Feeling Foreverrr

Defending Affect Theory (3)

This is the third post in a series on affect. (The first two are here and here; all of them will be collected here for future reference.) The whole project kicked off because of a single page of writing that sent me through the roof. But underneath my rage lived a more durable and (I hope) useful endeavor. Even though I’ve consistently used and explained my approach to affect theory, looking back at how I’ve done so, it’s clear that my understanding of and orientation towards the term have changed over a series of years; so while the purpose of this series is in some ways to track debates and divisions among those who think with/against affect, writing it has also been super helpful for clarifying exactly what I do and don’t believe (and why).

Working my way back up to where I began (that is, preparing to actually read Downing’s book), today I engage some of what I’ll call “internal” critiques. External critiques come from people like Downing, who do not and never have engaged in affective thinking. Internal critiques come from those who are invested in affect somehow, but who selectively critique its deployment from an interest in having it theorized better rather than abandoned wholesale.

Unsurprisingly, I tend to find the internal critiques infinitely more valuable and good-faith than the external ones. I’m just not sure exactly how dismissing the importance of feelings is a position that anyone could take seriously. Regardless of how they strike you as an object of study, it’s undeniable that they matter—that they affect decision-making, are implicated in the construction of hegemonic blocks, ideological conjunctures, and behaviors on both an interpersonal and collective level. That being said, I am open to the idea that there are good-faith, external critiques of affect theory in part because—as too often gets lots in these conversations—there is no one type of affect theory.

I am still hunting for some good-faith external critiques. I have at least one, but I could frankly use your help here. Much easier to find have been the internal critiques that point out limitations, flaws, or betrayed promises in the affect theories we’ve got, and point a way towards a more productive future. Along the way, because these critiques are often quite careful, they help draw out or taxonomize different schools of thought within affect theory.¹ This is what concerns me today.

Consistencies

Before we get to some of the major divergences, I think it would be helpful to talk about consistencies. What are some of the precepts about which affect theorists tend to agree? As Chris Ingraham puts it,

The Spinoza-Deleuze-Massumi strain that I work through is different from the psychological lineage of Freud-Tomkins-Sedgwick, or the activist-feminist one of Cvetkovich-Ahmed-Pedwell, which is different from whatever it would look like to include Innis-McLuhan-Peters, or the approaches of so-and-so and such-and-such, on and on. But the differences are seldom entirely different. In other words, even beyond putting “affects” into language, representing or classifying “affect theory” as a somewhat coherent and stable area of study still can’t get around the colliding, overlapping, situationally convergent and divergent modes and histories of doing affect theory, which itself attests to affect’s immunity to capture and regulation.

Well, I dunno about immunity…but nevertheless, in its language of collision, overlap, and action, this quote evokes a few themes central to affect theory, which, in my own summation, are as follows:

• The first is right there in Ingraham’s last sentence: affect shifts its focus from ontology (is) to process (does). This is one reason that affect theorists who use the autonomous hypothesis to bleed over into new materialism are confounding to me (and more on that below). The shift from is to does flows easily into point 2:

• An emphasis on the in-betweenness, the both at once, the indistinction of ostensibly distinct realms, the space where categories break down or contaminate one another. In other words, an insistence on the tangle of situations, of their full complexity. Affect is understood to not exist except between two entities that are affecting each other in a context; that means they are inherently relational, and make a mess of category.

• The still persistent sense, perhaps based on the autonomous hypothesis, that a full spectrum of feeling (emotions/affects/sensations) exists at once within and beyond language. In other words, while ideology and worldview and semiotic meaning-making are always operative (and therefore affect how we experience/interpret feelings), those feelings themselves are not reducible to our own conscious ability to articulate what they’re doing to us. In some ways, this is kind of a basic philosophical problem: you can’t know my experience of ennui—just your own. I can do nothing to fully capture in language my phenomenological experience, which means that on some level, that experience exceeds (even as it is affected by) signification.

• Getting back to the “immunity” question, affect theorists tend to treat affect as fundamentally un-graspable. We are approximating it, talking about it sidelong. This should, at its best, lend our analyses a degree of humility and and tentative, speculative quality. The questions I like best are more more often around “what can we learn if this is how it goes” rather than “AHA I have discovered how it goes.”²

Splits

If you’re looking for a breakdown of affect theory’s predominant strains, you could do worse than starting with Marta Figlerowicz’s, “Affect Theory Dossier.” Here, Figlerowicz tracks two major divergences among various schools of thought, the first, in my view, being the most consequential: the question of whether or not, to what extent, and how affects might be pre-conscious. I’ll focus on this debate below, because it seems to me that the second split (concerning affect’s “aesthetic, scientific, therapeutic, or philosophical usefulness”) seems to me settled in the sense that few disagree it radically depends on context.

