Gregg (2010), for instance, have identified at least eight
“main orientations” toward affect (pp. 6–8). This complexity can sometimes be
seen even within a single scholar’s understanding of affect. The 17th-century
Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), for instance, held a
multifaceted view of affect that entailed two distinct, but related dimensions:
affectus and affectio. Spinoza (1992) maintained that a “body can be affected in
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many ways by which its power of activity is increased or decreased” (p. 103);
affectus is his term for “a body’s continuous, intensive variation (as increase-
diminution) in its capacity for acting” (Seigworth, 2011, p. 184). The Spinozian
notion of affectus dramatically shaped the thinking of the 20th-century French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and his popular view of affect as a force,
as a “prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential
state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that
body’s capacity to act” (Massumi, 1987, p. xvi).1 But Spinoza proposed a second
dimension of affect, affectio, which refers to the particular state of one body’s
reaction to another body’s having affected it (Seigworth, 2011, p. 184). The
Spinozian notion of affectio underpins many contemporary psychological and
neurological understandings of affect as an elemental state, and Spinoza himself
associated it with three such states: desire, pleasure, and pain (Spinoza, 1992,
p. 141).

For Spinoza, then, affect involves both the intensive force that bodies exert upon
one another, increasing or decreasing their capacity to act (affectus) and the
elemental state generated by an encounter between two or more bodies (affectio).
Lundberg (2009) usefully describes the distinction between affectus and affectio
as that between affect as “productive force” and affect as “manifest emotion” (p.
401). Since first proposing this framework, however, Spinoza’s two dimensions
of affect have developed largely independent of one another, each becoming its
own account of affect. Indeed, consider one of the most well-known academic
squabbles surrounding affect. In 1991, the Marxist literary scholar Fredric
Jameson famously identified “the waning of affect” as one of “the constitutive
features of the postmodern” (Jameson, 1991, p. 6). After making this assertion,
Jameson was widely criticized by scholars of the “affective turn” in the
humanities who saw not a waning but “a magnification of affect” (see Shaviro,
2010, p. 4). Social theorist Brian Massumi (1995), for instance, argued that, “If
anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of [affect]” (p. 88).

What outwardly appears to be a disagreement over affect’s prevalence (i.e., its

decline or proliferation) is, in actuality, a more fundamental disagreement over
what affect is and how best to approach it. Jameson’s and Massumi’s
understandings of affect differ both conceptually and contextually. In contrast
to Massumi, who—based upon his reading of Deleuze—sees affect as an
unqualified intensity, Jameson regards affect as an effect or state (Jameson,
1991, p. 10). Moreover, unlike Massumi, who is generally concerned with affect
in “our condition” (i.e., postmodernity), Jameson specifically examines affect in
relation to “postmodernism.” Clarifying this distinction, Eagleton (1996)
explains: “postmodernity alludes to a specific historical period” that “springs from
an historic shift in the West to a new form of capitalism—to the ephemeral,
decentralized world of technology, consumerism, and the culture industry, in
which service, finance, and information industries triumph over traditional
manufacture,” while “postmodernism … refers to a form of contemporary culture”
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characterized by “a depthless, decentered, ungrounded, self-reflexive, playful,

derivative, eclectic, pluralistic art” (Eagleton, 1996, p. vii).

Thus, when Jameson identifies a waning of affect as emblematic of postmodern

culture, he is specifically referring to art in late capitalism, and indeed, his chief
examples contrast the works of Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch with those
of Andy Warhol, the personal styles of high modernism with the mechanical
reproduction of postmodernism. I point to the differences in Jameson’s and
Massumi’s views on affect because—even as they signal the complexity of the
scholarly terrain involving affect—they highlight one possible interpretive
heuristic to begin mapping that terrain.

In the case of Jameson, affect is tied to the expressive and representational

dimensions of art, to the feelings and emotions that art elicits or, in the case of
postmodern art, fails to elicit. From this perspective, affect is an elemental state
activated in a human subject by an external artistic object. Jameson (1991) sees
a waning of affect because he believes postmodern art is no longer capable of
communicating “the [artist’s] outward dramatization of inward feeling” (p. 12). In
the case of Massumi, affect entails neither subject nor object but bodily
movement, interaction, and the dynamic process of becoming. In this view, affect
is an intensive force that all bodies (whether human or nonhuman) exert upon
one another. Massumi sees a surfeit of affect because bodies continuously collide
and diverge. These two conceptions of affect—as state and as force—are rarely
integrated as they once were in Spinoza’s Ethics. To the contrary, they reflect
distinct scholarly traditions. In this article, I map these two traditions, reflecting
on their histories and assumptions.2 I conclude by looking at some of the ways
these traditions have been taken up by communication and cultural studies
scholars.

Affect as Elemental State

The view of affect as an elemental state has its roots in psychology and
neuroscience. In some iterations of this view, little or no distinction is made
between affect and other emotional states. In fact, in the early 1990s, Batson,
Shaw, and Oleson (1992) reported that in psychology “most often, the terms
affect, mood, and emotion are used interchangeably, without any attempt at
conceptual differentiation” (p. 295). In instances where conceptual distinctions
are made, affect is sometimes used as a catch all term to refer to a variety of
emotional states. Charles Altieri (2003), for instance, defines affects as
“immediate modes of sensual responsiveness to the work [of art] characterized
by an accompanying imaginative dimension,” which allows affect to serve as an
“umbrella term” that includes four basic categories: feelings, moods, emotions,
and passions (p. 2). In still other instances, affect is treated as its own core or
elemental state distinct from emotion and feeling.
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In this section, two leading theories of affect that treat it as an elemental state
are explored. The first is psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins’s theory of primary
affects, and the second is neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s theory of basic
emotions. By his own account, Tomkins (1982) began to recognize the
importance of affect in the early 1940s, though at the time, he notes, “affect was
in deep trouble and disrepute” (p. 353). Affect’s unfavorable status in academic
circles was principally a product of two intellectual traditions: behaviorism and
psychoanalysis. In the early 20th century, a behavioral approach held sway in
psychology. This approach concerned what could be objectively observed and
tested, which according to one of its most famous proponents, John B. Watson,
was restricted to the public behaviors and reactions of individuals.
Consequently, private behaviors, like thoughts and emotions, were excluded
from serious study. Affect fared little better in the psychoanalytic tradition,
where Freud subordinated it to the drives, which he believed “to constitute the
primary motivational system” (Tomkins, 2008, p, 4). With respect to both
behaviorism and psychoanalysis, then, affects were seen as playing an
inconsequential or secondary role in human motivation and action.

