The theory of affect, while a moderately new subject of study, has been addressed in many fields of study recently. It has been used for instance in the philosophical, feminist, sociological, and anthropological disciplines. However, the so called “affective turn” has also woven its way into many of the scientific fields in the turn of the century. According to Langlotz and Soltysik Monnet, the focus on feelings, affect, and emotionality has replaced the earlier study of the linguistic and the mind as the current trend in academia (13). Its wide application and interdisciplinary study within a wide array of fields has also conceived strongly distinct points of view as to the origin, understanding, and application of affect.
Affect theory is generally divided into two main factions that have haunted many theories since the Cartesian dualism, the contrast between mind, or consciousness, and body (Robinson): the biological and the cultural (see Liljeström and Paasonen 17-19; Armony and Vuilleumier, 16) or the somatic and the cognitive respectively (Furtak 19). The biological alignment sees affect as a completely or almost completely biological reaction. According to this view, affects are automatic reactions to stimuli manifesting physically in the body, that people are unable to control themselves such as crying or being surprised (see for
instance Tomkins’ theory of affect systems 63). They are thus biological and not learned, which would in short lead to the assumption that every person can have the same affects as the other. Affects in a purely biological view are universal, bound to instinct and nature. The cultural side, on the other hand, argues that most, if not all, of the affects are learned.
Therefore, while affects manifest in the physical body and consciousness of a person or persons, the affects themselves are culturally learned and constructed and given meaning and interpreted through (see e.g. Terada 4; Furtak 14; Valovirta 8)
This may explain why people from different cultures or even people within the same socio-cultural sphere with different experiences might not perceive an affect or a feeling in the same way. For example, a person living closer to the equator does not feel the same affect of kaamosmasennus as a Finnish person would. Kaamosmasennus is a feeling many Finns experience during the cold and dark time of the winter when the sun is over the horizon for only a briefly each day. A person can feel lethargic, heavy, melancholic, and without motivation. Moreover, these feelings are tied to the body, and together they are a very specific type of feeling down, one that is associated with the term and felt during the darkest period of the year. The affect that comes with this occurrence is completely unknown to those who have not experienced it themselves and thus its affect is in a sense learned, much in the same way as people experience certain feelings and emotions differently in their bodies.
Going even further, the affect of hate in the stomach can also differ depending on the person and culture: the affect can be felt as heaviness, coldness, tension, or turmoil (among others) in the area of the stomach, or in intestines and liver. The affects can also be very hard to explain as mere heaviness or tension in a specific area of the body. A person can experience affect in just one distinct part of the body, but it is often an accumulation of numerous sensations all over the body that together form an affect. The division between the biological
and cultural origins of affect is not in truth hardly ever as clear-cut, and often affect theorists acknowledge the presence and influence of both in affects (see e.g. Reddy 15-6; Sharma and Tygstrup 14; Taylor 7).
At this point the difference between affects, emotions, and feelings must be discussed in order to understand the theory of affect better. The term emotion is in most cases understood as psychological and attuned with conscious awareness of a feeling (Vermeulen 8). In its simplest terms affect is seen as a physical reaction caused by a feeling or emotion.
It is therefore tied into the body and the experiences of the body. It is also, according to Rei Terada both physical and psychological (Terada 4): affect is a physical, bodily way that psychological emotion and feeling manifest, but one that they also twine together and where they are inseparable from each other (Valovirta 8). How emotions and feelings have an effect on our bodies, but also how emotions and feelings manifest in our body is at the core of affect. As I briefly mentioned above, emotion is understood as an identifiable and knowable feeling, while an affect is less clearly identifiable. Vermeulen attributes affect with confusion and the uncertainty of what a person is feeling physically and psychologically (10).
Adding to the obscurity and uncertainty that one might not always even be certain what has caused the affect, is that similar affects can be triggered by very different feelings. A simplifying example is that a person can cry from sadness, anger, or happiness, among other feelings, but sometimes they are unable to identify what emotion they are feeling when crying. Affect eludes strict identification, naming, and straightforward classification to a single emotion (Vermeulen 8-10) but while some of them “evade strict meaning-formation and categorization […] [they] leave their imprint” (Valovirta 46) on a person or a thing.
