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ABSTRACT
This paper considers the state of the ‘field’ of affect studies and its development – partly through the involvement of one of its authors – over the course of decades. It argues that rather than identifying affect as the ‘other’ of signification and representation, thus ‘subtracting’ it from the conjuncture, one should understand the question of affect to point to the multiplicity of forms of sign behaviours – or, better, of forms of expression or collective assemblages of enunciation (in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari) that constitute a conjuncture in all its complexity. This article attempts to map this multiplicity by refining and expanding Guattari’s ‘mixed semiotics’. Finally, it offers a brief example of how such multiplicities (and their resulting hybridities) might be used to compare the ‘affective topographies’ and structures of feelings that have differentially enabled oppositional movements in the 1960s and the current moment.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Bryan G. Behrenshausen is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he specialized in cultural and media studies.
Lawrence Grossberg is the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His most recent book is We All Want to Change the World: The Paradox of the U.S. Left, available free online.
Notes
† Part 2, which is the heart and soul of this paper, is the product of the collaboration between the two authors; parts 1 and 3 were written by LG.
1. Affect Theory Conference: Worldings/Tensions/Futures. Millersville University, Lancaster, PA. October 2015.
2. Just to offer some example, we might look to the work of Eve Sedgwick, Meaghan Morris and Elspeth Probyn; the contributions of Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Paul Gilroy, Eduoard Gulissant, Achille Mbembe, Sadiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson; as well as the contributions of Etienne Balibar.
3. Often only after highly strategic readings, some of which (following Deleuze) do some degree of violence to the work.
4. I have described this emergent and increasingly dominant political, which is too commonly and too easily glossed as neoliberal, a gloss that allows us to escape our own participation, in Grossberg (Citation2015). One of the features of this new intellectual economy is the endless production of new subfields without ever asking the question: what do we gain by this? Affect studies exhibit many of the conditions I have identified of work in such subfields: it treats the old as new; it creates insular paradigms with little debates of the utility of specific assumptions about the object of study; it conflates description with conceptually grounded accounts; it creates a pantheon of superstar celebrities, whose words are far too often taken as revelation if not law.
5. Thus, for example, as structure of feeling is less a tool of textual analysis than of contextualization.
6. I have the same response to the so-called new materialisms. The oft-cited edited introduction to the ‘field’ (Coole and Frost Citation2010) brings together new ontologies of the physical world (based largely on science that is well over a century old), new molecular biologies, a not so new attention of material and corporeal realities, new technologies – often elaborating older forms – of intervention, power and governance built on the control of bodies and populations, and a (not so new) concern with political economy and spatiality.
7. In the terms, we will introduce in the next system, affect includes radically different notions of a-semiotic encodings and a-signifying semiotics.
8. For a fuller discussion of theories of agency, see Behrenshausen (Citation2016).
9. Thus, although many who talk about Spinoza emphasize the notion that joy is a positive passion that enables perseverance and increasing strength (the conatus), it is important I think to realize that at each of the three levels of understanding – imagination, reason and intuition – joy, perseverance and growing strength take on a different meaning. Most materialist interpretations of Spinoza remain at the lowest level of understanding – imagination – which is the knowledge of sensations.
10. Within the category of ‘signifying semiologies’, Guattari further distinguishes between ‘symbolic semiologies’ and ‘semiologies of signification’, but this distinction is irrelevant to the present argument.
11. To avoid some confusion here, we should note that Guattari often calls a-signifying signs ‘diagrammatic’, though this association essentially disappeared after his work with Gilles Deleuze. The essential difference between the diagrammatic and the a-signifying will eventually become critical to our argument.
12. One may forgive Guattari's rather oversimplified understanding of how genetics works – as if it were relatively simple and direct determination via coding, given that he was writing more than 30 years ago!
13. In fact, it seems to us that the virtual acts as an ontological guarantee of change, and that other relations/worlds are possible. But in the version of a cultural studies theory of multiple enunciations that we offer here, one can just as easily say that change is the ongoing re-articulation of the multiple, contradictory actualities, through the multiplicity of machinic assemblages.
14. It is different from the induction of form that moves from the specific to the general, or the transduction of sequences, that moves from specific to specific.
15. In Anti-Oedipus, they suggest that the diagram performs a double articulation, first between expression and content and second, between form and substance. We are, for pragmatic and analytic reasons, taking the liberty of separating these two and reserving the latter to identify the specificity of the semiotic itself.
16. Thinking in such binary terms often leads to arguments by resemblance so that if one observes, for example, slime mould, behaving in unpredictable ways that seem to be goal-directed, one assumes that they are ‘making decisions’.
17. This has to be distinguished from Deleuze and Guattari's order-sign.
18. As a result, we might suggest that the form of consciousness that Deleuze describes, following Leibniz, as the product of the fold, should be read as a specific historical articulation of the semiotic field.
19. Ironically, those who seek to queer binary oppositions often limit their queering to the oppositions that they do not want to embrace, but leave in place many others. Grossberg has argued, albeit perhaps not successfully, that one can consider signification and representation as affective.
20. We might here further distinguish a variety of modes of operation, such as affective magnets and epidemics, structured mobilizations, and spatial/material orientations.
21. Here, we are thinking of such apparatuses as mattering maps and systems of identity and difference.
22. Examples might be moods and structures of feelings.
23. Berlant's notion of cruel optimism is often taken up with too little critical consideration or contextualization. There are a number of problems with how it is commonly deployed: first, it is less a structure of feeling than an affective/ideological strategy; second, it is often read directly off of texts, in a very traditional act of literary interpretation; and third, it is most certainly not new – it has a long history as many histories of consumerism make clear. All of this might become clearer if one recognizes that it is a hybrid enunciative formation, so that one can ask how that formation – which was for most of the twentieth century dominated by ideological codes, has been rearticulated in the twenty-first century. That is, what one needs to study is not the simple fact of the strategy, but its contextual configuration and effectivity.
24. One might wonder whether this defines a certain, historically specific, form of autonomy for at least specific articulations of affect.
25. This may also explain a certain practice of literalism built on selective readings of sacred texts or social data.