It is precisely this understanding of affect that Tomkins (1982) questioned and

actively sought to overturn. From his perspective, affect is “the primary
motivational system,” an “innate biological … mechanism, more urgent than
drive deprivation and pleasure, and more urgent even than physical pain” (pp.
354, 355). In support of this claim, Tomkins cites the example of terror as an
innate affect. According to Tompkins, one can be terrified of losing their job,
being diagnosed with cancer, or being publically humiliated. But in none of these
circumstances is terror tied to the drive mechanism, to the “desperate quality of
the hunger, thirst, breathing, and sex drives” (p. 355). In his view, it is not the
drives that heighten or animate affect, but the affects that amplify drives, which
explains why one must be excited (affect) to be sexually aroused (drive), but need
not be sexually aroused to be excited (p. 357). Affect, Tomkins further notes,
“lends power to memory, to perception, to thought, and to action no less than to
the drives” (p. 356).

Based on his research, Tomkins identified nine primary affects, “the inborn
protocols that when triggered encourage us to spring into action” (Nathanson,
2008, p. xiii). He arranged these nine primary motivating mechanisms into the
categories of positive, neutral, and negative. According to Tomkins, there are two
positive affects: (a) interest-excitement and (b) enjoyment-joy; one neutral affect:
(c) surprise-startle; and six negative affects: (d) distress-anguish, (e) fear-terror,
(f) anger-rage, (g) shame-humiliation, (h) disgust, and (i) dissmell. Over time,
Tomkins has reworked some of the affects on this list, but he has consistently
described the first seven in pairs that encompass varying intensities of the same
affect. Rage, for instance, is an intensified version of anger, while excitement is
an intensified version of interest. The final two affects, disgust and dissmell, are
protective ones related to food; they work to prevent humans from eating or
drinking things that are toxic or harmful. Since affect amplifies “anything with
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which it is co-assembled” such as drive, motor, perceptual, and cognitive

mechanisms (Demos, 1995, p. 53), Tomkins (1981) says that it functions to make
“good things better and bad things worse” (p. 322).

For Tomkins, affects are triggered by the increasing, decreasing, or persistent

intensity of neural firing associated with an internal or external stimulus.
Contrary to Freud, Tomkins did not believe that affects were related to the
specific content of an experience such as breast feeding or potty training. Rather,
he linked affect to the density (frequency per unit of time) of neural firing. “My
theory,” he explains, “posits three discrete classes of activators of affect … These
are stimulation increase, stimulation level, and stimulation decrease” (Tomkins,
1981, p. 317). Each affect, he demonstrated, is an analogue of its stimulus. Just
as a gunshot is sudden and brief, so, too, is the surprise-startle affect it elicits.
Tomkins also found that the level and pattern of neural stimulation associated
with a particular affect corresponds to distinct facial displays and bodily
responses. The fear-terror affect generates a furrowed brow, frozen stare, and
increase in heart-rate and respiration, while the shame-humiliation affect
induces eye aversion, head dipping, blushing, and slumping. Since the affect
system is an innate brain mechanism involving stimulus and response, Tomkins
distinguished between affect and feeling, which he regarded as conscious
awareness of an affect, between affect and emotion, which he described as the
combination of an affect, a feeling, and memory of previous experiences of the
initiating affect, and between affect and mood, which he understood as a
persistent state of emotion (Nathanson, 2008, p. xiv).

As is perhaps already evident from the preceding discussion, affect is—in

Tomkins’s view—not necessarily cognitively activated (Tomkins, 1981, p. 321),
though it possesses the parasitical ability to co-assemble with cognitive, motor,
memory, drive, and perceptual mechanisms (Ngai, 2005, p. 53). “It is,” in
Tomkins’s (1981) words, “capable of very great combinational flexibility with
other mechanisms that it can conjointly imprint and be imprinted by” (p. 321).
The three major conjoint characteristics of affect that allow it to function are
urgency, abstractness, and generality (p. 321). The trait of urgency means that
affect amplifies whatever triggered it, thereby making that trigger or stimulus
matter. In fact, nothing matters (i.e., is available to human consciousness)
unless it has first been amplified by affect. The trait of abstractness means that
affect has no essential or absolute connection to any triggering mechanism, thus
allowing it to lend its power of amplification to any trigger. Finally, the trait of
generality means that affect has unlimited “transformability or degrees of
freedom” (p. 323), thus, making it capable of infinite assembly of various
mechanisms. In developing his theory of affect, Tomkins sought to answer no
less fundamental a question than, “Why do humans do what they do?”