To return to the division between biological and cultural affect theory, affect can also be seen as a subconscious reaction to an emotion, which may explain the difficulty of
describing affects. Because we are not conscious of having these ‘automatic’ reactions, we cannot identify them. However, as Vermeulen points out, this thought does not take into account that people become aware of their affects, and that it is impossible to avoid
“consciousness, cognition, intention, and narrative” (9) in human experience. Furtak describes this in slightly differing words: “emotions are embodied affective recognitions that provide us with a crucial vehicle of awareness” (14). According to Furtak, the affective emotion is “outwardly oriented” (36), meaning that affects can be experienced inwardly through the body, but also between the one experiencing the affect and the thing it is directed towards. It is a part of how we perceive and engage with the world around us. Furtak also proposes that “in order for our somatic feelings to be emotional, they must be experienced as being about significant features of the world” (43; emphasis original). This, in other words, indicates that by turning our focus on certain feelings we in turn give them attention and intent, which all together form an emotion to be felt, with direction and affect.
The main point that Furtak makes is that in experiencing emotions both the intent of the emotion, or its direction, and the process of feeling it within the affective body, are crucial to experiencing emotion (46). Affect, according to the perspective of Juvonen and Kolehmainen, can include emotions and bodily responses, but it is also more than those as it is also an “embodied non-linguistic, and non-conscious” (4) way of relating, understanding, and meaning-making, both within and externally of the body. Juvonen and Kolehmainen thus agree with Furtak’s view of affects being the way in which people connect and belong to the world around, but also the way they separate and distance from it. They also claim that affects are not strictly internal and subjective, but rather intercorporeal and trans-subjective (6), which suggests that groups of people can experience and cultivate even massive affects that can spread widely.
Sara Ahmed is also of the same view as Furtak, Juvonen, and Kolehmainen, positing affect as sociocultural. In her widely cited essay “Affective Economies”, she posits emotion and affect as societal capital, as it circulates through objects and subjects, individuals and masses, and by circulation the affect gains strength and affective weight (“Affective” 120).
Affect is thus, according to Ahmed, a way which people interact and communicate, come together or apart, through sharing and circulating affect. The circuit of affect can be wide and far-reaching, but it can also be on a micro level, like circulating the affect of love between two people or even affect within one person.
Sara Ahmed presents affects and their values as cumulative, forming based on past experiences both psychic and social (“Affective” 120). According to Ahmed, affective feelings do not originate from within a person but rather they ‘stick’ to objects, which then affects others (“Creating Disturbance” 32). While affect does not originate from the individual, subjects can also direct affects to objects, which can in times ‘stick’, especially when such affect is repeated by others. Affects therefore form continuous loops, which strengthens the affective weight every repeat of the cycle (Ahmed, “Creating Disturbance”
33-4). Affects can also come together from numerous objects such as space, place, time, past experience, and so on, to link a strong affective feeling and emotions to a person and/or public, as “things are already in place that inclines us to be affected in some ways more than others” (Ahmed, “Creating Disturbance” 32-33).
William Reddy discusses affect using a different term, ‘emotive’, especially in verbal communication with another person. According to Reddy, “[e]motives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful” (Reddy 105). Reddy claims that these emotives, or emotional utterances, are affected by a specific feeling, as well as forming that feeling, either
accentuating or deaccentuating it by increasing or decreasing its attention (105). Reddy claims that before forming utterances, the mind is bombarded with different impulses, but which impulse one focuses on is translated into coherent thought and intention, which can lead to emotives. It can be deduced that affects are the very same impulses a person receives, which might be brought to attention and formulated onwards in the consciousness, or be ignored, leaving them to the unconscious mind. This, however, does not mean that their effects cannot be felt, experienced or observed by the person themselves or by others. Reddy continues: “[e]motion cues that are inadvertent cannot have the same transformative effect, unless they are drawn into attention after they occur” (106). This follows Ahmed’s view of feelings and affects compounding through repetition and thus gaining strength and affective weight. In such a way affective responses and actions are culturally and socially learned, as the way to react and repeat certain affects (positive or negative) is learned through interaction and the affirmation of the borders between subject and object, society and individual.
