The fifth post in the Realigning Reception blog series on Affect Studies is written by Marianna Leszczyk. Marianna is a DPhil student at Oxford whose doctoral project explores the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in the prose of the Polish author Zbigniew Herbert, with a focus on Herbert’s trilogy of travelogues thematising his journeys in Western Europe. Tracing his occupation with the tensions between different media, representation and material reality, and the modern present and the ancient past, she investigates if Herbert’s essayistic writings could be seen as loci of not just reception, but also reception theory in its own right. With her project, Marianna aims to draw attention to the understudied workings of Eastern European classical reception.
Affect Studies: A Brief Introduction to its Theory and Practice
“Perhaps the key question for affect studies when it comes to such relatively pesky issues as disciplinarity is merely this: how might any specifically-angled engagement with ‘affect’ precipitate a re-imagining of the thresholds and continually shifting weight-bearing presuppositions / procedures / objects / relations that give unique texture, shape & rhythm to any discipline’s sense of capaciousness?” (Seigworth 2017, ii)
Within the past decades, few methodological approaches have emerged in the humanities that disrupt research conventions, challenge reader expectations, and unfortunately also escape understanding as often as affect studies. In this post, I aim to shed light on this lively and wide-ranging field, as well as the concept of affect itself, and to suggest what we, as scholars of the ancient world and its reception, can gain from applying the methodology of affect inquiry to our own subject matter.
The “Affective Turn”
It is a justifiable reflex to want to begin the exploration of an unfamiliar academic field nowhere but at its historical beginning – in the case of affect studies, however, that is not so simple. Most straightforwardly, one could start constructing its genealogy by naming the two seminal texts that marked the foundation of the field, Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold”, a new approach to the post-war psychoanalyst Silvan Tomkins, and Brian Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect”, both published in 1995 (Moyano Ariza 2020, 2). This earliest wave of affect theory primarily aimed at liberating the unconscious “intensities” of affect from the narratives of purpose and intentionality that are dictated by “rational” consciousness. Despite what critics (perhaps most famously Leys 2011) later accused Massumi and Sedgwick of, this turn to affect was not meant to dispose of the notion of intentional affects and emotions altogether, but as an attempt to describe the relationship between our conscious and unconscious selves in a way that “does not necessarily reduce itself to a power struggle” (Figlerowicz 2012, 6). To clarify, in the context of intentionalism, a philosophical stance “encompassing a range of positions on the relationship between intentionality and consciousness”, to call an emotion “intentional” usually means describing it as “object-directed” instead of arising without a concretely or immediately definable referent (Schaefer 2022, 121-22). Thus, whether an emotion is “accessible to conscious awareness” and whether it has a clearly identifiable object are two separate questions which should not be conflated; neither should it be assumed that affect theory is necessarily “anti-intentionalist” merely because it invites us to consider these questions (ibid, 120).
To return to the question of beginnings, despite the pivotal role Massumi and Sedgwick’s interventions played in the establishment of affect inquiry as a critical methodology, they remain only two of the potential origin points for a field that intentionally eschews linear genealogies and origin narratives. As Mathew Arthur retraces in his most recommended Oxford Bibliographies entry on affect studies (2020), paying critical attention to affect has “long been central to feminist, queer, disabled, and anti-racist work”. Among others, he points to Ann Cvetkovich’s (2012) conceptualisation of the field’s genealogy, which asks if queer theory, with “its depatholization of negative feelings such as shame or failure and reworkings of happiness and utopia”, could not be seen as an affective turn itself. Indeed, the aforementioned questioning of the relationship between affect and consciousness is similarly present in the work of the queer theorists Heather Love (2007) and Lee Edelman (2004), who both ask “how much choice the conscious self has in privileging some affective states over others” (Figlerowicz 2012, 6).
Similarly good resources suggested by Arthur are Garcia-Rojas 2017 and Murphie 2018, who both point to theorists of colour and non-Western traditions whose alertness to “the unruliness of world- and subject-making forces beyond stratifying knowledge formations”, such as the role played by embodiment in constructions of subjectivity, predates white affect studies. Fascinatingly, the field’s resistance to definition does not stop there but also extends to its primary subject matter, which is affect itself. There are numerous definitions of affect which all function as working definitions in various corners of the field, which means that the following will merely be an incomplete attempt at definition, a brief overview that should by no means be seen as exhaustive.
