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AFFECT THEORY: Defining Affect Theory for Literary Studies

Chapter · August 2022

DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-4

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 2
AFFECT THEORY
Wendy J. Truran

Abstract: Affect theory is not a settled method nor neatly delineated discipline. It is a dynamic field
of scholarship that explores bodies, worlds, and forces that move and motivate things into rela-
tional existence. The multiplicity of conceptual arrival and departure points enrich its intellectual
vibrancy, yet the diversity of approaches can also contribute to confusion (or even conflict) over
basic questions such as, “what is affect theory and what can it do?” This chapter explores the rhi-
zomatic terrain of affect theory and offers definitions of some key terms. This introduction discusses
two major trajectories—the Spinoza/Deleuze trajectory and the Feminist/Queer/Cultural trajectory.
Each approach pays attention to, and takes account of, bodies, their capacities and potentialities,
and “thinks-with” affect in order to create encounters, interpret events, attune to this world and
embody new ones. Affect theory may refuse the singularity of an origin story but affect and literature
have always been entangled and this chapter aims to give literary scholars and those new to affect
theory a guide to the major approaches in affect theory, as well as an overview of current and emerg-
ing trajectories of thought.

Affect theory is not a settled method nor neatly delineated discipline. It is “notoriously,” and
I would add gloriously, “undisciplined” (Snaza, Animate Literacies, 1). Affect theory is a
dynamic field of scholarship with shifting inter- and intra-disciplinary approaches that pay
attention to bodies, worlds, and the forces that move and motivate them into relation and
existence. Traversing and transforming disciplines as diverse as literary, cultural, media, trans,
critical race, and disability studies and contributing to and drawing upon philosophy, psy-
chology, and feminist, political, and queer theory, there is no single overarching theory of
affect. Neither do the theories that develop have a single traceable history nor future. So much
so, that the concept of affect has “gradually accrued a sweeping assortment of philosophical/
psychological/ physiological underpinnings, critical vocabularies, and ontological pathways”
(Seigworth and Gregg, “Shimmers,” 9).1 The openness and multiplicity of conceptual arrival
and departure points contribute to its intellectual vibrancy, creating “affective bloom-spaces”
of inquiry (Seigworth and Gregg, ibid. 9).2 Yet the diversity of ways to engage with affect and
emotion can also contribute to confusion and even conflict over basic questions such as, “what
is affect theory and what does it do?”
With multiple imbricated theories, ideas, and problematics, affect theory seeks to hone,
nuance, amplify, and interrogate existing critical analysis ideas and tools and imagine and

DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-4 26
 Afect Teory

develop new ones. Generally, theorists of affect attend to the other-than-conscious forces that
make subjects and worlds, and the entangled materiality of both. A key engagement between
affect theory and literary studies is the characterization of affect theory as a critical response
to post-structuralist emphasis on linguistic models of subjectivity. Rather than considering the
body as peripheral to an understanding of consciousness, cognition, subjectivity, emotion, and
society, affect theory makes the material and visceral central to it. Affect theory asks, “what
bodies do—what they want, where they go, what they think, how they decide—and especially
how bodies are impelled by forces other than language and reason” (Schaefer, Evolution, 1,
italic in original). Seeking to understand the forces of relation that create bodies (not only
or primarily human) that enmesh and connect us to and within the world; theories of affect
emphasize an embedded and embodied relationality. Donovan Schaefer offers a succinct sum-
mation of affect theory’s scope as “an approach to history, politics, and all other aspects of
embodied life that emphasizes the role of nonlinguistic and non- or par-cognitive forces” (ibid.
1). Put simply, affect theory crosses the theoretical humanities and considers, “the sensual
qualities of being, [and] the capacity to experience the world in ways that are profoundly
relational” (Liljeström, “Affect,” 1). This means that theorists often call into question “the
taken-for-granted status of the human and the body in science, theory, literature, and media”
(Arthur, “Affect,” 1).
Though the animating logics of the field are wide-ranging, certain concerns are held
in common. Affect theories gravitate towards a set of shared concerns that encompass
questions of materiality, politics, gender, sexuality, race, and class in order to understand
and, often, change them. In this short introduction I give a brief exploration of two major
trajectories within affect theory, namely the Spinoza/Deleuze trajectory and the Feminist/
Queer/Cultural trajectory. The “blurry snapshot” that I offer will help readers understand
individual theorists from literary and cultural studies and the broader streams in which
they theorize. By necessity, many fascinating avenues of research such as affective sci-
ences or the history of emotion will be given short shrift here, but some are discussed in
other chapters in this volume.3 Often posited as a critical response to post-structuralism’s
overemphasis on linguistic models of subjectivity, affect theorists are concerned that “a
whole range of intellectual questions can be thought as bypassed or lost if the focus is
solely on the semantic and symbolic” (Liljeström, “Affect,” 3). Yet many affect theorists
emerge from the post-structuralist tradition of feminist and literary studies and look to
affect as a means of more fully incorporating biology or embodiment (existing bodies
rather than The Body of post-structuralism) and language and culture. For many affect
theorists literature and language are foundational, either as a problem to address or as
an object of analysis. My discussion focuses on the theorists who draw on literature to
construct their theories, or who are literature “friendly” in terms of the ideas and concerns
with which they engage.

Defning Afect(s)
The definition of affect can be mercurial, taking its shape from the intellectual and disci-
plinary commitments of the scholar.4 I will linger on definitions as they help to identify and
describe the emerging contours of contemporary affect theory. Many theorists draw on phi-
losopher Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics and use his work to form a basic definition of affect as the
capacity to affect and be affected.5 Gilles Deleuze, touchstone philosopher for one trajectory
of affect theory, draws on Spinoza to define affect, as “prepersonal intensity corresponding
to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another implying an augmentation

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or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (Thousand Plateaus, xvi). Key here is that the
force of affect is manifest in the passage from one state to another. Similarly, Seigworth and
Gregg define affect as, “the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside,
or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can
serve to drive us toward movement” (“Shimmers,” 1, italics original). Movement can mean
physical action in the world, but can equally mean an idea, a change of mood, a reorientation,
or a totally imperceptible shift in body-world relations that has yet (or ever) to manifest. This
makes affect a part of an always ongoing process or event rather than an endpoint or result.

