Cited by T. Quick, 'Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices, 1897-1922', Science in Context 30 (4), pp. 423-474.
Description:

' Canales' concerns mesh well with a body of work which, as Ruth Leys notes, has become especially prominent in conjunction with appeals to biology as a transhistorical mode of explanation (Leys 2011, 441-443).'

 

Relevant passage from Leys:

'Thrift’s reference to the dynamics of birth and creativity suggests that, in embracing biology, many of today’s affect theorists hope to avoid the charge of falling into a crude reductionism by positioning themselves at a distance from the geneticism and determinism that were a target of the previous phase of cultural theory. Instead, they seek to recast biology in dynamic, energistic, nondeterministic terms that emphasize its unpredictable and potentially emancipatory qualities (see “BG,” p. 33). [note: 'For a discussion of the influence of ideas about chaos and complexity, associated with the work of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, on the theorization of affect, see Clough, introduction to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, pp. 1–33.'] Moreover, drawing on writings by Lucretius, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and other dissenting philosophers of nature, especially two recent figures, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, many of these theorists make a distinction between affect and emotion in terms that, again at first sight, seem different from those of the Basic Emotions paradigm. [note: 'Probably the most influential figure in the rise of the new affect theory is Deleuze, but it is invariably an open question as to the accuracy with which one or another affect theory represents his views. I shall leave this question to the side in order to focus on the claims made by the theorists under consideration here.'] Massumi, widely credited with emphasizing that distinction, defines affect as a nonsignifying, nonconscious “intensity” disconnected from the subjective, signifying, functional-meaning axis to which the more familiar categories of emotion belong. “In the absence of an asignifying philosophy of affect,” Massumi writes, “it is all too easy for received psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the considerable deconstructive work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism. Affect is most often used loosely as a synonym for emotion. But . . . emotion and affect - if affect is intensity - follow different logics and pertain to different orders” (PV, p. 27). [note: 'Massumi continues: “An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized” (PV, p. 28). On the basis of this distinction between affect and emotion, Massumi states that the affective “is not about empathy or emotive identification, or any form of identification for that matter” (PV, p. 40).'] Similarly, Thrift rejects or sets aside approaches that “tend to work with a notion of individualised emotions (such as are often found in certain forms of empirical sociology and psychology)” in favor of approaches that posit “broad tendencies and lines of force” and in which, adhering to an “‘inhuman’” or “‘transhuman’” framework, “individuals are generally understood as effects of the events to which their body parts (broadly understood) respond and in which they participate” (“IF,” p. 60). Likewise, Shouse follows Massumi by remarking that “it is important not to confuse affect with feelings and emotions... Affect is not a personal feeling. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social,... and affects are pre-personal... An affect is a nonconscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential... Affect cannot be fully realised in language... because affect is always prior to and/or outside consciousness... Affect is the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience. The body has a grammar of its own that cannot be fully captured in language” (“FEA,” ¶¶1, 5). [note: 'In many texts, the concept of affect is tied to a “nonrepresentationalist” ontology that defines affect in terms derived from Spinoza as the capacity to affect and be affected. Characterized in this way, affect is then seen to function as a layer of preconscious “priming to act” such that embodied action is a matter of being attuned to and coping with the world without the input of rational content.']

The claim that affect is a formless, unstructured, nonsignifying force or “intensity” that escapes the categories of the psychologists suggests that Tomkins’s or Ekman’s or Damasio’s talk about the existence of six or seven or eight or nine structured, evolved categories of innate emotions is incompatible with the views of writers such as Massumi who espouse Spinozist-Deleuzean ideas about affect. Yet it is striking how compatible Deleuze-inspired definitions of affect as a nonlinguistic, bodily “intensity” turn out to be with the Tomkins-Ekman paradigm. To take just one example, Thrift states that he wants to avoid the emotion categories of the empirical psychologists and social scientists. But he then proceeds to draw on four “translations” of affect that include references to the ideas of Tomkins, Ekman, and Damasio - the last of whom, in spite of a declared Spinozism and antidualism that makes his work especially attractive to many cultural critics, follows the Tomkins-Ekman paradigm in his approach to the study of the basic emotions (see “IF,” pp. 61–64). [note: 'Similarly, Shouse clarifies the distinction between affect and emotion by citing the work of both Ekman and Tomkins; see “FEA,” ¶¶1, 4.']

The regularity with which Deleuze-inspired affect theorists find a use for such scientific approaches to the emotions suggests that however complex the negotiations between such theorists and neuroscientists are said to be, and however those negotiations are described—as involving a renewed “conversation” between the humanities and neurosciences or as involving a more inventive and shameless form of borrowing by the humanities from the sciences. [note: 'Connolly states that his aim is not to “derive the logic of cultural activity” from the neurosciences but to “pursue conversations between cultural theory and neuroscience” (N, p. 9); Massumi declares that the point is to “borrow from science in order to make a difference in the humanities,” a process he also characterizes as a kind of “piracy” or “poaching” (PV, pp. 21, 20).'] - what fundamentally binds together the new affect theorists and the neuroscientists is their shared anti-intentionalism. My claim is that whatever differences of philosophical-intellectual orientation there may be among the new affect theorists themselves, and between them and the neuroscientists whose findings they wish to appropriate (differences do of course exist), the important point to recognize is that they all share a single belief: the belief that affect is independent of signification and meaning. In short, I propose that although at first sight the work of Tomkins - or Ekman, or Damasio - might appear to be too reductive for the purposes of those cultural theorists indebted to Deleuzean ideas about affect, there is in fact a deep coherence between the views of both groups. That coherence concerns precisely the separation presumed to obtain between the affect system on the one hand and intention or meaning or cognition on the other. For both the new affect theorists and the neuroscientists from whom they variously borrow - and transcending differences of philosophical background, approach, and orientation - affect is a matter of autonomic responses that are held to occur below the threshold of consciousness and cognition and to be rooted in the body. What the new affect theorists and the neuroscientists share is a commitment to the idea that there is a gap between the subject’s affects and its cognition or appraisal of the affective situation or object, such that cognition or thinking comes “too late” for reasons, beliefs, intentions, and meanings to play the role in action and behavior usually accorded to them. The result is that action and behavior are held to be determined by affective dispositions that are independent of consciousness and the mind’s control.' (441-443)