Definitions of Affect
The first and perhaps most widely known definition of affect is that of affect as emotion. Yet, it must be specified that rather than treating emotions as residing within a single subject, affect theorists are concerned with how, as Sara Ahmed puts it in “Affective Economies” (2004, 119), emotions “mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective”. To Ahmed, it is exactly this “nonresidence” of emotions that makes them “bind” subjects together and produces “‘sticky’ associations between signs, figures, and objects” (ibid). This notion of “sticking” is particularly important for the inbetweenness that characterises affect, whether defined as emotion, impulse, or potential for (inter)action: affect never “belongs” to one individual subject but, to cite Seigworth and Gregg (2010, 1), “is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise)”. Interestingly, some scholars such as Massumi (1995; 2002) believe that since affect continues to circulate among bodies and objects after fulfilling its mediating function of producing encounters between them, it could also be ascribed “autonomous capacities” and agency in the encounters that it produces.
So, while the concept of affect can be primarily used to discuss those visceral forces that are experienced as “feeling outside conscious knowing” (Ibbett 2017, 245), it also often functions in a more abstract way to describe the “resonant affinities of body and world” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 12), the potentialities present in encounters and processes. Crucial for affect studies is the phrase “not yet”, which goes back to Baruch Spinoza, another indirect foundational author for the field (for Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza see Hickey-Moody 2013, 80-84), and his often-cited thought, “No one has yet determined what the body can do.” This “not yet” encapsulates the way in which the futurity of affect can always hold both a promise (of an unfolding, a transformation, new capabilities) and a threat (of regression, inaction, possibilities lost). From those studying affect, this demands great attention to processes of becoming, which in turn entails embracing the state of “never-quite-knowing” and “always making-room” for a subject matter that is just coming into being (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 9; Seigworth 2017, ii). To those critical of the methodology, however, this emphasis on inbetweenness and not-quite-there-ness, combined with the elusiveness of subject matter and playfulness of language that often characterises affective scholarship, provokes doubts about the “seriousness” (academic rigour, political applicability, ethical value) of the insights affect inquiry can yield. This brings us to the question of how affective methodology works in practice, and how this approach could be useful for doing classical reception.
Affect and Its Application
In their introduction to the Affect Theory Reader (2010, 7-9), Seigworth and Gregg sketch out different forms that the study of affect can take, including phenomenologies of embodiment, nonhumanist traditions in philosophy, political studies of the materialities of power, as well as discourses of emotions that destabilise notions of the sovereign self and the subject/object binary. All those branches of affect studies share a “temporary bracketing-out of categories like cognition, intentionality, or language”, which allows them to disrupt common conceptions of knowledge work and “inherited representational schemes” (Arthur 2020). Equally importantly, affect studies do not shy away from reading the capacities of affecting and being affected as political. This is highly relevant for the study of the Graeco-Roman world and its reception, where it is very easy to build arguments on its continued “relevance”, thus affectability, without critically engaging with this process. Taking an affective approach to our subject matter helps us to question what it means for ancient material to still affect us, or for us to be affected by it, without falling back on essentialist discourses of the cultural supremacy of Greece and Rome. To give one example, helpful here could be Ahmed’s abovementioned notion of “sticking”: why do certain discourses (of democracy, artistic beauty, cultural origins) “stick” to Graeco-Roman material arguably far more than to that from other cultures and periods to which those discourses could also be applied? How does the body of classical material work as something that “sticks” subjects together as a source of identification (for elites, queer people, those propagating Western exceptionalism and those opposing it)?
Another stimulating methodology to apply here, in the context of both teaching and researching classical reception, would be that of affective pedagogy, as outlined by scholars such as Hickey-Moody (2013). Drawing on a Deleuzian understanding of affect as “the margin of modulation effected by change in capacity” (80), Hickey-Moody calls researchers to pay attention to the way art “facilitates bodily changes by increasing or decreasing a body’s capacity to act” (93). It is most interesting (and politically pressing, too) to study the ways in which classical material has invited bodies to act or hindered them from doing so, and more importantly, what those (in)actions were – writing a poem, choreographing a dance, or perhaps giving up on applying to university because of one’s lack of a classical education. The study of such “political economies of how feelings and responses are made” (Hickey-Moody 2013, 93; also prominently Ahmed 2004) is, I believe, one of most fruitful outcomes of affect theory’s refusal to replicate the body/text binary and its seeking out of the space inbetween. Moreover, the field’s focus on bodily and affective engagement as knowledge production can already be found in numerous recent publications on classical topics, such as Slaney’s (2020) work on kinaesthesia and reception or McCready-Flora’s (2018) work on embodied cognition in Plato.
