Is your mind separate from your body? Do you have a feeling of two-ness? Or is your mind part of your body?

Or is your mind in control of your body? It seems intuitive, but most appeals to modern science refute this.

The mind is made up of neurons, synapsis, chemical compounds – in other words, matter.

So is the mind/body divide simply an illusion?

Affect Theory is, in part, an attempt to overcome this duality. To synthesise the body and the mind.

The idea of affects has a history that goes back to Spinoza’s Ethics, published in 1677. But the affective turn – a more thorough engagement with what affects are – came in the mid-90s from philosophers Brian Massumi and Eve Sedgwick.

Affect Theory can, in part, be seen as a move away from the linguistic turn of the mid-20th century, central to which was the idea that language was the primary way we understand the world, and so an engagement with how language is constructed, used and changes should be fundamental to theories about human nature or social institutions.

Affect Theory can be seen as bringing biology, the material world, and the body back into the picture, and of uniting scientific and social theory.

To start, we might think about how we suppose that the body and mind interact.

At its simplest, the body sends signals to the mind through its senses, its sensations.

To borrow a few terms from affect theorists, affects are like forces, they are prior to intentions, autonomic, pre-subjective and visceral.

They are the intensities that move us. Affects are a way of theorising about the social forces that we encounter that might trigger the body to respond in a certain way.

For Brian Masumi, affect precedes emotional states. ‘Affect is not a personal feeling’, he writes. ‘Affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity’.

Affects ‘cannot be fully realised in language… because affect is always prior to/outside of consciousness’.

In the introduction to one of the foundational texts on Affect Theory, Parables for the Virtual, Massumi writes that, ‘when I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels’.

The book looks at the ramifications of this simple observation: that the movement of the body produces change in the world. Our actions have an affect on other bodies.

The eardrum, for example, is affected by vibrations in the air. A wall affects our body by stopping its progress. Culturally, words and walls affect us, producing possibilities and limitations.

In turn, we produce our own words, our own walls, that affect others’ bodies and then, potentially, minds.

The way we affect and are affected has to be culturally mediated so that we can make sense of the world. We have to have shared expectations of where walls go, what words mean, what morals and politeness and norms and politics are. Everything affects us in a certain way.

One consequence of thinking like this, though, is that it leaves the mind as a slave to outside forces. We are interpellated subjects – that means we are constructed, produced, defined in a certain way by forces outside of ourselves.

The question for many affect theorists is, ‘How do we bring change and potential back into the picture?’.

How, Massumi asks, ‘does a body perform its way out of a definitional framework that is not only responsible for its very “construction”, but seems to prescript very possible signifying and countersignifying move as a selection from a repertoire of possible permutations on a limited set of predetermined terms?’.

The way out of this is to conceive of the real material world and abstract ideas or minds as the same thing. What Deleuze calls ‘real but abstract’.

Think of them as a part of each other.

Take the movement of the arm and hand. It is real, it is bodily, it is matter. It is affect in certain ways. But in every moment it also has abstract possibilities. It has a number of positions it can move to. It might hit a wall and be limited. It is also defined by cultural abstractions: wedding rings, gestures, how words are written. Material in the world is never just material; it is always something more. All of these things are part of the potentiality of the hand.

It is real but abstract. It is body and mind.

Traditionally, when we think abstractly, we might come up with ideas. National Identity is… Liberalism is… This plant is…

Is implies stability, something frozen in time. But if we think back to how the hand is both material and abstract, then abstract ideas must also be material, and must imply concrete movements and possibilities. National identity can…? Liberalism can…? Plants can…

Massumi argues that because abstraction and matter are the same, and that matter is always in movement, we should start from process rather than signification or coding.

Okay, this may sound both unnecessarily esoteric and complicated. And you might be thinking, so what? But the way you start theorising about things like national identity and liberalism has huge consequences for how we think about them, and how the ideas proliferate into other disciplines, into journalism and the news, how change itself occurs.

Everything that affects us materially presupposes a range of possibilities, and every possibility presupposes a range of affects.

Massumi argues that instead of the duality of nature-culture, or mind-body, or nature-nurture, we need a continuum of each.

We don’t need social construction, we need social production.

So fundamentally, for Massumi Affect Theory is a way to think about ideas and matter at the same time. Every position of matter in space and time presumes a range of abstract possibilities. The title of the book, Parables for the Virtual, refers to Deleuze’s concept of the virtual.

In her book Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick begins by almost reversing Massumi’s starting point.

Sedgwick also thinks of Affect Theory as overcoming the dualistic divide between mind and body, but starts by looking at how we’re affected by language.

Sedgwick begins with a discussion on performative utterances, a concept by the philosopher of language, J.L. Austin, that hold that language doesn’t just describe the world, but also creates the world.

Sentences like, ‘the chair is red’, are different to utterances like, ‘I promise’, ‘I name’, or, ‘I give to you’.

The latter actually do something: the language itself has an affect on the world.

Philosopher Judith Butler famously applied performative utterances to gender, arguing that gender itself was performed – that it constructed and affected the world.

‘A woman does X’, or ‘should behave in Z way’, have the appearance of describing what a person thinks, or some authentic reality about the world. But these utterances actually construct, produce and perform gender. They are affective.

Language used in the news, in politics, in books, both the words themselves and the structural way they are used, create who we are – create our identities.

Utterances, affect, language, codes, norms, all have the effect of constructing subjects in one way and automatically excluding and repressing others. They produce rather than eliminate. They disguise themselves as natural, giving the appearance of being voluntary.

This doesn’t mean that’s all we are, though.

If we apply Massumi’s logic of the arm and hand being real but abstract – having possibilities in every moment – then language has a number of possibilities confined within each configuration. We reconstruct, reorganise and untap the potential within these utterances.

Repeating something you read in a newspaper is a good example of this. It’s not saying you can’t have another opinion, its just saying here’s an opinion for you to repeat. It affects you.

Sedgwick wants to apply this logic to objects as well as language. Like the hand that is always more than what it is, Sedgwick invokes material, texture, that is also always more than what it is.

It has a context. It invokes softness or safety, hardness or danger, textures have a history. Fashion and clothing has a history.

Jumpers invoke warmness, fires, comfort. The way we experience materials in the world says more than it appears in the surface.

Affect Theory is still in its infancy, and in many ways, especially for Massumi and Sedgwick, thinking about affect is as much an exploration and experiment, a literary pursuit, as it’s a definable theory.

But importantly it’s about bringing movement into theory, to moving away from simply thinking about language and social construction, two major themes of humanities departments for a few decades.

It is important to think about fluidity, motion, material, biology, language – and how bodies and minds are both moved and move.

Sources

Melissa Greg and Gregory J. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader

Patricia Ticineti Clough with Jean Halley, The Affective Turn

Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling

Ruth Leys, The Turn to Affect: A Critique