As with Tomkins’s theory of primary affects, Antonio Damasio’s theory of basic

emotions has had a significant influence on the multidisciplinary field of affect
studies. But unlike Tomkins, Damasio does not actually employ the term “affect”
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in his own research. He does, however, credit Baruch Spinoza’s philosophical

writings on affect as an important influence on him and acknowledges that affect
is often used to describe an ensemble of concepts that preoccupy him as a
neuroscientist, namely drives, motivations, emotions, and feelings (Damasio,
2003, pp. 8, 11). Damasio lays out his theory of basic emotions, which is
centrally concerned with “being in a state” (Wetherell, 2012, p. 31), across four
key works: Descartes’ Error (1994), The Feeling of What Happens (1999), Looking
for Spinoza (2003), and Self Comes to Mind (2010). When Damasio first proposed
his theory of basic emotions, it was controversial because it challenged the
conventional scientific wisdom of the time, which held that cognition and
emotion were independent of one another and that the body served the mind.
For Damasio, not only is emotion central to cognition, but also the “mind exists
purely for the body’s sake, to ensure its survival” (Eakin, 2003).

“Survival,” Damasio explains, “depends on the maintenance of the body’s

physiology within an optimal homeostatic range. This process relies on fast
detection of potentially deleterious changes in body state and on appropriate
corrective responses” (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013, p. 143). But how are changes
in body state and corrective responses detected and initiated quickly? The
surprising answer, according to Damasio, is emotions. Emotions are “complex
… automated programs of actions concocted by evolution,” that is “action
programmes” (Damasio, 2010, p. 108); they are triggered by external stimuli
related to the exteroceptive senses (vision, hearing, taste, and smell). These
experiences can be either perceived or recalled, but the action programs they
initiate “do not require deliberation. They are instinctual—that is biologically pre-
set” (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013, p. 145). For Damasio, this is very different than
how feelings work. “Feelings,” he explains, “are composite perceptions of what
happens in our body and mind when we are emoting” (Damasio, 2010, p. 109).
So, while emotions entail innate programs of action (and accompanying changes
in body state), feelings involve perceptions of the body and what it is doing. Thus,
whereas emotions “can be triggered and executed nonconsciously,” feelings pivot
on consciousness (Damasio, 1999, p. 37). “The basic mechanisms underlying
emotion,” he goes on to say, “do not require consciousness, even if they
eventually use it” (p. 42).

In addition to distinguishing between emotions and feelings, Damasio also

distinguishes among three categories or tiers of emotions: background emotions,
primary emotions, and secondary emotions. By background emotions, he means
something on the order of one’s general orientation, their degree of edginess or
tranquility (enthusiasm or discouragement) for instance. Background emotions
should not be confused with moods, however, which entail “sustaining a given
emotion over long periods of time” (Damasio, 2003, p. 43). In contrast to
background emotions, primary or basic emotions refer to the states of fear,
anger, disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness. These states are all, according
to Damasio (2003), “easily identifiable in human beings across several cultures
and in nonhuman species as well” (p. 44). Finally, he discusses secondary or
Affect 7

social emotions, which include compassion, embarrassment, guilt, shame,

contempt, jealousy, envy, pride, and admiration. Unlike primary or basic
emotions, which rely exclusively on the limbic system, amygdala, and anterior
cingulate, secondary or social emotions require “the agency of the prefrontal and
of somatosensory cortices” (Damasio, 1994, p. 134). This broadening of systems
means that secondary emotions typically accompany feelings and that, unlike
primary emotions, which are pre-organized and universal, secondary emotions
are less automated. In short, secondary emotions are significantly shaped by
personal experience.

That is not to say that personal experience plays no role whatsoever in basic
emotions, but it is indirect. From a neurological perspective, the activation of
emotion (for our purposes, fear) looks like this. A threatening object or event is
registered via an exteroceptive sense (e.g., the sight of a bear). This sends a
neural signal to the amygdala, which recognizes the object or event as an
emotionally competent stimulus (ECS). The ECS, which is a pattern that has
evolved biologically over time to ensure a safe homeostatic range for the body,
triggers an automated response or program of action (i.e., the amygdala sends
predetermined commands to the hypothalamus and brain stem). The state of the
body changes to fear (i.e., heart and respiratory rates increase, cortisol and
adrenaline are secreted into the blood stream, blood vessels in the skin contract,
etc.). These changes in the body state are sensed by the interoceptive system and
mapped (i.e., a feeling develops). While fear is, for Damasio, a largely universal
experience, fear of bears is not. Personal life experiences with bears (e.g., perhaps
one is an animal trainer), as well as the context in which one encounters a bear
(e.g., while camping versus at the zoo), modulate whether or not seeing a bear
qualifies as an ECS.

Despite developing in different fields and employing different terminologies,

Tomkins’s theory of primary affects and Damasio’s theory of basic emotions
share a remarkably similar set of assumptions. First, for both Tomkins and
Damasio, affects are elemental body states arrived at through automated
biological processes. Second, there are several identifiable affects or bodily states
that are innate and universal, meaning they occur across all cultures, even
cultures that do not have names for them. Though Tomkins’s and Damasio’s
terminologies differ somewhat, both regard fear, anger, disgust, and surprise, as
well as some variation on joy (happiness) and distress (sadness) as basic affects.
Third, affects do not require conscious thought and, in this sense, may be
understood as precognitive. Fourth, the experience of a particular affective bodily
state is quickly captured and mapped, leading to conscious feelings. While
communication scholars across a wide array of areas have utilized these theories
to explore the role that affect plays in communication, the conception of affect
as elemental bodily state has disproportionately informed empirical-based
research in areas such as persuasion (Nabi, 2010) and media effects (Bolls,
2010).
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That having been said, a number of humanities-based scholars have actively

pursued the notion of affect as elemental state. Literary and queer studies
scholar, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who along with Adam Frank, for instance, were
central to popularizing the concept of affect in cultural studies through the
examination of shame in their 1995 book, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan
Tomkins Reader. Sedgwick (2003) continued to explore the role of affect in
subsequent work, paying special attention to the idea “that motivation itself,
even the motivation to satisfy biological drives, is the business of the affect
system” (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 20). Other humanistic scholars to take up affect as
elemental state include the media ecologist Phil Rose (2013), performance
studies scholars Margaret Werry and Róisín O’Gorman (2007), and rhetoricians
interested in neurorhetorics (Marinelli, 2016; Mays & Jung, 2012). The film
scholar Lisa Cartwright (2008) also utilized this perspective to develop a theory
of “moral spectatorship,” which develops the concept of “empathetic
identification” (p. 24); in contradistinction to psychoanalytic theories of
identification, Cartwright frames identification in terms of affect and
intersubjectivity.