Spinoza/Deleuze: Afect and Be Afected

In the knot of scholars who draw upon Spinoza and Deleuze affect is considered pre-personal,
pre-linguistic, non-representational, and a-signifying. The “pre-” Seigworth suggests, is a sig-
nal for the emergence of particular capacities of bodies and their materialization through the
co-participation of their contexts (“Capaciousness,” iii). Rather than before a coherent con-
sciousness, discourse, or subject, the “pre-,” “points to the co-constitutive nature of particular
things such as consciousness, the individual, the discursive [etc.] along with what is supposed
to fall out or recede into the background as the context/conditions of emergence” (Seigworth,
“Capaciousness,” iii). This ontology of affect means that affect must be understood in its tran-
sitions, as movement, as an always unfolding event rather than a thing. If we conceive of
bodies as assemblages of “complex constellations of objects, bodies, expressions, qualities,
and territories that come together for varying periods of time to ideally create new ways of
functioning” (Livesey, “Assemblage,” 18) then “this movement-slip gives new urgency to
questions of ontology” that “bumps ‘being’ straight into becoming” (Massumi, Parables, 5).
In a world that is becoming an increasingly surveilled networked digital ecology, technology
and data are an inevitable part of affective event spaces (see posthumanism later in the chap-
ter). As the scholars in the edited collection Affects, Interfaces, Events, point out “the prolif-
eration of digital and interfacial technologies produces an intensified distribution of affect in
most aspects of our daily lives . . . [that] modulates our very existential conditions” (1).6 The
utility of seeing such ongoing and complex affective assemblages, including the digital and
technological, as “becomings” is in the possibility for infinite variation (Deleuze and Guat-
tari, Thousand Plateaus, 256). Affective assemblages are not necessarily predetermined by
cultural, historical, or political forces, and therefore structures and worlds might be changed.
To “affect and be affected” means that our capacity is changed in some way by the impact
of an encounter with something: a body, an object, an idea, or an emotion. Capacities, Ben
Anderson proposes, are “always collectively formed” and because “capacities are dependent
on other bodies, they can never exhaustively be given in advance” (Encountering Affect,
9–10). Change is therefore inherent to affect, it carries potentiality in its emergent relation,
and so, Massumi claims, it has a political orientation: “There is always a something-doing
cutting in, interrupting whatever continuities are in progress. For things to continue, they have
to re-continue. They have to re-jig around the interruption” (“Microperceptions,” 4). Affect,
in the Deleuzian strain is “proto-political” (Parables, ix), “it concerns the first stirrings of the
political, flush with the felt intensities of life” (ibid. 70).
In order to have tangible change—not merely the rearrangement of the same conceptual
furniture—one must become realigned with a “logic of relation” and embrace “the unfounded
and unmediated in-between of becoming” (ibid. 70–71). For Massumi, affect offers the poten-
tiality of micropolitical changes of the body in culture rather than the “rupture” of a “discursive
body” of culture (ibid. 1). Since the formations of relations and those affected are never fully

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known in advance, so affect has the potential to assemble into something other than the norma-
tive, predictable, or currently existing political structures. This, Spinoza/Deleuze aligned theo-
rists claim, opens the potentiality for change, including sociopolitical change. This potential
for variation, rather than the determinism of social construction, is part of what affect can do.

Diferent Camps but Fellow Travelers—Feminist/Queer/Cultural Trajectory

The second trajectory, grounded in Feminist/Queer/Cultural studies seeks to make change
more immediate and tangible through scholarship and activism.7 Clare Hemmings suggests
that feminist theories that use affect pay attention to everyday experience and cultivate politi-
cal accountability, community, and change (“Invoking Affect,” 558). Theorizing affect in and
besides existing social and cultural phenomena the Feminist/Queer trajectory defines affect
more capaciously. Ann Cvetkovich, for example, defines affect “in a generic sense . . . as a
category that encompasses affect, emotion, feeling, and that includes impulses, desires, and
feelings that get historically constructed in a range of ways” (Depression, 4). She continues,
“I favor feeling in part because it is intentionally imprecise, retaining the ambiguity between
feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences” (ibid. 4).
This ambiguity allows for a more textured and rich accounting of lived experiences, both
individual and collective. Sara Ahmed’s definition of affect traces specific emotions through a
phenomenological orientation, “the affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its
mark or trace” (Cultural Politics of Emotion, 6); this connects lived experience, emotion, and
affective contact. She points out that “we are affected by ‘what’ we come into contact with”
(Queer Phenomenology, 2), thereby emphasizing the press of impression, “feelings do not
then simply reside within subjects and then move outward toward objects. Feelings are how
objects create impressions in share spaces of dwelling” (Happiness, 14). The forces of affect
are interwoven into and co-create the dynamic composition of life.
Lauren Berlant’s definition of affect, for example, accounts for the “multiple affective reg-
isters of collective life” (“Conversation,” 183). Wishing to produce a “materialist context for
affect theory” (Cruel Optimism, 14) Lauren Berlant draws on Raymond Williams’ concept of
“structures of feelings” (Marxism and Literature, 132) and the ongoingness of social structures
and forms to explain power and power shifts.8 In Cruel Optimism, Berlant’s definition of opti-
mism is very close to affect as a Deleuzian force, “all attachment is optimistic, if we describe
optimism as the force that moved you out of yourself and into the world” (1). She provides
“ways to encounter and produce an account of the multiple affective registers of collective life
that keep people loosely knotted together (attached to themselves and to the social)” (“Conver-
sation,” 183). Meaning that, like many others in this trajectory, Berlant looks to theorize how
emotional life and affective forces form part of political, social, and cultural life.
Unlike the Spinoza/Deleuze strain, feminist and queer studies scholars question the notion
that emotion and affect are distinct, and that emotion is purely personal. Massumi claims, for
example, that “emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an
experience which is from that point onward defined as personal” (Parables, 28). In contrast,
Sara Ahmed, states that “emotions are not simply ‘within’ or ‘without’ but that they create the
very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds” (“Affective Economies,” 117).
She is interested in the way “emotions involve subjects and objects, but without residing posi-
tively within them,” imaging instead the slippage of emotion between bodies and world, some
emotions gathering, or “sticking” on certain bodies (“Economies,” 120). Rather than seeing
emotions as “psychological dispositions,” she states, “we need to consider how they work,
in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between psychic and the social,

