The Affect Theory Reader

by Melissa Gregg (Editor), Gregory J. Seigworth (Editor)

This field-defining collection consolidates and builds momentum in the burgeoning area of affect studies. The contributors include many of the central theorists of affect—those visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing that can serve to drive us toward movement, thought, and ever-changing forms of relation. As Lauren Berlant explores “cruel optimism,” Brian Massumi theorizes the affective logic of public threat, and Elspeth Probyn examines shame, they, along with the other contributors, show how an awareness of affect is opening up exciting new insights in disciplines from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, and psychology to philosophy, queer studies, and sociology. In essays diverse in subject matter, style, and perspective, the contributors demonstrate how affect theory illuminates the intertwined realms of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political as they play out across bodies (human and non-human) in both mundane and extraordinary ways. They reveal the broad theoretical possibilities opened by an awareness of affect as they reflect on topics including ethics, food, public morale, glamor, snark in the workplace, and mental health regimes. The Affect Theory Reader includes an interview with the cultural theorist Lawrence Grossberg and an afterword by the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart. In the introduction, the editors suggest ways of defining affect, trace the concept’s history, and highlight the role of affect theory in various areas of study.

Contributors
Sara Ahmed
Ben Anderson
Lauren Berlant
Lone Bertelsen
Steven D. Brown
Patricia Ticineto Clough
Anna Gibbs
Melissa Gregg
Lawrence Grossberg
Ben Highmore
Brian Massumi
Andrew Murphie
Elspeth Probyn
Gregory J. Seigworth
Kathleen Stewart
Nigel Thrift
Ian Tucker
Megan Watkins

Genres: Theory, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology, Academic, Essays, Research

416 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 2010

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good introduction to affect theory, its history, and to its different theoretical tendencies and tracks. Some of the essays are perfect examples of the most vapid, mystifying, and self-congratulatory habits of thinking and writing in cultural studies theory. Other essays are stimulating & thoughtful and suggest that this concept of affect could be useful in the effort to understand aspects of experience.

["Nico" · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brutally difficult without Deleuze's Spinoza (as was the case for me), so consider reading that first. I would also recommend seeking additional context by exploring Affect Theory first before turning to the Affect Theory Reader. It is less suitable as an introduction to Affect Theory than as a deepening of awareness of the field and its implications.

[Two reads that became integral to my understanding of many of these essays were Sedgwick's Touching-Feeling (on affect in literature) and Shame and Its Sisters (on Tomkins psychology of affect). Reading either of these (T-F follows from SIS) will go a long way towards contextualizing references to Tomkins, who is a kind of founding figure in Affect Theory.]

If the difficulty doesn't deter you, this really is a fantastic collection of essays. Ahmed's Happy Objects, Massumi's Future Birth of the Affective Fact, and Berlant's Cruel Optimism in particular drastically changed the way I see parts of the world and are worth reading even if you don't have time for the rest of the collection (or if you want to sample it first).

Parts 4 and 5 may be of reduced utility to many readers. Part 4 because the topics are highly specific without having the space for an in-depth treatment (mental health service relations between patient and provider, cubicle politics, a vygotskian critique of decentering the teacher). Part 5 because it is ostensibly concerned with going /beyond/ affect, but in a meandering way. So while this is a great essay collection, my impression is that it starts a lot stronger than it finishes.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is yet another great working text -- a research book in which the authors are working through their ideas on particular concepts related to affect -- that will serve as a reference for quite a long time. That it took me so long to work through it has more to do with a certain sense I had of "knowing about" affect and not needing someone else's help. Wrong. The topics addressed here -- some of which are: happiness, fact, shame, optimism, food and taste, ethics, excess, sympathy, biomedia, mental health, the workplace, Pedagogy, glamor, virtual and actual -- far exceed anything close to my grasp of affect. So, I hope to get back to these essays again, regularly, as well as to read again with pleasure the wonderful interview with Larry Grossberg.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only read relevant chapters, Ahmed's and Grossberg's essays are very interesting, in different ways. I also like Clough's essay on the economy of affect. the role of media (especially biomedia) in this economy.
but what I realized the most is that I have to read Deleuze and Guattari in order to understand the affective turn in cultural studies.

[Andy Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A handful of interesting essays - but overall, too much theory, not enough affect, ironically...

[JK · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the essays are fantastic, Clough, Anderson, Thrift, Massumi, Berlant, Stewart.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

very good outline of the emergent critical field.

[David Carver · Rating 3 out of 5]

After a century dominated by the "linguistic turn," affect theory offers a much more complicated but much less ultimately stifling theoretical vision of politics, culture, gender, art, knowledge, and society for the contemporary scholar. The essays in this book are of two main sorts: example-driven, such as Massumi's essay on threat in the neoconservative era of double-conditional preemption; and theory-driven, such as nothing I can remember, as these tended toward an obfuscation that did not reflect precision so much as artificial significance. Based on the writers and topics collected for this book, the challenge for Western academia under the influence of affect studies will be how to reverse the model of the previous century's academic approach to cultural studies: from unified-theory confusion to multiplicitous pragmatism.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Affect theory: here it is. Some good essays, some... tedious; problematically, dense layers of mystification in most essays, even the best. I have mixed feelings about it, but the collection itself is a landmark and worth noting as such.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

though i really liked happy objects, Sarah Ahmed's contribution, and Patricia Clough on the political economy of the biomediated body

[Kristine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t really understand this but I felt like I did lol!

[Karmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only read part I: Happy objects. It was, however, very insightful and I'm interested in picking it up again and reading the whole.

[Aida · Rating 4 out of 5]

All of the essays are quite well-written but certainly range in clarity depending on the reader's background. A theory reader to be sure, but perhaps not for the beginner affect theory learner.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind blown.

[Juno · Rating 5 out of 5]

This rating is specifically for Masumi's chapter "The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat."

This article really left an impression on me, and the notion of the Double Conditional of fear, danger, and threat feels so immensely relevant in today's North American political culture that I can scarcely believe it was written in 2010. Well, yes I can.

I thought this chapter provided not only profound and apt academic theory, but also an element of tongue-in-cheek humour that I appreciated as a grad student reader fighting my way through hundreds of pages of anthropological theory per week. The format of proposing questions, assertions, and facts throughout not only grounded the narrative and reminded the reader of the point despite the theory veering towards the abstract in several areas, especially for a hardly-pre-9/11 person such as myself, but it also showed Masumi's personality and wit. I really appreciated that element.

I wish more people could read this chapter, because it felt like I unlocked some secret level of my critical thinking reading this.

[samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

• Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces-visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insistingbeyondemotion-that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world's apparent intractability. Indeed, affect is persistent proof of a body's never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world's obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations.
• Affect is born in in-between-ness and resides as accumulative beside-ness.
• Binsings and unbindings, becomings and un-becomings, jarring disorientations and rhythmic attunements. Affect marks a body's belonging to a world of encounters or; a world's belonging to a body of encounters but also, in non-belonging, through all those far sadder (de)compositions of mutual in-compossibilities. Always there are ambiguous or "mixed" encounters that impinge and extrude for worse and for better, but (most usually) in-between.
• "yet-ness" of a body's affectual doings and undoings.
• affect's impinging/extruded belong- ing to worlds, bodies, and their in-betweens-affect in its immanence- signals the very promise of affect theory too: casting illumination upon the "not yet" of a body's doing, casting a line along the hopeful (though also fearful) cusp of an emergent futurity, casting its lot with the infinitely connectable, impersonal, and contagious belongings to this world.
• a hyperconsciousness of the affective minimum, of the microscopic fragment of emotion... which implies an extreme changeability of affective moments, a rapid modification, into shimmer
• neutrally inflected, immanent pathos or "patho-logy" that would be an "inventory of shimmers, of nuances, of states, of changes (pathe)" as they gather into "affectivity, sensibility, sentiment:' and come to serve as "the passion for difference"
• The body becomes less about its nature as bounded substance or eternal essence and more about the body "as an interface that becomes more and more describable when it learns to be affected by many more elements"
• The aesthetically inflected moment that underlies almost any theoretical orientation toward affect. Not aesthetics in its "dominant mode" where, as Ben Highmore argues in his essay, it both moralizes and takes "satisfaction in the end form of a process"; rather this decidedly affect-driven aesthetics is interested "in the messy informe of the ongoing-ness of process."
•

[Colin Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read most of this collection in preparation for a podcast episode on Affect Theory (see the link below). Overall, I like a lot of what I read. Early essays from Ahmed, Berlant, and Anderson are quite strong and effectively illustrate the core theoretical characteristics of Affect Theory. At times, some of the essays, specifically the introduction, make stylistic choices I found frustrating. With that said, The Affect Theory Reader is a competent exploration of the theory itself. However, a reader may need a passing understanding of Affect Theory to make sense of some of this volume's entries.

Podcast Episode Link:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certain contributions (particularly those of Ahmed, Massumi, and Berlant) offer culturally intelligible and materially relevant additions to the notion of affect. Others, unfortunately, miss the mark and end up being theoretically dense without appropriate grounding or social significance.

[Lucía · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esencial para ampliar la corriente de las teorías afectivas. Para conocerla, mejor una explicación en aula/conferencia. Leí la mitad de la introducción y los capítulos 1 y 2 (Ahmed y Massumi).

[Swarm Feral · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glorious. Poetic prose that’s also very succinct and able to be parse in meaning. Covers the basics of Spinoza via Deleuze while also hitting many other valances. Really awesome.

[Liz]

Still have mixed emotions about Affect Theory AS a thing that crossed literary and psychological spaces AS such. It feels like it's being co-opted to mean too many things and falls in to the same pitfalls that Deleuze and Gauttari often do by taking "as-if" to mean "is".

[Mills College Library]

152.4 A2565 2010

[Jay Dewey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave up on this one as a straight read, and have consigned it to my reference shelf.