The concept of intersubjectivity within this tradition is significant because it is

one way of understanding how affect circulates and moves. Accounts of affective
movement associated with a view of affect as elemental state have tended to
subscribe to some version of “mimesis” or “affective contagion,” in which,
according to Anna Gibbs (2001), “Bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch
fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame,
igniting rage, exciting fear” (p. 1). Among the most widely cited works in this
tradition is Teresa Brennan’s (2004) The Transmission of Affect which, drawing
upon contemporary neuroscience, advances the idea of “chemical entrainment”
(involving pheromones) to explain how affects pass between bodies in groups and
crowds. While Brennan’s theory is a novel one, the “transmission” metaphor at
its center ultimately re-inscribes the idea of individual bodies that are essentially
separate and stable (see Wetherell, 2012, p. 144). It is this view of bodies that
the second major perspective on affect explicitly and forcefully challenges.

Affect as Intensive Force

While the view of affect as an elemental state generally finds its roots in the
disciplines of psychology and neurology, the view of affect as an intensive force
is more commonly associated with developments in philosophy and humanities-
based disciplines such as literature, art history, communication, and cultural
studies, as well as cultural anthropology and geography. The most famous
proponent of this conception is the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, along with
his friend and frequent collaborator, French psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix
Guattari. In their view, affect entails “the change, or variation, that occurs when
bodies collide, or come into contact” (Colman, 2010, p. 11), or rather, “passages
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of intensity, a reaction in or on the body at the level of matter” (O’Sullivan, 2006,

p. 4). In this section, I explore Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of affect as
intensive variation and then outline two current strains of this conception:
cultural theorist Brian Massumi’s thesis on the “autonomy of affect” and cultural
geographer Nigel Thrift’s non-representational theory. Though Massumi and
Thrift are far from a comprehensive list of the scholars working in this area, most
conceptions of affect as intensive force are grounded in their work.

To fully appreciate the perspective of affect as intensive force, it is necessary to

look first at the principal current of thought that it responds to and challenges.
Throughout the 20th century, critical theory was dominated by a concern with
language. In philosophy, that concern manifested itself in the so-called
“linguistic turn,” a recognition by analytic philosophers that the structures of
language delimit what can be said and, by extension, what can be thought. Since
language does not mirror reality (i.e., as correspondence theories of truth
suggest), language necessarily shapes our understanding of reality. Even the
cognitive turn, which took place in philosophy mid-century, ends up being an
extension of the linguistic turn since the mind is treated like a representational
system. As Jacques Lacan (1998) famously said, “the unconscious is structured
like a language” (p. 48). The centrality of language and, therefore, representation
was also evident in linguistic circles, where the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure demonstrated there was no necessary correspondence between a sign
and the thing to which it refers. Similarly, in literary and cultural studies,
theorists extolled a universal “textualism,” or the notion that “There is nothing
outside of the text” (Derrida, 1997, p. 158). The primacy of language, which gave
rise to structuralism and later post-structuralism, had two notable effects; it
disciplined the senses, and it privileged textual and interpretive approaches to
knowledge (see Howes, 2003, pp. 17–22).

Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of affect fundamentally challenges these

biases by suggesting a mode of thought that is non-representational (Seigworth,
2011, p. 183; see also Deleuze, 1978), a carnal knowledge that escapes but runs
“parallel to signification” (O’Sullivan, 2001, p. 126). This view is heavily
influenced by Spinoza’s account of affect and Bergson’s (1991) views on matter.
But whereas Spinoza, as noted in the introduction, specified two dimensions of
affect (affectus and affectio), Deleuze and Guattari derive their formulation of
affect principally in relation to affectus, to “a body’s passage from one state of
affection to another” (Massumi, 1987, p. xvi; Seigworth, 2011, p. 184;). Affects,
they argue, are neither feelings nor affections (i.e., basic emotions), as “they go
beyond the strength of those who undergo them” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p.
164). Nevertheless, affections, which describe the state of the affected body at a
given moment in time (i.e., a slice of our duration), signal the capacity of the
body to affect and be affected by other bodies, to transition from one state to
another as a result of the material forces that bodies continuously exert upon
one another. Deleuzian-Guattarian affect, therefore, “requires a view of the body,
not as an organic closed system (as in Freud), but as … a ‘machinic assemblage’
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… radically open to the world” (Labanyi, 2010, p. 225). In this view, “a body is
defined not by the form that determines it,” but as an individual thing
distinguished from others things in respect to motion and rest, that is, a body
without organs (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 260; see also Spinoza, 1992, p.
63). Virtually anything, human or nonhuman, can function as a body so long as
it has the capacity to affect and be affected. “Bodies,” explains Barbara Kennedy
(2000), “might be technological, material, organic, cultural, sociological, or
molecular” (p. 98).