The idea that affects might be pre-conscious is largely associated with Brian Massumi’s influential work, Parables for the Virtual. It essentially makes the claim that affects are distinct from emotions and feelings insofar as the former strike our bodies in a manner that is somatically irreducible to a given social genre. In this tripartite model, emotions are quintessentially social (we know, on some level, what feelings are when they happen to us because we’ve already seen sadness and lovesickness and grief represented in our culture and therefore have labels to which our emotional experiences can be affixed and through which we can sort out our own iterations of shared experience). Feelings then are personal (since we experience everything singular ways).

Affects, unlike the others, are pre-conscious, and so may or may not line up with feelings or emotions at a given moment; in this understanding, affects transpire before the moment in question, before they can be grounded in our mind/body. Like the quintessential hand on a hot plate or the shoulders that jump in response to a slammed door, affects refer to the forces of one body on another—that, and nothing more. Because the semantic content, interpretation, and processing comes after we experience a given affect, affects have been understood on a certain level as independent of us—or in Massumi’s language, “autonomous.”

This understanding has been, in my view, both the most infuriating for critics of affect theory and the most walked-back by those who actually use it. The autonomy theory, in my view, is responsible for charges that affects are (for example) hopelessly vague. If affects aren’t emotions and necessarily precede the human brain, what are we really talking about? Instinctual, base firing of synapse? How can we ever account for such a thing?

It could be argued that Massumi’s point was to throw up a caution, rather than to champion the radical possibilities of something we can’t really ever get our heads around. And while I don’t necessarily buy that argument (Massumi’s claims are after all rather grand), it’s clear that many critics stop engaging in good faith once they discover that affects are in some ways imprecise. Rather than take this vagueness as a caution towards epistemic humility, critics of affect charge that it enables sloppy or ideologically driven theorizing—affects can do whatever theorists claim they can do because they are impossible to investigate. This charge has never been very convincing to me for a really simple reason: while this might be true in a given case, it’s not universally so. As with every other method, there are strong and weak deployments, sloppy and careful scholarship.

The charge of vagueness is also what gets us to the critiques of poetic writing, because both are imprecise. This is why I spent so much time thinking about Kornluh’s arguments: though she targets “autotheory” rather than “affect theory,” her critique effectively treats the writing associated with both as a form of seduction, what I take to be an almost overtly feminized and illusory pursuit of pleasure at the expense of hard, masculine reason.

Where this is implicit in Kornbluh, Downing makes this explicit, suggesting that the solution to affect’s inherent wishywashiness is to appropriate masculine reason for everybody (else’s) benefit. I think this gendered reading—which reinforces the women=emotion/men=rationality binary—continues to be hyper-relevant, and is a chief reason for my refusal to abandon affect. For after all it has been queer theorists who have immediately and consistently expressed an interest in affect theory, as Lauren Berlant points out.³

The autonomous hypothesis is also responsible for another charge against affect theory, and this one I am indeed concerned about: the way that “autonomous” affects can be used to reinforce new materialist ontologies. I’m not going to take us too far away into OOO or anything; but because this is after all a music newsletter, I’ll detour slightly to suggest that the new materialist impulse shows up in a lot of sound studies work that’s interested in treating sound as separate from music. In other words, in the same way that the autonomous hypothesis pits affect against emotion, new materialist sound studies map music’s vibrational force as distinct from sound’s signifying capacity. This approach is most clearly discussed (and skewered) in Marie Thompson’s tremendous article, “Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies.” Because I agree with her in every way, I also criticize affect theories that lean in this direction. It’s a critique that I fully endorse.

Yet, the precognitive hypothesis and its associated lineages are ultimately only part of the story; even when internal critiques rightly point out dead-ends for good theory, the affect theorists I value moved on from the autonomous hypothesis almost immediately.

As early as 2008, Sara Ahmed was lambasting new materialism, and in 2014, people like Margaret Wetherill were saying “It has been seriously unhelpful to posit a generic category of autonomous affect (applied to relations between all bodies human and non-human)” because “It is so obvious that semiosis and affect are inextricably intertwined, not just in the production of ‘atmospheres’, spaces and relations but in their effects and in subsequent patterns of engagement.”

Beyond unhelpful, it’s also most probably wrong. As Ruth Leys shows in meticulous detail, there are good reasons to be skeptical of not only the scientific studies that Massumi and Sedgwick relied upon in order to make their claims, but also the way that each interpreted these studies. Though I agree with Carolyn Pedwell’s critiques of Leys’s book-length treatment, the latter’s earlier article, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” articulates important errors in some of affect theory’s most canonical works.

