Feeling Foreverrrr
Defending Affect Theory (4)
For this penultimate post, I’m shifting registers a bit to talk about different levels of scale. In the last post, I discussed some critiques of affect theory that strike me as not only good faith but also right. I called these “internal” critiques because they seem to me made by scholars who have some investment in affect and are interested in trying to work more productively, refining and strengthening the method rather than rejecting it outright. Here I’m going to briefly discuss one good-faith, external critique that provides an opportunity to think about questions of scale—that is, if affect is fundamentally relational, what level of social interaction do affect theorists tend to analyze?
Readers will know that I am constantly engaged with Robin James’s work, so I was tantalizingly curious when she wrote, in January, “I finally figured out what bothers me about affect theory.” And despite the subtitle of this (my) little series (defending affect theory), you will perhaps be unsurprised that I wind up largely agreeing with James’s argument. I think it would also be interesting/productive if we had ended up disagreeing, but alas, I can’t do it. Instead, I want to chime in as it were and talk about where my mind goes from there.
Skipping (for the sake of this post) a lot of valuable political philosophy (which you shouldn’t), James winds up here:
Reading Leys alongside Spivak and Ranciere suggests that the ideological function of affect theory in the mid-to-late 1990s was to valorize private individual experience over Vertreutung-as-transformational-class-consciousness.
As I read it, this critique follows a common line about affect theory, the line that Anna Kornbluh takes as a given: in seeking to better understand the texture of life experience, affect theorists inadvertently lose themselves in myopia. Extrapolating the affective texture of everyday life, or music performance, or (or or or)…requires a quasi-phenomenological investigation that endlessly circles around how things feel—and because we can’t know how things feel to other people (and because affect as a methodological orientation tends to encourage experiments of all kinds, including experiments in writing), the scholarship gets conflated with autotheory.
This has always stuck me as a bit odd in part because as true as it is that affect theorists like Kathleen Stewart are concerned with subjective experience, they are as often concerned with what that experience reveals about the limits of personal perception, the edge at which affect bleeds over into something beyond cognition. This is the point with which Leys takes issue (because it implies the idea that affects exist independently of us); but it is not something that stops off at noting how things feel to me and me alone. It’s a bit like suggesting that identity politics is problematic because it treats everyone as an individual atom that solipsistically and selfishly prioritizes their own view of the world. The entire point of identity politics as originally conceived was that groups of people share experiences on account of structural conditions, and that it was important to attend to those experiences insofar as they are systematically overlooked by those who experience life without such frictions.
But rather than digging into affective accounts based in individual experience and looking there for some larger implications, what I want to do here is ask the simple question: are there affect theories that are explicitly and from the jump concerned with social dynamics at the scale of the collective?
Structures of Feeling
Though cursorily defined in an essay about something else entirely,1 Raymond Williams’s evocative phrasing has inspired generations of critical theorists to explore how it is that emotional responses sediment themselves into certain patterns, genres, or structures (as he put it)—affective architecture that doesn’t so much determine how people will feel about things as it does condition our responses to events in certain ways, some more than others. And this is where we finally get to Berlant.
Throughout their career, Lauren Berlant tried to understand the affective attachments undergirding our large-scale cultural genres, especially fantasies like the American Dream that were (as they famously put it) “cruelly” optimistic insofar as they both kept alive a dormant hope for the future (animating continued living) and insofar as that hope, bent towards such a specific purpose, turns out to be toxic and damaging for most who harbor it.
Here’s a little excerpt from a project I’m working on:
This also means that fantasy is powerful, and capable of causing great harm. If we are what we pretend to be, there are many cultural forces pressuring us to make sure we aspire only to narrow, consistent versions of one another. “We must be careful about what we pretend to be” because our fantasies are always caught up in the wider world—choosing which to indulge and which to dismiss is a decision with political implications.
Nobody understood this connection better than Lauren Berlant, who teased out its contours in (among other places) a small but heavy book called Desire/Love. There, Berlant complicates fantasy by talking about it in psychoanalytic terms. As an expression of our unconscious desires, fantasy isn’t so much a fiction based in the real world or a story we tell about what we hope will happen. Instead, it’s more like the “setting for desire’s enactment,” the scenes in real life where we play-act how we’ve learned a certain kind of narrative is supposed to go.