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) take up their conception of

affect primarily in terms of art, which they define as “a bloc of sensations, that is
to say, a compound of percepts and affects” (p. 164). For them, works of art are
bodies whose material aesthetics produce sensations in other bodies at the level
of matter and energy. Specifically, they identify three monumental types of
sensations, each of which functions as a material force or intensity affecting
bodies as affect. The first is vibration, a simple sensation that is “more nervous
than cerebral” (p. 168). Though simple, vibration “is determined by a difference
in intensity that either rises or falls” (Kennedy, 2000, p. 113), thereby generating
rhythmic oscillations in attendant bodies. Resonance, which Deleuze and
Guattari (1994) describe as “the embrace,” refers to a second variety of sensation;
it occurs when “two sensations resonate with each other so tightly in a clinch of
what are no more than ‘energies’” (p. 168), transferring excitation across bodies.
Finally, they identify distension, which arises when “two sensations draw apart,
release themselves, but so as not to be brought together by the light, the air, the
void that sinks between them,” eliciting a sense of movement. The sensations of
vibration, resonance, and movement all have the capacity to affect bodies at a
material, presubjective, asignifying level. Deleuze (2003), in his account of
Francis Bacon’s painterly practice, is clear that sensation has nothing to do with
a subject’s feelings, writing, “there are no feelings in Bacon: there are nothing
but affects, that is, ‘sensations’ and ‘instincts’ … Sensation is what determines
instinct at a particular moment, just as instinct is the passage from one
sensation to another” (p. 35). Hence, for Deleuze and Guattari, “Affects are
sensible experiences … liberated from organizing systems of representation”
(Colebrook, 2002, p. 22); they are “felt as differences in intensity” (O’Sullivan,
2006, p. 169).

Among the most prominent scholars to take up these ideas is Brian Massumi, a
cultural theorist, who is one of the chief translators of Deleuze and Guattari’s
work. Following Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi (2002) equates affect with
“intensity,” which he argues is not “semantically or semiotically ordered,” but
which “is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in
the skin—at the surface of the body, at its interface with things” (pp. 24–25).
Massumi’s insistence that affect is “the body’s response to stimuli at a
precognitive and prelinguistic level” (Labanyi, 2010, p. 224) that involves the
brain but not consciousness is perhaps most evident in the strong divide he
draws between affect and emotion. Indeed, as Ruth Leys (2011) explains in a
Affect 11

special issue of Critical Inquiry on affect, Massumi is widely credited with

emphasizing the “autonomy of affect,” the idea that affect is “a nonsignifying,
nonconscious ‘intensity’ disconnected from the subjective, signifying, functional-
meaning axis to which the more familiar categories of emotion belong” (p. 441).
While Massumi’s view on the distinction between affect and emotion is consistent
with Deleuze and Guattari’s, he stresses it more explicitly and forcefully. In
Parable for the Virtual, Massumi (2002) maintains that, “emotion and affect—if
affect is intensity—follow different logics and pertain to different orders” (p. 27).

The view that affect is extralinguistic, asignifying, nonconscious, and

presubjective has important implications, not least of all for the relation between
affect and discourse, which Massumi splits “into two tracks and privilege[s] the
track of the body or the process of becoming, and the moment of impact and
change” (Wetherell, 2012, p. 19). For Massumi, discourse has a domesticating
and neutering effect on affect; “discourse is seen as taming affect, codifying its
generative force” (Wetherell, 2012, p. 19). This taming effect arises because
discourse is bound up with all the structures (i.e., identities, subjectivities,
communities, cultures, and histories) that allow ideology to do its work. To
prevent “received psychological categories” from slipping back into a theory of
affect (Massumi, 2002, p. 27), Massumi subscribes to the perspective that
“affects must be viewed as independent of, and in an important sense prior to,
ideology—that is, prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs” (Leys,
2011, p. 437). Not surprising, this is a controversial position, especially among
academics who are unwilling or perhaps unable to take seriously the possibility
that affect operates outside of language, discourse, and ideology.3 In response to
criticism that the body is always already mediated by discourse, defenders of
Massumi’s view often point to the example of infants, who, having not yet entered
the realm of the Symbolic, are nonetheless machines for generating affect.
Infants, who are as of yet preverbal and a-ideological, can nonetheless exert
intensive forces that affect and are affected by other bodies.

Massumi’s insistence that affect is “preconscious and bodily, rather than

individuated, discursively mediated, and constructed” is also reflected in Nigel
Thrift’s non-representational theory (NRT), which concerns processes that are
“more than language” and below the “threshold of cognition” (Wetherell, 2012, p.
55). More specifically, Thrift argues that NRT has seven main tenets. First, it
seeks to capture the “onflow” of everyday life, meaning that it is rooted in
philosophies of becoming that challenge the idea of static, unchanging states
(Thrift, 2008, p. 5). Second, it is decidedly pre-individual; parting ways with
methodological individualism, it views the world “as made up of all kinds of
things brought in relation with one another by many and varied spaces through
a continuous and largely involuntary process of encounter” (pp. 7–8). Third, it
concerns the material practices of bodies in addition to the symbolic actions of
individual subjects (p. 8). Fourth, it regards “things” as lively and takes seriously
the energy that things generate (p. 9). Fifth, it is experimental, especially its
infusion of the performative and other non-empirical methods into social science
Affect 12

(p. 12). Sixth, it recognizes affect and sensation as registers of thought as

important as the register involving signs and significations, challenging “the
privileging of meaning … by understanding the body as being expressive without
being a signifier” (pp. 12–14). Seventh, it stresses an ethic of novelty “celebrating
the joyous, even transcendent, confusion of life,” and, thus, opening the
possibility for new forms of politics (p. 15). The major tenets of NRT collectively
challenge the hegemony of representational notions of the mind and of thought.