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 Wendy J. Truran

and between individual and the collective” (“Economies,” 119). Concepts, ideas, attitudes,
are “sticky” with emotions and affects, so that we inherit or incorporate ideas that are not
fully conscious and not our “own.” In the Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed points out
the (highly gender biased) value judgments that “stick” to discussions of emotion and affect
and that form a hierarchy, “this hierarchy clearly translates into a hierarchy between subjects:
whilst thought and reason are identified with the masculine and Western subject, emotions
and bodies are associated with femininity and racial others” (170). The answer, in Ahmed’s
view, is not to claim emotion as rational but to “contest this understanding of emotion as ‘the
unthought,’ just as we need to contest the assumption that ‘rational thought’ is unemotional, or
that it does not involve being moved by others” (ibid. 170). Emphasizing the mediated form of
emotion and affect, Ahmed reminds us that

knowledge cannot be separated from the bodily world of feeling and sensation;
knowledge is bound up with what makes us sweat, shudder, tremble, all those feel-
ings that are crucially felt on the bodily surface, the skin surface where we touch and
are touched by the world.
(ibid. 171)

These ideas of affect are not Deleuzian becomings but rather an articulated expression of the
impact and construction of self and world.

Afect or Afects
Affect may also be referred to in the plural as well as singular—affects versus affect. This sig-
nals two main shifts in definitional focus; first, a move toward particular emotions and feelings
rather than pre-personal forces. Discussions of specified feelings are mainly found in the Femi-
nist/Queer/Cultural studies trajectory. Theorists that research singular affects seek to trace the
psycho-socio-political impacts of specific feelings, emotions, or moods such as happiness,
melancholy, shame, zaniness, or compassion.9 Sianne Ngai, in her first book Ugly Feelings for
example, considers the “aesthetics of negative emotions” and “negative affects” that signal a
“general state of obstructed agency” (3). Drawing on contemporary theories of emotion and
affect theory, she seeks to revitalize the discourse of aesthetics and to expand the category of
aesthetic emotions to include “ugly feelings” such as envy, irritation, anxiety, stuplimity, and
paranoia (ibid. 6). For Ngai the difference between affect and emotion is one of degree not kind
and so she uses the terms almost synonymously:

my assumption is that affects are less formed and structured than emotions, but not
lacking form or structure altogether; less “sociolinguistically fixed,” but by no means
code-free or meaningless; less “organized in response to our interpretations of situa-
tions,” but by no means entirely devoid of organization or diagnostic powers.
( ibid. 27, italics in original)

Like feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, Ngai emphasizes the socially constructed nature of emotion
and feeling.
The second way that individual affects are discussed in the Feminist/Queer trajectory is linked
to psychology and the influential recuperation of psychologist Silvan Tomkins’ theory of affect
by Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank in Shame and Its Sisters. The attraction for queer theorist
Sedgwick in Tomkins’ ideas was as a means of accounting for human beings and culture that