Becoming and being aware of the ways society’s norms shape our affective responses and being sociable, opens up the possibility of challenging them, of reorienting affective ways of performance and repetition.
But what about when the affect one experiences is different from the expected? Ahmed is aware that being misaligned with the surrounding affect does happen, and according to her, a person becomes an “affect alien” in such a moment (“Creating Disturbance” 34). She also writes: “The gap between the affective value of an object and how we experience an object can involve a range of affects, which are directed by the modes of explanation we offer to fill this gap” (“Creating Disturbance” 34). Being alienated and pushed away from the society and reigning cultural norms in such a way, is not necessarily negative, as it can bring to light injustices, microaggressions, inequality and so forth: “You can be affectively
alien because you are affected in the wrong way by the right things. Or you can be affectively alien because you affect others in the wrong way” (Ahmed, “Creating Disturbance” 36). In intrapersonal relations, the movement of affect and feeling can also be accepted and repeated in a communal way, you are excited about something, which makes me excited about you being excited for example (Ahmed, “Creating Disturbance” 38). Such feelings might also be rejected, ignored, or misconstrued by the other, which in turn either transforms the affect, reorients it, or stops it altogether from “sticking” or repeating (Ahmed, “Affective” 120;
“Creating Disturbance” 35).
Communal responsiveness can be united with Ahmed’s theories concerning the politics of feeling. As a concept, communal responsiveness relies on the repeating of positive and confirming affects within a relationship to maintain it and nurture it. According to Clark and Monin, in mutual communal responsiveness the acceptance of a gesture as it is, and of affect by expressions of gratitude strengthen the bond and the positive loop of affection (206).
The key word here is responsiveness, meaning that the responses are aligned and complimentary of the other’s affect and actions. If the affect is misconstrued or misaligned, the loop of communal affect breaks. For example, if one does not accept a gesture of communal responsiveness such as help or a gesture intended as affective, and instead takes it as a duty or a debt to be repaid, the intended affect fails and is transformed to a less positive one.
Because affects are experienced and perceived differently, this generates many different readings and descriptions of affect. Moreover, affects are more often than not ambiguous. As stated above, they can be very specific feelings in the body, but most often many feelings that are both physical and psychological form the affect. Precisely because of the ambiguity in identification, it allows for a wide range of interpretations. Especially in the
study of literature, these invite possibilities of reading. The study of affect in literature depends heavily on the reader (Valovirta 8). Because affects are a mixture of bodily and psychological responses to feelings or emotions that can be difficult to explain even by the experiencer, the way in which affect is interpreted and accepted relies on the lived life and experiences of the reader. The “complex and multifaceted” affects cannot, according to Valovirta, be placed in “the classical categories of emotion” (63), which allows the reader a freer range of interpretation of their meaning. As Langlotz and Soltysik Monnet claim, affects “remain hidden to our immediate perceptual and conceptual grasp” (12).We can see, or in this case read, the affect figuratively by taking note of the character’s visual and physical expressions, thoughts, and actions, but we cannot perceive in actuality the emotion or feeling the character is experiencing (Langlotz and Soltysik Monnet, 12). Affects promote the dialogue between the text and the reader, for without the reader, the affect is left without meaning. It needs the interpretation of a reader because of its ambiguity. At the same time the reader is able to draw their own interpretations from the clear classification-resisting affect.
The reason I have chosen to use affect in my analysis of The Stone Gods is that the novels by Winterson in general deal heavily with the body and the bodies of the characters.
Because of this occupation with physicality in her works in particular, I find that the application of affect fits the study of TSG particularly well. The inner feelings and bodily responses of the characters are often described at length through allusions, symbolism, and imagery, while Winterson lets the affect speak itself and interpretations to flourish. The reader can attempt to discern the emotions and feelings behind these affects, but there is no single truth in them.