One of the unique aspects of Thrift’s NRT is its explicit emphasis on politics, on
showing how the study of affect can enhance our understanding of politics, as
well as using affect theory to generate new forms of politics. In Thrift’s (2008)
words: “the envelope of what we call the political must increasingly expand to
take note of ‘the way that political attitudes and statements are partly
conditioned by intense autonomic bodily reactions that do not simply reproduce
the trace of a political intention and cannot wholly be recuperated within an
ideological regime of truth’” (p. 182) As a geographer, Thrift is interested in how
the study of affect influences and impacts the politics of space, especially, urban
space. In that regard, Thrift points to four developments. First, he suggests there
is a general altering of the form of politics, expanding the modes of political
involvement beyond traditional means (Massumi, 1995, pp. 100–103). Second,
there is a growing “mediatization” of politics in which “political presentation
increasingly conforms to media norms” (Thrift, 2008, p. 184). Massumi (2002)
agrees. Citing the example of Ronald Reagan, he argues that the timbre and
“beautiful vibratory” quality of Reagan’s voice made him appealing even though
his thoughts were incoherent (p. 41). Third, the political is spreading into new
sensory registers, creating microgeographies governed by biopolitics. Fourth,
urban space is increasingly designed to elicit political response through
strategically engineered landscapes.

Though distinctive, the various views of affect as an intensive force inspired by

Deleuze and Guattari share a common set of assumptions. First, affect is
regarded as a distinct way of knowing. In Thrift’s (2008) words, “affect is
understood as a form of thinking” (p. 175). Second, that form of thinking is
regarded as presubjective, asignifying, and nonconscious; it occurs at the level
of bodies (Clough, 2007, pp. 1–2). This perspective represents a direct challenge
to the notion that thought is exclusively an individual, rationalist,
representational, and conscious activity. Third, affect is distinct from emotion.
In Massumi’s (1995) words, “An emotion is a subjective content, the socio-
linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward
defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual
point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed
progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and
meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized” (p. 88). Put another way, emotion
is “the subjective capture of affects” (Schrimshaw, 2013, p. 31). Fourth, affect
entails a material aesthetics. To take seriously the view of affect as intensive
force involves foregrounding the importance of matter as lively, vibrant, and
Affect 13

animate. One useful way to think about this is in terms of what Jane Bennett
(2004) calls thing-power, “which figures materiality as a protean flow of matter-
energy and figures the thing as a relatively composed form of that flow” (p. 349).
Bennett further describes thing-power as “the lively energy and/or resistant
pressure that issues from one material assemblage and is received by others” (p.
365). Though asignifying, matter is nonetheless expressive, for the aesthetic
qualities of things elicit sensations as bodies come into contact with one another
(see Hawhee, 2015).

This unifying set of assumptions has been particularly appealing to rhetorical,

media, and cultural studies scholars interested in materiality and the ways that
bodies can be excited, primed, and swayed (i.e., affected) at the level of matter.
One of the chief advocates of a Deleuzian approach to affect has been Eric. S.
Jenkins. In scholarship exploring the circulation of memes (Jenkins, 2014a), the
contributions of affect to media ecology (Jenkins & Zhang, 2016), and the
affective dimensions of animation (Jenkins, 2014b), Jenkins has affirmed that
affect “is not the property or possession of the subject but arises in between, in
the intervals connecting bodies” (Jenkins, 2014b, p. 7). Similarly, D. Robert
DeChaine (2002) adopted this perspective to analyze the embodied character of
musical experience, while Eric King Watts (2012) utilized it to demonstrate the
vibrational experience of the human voice. J. D. Dewsbury (2015) has mobilized
this perspective to examine the relationship between landscapes and the
performative materialities of habit, while Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric
Aoki (2013) employed it to assess the spatial experience of the Whitney Gallery
of Western Art. In each case, the aforementioned authors stress the intersection
of matter, movement, aesthetics, and sensation to affect.

Stuck in the Middle With You

As is likely already evident, the two dominant understandings of affect charted
in this essay—as elemental state and as intensive force—are not wholly at odds
with one another and, indeed, some scholars have worked to creatively
(re)combine them as Spinoza had done. Spinoza, Papacharissi (2015) reminds
us, “defined affects as states of mind and body that include, but also extend
beyond, just emotions and feelings to describe driving forces that are suggestive
of tendencies to act in a variety of ways, or, to not act at all” (p. 12).
Communication and cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg, for instance,
drew upon this dual understanding to help explain how popular culture creates
“affective investments.” Like Deleuze and Guattari, Grossberg (1992) regards
emotion and affect as operating on two different planes, associating the plane of
emotion with signification and ideology and the plane of affect with prepersonal,
asignifying “senses and experiences” (p. 80). But Grossberg goes on to say that
“Too often, critics assume that affect—as pure intensity—is without form or
structure,” adding that affect, “is articulated and disarticulated—there are
Affect 14

affective lines of articulation and affective lines of flight—through social struggles

over its structure” (p. 82). In stressing this point, Grossberg seeks to map the
relation between emotion and affect, arguing, “Our emotional states are always
elicited from within the affective states in which we already find ourselves” (p.
81).

