The turn to affect
emotions without subjects, causality without demonstrable cause
pp. 259-278
in: Thomas Blake (ed), The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Probing the theoretical implications of claims, championed by Brian Massumi and Patricia Clough, that affect is physiological and pre-subjective, this chapter argues that if the personal history that comes with emotion is subsumed into affects so construed, then the subject is twice removed: once in the stripping down of emotion to affect; and again in the shift in political and social analysis from consensus to contagion. A turn to affect that entails a turn away from conventional rationality risks leaving behind concepts like the human, the subject, and agency, and so put at risk the ability to define the social and affect in ways that enable them to do meaningful work. Having effects is not quite the same as being efficacious, for ubiquitous effects threaten to make them inconsequential by mystifying causality. To address this danger, the chapter proposes a theory of affect that at least gives it the possibility of recognizing the value of further cognitive processing.