Fantasy explains how the rom-com informs romance in the real world: men buy flowers and make grand gestures because that’s the pop-cultural (and therefore omnipresent) image through which we internalize what counts as love. Women often aspire to white weddings for the same reasons. Understanding fantasy, for Berlant, is all about tracing the pull of desire from the unconscious mind out into the very generic conventions that we use to ground and express those desires—even as the conventions themselves attempt to “sanitize” what we feel.
US culture is saturated by examples of uninterrogated desires expressing themselves in generic forms that pass for unique achievements, from HGTV’s propaganda about the ideal American home to internalized clichés that see aging white men splashing out on red convertibles. But perhaps the easiest example of what Berlant means by “sanitization” here is heterosexual love’s dominant mode, the courtship/dating—>engagement—>marriage—>baby shower/gender reveal—>suburban nuclear family pipeline. We know we’re supposed to enact in these rituals before we know if we want to, making it difficult to parse whether any eventual participation on our part represents a desire that’s authentically our own.
Berlant is fascinated by the working of repetition, the idea that culture can affirm for us both that we are somehow unique and paradoxically that our unique desires deserve to achieve the very same ends that everyone else also pursues. With this in mind, fantasy might sound a different kind of cautionary tale, one that warns us not about unachievable delusions but the dangerous and all too probable tendency for our psychic unresolvedness to prefer any foothold it can find, regardless of form or content. Too often what this means is that we pursue the very same fantasies everyone else does, the ones being manufactured by corporations for us to divert our energy into.
As you can see here, what compels me about Berlant’s work is how it’s able to theorize structures of feeling based on affective cues that can’t be located in empirical data because they are connected to the unconscious mind, to the psychoanalytic concerns that I have always dreaded considering, but which Berlant never wholly abandons. This is an affect theory dedicated not so much to deconstructing ideology as reassembling a world, showing the social and material factors that make sense out of (I suppose we could crudely say “explain”) how people get attached to things: concepts, activities, genres, rituals, social life, all of it, no matter how contradictory.
Here’s a quippy thought: ideology theory requires coherence of some kind. Attachment works just fine with incoherence. And because most of social life under capitalism is contradictory, affect is more honest about the ways by which social processes build worlds in common.
Part of my interest in affect is about how people get attached to concepts in the way they get attached to lovers: how people take abstractions extremely personally and how they throw themselves into things without a plan or ideology – sometimes it’s ideological in the sense that people throw themselves into things they have learned they should throw themselves into, but often it’s inventive. And that’s why you have to know about affect because something makes you do something while not knowing why you did it. My interest was in discovering how we register affect as a kind of belated experience. That’s why I also work on genre because genres are spaces where problems of causality are also reflected on and disturbed.
We need language for the actions we take that aren’t necessarily thought-through. We need some way of accounting for attachments that exceed our ability to articulate. This is what affect does at the level of the social, and it’s what Berlant’s body of work gives us.
Big Feelings
What I try to bring to the table might be properly diagnosed as a reparative orientation towards this work: where Berlant is invested in constructing an image of how mainstream culture works to tie people around ideas that may harm them (not to mention the rest of us), I am trying to do the same thing in what we might have once called “subcultural” spaces. I want to tie together the disparate elements that make up an affective structure (Berlant thought about “sentimentality” for example—I’m thinking about “big feelings”) within a particular social orientation (or what Berlant called, an “intimate public”).
For Big Feelings, that was a queer and feminist social orientation within an indie scene—except that “scenes” as such are dissolving in our hyper-mediated, super-isolated, prohibitively-expensive and still gentrifying world. This makes affect even more useful and important: we don’t have scenes in the traditional sense anymore but we do still have intimate publics, tied together through an abstract sense of how things ought to fit together, even or especially in the face of a whole bunch of evidence that nobody with any power at all agrees with you.
For me, this is a distinct project, but it still comes out of Berlant’s thinking. “Let’s not talk about public and private anymore,” they said in a late interview; “let’s talk about intimacy, which transects public and private. The intimate is everywhere: you bring it everywhere and it circulates everywhere. It registers as intensities of attachment and recognition, inferred and explicit, that pass across people, groups and movements.”
Just listen to Berlant offer a reparative orientation of their own, however qualified:
What excited me was that, in order to look forward to life and have some access to objects to long for and that allow for pleasure, forms of life have to be built through repetition and return. And queers have no choice but to do it. They have to have neighbourhoods and other forms of mediated locales, places to go to and ars erotica, as well as developing unsaids around safety and desire that are so intense they become explicit. Queer practices bring the intimate into circulation to create spaces of intimacy in registers including, but not identical to, the register of freedom.
