Affect

“In contemporary cultural theory, ‘The solidity of the subject has dissolved into a concern with those processes, practices, sensations and affects that move through bodies in ways that are difficult to see, understand and investigate’, states Lisa Blackman (2012). After years of focusing on constructivist and discursive research paradigms, the need to understand what Scott Lash calls our increasingly ‘intensive’ culture – fuelled by the dissemination of global, hypercomplex and multisensual spaces,  media and everyday practices (Lash, 2010) – has stimulated an array of affect research among cultural analysts. Since Michel Foucault and his analysis of power as ‘biopower’, the ‘bio’ has been at the center of interest, when it comes to investigating forms and strategies of control, domination, resistance and dislocations. The ‘affective turn’ represents both the urge to understand how, for example, bodies are targeted and strategically modulated affectively, and how they become empowered and mobilized socially and politically (Grusin, 2010; Protevi, 2009; Knudsen and Stage, 2012).”

“All of this is enough, of course, to cause some (though decidedly not all) university-based professional historians significant anxiety. In an essay noting the dangers of historical reenactment for scholarship, Vanessa Agnew argues that reenactment can be accused of “eclipsing the past with its own theatricality.” In her formulation, as in others’, history can be overrun by the error-ridden embarrassment of the live body (here indicated as “theatricality”) reenacting the past in the present.8 Alexander Cook agrees, erecting, as if unproblematic, the classic mind/body split to suggest reenactment’s “persistent tendency to privilege a visceral, emotional engagement with the past at the expense of a more analytical treatment.”9 By this account, touch (“visceral”), and affective engagement (“emotional”), are in distinction to the “analytical.”10

In marked contrast to this view, recent scholars in queer historiography, such as Carolyn Dinshaw, Chris Nealon, Louise Fradenberg, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Dana Luciano, Heather Love, and Judith Halberstam build on materialist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic, and post-structural theories to argue for an inquiry and analysis that challenges received modern Western conventions of temporal linearity (conventions Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “modern historical consciousness” and Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen call “secular time”). Such scholars argue for the value of crossing disparate and multiple historical moments to explore the ways that past, present, and future occur and recur out of sequence in a complex crosshatch not only of reference but of affective assemblage and investment.11

Indeed, there has been something of an “affective turn” in scholarship, coming close on the heels of the “performative turn” that arguably reached an apex in the 1990s. Patricia Clough is often cited for crafting the phrase “affective turn” and she links the turn to Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi, but the phrase appeared much earlier in feminist work by Kathleen Woodward, Lauren Berlant, and Linda Nicholson.12 The affective turn is extremely interesting in regard to the fact that it seems to resist the binary still so virile in the linguistic ties of the performative turn – that is, the binary between writing or textuality on the one hand and embodied gestic repertoires of behavior on a seeming other. The affective turn resists replicating the body/text binary, but situates itself more interestingly in spaces

etween such binaries – including self/other – as much affect is situated, like atmosphere, between bodies. Thinking through affective engagement offers a radical shift in thinking about our mobilities in dealings with the binaried landscapes of social plots (such as gender, such as race), undoing the solidity of binaries in favor of mining the slip and slide of affect as negotiation. As such, affects – and feelings and emotions (though the differences in terminologies vary between scholars) – are often described via words that indicate viscosity, tactility, or a certain mobility in the way one is moved. Kathleen Stewart, following Alphonso Lingis, suggestively writes of the “jump” of affect – the way affect jumps between bodies – crosses borders of bodies, getting into and out of bodies as if there were no material border of consequence even “if only for a minute.”13 Teresa Brennan takes the jump as “transmission”

between such binaries – including self/other – as much affect is situated, like atmosphere, between bodies.”