For rhetorical and psychoanalytic scholar Christian Lundberg (2012), “affect,” in

Grossberg’s view, “serves a trans- or asubjective economy of forces that produces
the subject” (p. 109). This move, which he argues resonates strongly with Freud’s
understanding of a “set of forces that precede the manifest content of the
subject’s actions,” might reasonably be interpreted as simply driving the subject
to a deeper, more hidden level and, thus, as running counter to Deleuze and
Guattari’s desubjectivizing view of affect (pp. 108–109). Turning to Lacan, who
Lundberg readily admits had a very uneasy attitude toward affect,4 he suggests
affect “can be situated in the Real, although not necessarily at the site of the
body” because it implies “the possibility of bodily experience not mediated by the
presence of the signifier” (p. 111). Such a move, situating affect in the Real, but
outside the body and subjective practices of meaning, he posits, allows for a
“quasi-ontology … that escapes seamless representation in the regime of the
signs” (Lundberg, 2012, p. 111; see also Lundberg, 2009, 2015). Lundberg’s
theorization of affect is a challenging and provocative one that, given its Lacanian
inspiration, also rehabilitates some version of subjectivity that runs counter to
Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of affect as operating outside the economy of
the sign.5

A number of communication and cultural studies scholars, but especially those

working in the psychoanalytic tradition, have found utility in both Lacan and the
Lacanian-inspired scholarship on affect. Ernesto Laclau (2005), for instance,
employs a Lacanian view of affect to help explain the appeal of populist rhetoric;
specifically, he suggests that affect highlights the force of a “people’s” investment
in a given discourse or entity (p. 110). Joshua Gunn has also drawn upon
Lacan—along with Sigmund Freud, Lauren Berlant (2008), and Anne Cvetkovich
(2003) among others—to explore various dimensions of affect, including how
deeply gendered norms regarding speech tonalities often result in moments of
affective transgression (Gunn, 2010), how the formal (affective) appeal of the film
The Passion of the Christ relies upon the generic norms of pornography (Gunn,
2012), and how laughter troubles the human/machine binary (Gunn, 2014). In
each instance, Gunn has attended carefully to the concepts of repetition, form,
and bodily rhythm. This has produced a compelling body of work that enhances
our understanding of the relation between affect and emotion by highlighting the
entwinement of the sensual/sensorial with the symbolic/representational. This
entwinement also animates Brian L. Ott and Diane Keeling’s (2011) analysis of
the film Lost in Translation, though they prefer the psychoanalytic work of Julia
Kristeva (1984) and her distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic,
rather than Lacan, to account for rhetoric’s affective dimension.
Affect 15

A third middle ground of inquiry into affect is reflected by Sara Ahmed’s work
exploring the “sociality of emotion.” Rejecting the notion that emotions are
psychological states, she draws upon Marxism to advance the idea of an
“affective economy,” which holds “that it is the objects of emotions that circulate,
rather than emotion as such” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 11). In this framework, emotions
reside neither in individuals nor objects, but move in association with the
movement of objects, which become sticky or saturated with affect. This
perspective assists critics in analyzing how affect flows through contemporary
politics and, indeed, numerous rhetorical scholars have drawn upon this
perspective to examine the affective dimensions of diverse rhetorical phenomena.
While any attempt to survey those efforts is necessarily selective and partial, it
is worth highlighting a few of the key voices and views in this arena.

In a frequently cited review essay, Jenny Edbauer Rice (2008) examines Ahmed’s
The Cultural Politics of Emotion along with three other recent contributions to
critical affect studies (CAS), which she defines as “the interdisciplinary study of
affect and its mediating force in everyday life” (pp. 201–202). In doing so, she
draws attention to the broad ways that affect theory shapes “how we
conceptualize the public space;” challenges “us to rethink the telos of rhetorical
publics;” and invites “more complex understanding of pathos (beyond emotion),
increased attention to the physiological character of rhetoric, and a rethinking
of ideological critique” (pp. 209, 210, 211). Taking up these varied charges,
scholars such as Erin J. Rand (2015, 2014), Caitlin Bruce (2015), Catherine
Chaput (2011), and Dana L. Cloud and Kathleen Eaton Feyh (2015) have all
sought to clarify “the intersection of the somatic and the social” (Cloud & Feyh,
2015, p. 303). Brent Malin’s (2001) work on “emotions as public, embodied
practices” is also of note, though his discussion of emotion is closely tied to
discourse and processes of meaning-making, which is precisely the view many
scholars of affect wish to upend.

The German philosopher Gernot Böhme’s “theory of atmospheres,” which

challenges firm object/subject and affect/emotion dichotomies, provides a
fourth mediating perspective on affect as elemental state and intensive force.
According to Böhme, atmospheres “designate that which mediates the objective
qualities of an environment with the bodily-sensual states of a person in this
environment” (Böhme, 2014, p. 92). Elaborating on their “peculiar intermediary
status … between subject and object,” Böhme writes:

atmospheres are neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by

things, and yet they are something thinglike, belonging to the thing in that things
articulate their presence through qualities-conceived as ecstasies. Nor are
atmospheres something subjective, for example, determinations of a psychic
state. And yet they are subjectlike, belong to subjects in that they are sensed in
bodily presence by human beings and this sensing is at the same time a bodily
state of being of subjects in space.
Affect 16

(Böhme, 1993, pp. 114, 122; see also Anderson, 2009)

In as much as atmospheres problematize the object/subject dichotomy, they do

not align exclusively with affect or emotion, sensation or signification. While
atmospheres involve the flow of affective intensities across/among bodies within
a space, the felt experience of those flows are rendered subjectively as emotions,
which, in turn, are immediately enfolded back into the space as affective flows.

The spatial aspect of atmospheres is absolutely crucial to their functioning and,

for Böhme (2014), entails five specific characteristics (pp. 93–94). First, spaces
express a general tenor or mood such as playful or serious, cheerful or solemn.
Second, spaces operate synesthetically, thus, sparking a dynamic interplay of
senses. The color of a room, for instance, may evoke a sense of warmth or
coldness. Third, spaces convey a disposition toward movement that varies from
narrow and claustrophobic to expansive and open. Fourth, spaces are reciprocal,
meaning they both influence and are influenced by the bodies present in a space.
Fifth, spaces are social and, as such, carry cultural meanings and values. Each
of these characteristics, according to Böhme (2013), can be modulated by
manipulating a space’s material conditions and aesthetic properties, what he
refers to as its “generators” (p. 4). The most important generators of atmosphere,
he argues, “are light and sound, that is, more specifically: music and
illumination” (Böhme, 2014, p. 94). Because atmospheres can be modulated by
material/aesthetic choices, they lend themselves to critical analysis, which has
prompted some rhetorical scholars to attend to the affective/emotive dimensions
of particular spaces (Ott, Bean, & Marin, 2016).

