ABSTRACT
If this essay were a polemic, it would argue that our current view of the communication of affect and emotion is too often simply mimetic and literalizing, as though their transmission were performative rather than an opening to all sorts of consequences, including none at all. It would aim to counter the unfortunate tendency in much contemporary affect theory to elide the difference between the structure of an affect and the experience we associate with a typical emotional event. It would also argue for slowing down how we apprehend these phenomena. To slow down amidst the emergence of an intensified situation is to sense much better what’s becoming undone, what is firing off and dissipating into nothing or a general atmosphere, what is sparking and getting taken up, and how people ride the wave of the happening, shifting it and themselves around in it, and sometimes making an event out of it. For the affective event is an effect in a process, not a thing delivered in its genre as such.