Even more than the autonomous hypothesis, Leys goes after Sedgwick for rather uncritically championing a “basic emotions” model that remains influential in neurobiology despite being wholly unconvincing. Massumi also runs afoul of good biology when he inadvertently reimposes a mind/body split through his autonomous reading of affect. But Sedgwick, Frank, and (their endorsement of) Tompkins are the real culprits in my reading:

The result of Tomkins’s approach is to suggest that the affects are only contingently related to objects in the world; our basic emotions operate blindly because they have no inherent knowledge of, or relation to, the objects or situations that trigger them. (Leys 2011, 437)

For many critical humanists as well as some neurobiologists, this amounts to an untenable essentialism. As social psychologist Magaret Wetherell writes,

Psychobiologists are reluctant to cede much ground to the unfamiliar territory of the social, but the consistent picture emerging is of the plasticity and flexibility of affective responses, the immense amount of cultural and developmental learning involved in complex interaction with any possible innate response tendencies (e.g. Lewis and Liu, 2011), and the impossibilities of endorsing a kind of Darwinian simplicity about ‘lower’ emotions and ‘higher’ cognition… ( Wetherell 2014, 146)

For Wetherell and Leys, new paradigms are needed to interpret how affective experiences are entangled with contexts. “Affective activity is a form of social practice,” which is why, for Wetherell, Sara Ahmed gets the closest to articulating an accurate (read: nuanced and complex) account of feeling.

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed tracks the “stickiness” of emotions, which arise between people and the outside world, yet also adhere and coalesce around certain objects, scenes, and locations. Famously, the “happy object,” for Ahmed, is one that accrues sentimental value through repetition and return, generating in us positive affects not due to some inherent quality (think of your beloved rock collection) but because of the time we spend with them. “These points,” says Wetherell, “are unarguable.”

In social psychological terms, affect is distributed. It is an in-between, relational phenomenon. Subjects cannot be disentangled from objects, or individuals from their situations. This is why a concept like social practice has such power and persuasive force. Ahmed’s next theoretical move, though, draws what I see as the wrong conclusion from this entanglement. She goes on to isolate emotion, reifying it from the total practical context of social action and engagement. Emotion becomes the main driver and focus in her account. (158)

Where Wetherell parts with Ahmed is, it seems to me, about a matter of emphasis. For Wetherell, Ahmed’s focus on emotions reifies affect as a kind of “mystical” force—neither here nor there. Wetherell instead wants us to always keep our focus on the people and actions responsible for the affects in the first place.⁴ This, it seems to me, is a rather odd critique of a book called The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Yet it’s perfectly fair insofar as Wetherell is discussing that book through the question of how it does or doesn’t advance the field of affect theory writ-large.

I am in fully agreement with Ahmed (and therefore, to a degree, Wetherell). I have always aligned myself with Ahmed and Cvetkovich most specifically, but Pedwell’s wonderful book Revolutionary Routines resonates with my first book in many ways. Between these authors and Lauren Berlant (subject of my next post), there is a queer-theoretical perspective here that approaches affect with all the insights of another thoroughly caricatured and unfairly maligned school of thought: poststructuralist literary theory.⁵

I’m not going to to detour us into a defense of either poststructuralism (you can follow that last footnote if you’re interested) or queer theory (which is coming under new and interesting fire from within its own house). For those of us already/still here: where does that leave us? Wetherell says,

There are no neat and easy dividing lines between physical affect and discourse, or between discursive capture and affective capture, or between discursive enlistment and affective enlistment. Rather, very complicated and mostly seamless feedbacks occur between accounts, interpretations, body states, further interpretations, further body states, etc. in recognizable flowing and changing episodes. (152)

But if affect can’t be cleanly disentangled from discourse and material, how do we study it? Moreover, what’s the point in trying? For one thing, I believe that there’s a big difference between claiming that affects are irreducible to linguistic signification and saying that affects are independent of it. Being irreducible means that something about given aesthetic experience can’t be captured in language—famously, in affective parlance, it “escapes.” What if we were to pay attention to that which flees, and then build backwards from there?

Thoughts on the Way Out

For me this comes down to a question of negation and then addition: first, what’s not captured by the stuff we can account for, but which we can somehow perceive as notable in any case? Second, how do we locate, from that gap, other factors that might contribute to our ability to perceive?

Recently, I was thinking about this with a music video I wanted to write about.⁶ My claim was that interpreting it well required thinking in excess of genre—not because genre (insert “language” or “consciousness” for your affective parallels) is the wrong or outmoded thing, but because it’s not sufficient on its own for understanding the work that this music does.

