ABSTRACT
Feminist theory, Teresa de Lauretis has argued, came ‘into its own’ through a self-conscious and self-critical redefinition of its key terms – subject, power and difference. In her account, it was ‘the feminist critique of feminism’ by women of colour and lesbians since the turn of the 1980s that made feminist theory possible and identifiable as feminist theory ‘rather than a feminist critique of some other theory or object-theory’ (de Lauretis 1990: 131). As a result of this critique, she maintained, the subject of feminism was reconceptualized as ‘shifting and multiply organized across variable axes of difference’, and social field redefined as ‘a tangle of distinct and variable relations of power and points of resistance’. These redefinitions were a result of feminist critique becoming conscious of itself, turning inwards and examining its own terms. In 1990, therefore, amid intensifying identity politics around issues of sexuality, ethnicity and ‘race’, de Lauretis proposed a notion of feminist theory, in the singular, as a ‘process of understanding’ and a ‘pursuit of consciousness’ (de Lauretis 1990: 116, 131). Mapping a historical legacy of ‘social and subjective transformation’ within feminist theory, de Lauretis linked together the 1970s’ practice of consciousness-raising, Adrienne Rich’s call for the ‘politics of location’, and ‘the theory in the flesh’ or ‘mestizaconsciousness’ proposed by Cherrié Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Within such a frame, de Lauretis envisioned both the subject of feminism and the practice of feminist theory in terms of movement and self-displacement that is ‘concurrently social and subjective, internal and external, indeed political and personal’ (de Lauretis 1990: 116). While firmly rooted in poststructuralist notions of language and sub-
jectivity, and foregrounding consciousness as a key term, the way in which de Lauretis characterizes the movement of feminist thought seems, in hindsight, to foresee the broad interest in the question of affect feminist scholarship would take from the 1990s onwards. In the fields of philosophy, history, literature, cinema studies, art history, media and cultural studies as well as in sociology, anthropology, politics and science studies, feminist scholars have turned to the question of affect and the topic of affectivity in search of a new critical vocabulary for investigating and conceptualizing the subject of feminism as embodied, located and relational. This search has been highly visible
in the abundance of publications, conferences and course syllabi that across the humanities and social sciences have established the ‘affective life’ – affects, emotions, feelings, passions, moods and sentiments – as a new research area (Greco and Stenner 2008). Beyond a mere ‘hot topic’ (Woodward 1996), however, what has been
termed ‘an affective turn’ (e.g. Koivunen 2001; Gibbs 2002; Clough and Halley 2007, 2008; Gorton 2008; Tyler 2008) is best viewed as a broad range of criticisms of the linguistic turn and its effects on feminist research. Importantly, it will be argued, a turn to affect can be detected both against and within the poststructuralist, social constructionist theories of subject and power. Affects have become an object of interest both as articulations of culture, language and ideology, and as a force field that questions scholarly investments in those terms. Furthermore, the ‘turn’ features both an individualist and anti-individualist thread. While the question of affect for many scholars is a question of epistemology and methodology and, therefore, an opportunity for increased personal and political accountability through ‘a lost language of emotion’ (Middleton 1992) or a rehabilitation of ‘the emotional self ’ (Lupton 1998), for others it reads as a possibility to move beyond the individual and personal, and to relocate critical attention from language, discourse and representations to the real, from body to matter, from cultures to nature, from identity to difference, from psychic to social. Whereas some view the concept of affect as a means to focus on the agency of the subject, others use it to displace the concept of subject and to radically rephrase the notion of agency itself. Whatever the focus, the affective turn is fuelled by a desire to renegotiate the critical currency of feminist thought. For some, the turn entails refining and complementing constructionist models and reworking the relations of the subjective and the social. For others, the turn is about new disciplinary alliances, most notably across the divide between human and natural sciences. To talk about an affective turn in the singular is to imply a shared agenda
and sense of direction that does not do justice to the diversified field of feminists ‘working with affect’. This becomes all the more evident when focusing on the concept of affect, trying to locate the identity of the turn in a conceptual novelty, a shift from emotion or feeling to affect – a concept that beyond psychology or psychoanalysis, or as a term connoting physiological processes, was hardly used in the social sciences or humanities until the 1990s. In one contemporary reading, ‘emotion refers to cultural and social
expression, whereas affects are of biological and physiological nature’ (Probyn 2005: 11). Such conceptual division can be seen to reflect disciplinary preferences: the humanities and social sciences, those studying cognition, social expression and interpretation of cultures traditionally use ‘emotion’, whereas the sciences, those studying the brain and the body, privilege ‘affect’ as a term (Probyn 2005: xv). There is, however, little agreement on these definitions. In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the notion of affect is vague, referring
to necessary states of pain and pleasure, to unmeasurable and inner-directed
charges and discharges, and to qualitative expressions of drives (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 13-14; Green 1986; Giardini 1999). In clinical psychoanalytical practice, the notion of emotion designates the patient’s first-person feelings, whereas affect is used to denote the analyst’s observational description in third-person (Ngai 2005: 25). Within psychoanalysis, André Green foregrounds affect as the pivotal term for how psyche operates, using affect as a ‘categorical term’ grouping together ‘the qualifying subjective aspects of the emotional life in the broad sense’ (Green 1991: 8; see also Armstrong 2000). In the writings of Silvan Tomkins (1995), again, affect is a biopsychological notion based on empirical studies and defined as distinct from the psychoanalytic logic of drives. His model features nine discrete human affects that have distinct neurological profiles and measurable physiological responses. For Teresa Brennan, in her work combining psychological and philosophical theories with biology and neuroscience, affect stands for ‘the physiological shift accompanying a judgement’, yet is ‘basically synonymous’ with emotion (Brennan 2004: 5-6). Like Green or Brennan, Sara Ahmed (2004) uses emotion and affect interchangeably to highlight the fluidity of the conceptual boundaries. In many accounts, moreover, affect and emotion are defined as two aspects of the same phenomenon: emotion, thus, being ‘a psychological, at least minimally interpretive experience whose physiological aspect is affect’ (Terada 2001: 4), or ‘emotion referring to the social expression of affect, and affect in turn is the biological and physiological experience of it’ (Probyn 2005: 25). Whereas for some philosophers, the concept of emotion is the preferred categorical term (Rorty 1980; Nussbaum 2001), for others, the notion of feeling comprises ‘all experiences people might categorize as emotions’ (Campbell 1997:10) and serves as ‘a capacious term that connotes both physiological sensations (affects) and psychological states (emotions)’ (Terada 2001: 4). For Brian Massumi (2002) and proponents of ‘new materialism’, the very distinction between affect and emotion is a key argument. There is, hence, no conceptual consensus uniting ‘the turn’. To begin with,
the conceptual multitude has historical roots, as translations of the Latin word affectus used the terms of affect, passion, desire and emotion as synonymous until the late 19th and 20th centuries (Brennan 2004: 3-4). More importantly, the concepts themselves are the battlefield. On one hand, the many, often contradictory definitions and uses of these key concepts witness the transdisciplinarity of the research field and the various disciplinary traditions involved. On the other hand, the choice of concept – is one to use affect, emotion, feeling or passion, and in what sense? – is a question of negotiating and positioning oneself in relation to the key conceptual sets of cultural analysis Teresa de Lauretis identified in 1990 as demanding feminist self-reflection: ‘subject and object, self and other, private and public, oppression and resistance, domination and agency, hegemony and marginality, sameness and difference’ (de Lauretis 1990: 115). In today’s research context, the conceptual politics of affect is also permeated by new conceptual tensions, those of inside and outside, nature and culture, matter and meaning.