As a reception scholar, I feel most drawn to the aspect of affect studies that allows Figlerowicz (2012, 3) to describe all of its subfields as “theories of timing” – “theories of the self running ahead of itself” or “catching up with itself”. Figlerowicz here emphasises the capacity of affect theory to point to instances where subjects act on affects (or the effects of affect) before consciously realising what they are, but also to instances of recognising and making room for those emotions or impulses in our notions of subjectivity. The questions that affect theory asks about the relationships between affect and consciousness, the narrativization of the self, and about the possibility of detachment, both from one’s emotions and the objects one engages with, are highly important for studying the Russian doll of various consciousnesses that is classical reception. Remaining attentive to the affective, and thus potentially non-intentional and/or unconscious, dimension of the material we work on allows us to avoid worn-out linear genealogies of reception in which antiquity is consciously handed down from one rational, well-bounded self to another. After all, the ancient past is not an heirloom – it is a potentiality circulating between times and contexts in a manner that can almost recall affect. And, just like affect itself, it can hold both a promise and a threat.
WORKS CITED
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. “Affective Economies” Social Text 22.2: 117–39.
Arthur, Mathew. 2020. “Affect Studies” in Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory, edited by Eugene O’Brian. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future. Durham: Duke University Press.
Figlerowicz, Marta. 2012. “Affect Theory Dossier: An Introduction”, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 20: 3–18.
Garcia-Rojas, Claudia. “(Un)Disciplined Futures: Women of Color Feminism as a Disruptive to White Affect Studies.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 21.3 (2017): 254–271.
Hickey-Moody, Anna. 2013. “Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics and Affective Pedagogy” in Deleuze and Research Methodologies, edited by Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose, pp. 79–95. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ibbett, Katherine. 2017. “When I Do, I Call It Affect.” Paragraph 40.2: 244–253.
Leys, Ruth. 2011. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37.3: 434–72.
Love, Heather. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press.
Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The Autonomy of Affect”, Cultural Critique 31: 83–109.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. Affect, Movement, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
McCready-Flora, Ian. 2018. “Affect and Sensation: Plato’s Embodied Cognition”, Phronesis 63.2: 117-147
Moyano Ariza, Sandra. 2020. “Affect Theory with Literature and Art: Between and Beyond Representation”, Athenea Digital 20.2: e2319.
Murphie, Andrew. 2018. “Fielding Affect: Some Propositions.” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1.3: i–xii.
Schaefer, Donovan O. 2022. “Rationalist Nostalgia: A Critical Response to Ruth Leys’ The Ascent of Affect”, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 2.4: 115-35.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky and Frank, Adam. 1995. “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins”, Critical Inquiry 21.2: 496–522
Seigworth, Gregory J., and Gregg, Melissa. 2010. “An Inventory of Shimmers” in The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, pp. 1–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Seigworth, Gregory J. 2017. “Capaciousness.” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1.1: i–v.
Slaney, Helen. 2020. Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820: Moved by Stone. London: Bloomsbury Academic
FURTHER READING (AFFECT, CLASSICS, HISTORY)
Blackman, Lisa. 2012. Immaterial Bodies. Affect, Embodiment, Mediation. London: Sage.
Gunew, Sneja. 2009. “Subaltern Empathy: Beyond European Categories in Affect Theory”, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35: 11–30.
Konstan, David. 2021. “Being Moved: Motion and Emotion in Classical Antiquity and Today” Emotion Review 13.4: 282-88.
Lucas, Duncan A. 2018. Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy: Dreams We Learn. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge.
Telò, Mario and Mueller, Melissa (eds.). 2018. The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
The feature image for this post is The Ten Largest, No. 8, Adulthood (1907) by Hilma af Klint (public domain, sourced from Wikimedia Commons).