According to a genre perspective (a term with its own dense history), this is a kind of instrumental, improvised music that we might call “jazz.” How I know this is not just about musical style, but also social factors and value systems—what kind of label the music is released on, how the musicians interact, what instruments they’re playing, and so on. Genre itself is a nuanced and multifaceted concept, which led one peer reviewer to implicitly ask, Why do we even need affect here?

For me, there’s something that genre on its own doesn’t quite capture, which is that this music is also communicating—on the level of feeling—in a way that most improvised music, most jazz music, does not. Unlike the affective orientation most associated with those genres (improvisatory spontaneity, interaction, lyrical sophistication, and perhaps instrumental virtuosity) this video communicates a sense of ambiguity, vulnerability, and introspection that is much more aligned with indie genres than improvised ones. My claim is that it performs “indie affects” in ways that can’t be grasped by music notation or stylistic analysis. Affects in this sense cohere from genre formations but also transcend them, linking one home base with another, and confusing things along the way.

The track feels (more than it sounds) like indie music to me. But why? To build back up from this negation, I try to piece together how I understand the music to be communicating qualities like introspection and ambiguity, which necessarily requires thinking visually, sonically, and socially (e.g. by linking these musicians to the indie scenes in which they participate). None of this is “locatable” anywhere in one single material factor but emerges in conjunction with all of them—not to mention the fact that in order to hear it, you have to be conversant with history, convention, and the world-building practices of a scene. One must, as Berlant so often reminds us, become intimate and familiar with the terms that sensory worlds use to construct themselves. That kind of worldbuilding what I most often turn to affect to help me think through, and it is where I’ll pick up in the next round.

—

Ahmed, Sara. 2008. “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the `New Materialism.’”European Journal of Women’s Studies 15 (1): 23–39.

Ahmed, Sara. 2015. The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edition. Edinburgh University Press.

Berlant, Lauren and Jordan Greenwald. 2012. “Affect in the End Times: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 2 (2): 71–89.

Downing, Lisa. 2026. Against Affect. University of Nebraska Press.

Figlerowicz, Marta. 2012. “Affect Theory Dossier: An Introduction.” Qui Parle 20 (2): 3–18.

Hofman, Anna. 2020. “The romance with affect: sonic politics in a time of political exhaustion.” Culture, Theory, and Critique 61 (2–3): 1–24.

Ingraham, Chris. 2023. “To Affect Theory.” Capacious e (1). 10.22387/CAP2022.76.

Kornbluh, Anna. 2024. Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Verso.

Massumi, Brian. 2001/2021. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press.

Pedwell, Carolyn. 2019. “Affect theory’s alternative genealogies – Review Symposium on Leys’s The Ascent of Affect.” History of the Human Sciences 33 (2): 134–142.

Shank, Barry. 1992. “A Reply to Steven Watts’s ‘Idiocy.’” American Quarterly 44 (3): 439–448.

Thompson, Marie. 2017. “Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies.” Parallax 23 (3): 266–282. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339967.

Wetherell, Margaret. 2014. “Trends in the Turn to Affect: A Social Psychological Critique.” Body & Society 21(2): 139–166.

Wetherell, Margaret and David Beer. “The future of affect theory: An interview with Margaret Wetherell.” Theory, Culture, & Society, October 15, 2014. https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/blog/the-future-of-affect-theory-an-interview-with-margaret-wetherell.

1. What we’re not doing here, you’ll notice, is defining “affect” or “affect theory” in any kind of rigorous manner. Partially, that’s because I view its essential irreducibility as one of its most important consistencies. Partially, that’s because others have already done this (daunting) work. If you’d appreciate a refresher, I’d recommend this or this.

2. This part seems to me particularly infuriating for political economists, sociologists, new materialists, and others who are wedded to the idea that scholarship’s one and only function is to prove how things fit together. Often, it seems to me, they want you to believe that, too.

3. “The reason so many queer theorists are interested in it, I think, is because while one can’t intend an affect, one can become attentive to the nimbus of affects whose dynamics move along and make worlds, situations, and environments” (Berlant 2012).

4. In Wetherell’s own words: “Once again, affect becomes uncanny. What human social actors (always in the process of formation) do to themselves, to their objects, and to each other fades from view as the movement of affect becomes the dominant actor.”

5. You may read, for example, Barry Shank’s reply to Steven Watts—in which he writes that “Watts insists that “poststructuralist ‘radicalism,’ for all its flashes of insight and illuminating techniques, ultimately offers an agenda for academic narcissism and self-satisfaction”—and think of Kornbluh’s nearly identical charges against autotheory.

6. Watch out for “Jazz as Indie Music” in the fall issue of the Journal of Jazz Studies. Or don’t. (I’ll remind you.)