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was able to encompass materiality, biology, and affect that does not rely on structuralist sym-
bolization, and thereby producing an alternative set of relations to critique subjectivity. Draw-
ing on Darwin’s work on the evolutionary nature of emotion, Tomkins suggests that affects are
hardwired “affect programs” and are both universal and innate.10 Tomkins posits that nine basic
affects are fundamental to human emotional response and motivation. Pre-rational and pre-
conscious affects, he suggests, are the precursors to emotion and the power system for cognition:
“Reason without affect would be impotent, affect without reason would be blind” (Tomkins cited
in TF 37). Sedgwick and Frank find that Tomkins’s cybernetically inflected writing and theory of
affects, allows them to start somewhere different when engaging in criticism.11 Moving beyond
Tomkins, contemporary affective neuroscience has taken up the task of interrogating affects by
examining the nature and mechanisms of affect, emotion, brain, body, and culture.12
Yet, to separate affect (singular, pre-personal forces) and affects (plural, inclusive of emo-
tion) too strenuously would be a mistake. Theorists such as Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart,
and Eugenie Brinkema, to name a few, trace specific forms of affect while also putting to
use Deleuzian concepts, or while thinking of affect as processual ongoingness. For example
in Touching Feeling Sedgwick develops her ideas on affect to explore, “promising tools and
techniques for nondualistic thought and pedagogy” (1). Paranoid critical reading, Sedgwick
argues, may have begun as a radical form of analysis, but had become an expected and norma-
tive approach to criticism; therefore such a dualistic approach forms a part of the normative
systems that scholars sought to interrupt in the first place. Drawing on Deleuze’s concept
of “planar relations” she posits a spatial conception of relation that embraces affect’s lateral
relations of “beside”: “Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing,
repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing,
aggressing, warping, and other relations” (Touching Feeling, 8). This approach avoids reduc-
tive binaries, “there is nothing very dualistic about beside—many things can be beside (but not
infinitely)” (Touching Feeling, 8). Suggesting a reparative rather than a paranoid approach to
critical analysis, Sedgwick seeks to offer an alternative to dualistic thinking and reified critical
approaches, because such conformity “creates a positive feedback loop, it becomes self-rein-
forcing as opposed to self-fulfilling” (Touching Feeling 12). Thus, she explains the importance
of creating alternative critical approaches besides the ones already in use.

Critiquing Afect Teory

One of affect theory’s best known and most prolific critics is Ruth Leys. Leys critiques what she
claims is the “anti-intentionalism” of affect theory which, she suggests, rejects judgment or cog-
nition as part of its formation. Such non-intentionalism, she claims, places affect and therefore the
body as primary and prior to the mind, thus reproducing a body-mind dualism. Her article, “The
Turn to Affect: A Critique” (2011), sparked lively debate in the journal Critical Inquiry and most
recent work, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique, collects her thinking and criticism of
affect together.13 A different critique of affect theory is discussed by Claudia Garcia-Rojas. She
suggests that affect theory is overly reliant on white, male philosophers which runs the risk of cre-
ating “white affect studies” (“Undisciplined Futures,” 254). Affect theory, she argues, prioritizes
Western European theories of affect and perpetuates an analytic philosophical subjectivity. This
citational habit, she points out, occludes alternative epistemic economies, such as the queer Black
feminisms tradition: “Although women of color feminists were theorizing embodied feelings
and social emotions before the emergence of White affect studies, their theories are either deni-
grated or excluded altogether” (256). Garcia-Rojas seeks to create an alternative genealogy that
places queer women of color feminists at the center of scholarship, citing Moraga and Anzaldua.