While Grossberg, Lundberg, Ahmed, and Böhme differ in their assumptions and
approaches, each is concerned with finding some middle ground between a view
of affect as an elemental state, which has been rightly criticized for being too
fixed and, thus, failing to capture the processual character of becoming, and
affect as an intensive force, which has justifiably been criticized as being too
theoretically abstract and, therefore, of limited heuristic value. That these
“middle grounds” as I have dubbed them raise their own questions and
paradoxes is not a limitation so much as it is a testament to the complexity of
affect.

Further Reading
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh
University Press.

Böhme, G. (1993). Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics.

Thesis Eleven,
Affect 17

Böhme, G. (2014). The theory of atmospheres and its applications (A.-C. Engels-
Schwarzpaul, Trans.). Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 15,
92–99.

Brennan, T. (2004). The transmission of affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press.

Clough, P. T., & Halley, J. (Eds.). (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Damasio, A. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain.
London: William Heinemann.

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain.
New York: Avon Books.

Damasio, A. R. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the
making of consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.

Damasio, A. R. (2010). Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious brain. New
York: Pantheon.

Deleuze, E., & Deleuze, G. (1978). Lecture transcripts on Spinoza’s concept of

affect.

Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical philosophy (R. Hurley, Trans.). San

Francisco: City Lights Books.

Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation (D. W. Smith, Trans.).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and

schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G.
Burchell, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Demos, E. V. (Ed.). (1995). Exploring affect: The selected writings of Silvan S.

Tomkins. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.). (2010). The affect theory reader. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.

Grossberg, L. (1992). We gotta get out of this place: Popular conservatism and
postmodern culture. New York: Routledge.
Affect 18

Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Protevi, J. (2009). Political affect: Connecting the social and the somatic.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Spinoza, B. (1992). Ethics: Treatise on the emendation of the intellect and selected
letters (S. Shirley, Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hacket.

Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. New York:

Routledge.

Tomkins, S. S. (1982). Affect theory. In P. Ekman, W. V. Friesen, & P. Ellsworth

(Eds.), Emotion in the human face (2d ed., pp. 353–395). Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press.

Tomkins, S. S. (2008). Affect imagery consciousness: The complete edition. New

York: Springer.

Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding.

Thousand Oaks: SAGE.

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Notes:
(1.) Elaborating on this view, Brinkema (2014) explains, “Affects for Deleuze are
not feelings, emotions, or moods but autonomous potentialities, pure ‘possibles’
that are linked to a complex series of highly specific terms, such as ‘sensation,’
Affect 25

‘becoming,’ ‘force,’ ‘lines of flight,’ and deterritorialization.’ … for Deleuze, affect

is not linked to interior state or individual subject” (Brinkema, 2014, p. 24).

(2.) These are, of course, not the only two ways to conceptualize affect, though
they are regularly highlighted. Seigworth and Gregg (2010), for instance, identify
two key vectors of affect theory: “affect as the prime ‘interest’ motivator that
comes to put the drive in bodily drives (Tomkins); [and] affect as an entire, vital,
and modulating field of myriad becomings across human and nonhuman
(Deleuze)” (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 6). These two vectors largely correspond
with what I am calling the “state” and “force” traditions. The centrality of these
two traditions is also highlighted by Paasonen, Hillis, and Petit (2015), who
observe: “In new materialist investigations inspired by the philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, … affect translates as nonsubjective and impersonal
potentiality, intensity, and force… . In contrast, in the work of the psychologist
Silvan Tomkins, … affects are identifiable and specific … physiological reactions”
(Paasonen, Hillis, & Petit, 2015, p. 6).

(3.) Brinkema (2014) posits, for instance, that “Affect is not the place where
something immediate and automatic and resistant takes place outside of
language. … Affect is not where reading is no longer needed” (Brinkema, 2014, p.
xiv). Brinkema is a committed textualist who maintains that any productive
theory of affect would allow critics to “read for affect and affectivity in texts.”

(4.) I have chosen not to treat Lacanian psychoanalysis as a distinct “perspective”

on affect in this encyclopedia essay on two grounds. First, I concur with Evans
(1996), who argues that “Lacan does not propose a general theory of affects”
(Evans, 1996, p. 5), though he does dedicate a whole seminar (1962–1963) to
discussing L’angoisse (variously translated as anxiety, anguish, or angst), which
he regarded as an affect, not an emotion (Evans, 1996, p. 11). Second, I am
compelled by Seigworth’s (2011) claim that, “Lacan regarded any sustained
attention to affect as thoroughly misguided.” On the final day of his seminars in
1953–1954, Lacan responded to a question about affect in this manner: “I believe
that is a term [‘the affective’] which one must completely expunge from our
papers” (Seigworth, 2011, p. 183). I recognize and appreciate that this is a
contested position, which is why I have included Christian Lundberg’s Lacanian-
inspired view of affect, as well as the work of Joshua Gunn, in this review. For
those interested in learning more about the role of affect in Lacan’s thought,
please consult Soler’s (2015) Lacanian Affects.

(5.) Lacan (1988), for instance, argues that: “The affective is not like a special
density which would escape an intellectual accounting. It is not to be found in a
mythical beyond of the production of the symbol which would precede the
discursive formulation” (Lacan, 1988, p. 57). In other words, Lacan objects to
treating the affective realm as primary.
Affect 26

Brian L. Ott

Department of Communication Studies, Texas Tech University

Oxford University Press

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