“Repetition and return” is what I see in bands that cover other bands, indie groups that reference the same astrological ideas or Tarot symbols or objects like lip gloss, building a world of shared sense through continued reference and reinforcement. My working with affect is not about arguing for indie rock’s counterhegemonic potential, but about painting a portrait—as nuanced and sensitive as possible—of how a group of people beset by the world carve out space within it, theorizing what it is they hoped might happen once they made it and how music plays a role in these aspirations.
Queer Phenomenology
So at the end of it, and getting back to Leys/James: I’m not sure whether I understand the difference between phenomenological accounts of personal experience and affective ones, aside from the traditions they draw on—both in terms of literature (phenomenology tends to have philosophical references, where affect has queer theory/literary ones) and in terms of writing style (again, owing to their references, phenomenology tends to read like philosophy, affect like…well, an irreducible hybrid).
That being said, both seem different from the kind of worldbuilding accounts that Berlant gives us. And perhaps this is the most consistent through-line in the queer-inflected affect theory that I use: Ahmed is a curious case that seems to straddle phenomenology (Queer Phenomenology) and affect (The Cultural Politics of Emotions); but equally true of each is that Ahmed thinks outward from personal experience. Queer Phenomenology, for example, is more than anything dedicated to understanding how bodies are directed in space precisely because spaces aren’t neutral; in other words, the room that we walk into is always a metonym for the container of our social world, the ways that social policy, political history, and economics have structured a world that many of us feel out of alignment with. This isn’t a myopic theory about how Ahmed personally walks into a room; it’s a theory that begins with her life and ends in the wider world.
Cvetkovich, too, is concerned with affective experience (in her case, trauma and therapy) that occur in queer communities precisely because the world itself is anti-queer, precisely because trauma is a social condition that is unevenly distributed and shows up disproportionately among marginalized communities. Again: the personal in Cvetkovich is consistently channeled through literature and social space, rather than circulating endlessly in a sort of hyper-individualized reverie (the caricature of an affect theorists’s posture).
Add these to Berlant and it seems to me that all three authors think with (and advance our understandings of) affect while consistently grounding the discussion in collective and social experiences, using the personal to reflect upwards rather than swirl around an eddy.2 In this, they share an identity politics with the queer and Black feminism articulated by the Combahee River Collective. Together, they give us an affect theory worth holding onto.
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Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press.
Ahmed, Sara. 2015. The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edition. Edinburgh University Press.
Berlant, Lauren and Hans Demeyer. “Lauren Berlant on Intimacy as World-Making.” Extra Extra 16. https://extraextramagazine.com/talk/lauren-berlant-on-intimacy-as-world-making/.
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press.
DiPiero, Dan. 2025. Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl. University of Michigan Press.
James, Robin. 2026. “I finally figured out what bothers me about affect theory.” its her factory newsletter, January 22.
Shank, Barry. 1994. Dissonant Identities: The Rock ‘n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Wesleyan University Press.
Also one that’s annoying to find (just get the Raymond Williams reader). Here is a block of salient text for the curious:
In principle, it seems clear that the dramatic conventions of any given period are fundamentally related to the structure of feeling in that period. I use the phrase structure of feeling because it seems to me more accurate, in this context, than ideas or general life. All the products of a community in a given period are, we now commonly believe, essentially related, although in practice, and in detail, this is not always easy to see. In the study of a period, we may be able to reconstruct, with more or less accuracy, the material life, the general social organization, and, to a large extent, the dominant ideas. It is not necessary to discuss here which, if any, of these aspects is, in the whole complex, determining; an important institution like the drama will, in all probability, take its colour in varying degrees from them all. But while we may, in the study of a past period, separate out particular aspects of life, and treat them as if they were self-contained, it is obvious that this is only how they may be studied, not how they were experienced. We examine each element as a precipitate, but in the living experience of the time every element was in solution, an inseparable part of a complex whole. And it seems to be true, from the nature of art, that it is from such a totality that the artist draws; it is in art, primarily, that the effect of the totality, the dominant structure of feeling, is expressed and embodied. To relate a work of art to any part of that observed totality may, in varying degrees, be useful; but it is a common experience, in analysis, to realize that when one has measured the work against the separable parts, there yet remains some element for which there is no external counterpart. This element, I believe, is what I have named the structure of feeling of a period, and it is only realizable through experience of the work of art itself, as a whole.
Sometimes I look at my bibliographies, which invariably begin with Ahmed, Berlant, and Cvetkovich, and think of them as the ABCs of whatever it is you might call my method. :D