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 Wendy J. Truran

There is certainly a predominance of white, Western philosophical genealogies in affect but, as

Garcia-Rojas acknowledges, this is not the entire affective terrain. Intersectional philosophies and
positionalities are developed in the Feminist/Queer trajectory. Scholarship that combines affect
studies and post-humanism or new materialism also create other-than (white, male, cis) -human
narratives. Yet First Nations and Indigenous peoples point out that they have long established
traditions of more-than-human relations that have been claimed as new by post-humanism.14
Scholars such as Kyla Wazana Tompkins also express concern that new materialism and affect
studies sideline issues of race and difference (“Limits”). These are important concerns to address
and Chad Shomura offers a persuasive argument for the potentiality of new materialisms and
affect to address questions of “undoing the subject and the human; interrogating liberal person-
hood; investigating bodily affect as an avenue toward political collectives” (“Exploring New
Materialisms,” n.p.).15 Colin Patrick Ashley and Michelle Billies also argue that race in affect
studies is under theorized and that “questions of race and racial matterings are often demonized
as inherently nonmaterial and sidelined to the field of representation” (“Affective Capacity,” 64).
They address this problem by theorizing an “affective capacity of blackness” for the “potential
circulations of black affective resistance” (ibid. 63). There is important and influential scholar-
ship on and from critical race studies but clearly “racial matterings” needs, and deserves, a greater
profile in affect studies and affect theory in all trajectories.

Lively Bodies, Lively Forces

To close the chapter, I will briefly discuss an approach that incorporates the concerns of both
trajectories previously discussed via an interest in emerging ontologies and complex assem-
blages as well as a commitment to “situated knowledges,”16 namely feminist science studies
(FSS). Post-humanism has been a key engagement for literature and the theoretical humani-
ties. FSS incorporate affect to radically redraw current relational scales and scopes, while
proposing speculative new worlds, often via speculative fictions. Jane Bennett explains that
“contemporary theory has taken a nonhuman turn that locates the human on a continuum of
lively bodies and forces—continuum that elides conventional dichotomies of life and mat-
ter, organic and inorganic, subjective and objective, agency and structure” (influx and efflux,
xi). Not only theoretical, Rosi Braidotti points out that “Posthuman subjectivity is a practical
project. It is a praxis” (Posthuman Knowledge, 73). This communal feminist praxis, she states,
“promotes action and critical self-knowledge, by working through negativity and pain. This
pro-active activism manifests the living beings’ shared ability to actualize and potentiate dif-
ferent possibilities” (“In This Together,” 468). Feminist science studies teaches us that “per-
spectives are partial and embedded within situations” and that the sciences, like culture, are
“discourses not untouched fact” (Snaza, Animate Literacies, 25, 107). Theorists such as Donna
Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, and Mel Y. Chen engage with decentering the human
and placing human subjects with a continuum of existence with no special privilege and so
we must take the more-than-human into our ethical accounting.17 Founding figure in feminist
science studies Donna Haraway insists that we must stay with the trouble of “a dangerously
troubled multispecies world” and acknowledge that we are kin to the critters or “chthonic
ones” with whom we share this world (Staying With the Trouble 6, 2). Particularly useful for
the articulation of affect and literature is her notion that “bounded individualism in its many
flavors in science, politics, and philosophy has finally become unavailable to think with” (ibid.
5) and that imagination and storytelling is central to thinking otherwise.
For Haraway storytelling is vital to theorizing, so that she draws upon the companionship
and “tentacular thinking” (ibid. 5) of human scientists, artists, and science fiction writers as

