Affect is a concept, used in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and elaborated by Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, that places emphasis on bodily or embodied experience. The wordaffect takes on a different meaning in psychology and other fields. For Spinoza, as discussed in Parts Two and Three of his Ethics, affects are states of mind and body that are related to feelings and emotions, of which he says there are three primary kinds: pleasure or joy, pain or sorrow and desire or appetite. Subsequent philosophical usage by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and their translator Brian Massumi, while derived explicitly from Spinoza, tends to distinguish more sharply than Spinoza does between affect and what are conventionally called emotions. Affects are difficult to grasp and conceptualize because, as Spinoza says, "an affect or passion of the mind is a confused idea" which is only perceived by the increase or decrease it causes in the body's vital force. The term "affect" is central to what has become known as the "affective turn" in the humanities and social sciences.
In Spinoza
In Baruch Spinoza'sEthics, Part III Definition 3, the term "affect" is the modification or variation produced in a body by an interaction with another body which increases or diminishes the body's power of activity : Affect is thus a special case of the more neutral term "affection", which designates the form "taken on" by some thing, the mode, state or quality of a body's relation to the world or nature. In Part III, "Definitions of the Emotions/Affects", Spinoza defines 48 different forms of affect, including love and hatred, hope and fear, envy and compassion. They are nearly all manifestations of the three basic affects of:
desire or appetite, defined as "the very essence of man insofar as his essence is conceived as determined to any action from any given affection of itself";
pleasure, defined as "man's transition from a state of less perfection to a state of greater perfection"; and
pain or sorrow, defined as "man's transition from a state of greater perfection to a state of less perfection".
In Spinoza's view, since God's power of activity is infinite, any affection which increases the organism's power of activity leads to greater perfection. Affects are transitional states or modes in that they are vital forces by which the organism strives to act against other forces which act on it and continually resist it or hold it in check.
In Bergson
contends in Matter and Memory that we do not know our body only "from without" by perceptions, but also "from within" by affections.
The terms "affect" and "affection" came to prominence in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In his notes on the terminology employed, the translator Brian Massumi gives the following definitions of the terms as used in the volume: Affects, according to Deleuze, are not simple affections, as they are independent from their subject. Artists create affects and percepts, "blocks of space-time", whereas science works with functions, according to Deleuze, and philosophy creates concepts.
Affective turn
Since 1995, a number of authors in the social sciences and humanities have begun to explore affect theory as a way of understanding spheres of experience which fall outside of the dominant paradigm of representation ; this movement has been called the affective turn. Consequently, these approaches are interested in the widest possible variety of interactions and encounters, interactions and encounters that are not necessarily limited to human sensibility. The translator of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Canadian political philosopher Brian Massumi, has given influential definitions of affect and has written on the neglected importance of movement and sensation in cultural formations and our interaction with real and virtual worlds. Likewise, geographer Nigel Thrift has explored the role of affect in what he terms "non-representational theory". In 2010, The Affect Theory Reader was published by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth and has provided the first compendium of affect theory writings. Researchers such as Mog Stapleton, Daniel D. Hutto and Peter Carruthers have pointed to the need to investigate and to develop the notions of affect and emotion. They hold that these are important in the developing paradigm of embodiment in cognitive science, in consciousness studies and the philosophy of mind. This step will be necessary for cognitive science, Mog Stapleton maintains, to be "properly embodied" cognitive science.