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well as multispecies activisms. In the best intersectional, anti-racist, proqueer feminist tradi-
tions she claims, “storytelling and fact telling” (ibid. 31) are necessary—and I would add nec-
essary to theorize affect. Haraway goes on to say, “it matters what thoughts think thoughts.
It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what stories tell stories” (ibid. 35).
Nathan Snaza’s Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism is a
good example of a critic who combines storytelling and fact telling to offer new thoughts
on literature and affect. He offers a “nonhumanist reconceptualization” of the practices that
typically fall under the auspices of the humanities (ibid. 3). Refusing the expected boundar-
ies of literature while still incorporating close textual analysis, Snaza seeks to rethink the
humanities, and particularly literature, as part of a more-than-human assemblage that offers
“a significantly enlarged sense of affective participation in the events of literacy” (ibid. 3).
Tracking literature, literacy, the human, and humanities, Snaza shifts from a dualistic rela-
tion of reader-to-text, to a processual one. Literacy, Snaza points out, is not only a cognitive
exercise nor an individual or even only a social one, literacy, he argues is, “primarily about
affects and no conscious events of meaning making or representational constructions” (ibid.
17). Through reading texts such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and James Joyce’s Ulysses, and
by discussing philosophers such as Sylvia Wynter, Snaza expands and reconceives reading
and literature to become an assemblage of energies “across a wide variety of actants” that
include the nonhuman that contribute to what he calls “literacy situation” (ibid. 4). Rather
than literature being something that is written and received, and literacy as something learned
and acquired, he proposes a speculative project of taking literacy as an “animate practice”
(ibid. 4). It is a rich ecology of entangled political and educational relations that forms “affec-
tive attunement politics” (ibid. 6, italics in original)—following gut attractions, how you are
touched and touch things. So, with Snaza and Haraway, both use literature and storytelling to
bring the Spinoza/Deleuze and Feminist Queer trajectories together to think “besides” current
critical tools and assemble new ones. Reading, after all, is a critical act and interpretation can
be a form of critical world making.

Conclusion
Affect theory may refuse the singularity of an origin story but affect and literature have always
been entangled because storytelling is the way that worlds are made. Affect theory for the
Spinoza/Deleuze trajectory, by following forces besides language and reason, opens the poten-
tiality to events becoming otherwise; it is the change when bodies collide. For the Feminist/
Queer/Cultural trajectory tracing the affects that circulate as public feelings or within socio-
political power structures affect theory can give form to affective registers that may have
been occluded, precarious, or violently repressed. Each trajectory pays attention to and takes
account of bodies, their capacities and potentialities, and “thinks-with” affect in order to create
encounters, interpret events, attune to this world, and embody new ones.

Notes
1 Seigworth and Gregg, in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, give “brief and blurry snap-
shots” of eight ways to approach the theorization of affect, see pp. 6–8.
2 The transdisciplinary nature of affect theory can be thought of as a hindrance or an help. For some, the
lack of consensus on definition, terminology, methodology, and objective can form too large a chasm
between knowledge fields. For others, it is the entangled and unsettled cross-disciplinary fertilization
that allows theorists to address complicated onto-epistemological issues and imagine new concepts.

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 Wendy J. Truran

For discussions of some of these tensions see Greg Seigworth, “Capaciousness,” pp. i–v, and Andrew
Murphie, “Fielding Affect: Some Propositions,” pp. i–xiii.
3 There is an immense amount of scholarship in philosophy, history of emotions, and affective sciences
that engage with what each would consider “affect.” In this volume see history of emotion (Chapter 8)
and philosophy of emotion (Chapter 9). Affective sciences are represented in this collection by chap-
ters on affective neuroscience (Chapter 1), cognitive science (Chapter 4), and empirical approaches to
emotion (Chapter 6).
4 Across the immense scholarship on the history and philosophy of emotions affect has encompassed
emotions, moods, attitudes, bodily states, judgments, or sensory data. In this volume see the chapters
on history of emotion (Chapter 8) and philosophy of emotion (Chapter 9).
5 See Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, 2001, and Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1988.
6 For scholars that work on affect, media, and digital cultures, see Megan Boler, Wendy Chun, Patricia
Clough, Rebecca Coleman, Tero Karppi, Adi Kuntsman, Andrew Murphie, Zizi Papacharissi, Domi-
nic Pettman, Amit Rai, Tony Sampson, and Greg Seigworth to name but a few.
7 Queer theory’s concern with identity, aesthetics, and cultures that cultivate non-normative approaches
to being, knowing, and existing is a key player in affect(s)’ theorization. Other key queer theorists of
affect include José M. Muñoz; see especially Disidentifications, Cruising Utopia, “Between Psycho-
analysis and Affect” and “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down.” Important work with affect is emerging
from Trans studies scholars; see Hilary Malatino (queer embodiment, side affects, trans care), Aren
Aizura (mobile), Eliza Steinbock (shimmering), and Eli Clare (disability).
8 Many affect theorists begin with Raymond Williams’ notion of social structures of feeling. Williams
posited the concept of “structures of feeling” that calls for a new affect inflected “cultural hypothesis”
that might understand “a social experience which is still in process” (132, italics original) by designat-
ing “affective elements of consciousness and relationships” (132). The “structures of feeling” have a
special relation to art and literature since “the idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related
to the evidence of forms and conventions—semantic figures—which, in art and literature, are often
among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming” (133).
9 Ann Cvetkovich points out in her own exploration of depression as a public feeling, queer theory has
been important in depathologizing negative feelings such as shame (Sedgwick), failure (Halberstam),
backwardness (Love), and melancholia (Flatley). For more “positive” affects, see Sara Ahmed (hap-
piness), Sianne Ngai (zany, cute), Lauren Berlant and Jay Prosser (compassion), Wendy J. Truran
( joy).
10 Silvan Tomkins trained as a psychoanalyst but disagreed with Freud’s notion that the drive system
was the greatest motivational force, positing instead the affect system. See Silvan Tomkins, Affect
Imagery Consciousness, Vols I, II, III.
11 Basic emotion theories (BET) such as Tomkins’ is contested in psychology; see Ruth Leys discussion
of the history of basic emotion theory in The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique, pp. 1–76; see
also Schaefer, Evolution, for a short explanation of BET and his rebuttal of Leys’ critique, Evolution,
pp. 40–42, 42–53.
12 In this volume, see chapters on affective neuroscience (Chapter 1), cognitive science (Chapter 4),
and empirical approaches to emotion (Chapter 6). See also Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza:
Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain; Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain; The
Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness; Joseph LeDoux, The
Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life; Panksepp et al. “The Philosophi-
cal Implications of Affective Neuroscience.” For discussion the cross-pollination of affect theory and
psychoanalysis, see Patricia Clough and Jacob Johanssen, “By the Skin of our Machine”; José E.
Muñoz (ed.), “Between Psychoanalysis and Affect: A Public Feelings Project”; Gregory J. Seigworth,
“Fashioning a Stave, or, Singing Life.”
13 To read Leys’ original essay in Critical Inquiry and the responses from William E. Connolly, Adam
Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson, and Charles Altieri, see https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/affect_
an_exchange/. For other critical engagements with affect, see Linda Zerilli “The Turn to Affect and
the Problem of Judgment,” Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating
the Turn to Affect,” and Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect.”
14 See Kim TallBear, “An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human,” GLQ 21,
no. 2–3 (2015), pp. 230–35.
15 For two insightful responses to Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ original critique of new materialism, that
also offer useful bibliographies of scholars that are interested in affect and the “refashionings of the

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materiality of race,” see Chad Shomura and Michelle N. Huang. For scholars who engage with affect
theory and race, see Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, A. G. Weheliye, Jasbir Puar, Neetu Khanna, Omar Kas-
mani, and Juliette Singh.
16 See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective.”
17 Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter for example, explores the philosophical and political possibilities of
challenging human exceptionalism and taking into account the “active powers of nonsubjects” (ix).
She imagines an ethical ontology that recognizes the vitality of non-human materialities and that
takes account of affect as central to any consideration of politics. A more computationally inflected
posthumanism can be found in the work of N. Katherine Hayles. She proposes a definition of “distrib-
uted” cognition that might apply “to technical systems as well as biological life-forms” (Unthought
3). She argues that “most human cognition happens outside of consciousness/ unconsciousness” and
that thinking and being are assemblages that incorporate non-human entities (ibid. 5).

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